Henry

Something that I’ve been wondering about for a while. Google Ads don’t necessarily match their advertisements to websites in quite the manner that you’d expect, presumably because of the way that its underlying algorithm works. Brad DeLong's site, for example, seems to have become the new in-spot for Republican and Conservative singles to hook up with each other, while Nathan Newman rather improbably provides a venue for union-busting specialists to connect with their core clientele in the business community. I wouldn’t at all be surprised if many of Nathan’s readers make a habit of clicking on the link to “Union-Free Labor Relations Training” on a regular basis. After all, each time that they do, a small sum of money presumably disappears from the advertising budget of a rather slimy organization, and reappears (after Google deducts its cut) in Nathan’s Paypal account. Now personally, I’ve no problems with that. But does this undermine the rationale behind using Google Ads for politically targetted advertising? Left-leaning blogs are likely to “sound” Republican to Google’s algorithm because of the frequency with which they mention Republican politicians (and Republican blogs will sound left-wing). Thus, they’re likely to attract a disproportionate number of ads which are aimed at exactly the wrong population. Many of the people who read these blogs are unlikely to want to click on the ads for any sincere motives. The same, of course, is true for right wing blogs harping on how horrible the Democrats are; again they’ll appear to be “good” bets to an automated algorithm for advertisements aimed at leftwingers, unless that algorithm is sophisticated indeed.

Unless Google changes its algorithm, I can’t imagine any easy technical way of distinguishing ‘fake’ clickthroughs from real ones, except in the most straightforward of cases (e.g. the same person at the same IP address repeatedly clicking on an ad again and again). Now this may in reality be a non-problem – I’ve seen no data on it- but in principle, Google Ads seems to me to be quite vulnerable to politically motivated attacks, which could prove quite expensive for the advertisers.

David Brooks on the merits of Bush’s Africa policy.

bq. The Bush folks, at least when it comes to Africa policy, have learned from centuries of conservative teaching – from Burke to Oakeshott to Hayek – to be skeptical of Sachsian grand plans. Conservatives emphasize that it is a fatal conceit to think we can understand complex societies, or rescue them from above with technocratic planning. … The Bush folks, like most conservatives, tend to emphasize nonmaterial causes of poverty: corrupt governments, perverse incentives, institutions that crush freedom. Conservatives appreciate the crooked timber of humanity – that human beings are not simply organisms within systems, but have minds and inclinations of their own that usually defy planners. You can give people mosquito nets to prevent malaria, but they might use them instead to catch fish.

The crucial – and rather disingenuous – qualifier is “at least when it comes to Africa policy.” Even Brooks doesn’t have the chutzpah to defend Bush’s overall foreign policy approach as an exemplar of Burkean prudence and appreciation for the complexity of other societies. On which, see further a rather interesting article by leftwing rabblerouser John Hulsman and Anatol Lieven forthcoming in the Summer 2005 issue of _The National Interest_. But even on Brooks’ chosen turf – the Bush administration’s Africa policy and the Millenium Challenge Account initiative – there’s little positive to be said from a principled conservative stance. Burke, Oakeshott and other traditional conservatives are notoriously hostile to grand abstractions and keen on practical results. Over the last four years, the Millennium Challenge Account has yielded plenty of airy rhetoric, but no practical results worth talking about. This is for the simple reason that it still scarcely exists. The problems of implementation that Brooks, in fairness, acknowledges in passing, stem from the fact that the Bush administration has obligated only 2% of the Millennium Challenge funds. Nor has the administration requested the $5 billion that Bush promised in any of the four budgets submitted to Congress after the initiative was announced. As of April 29 not one dollar of Millennium Challenge Account money had reached a developing nation. While an appreciation that complex societies can’t be “rescued from above by technocratic planning” is a fine and wonderful place to begin thinking about how to improve development aid, it can also be a highly convenient excuse for doing nothing. For all the bluster about Burke, Hayek and Oakeshott, the development-aid-as-vaporware approach seems at the moment to be well explained by a simpler theory of conservatism as moral philosophy ; that its primary characteristic is “the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

