Henry

Nathan Newman writes about union-busting cartels.

bq. For folks who remember the southern California grocery chain strike last year, a key to the grocers breaking the strike was a revenue sharing deal between the big chains– thereby preventing the unions from easily reaching settlement with any of the firms individually.

The L.A. Times story that he links to has more.

bq. The chains initially refused to disclose the pact’s details and sought to have them sealed after Lockyer sued. But King unsealed the documents in February. They showed that the companies used a formula based on their sales, before and during the dispute, and their regional market shares to figure out what Kroger should pay the others. Kroger later revealed in securities filings that it paid a combined $148 million to Safeway and Albertsons, and Albertsons said it received $63 million of that. That would have left $85 million for Safeway.

Those who have read Adam Smith will remember his observations on the tendency of business owners to gang up together against workers.

bq. We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of. Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution, and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do, without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people.

(Funnily enough, Smith’s self-appointed intellectual heirs at the Adam Smith Institute don’t seem all that interested in his ideas on combinations of masters, despite their eagerness to smash trade unions. An oversight that I’m sure they’ll be rushing to rectify.)

Eszter’s post on physicists, sociologists and network theory has given rise to some interesting responses, and the beginnings of a broader distributed discussion on what disciplinary boundaries mean. Maybe it’s time to tie these threads back into a knot, entangle them further with some arguments from Susanne Lohmann on the functions and problems of academic disciplines, and see how people choose to unravel it all. (warning – lengthy extracts below fold).
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David Greenberg had two interesting articles last week about the gap between academic and popular history, and how to bridge it. This suggests an interesting question. Which academic books are fit for human consumption? Or, to put it less polemically, which books written for academic purposes deserve, should find (or in some cases have found) a more general readership among intelligent people who are either (a) non-academics, or (b) aren’t academic specialists in the discipline that the book is written for. Nominations invited. To start the ball rolling, I’m listing three (fairly obvious imo) contenders myself.

bq. E.P. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class. A classic, which reads more like a novel than a piece of academic history, rescuing organizers, sectaries, pamphleteers and gutter journalists “from the enormous condescension of posterity.” Moving, smart, and wonderfully written.

bq. Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty. A stunningly simple idea, worked out to its logical conclusions – it creates a new vocabulary for understanding how social institutions work.

bq. James Scott, Seeing Like A State. Libertarians will like the critique of state-led social engineering, but be discomfited by Scott’s account of the totalizing effects of markets. Traditional social democrats and socialists will have the opposite set of reactions. Both should read it (as should anyone else interested in the intersection between political theory and real life).

Interesting times for the European Union’s constitutional project. The French are looking decidedly wobbly on the new European constitution, which they vote on next Sunday. The Dutch, who will be voting soon after, appear to be strongly opposed. This all sounds dreadful for pro-Europeans. However, I’m going to make two predictions. First, the unexceptionable one – I don’t think that the constitution has much chance at all of being ratified. If it somehow gets over the French hurdle, it’s going to come a cropper at the British one. Then the risky one – I reckon that the European Union may be on the verge of acquiring real political legitimacy for the first time, exactly and precisely because of the vociferous debates which are starting to get going.
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Via Russell Arben Fox I see that Paul Ricouer has died at the age of 92. Le Monde, theTelegraph and Guardian have obituaries. In addition to Ricoeur’s direct philosophical legacy, he had a very substantial indirect influence on the social sciences through Clifford Geertz, whose arguments about culture and its study are informed by Ricoeur’s hermeneutics.

Update: As Scott McLemee points out, it’s already Tuesday, and

bq. nobody in the American media has insulted Ricoeur yet. What’s going on? Have our pundits lost their commitment to mocking European intellectuals and the pointy-headed professors who read them?

Is something wrong? Inquiring minds would like to know.

Steven Levitt’s work is familiar to many _Crooked Timber_ readers. He’s a professor in the University of Chicago’s Economics Department, a winner of the John Clarke Bates medal, the editor of the _Journal of Political Economy_, and the author of a rather terrifying number of peer-reviewed articles. He’s also just co-authored a book with Stephen J. Dubner, a _New York Times_ journalist who wrote a widely cited profile of Levitt last year. _Freakonomics_ is currently Number Two on the _New York Times_ bestseller list, and Number One on the _Wall Street Journal_’s business bestsellers list. In addition to all the above, Steve and his co-author have just started a blog centered on the book, and will soon start writing a monthly column for the _Times_. We asked Steve a while back whether he would be prepared to participate in a Crooked Timber seminar on freakonomics, economics, and the social sciences; he very kindly agreed, and you see the result before you. We’re also grateful to have the participation of two non-CT regulars. Tyler Cowen is a professor at George Mason University; he blogs at Marginal Revolution and still puts in an occasional appearance at the Volokhs. Tim Harford writes the “Dear Economist” column for the _Financial Times_. His first book, _The Undercover Economist_, is coming out in November 2005.

Kieran Healy argues that Levitt and Dubner’s use of the term “incentives” covers a multitude, and examines the relationship between freakonomics, economics, and the social sciences. John Quiggin argues that Levitt’s work is driven unflinchingly by the data, and that it provides evidence that even if incentives work, they don’t work in the ways that their designers might have expected. Henry Farrell supplements Healy’s and Quiggin’s arguments with a comparison between Levitt’s work and Gary Becker’s agenda for a unified economic approach to human behaviour. Tyler Cowen draws out some hypotheses from Levitt’s joint work on the economics of crack cocaine. Tim Harford examines why so few people try to popularize economic thinking. Finally, Steve himself responds to all the above.