(hat tip – p o'neill )

I just finished reading Rick Perlstein’s The Stock Ticker and the Super Jumbo yesterday (an earlier version of the essay and the various responses is available here, but buy the book if you can for extra post-election analysis goodness). It’s a great read, and a smart essay, but I think it buries its real argument.
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This exchange between Ivo Daalder and Jolyon Howorth is the most interesting thing I’ve seen on the TPM _America Abroad_ blog so far. The various contributors to the blog are perhaps a little too well-used to the “we must get serious about aspect _x_ of our foreign policy” class of op-ed to take easily to the more freewheeling and dialogic medium of blogging; Daalder is much more lively when he’s engaged in a bit of conversational give-and-take. The subject is a serious one; whether the EU is losing its _raison d’etre_. Daalder is worried that it is; Howorth pooh-poohs these fears. I’m worried that Daalder has the better of the argument.
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Go see.

Juan non-Volokh quotes one of his correspondents to rebuke Brian Leiter for not understanding that corporatism means government by corporate entities rather than corporations. Non-Volokh’s correspondent is right in stating that corporate entities don’t equal corporations, although apparently disinclined to address Leiter’s main point, which is that business did indeed play a prominent role in the Fascist state (the extent to which the political was “autonomous” from the economic is the subject of considerable historiographical debate, in the German case at least). Unfortunately he then goes on to give a quite distorted and politically loaded account of what corporatism actually was. He tells us that a “corporate is a production planning board made up of workers, owners, and others involved in production advocated by the syndicalist school of socialism,” and then goes on to try to claim that the modern left has a lot more in common with fascism than the modern right. Now it’s true that Giovanni Gentile was influenced by Georges Sorel, who was the most prominent advocate of syndicalist thought. But the two were very different, both in theory and practice. Corporatism, more than anything else, was an attempt to put the conservative and anti-socialist ideas expressed in Leo XIII’s encyclical, Rerum Novarum ,into practice. Its animating philosophy was the belief that the corporate interests in society – business, workers etc – should work in solidarity to organize economic and political life. It was explicitly conceived as a rejoinder to the twin threats of socialism and democracy. Syndicalism was a very different creature, and argued that politics and economy should be under _trade-union_ control. Philippe Schmitter’s seminal essay, “Still the Century of Corporatism?,” which spurred the revival of the modern study of corporatism (and more particularly of its analogies with post WWII forms of economic organization), discusses the difference between these two social philosophies at length – indeed he predicts tongue-in-cheek that if the twentieth century is the century of corporatism, perhaps the next stage of history will see the rise of syndicalism as a counter-movement. Juan non-Volokh’s correspondent’s spurious historical analogy seems to me to be a rather transparent smear job.

Update: I should make it quite clear that this post is not a broad statement of support for Brian Leiter in his ongoing dispute with Juan non-Volokh. I don’t find his threat to find out who Juan non-Volokh is, and to out him, any more respectable than Donald Luskin’s somewhat similar effort to use a bogus libel suit to find out who Atrios was, when Duncan Black was an anonymously-blogging non-tenured economics professor.

Update 2: Brian Leiter asks me in correspondence to make it clear that he, unlike Luskin, has not threatened Juan non-Volokh with a lawsuit; instead, he’s relying on someone to tell him who non-Volokh is. While I consider this to be quite irrelevant to the matter at hand (the threatened harm is in the outing, not in the methods used to pursue it), I’m happy to state this for the record.

Update 3: It would appear that Brian Leiter has reconsidered. I’m glad to see it.

Chris Bowers has an interesting post trying to explain why left wing blogs are now getting a lot more traffic than right wing ones. Bower’s theory is that this is because the high-traffic blogs in the left-blogosphere make far more use of community based systems such as Scoop and active comments sections than their equivalents on the right. The result, in Bowers’ eyes, is that:

bq. There are swarms of new conservative voices looking to breakout in the right-wing blogosphere, but they are not even allowed to comment, much less post a diary and gain a following, on the high traffic conservative blogs. Instead, without any fanfare, they are forced to start their own blogs. However, because of the top-down nature of right-wing blogs, new conservative blogs remain almost entirely dependent upon the untouchable high traffic blogs for visitors. In short, the anti-community nature of right-wing blogs has resulted in a stagnant aristocracy within the conservative blogosphere that prevents the emergence of new voices and, as a result, new reasons for people to visit conservative blogs.
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Dan Drezner on the Downing Street Memos.

bq. The biggest charge is that the president shaped the intelligence to gin up an excuse for the war. On this point, Fred Kaplan’s essay in Slate does a nice job of encapsulating what I think:

bq. _The memos do not show, for instance, that Bush simply invented the notion that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or that Saddam posed a threat to the region. In fact, the memos reveal quite clearly that the top leaders in the U.S. and British governments genuinely believed their claims…._

bq. _The implicit point of these passages is this: These top officials genuinely believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction—and that they constituted a threat. They believed that the international community had to be sold on the matter. But not all sales pitches are consciously deceptive. The salesmen in this case turned out to be wrong; their goods were bunk. But they seemed to believe in their product at the time._

bq. The administration was clearly wrong about the WMD threat — but I think they thought they were right. They deserve any criticism they get about being wrong — but they don’t deserve the meme that they consciously misled the American people.

I don’t think that this claim holds; and there’s an analogy that I think makes this clearer (Kaplan uses a version of this analogy in his article, but doesn’t develop it). In many countries (including my home country, Ireland), police have a reputation for stitching people up; they seem prepared in some instances to commit perjury in order to get people convicted for crimes. Now in some cases, this is a completely cynical exercise – the police have no idea of whether the accused is guilty or not, but need to get a conviction for political or other reasons. But in others, it’s because the police think that they know who committed a crime, but don’t have the necessary evidence to get the person convicted in court. Therefore, they perjure themselves and lie about the evidence in order to get the conviction.

This, it seems to me, is what happened in the lead-up to Iraq. The Bush administration, like others, probably did genuinely believe that Iraq had an active nuclear program. But it didn’t have the necessary evidence to prove this, either to its allies or to its own people. It therefore cooked the evidence that it did have in order to make its claims more convincing. It didn’t deceive the public about its basic belief that there were WMDs in Iraq. But it did deceive the public about the evidence that was there to support this belief, in order to convince them that there was a real problem. In other words, it _did_ “consciously mislead” the American people (and its allies). When the police are caught perjuring themselves to get convictions, they should (and frequently do) suffer serious consequences, even if they believe that they’re perjuring themselves in order to get the guilty convicted. That’s not what the police should be doing; they haven’t been appointed as judges, and for good reason. If the police persistently lie in order to get convictions, the system of criminal law is liable to break down. Similarly, when the administration lies about a major matter in order to get public support, it shouldn’t be excused on the basis that it thought that it was lying in a good cause. It’s still betraying its basic democratic responsibilities.

Cory Doctorow’s new novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, is out. Now Cory is a mate, so I’m not sure that I’m entirely unbiased in warmly recommending it. But I can honestly say that while I enjoyed his first two novels, I think that this one is on an entirely different level. It’s matter-of-fact surrealism; the main character’s father is a mountain, his mother is a washing machine, and his brothers are nesting Russian dolls, an island, a prophet and a very unpleasant reanimated corpse. It’s a love poem to Toronto (which is part of why I enjoyed it so much – the house in which much of the novel takes place is about 15 minutes walk from where I used to live). And it’s a warm, funny romance between two flawed, interesting people. Gene Wolfe says it’s a “glorious book, but there are hundreds of those. It is more. It is a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read.” And you can read it for yourself before buying; the text is Creative Commoned and available for download at http://craphound.com/someone/download.php.

!http://www.henryfarrell.net/cory.jpg!

Matt Yglesias notes that “MPAA rules for avoiding an R-Rating … allow you up to two uses of “fuck” as long as the word appears in a non-sexual context.” A bit reminiscent of the “Rory” Award, featured in Douglas Adams’ _Life, the Universe and Everything_, which was granted for the Most Gratuitous Use of the Word “Fuck” in a Serious Screenplay. In the US edition of _LTUAE_, this was changed to the Most Gratuitous Use of the Word “Belgium” in a Serious Screenplay, neatly proving Matt’s point about the unique censoriousness of American media.

Julian Sanchez and Lynne Kiesling say very rude things about Bob Geldof’s campaign to stop the sale of tickets to the Live-8 concerts on eBay (BBC story here). Julian describes this as “idiotic” and Lynne describes it as “wooly thinking about economics.” It’s neither. There’s an excellent rationale for what Geldof did. The tickets were initially distributed through a lottery, in which people sent instant-text messages to an address for a fee; a small percentage of the two million who sent the messages got tickets. It’s safe to assume that those who participated in this lottery did so for a mix of reasons; partly charitable, partly a desire to go to the concert. But altruistic motivations can be driven out by market mechanisms. Richard Titmuss wrote a famous book a few decades ago, The Gift Relationship, which provided a fair amount of empirical evidence to show that this was true in the case of blood donations, and that purely voluntary systems of blood donation did better on a variety of counts than did systems where some people were paid to donate blood (see also this paper by Kieran which touches on Titmuss’s arguments). On this logic, Geldof did exactly the right thing. If tickets to the concerts became commodities to be bought and sold on the open market, it’s highly plausible that future participation in lotteries of this kind would be seriously hurt. Geldof’s actions are perfectly defensible.

Katia Papagianni has a great letter in today’s _FT_ responding to the Andrew Moravcsik article that I criticized yesterday. Key section:

bq. The European Union constitutional crisis demonstrates, as Prof Moravcsik writes, that debates over institutional reform do not generate an engaged public because citizens respond only to salient ideals and issues. However, EU debates do not only address opaque institutional reforms, but also salient issues that EU citizens care about such as immigration, foreign policy, development and humanitarian assistance, in addition to monetary and competition policy. The fact that European-level politics has not engaged the public so far and has nevertheless progressed successfully does not mean that the public’s engagement is impossible or detrimental to the EU’s future. The EU’s citizens were asked late to join the constitutional process and to participate briefly in an abstract debate as opposed to engaging in meaningful discussions on concrete policy issues over a long period of time. Europeans should not be asked to decide whether they feel European or whether they aspire to a federal Europe. These are not relevant questions. Europeans should rather be asked what types of policies, combing national and EU-level responsibilities, they prefer.

This is exactly right – and what has been missing from the debate so far. The answer isn’t to shroud the processes of the EU still further in technocratic gobbledygook, or to engage in publicity stunts designed to make European citizens ‘identify’ with a process in which they aren’t making the choices. It’s to have real debate on the fundamentally _political_ choices underlying the specifics of EU integration.

I’ve been reading Red State over the last few days, which I’ve been told is the smarter, more thoughtful side of Republicanism. So far, I’ve been deeply unimpressed, especially when it comes to their coverage of Guantanamo. In the last couple of days, we’ve had Erick’s modest proposal that everyone in the camp should be killed (but no, he’s joking; what he really means is that they should all be locked up in perpetuity as enemies of America). We’ve had Mark Kilmer’s argument that Senator Durbin’s statement on Guantanamo is just another example of Democrats’ hatred for Bush and Republicans. We’ve had Krempasky’s Chris Muir gets it, copying one of the most egregiously offensive cartoons I’ve seen in a long while (news for Krempasky and Muir: being “chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor” so that you urinate and defecate on yourself is not a choice between orange-glazed chicken and rice pilaff). And that’s not to mention Paul J. Cella’s doozy on why we shouldn’t be letting Muslims come to the US (apparently, Muslims just don’t know how to be Americans).

It’d be easy to use this as a cheap way to accuse everyone on the right side of the blogosphere of being apologists for the inhumane treatment of prisoners, religious hatred etc. It’d also be unfair (it’s clear from the comments sections that a number of right-wingers are pretty disturbed at these posts too). But I can’t understand why, say, Sebastian Holsclaw (who’s nobody’s torture apologist) is happy to be associated as a co-blogger with this particular bunch of yahoos. If the last couple of days are anything to go by, there’s not much real difference between Red State and the hatemongers at LGF.

Update: Is Pejman Yousefzadeh offering some veiled advice to his co-bloggers?

bq. Want to deny lunacy a forum? Great. The best thing to do is to grow up, act responsibly, make your honestly held and believed arguments with as much passion and fervor as you believe appropriate to the occasion and understand that if you step over the bounds of decency, the shadows will come out to embrace you while the rest of society watches in justified revulsion.

Andy Moravcsik had an article in the FT yesterday which provides an interesting counter-argument to Chris’s – claiming, in effect that the French and Dutch should never have been asked to decide upon the technicalities of EU decision making (FT version with sub required here, Word version on Moravcsik’s home page here ). But Moravcsik goes further even than Giscard – he claims that the very idea of asking people to vote on the text was naive:

bq. The convention, the constitution and the invocation of European ideals were tactics explicitly designed to increase public legitimacy. Enthused by the prospect of re-enacting Philadelphia, Europeans were supposed to educate themselves, swell with idealism, back sensible reform and participate more actively in EU politics. In retrospect, this grand democratic experiment seems naive. Abstract constitutional debates and referendum campaigns gave anti-globalisation, anti-immigrant and anti-establishment discontents of every stripe a perfect forum. EU policies already ratified by national parliaments, such as the recent enlargement, drew fire. Add the suspicion of voters unsure why a new constitution is required at all, and the enterprise was doomed.

Still, he thinks that the voters made the right choice, despite themselves.

bq. In rejecting the resulting document, reasonable though it is, French and Dutch voters may be wiser than they know.

Why? Moravcsik believes that the recent votes demonstrated the impossibility of a ‘political’ integration process. EU leaders should return their attentions to the bread-and-butter business of the European Union, and to incremental, unflashy integration based on technocratic bargains among the big member states.

Moravcsik’s arguments stem both from his basic theoretical claims about the processes driving EU integration (he’s the best-known academic advocate of the argument that the EU is little more than a set of bargains among states) and from his belief that the debate over the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’ is a chimera (see here for the best short version of his arguments). He claims that the kinds of policies that are delegated to the European Union are the kinds of policies that national governments usually delegate – decisions over cross-border trade issues, interest rates, judicial decision making and the like – so that we shouldn’t be especially concerned when they’re delegated to a transnational rather than a national authority. In any event, there are checks and balances that allow for some degree of democratic control (the European Parliament, national parliaments and so on). These arguments can be challenged on both empirical and normative grounds. There’s a lot of evidence that EU decision-making processes do escape the control of nation states (something I’ve posted on frequently before). But more pertinently, the fact that many aspects of economic decision making are delegated and removed from direct democratic controls is by no means necessarily a good thing on normative grounds. Indeed, you could turn Moravcsik’s argument on its head – a fair amount of the animus that led to the “No” votes was less specifically directed at the constitutional text, or even at the EU, than at the general feeling that economic decision making is slipping away from democratic control, and that the EU is one manifestation of this. Indeed, I suspect (and hope) that the ‘No’ votes are the beginning of a wider challenge to the notion that vast areas of economic decision making should not be subject to political control. While I’m broadly in favour of an integrated Europe, I’m not especially keen on a EU like the one we have today, in which the imperative of the free market usually overrides national level social protections.