As with our Mieville seminar, we expect that the main discussion will take place in comments to Levitt’s reply post. Feel free, however, to comment on individual posts if your comment seems more germane to a specific post or point made therein. As always, please be polite; unnecessarily offensive comments are likely to be deleted.

This seminar is available for reproduction under a Creative Commons license. For those who prefer to read printed text, a PDF is available here.

Update: Have changed the timestamp on these posts to keep them on the main page for a couple of days longer.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Steven Levitt’s work, as summarized in _Freakonomics_ and the original articles on which _Freakonomics_ draws, is eclectic in both subject matter and methodology. In the best sense of the word, it’s problem-driven research. Levitt has an extraordinary knack for finding interesting problems and interesting data that can be brought to bear on those problems. This is a large part of its attraction to the broader social science community – when you read something that Levitt has written or collaborated on, you get the sense of someone who is genuinely excited at discovering more about the ways in which the world works. His work is driven by curiosity, and it shows. As Kingsley Amis’s Jim Dixon says, an awful lot of academic work consists of “funereal parade[s] of yawn-enforcing facts,” that throw “pseudo-light” on “non-problems.” Not Levitt’s articles. Insofar as thirty-page chunks of social science can be fun, they’re fun.
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A few items that I’ve wanted to link to, but haven’t, thanks to grading pressures over the last few days.

The Chronicle of Higher Education on allegations of skulduggery in the world of poetry publishing.

Matt Yglesias complains about economists’ tendency to look at problems as strategic bargaining situations, rather than as the products of history and path dependence. My rejoinder (stolen like much else from my mate Jack Knight) is that there is no reason that you can’t have both. Many informal social institutions, such as the woman taking the man’s name when she marries, can be seen as a sort of institutional curdling of power inequalities in bargaining games that have been repeated over a very long period. More to the point – Jack makes a very convincing argument that informal institutions are almost by necessity going to reflect power inequalities – only in those relatively unusual situations where people care more about coordinating with each other than about which solution they coordinate on (for example: deciding which side of the road to drive on), or where there aren’t substantial power asymmetries, can we expect the development of the simple efficiency-enhancing institutions that many economists assume to be the norm.

Sploid on South Park Republicans (via Nick Gillespie).

And Mark Schmitt has lots of good links in re: the rise of conservatism and right-wing foundation money.

Savage Minds posts on the decision of Yale’s Department of Anthropology not to renew David Graeber’s contract, and suggests that the “real tipping point was his involvement with campus politics” and more specifically his support for “one of the organizers of a graduate student unionizing drive.” The source for this appears to be Graeber himself. Now I’ve no way of knowing whether Graeber’s own account tells the whole story, and the other side don’t seem to be talking. But either which way, the decision to let Graeber go is illustrative of a wider problem; as Jennet Kirkpatrick and Ian Robinson put it, non-tenure track faculty are fighting for the right “to be fired, but only with just cause.” It’s demonstrably risky for non-tenure track faculty to make waves, even when there’s strong justification for so doing; their reappointment (or lack of same) is at the pleasure of the Department, and they’ve no recourse (or right to know why) if they’re let go.

Update: See also this story at Inside Higher Ed where Marshall Sahlins says that Graeber’s “scholarship was at the level he would have had tenure at any normal university.” See also this petition in support of Graeber.

Matt Yglesias writes about philosophical zombies which reminds me to mention that this particularly refined class of undead gets a nod in Charles Stross’s Singularity Sky. It’s a nice example of a genre trope getting picked up by the academy, spun around, then yanked back into the popular culture with its references skewed. The few moments in the last couple of days which I haven’t spent grading, I’ve been reading Stross’s The Family Trade, a novel contribution to the somewhat exiguous genre of economic fantasy. Sort of like Roger Zelazny’s _Amber_ but with real feudalism – illiterate peasants, aristocrats who are obsessed with their fishing and mining rights (even if they don’t know much about what fishing and mining actually involve in practice), and a spunky heroine determined to reform the gung-ho mercantilism of her family business. It’s all enormous fun. I don’t usually buy books in hardback, but I couldn’t wait for a year to order a copy of the sequel, which is coming out in June. Good stuff.

John Sutherland splutters indignantly in _The Guardian_ that Steve Levitt’s Freakonomics, hides “hard-core Reagonism [sic] and Thatcherism” under a mask of playfulness. His evidence for this? First, that Levitt is an economist:

bq. Fun as it is to read, Levitt’s vision of the human condition is cold. The solution to every problem, whether political, moral, social or spiritual, is economics. The human animal is a rational-choice machine, driven by incentives and self-interest.

Second, that Reagan’s tax-cuts were “highly freakonomical” because they were counter-intuitive.

bq. Cut the taxes for the rich, and the poor will benefit. How? Because of trickle-down. And the government will pull in more revenue. Why? Compliance: people don’t mind paying taxes, they mind paying excessive taxes. History has proved Freaky Ron wrong on the first count and perhaps right on the second.

Now fulminating opinion-pieces should perhaps be held to a lower standard of truth than serious journalism. But even so, this is still an exceptionally silly article. First, even if Levitt’s view of the human condition is cold and based on economics, this is by no means evidence that he’s a right-wing jihadist. If Sutherland really wants to see the argument that “the solution to every problem, whether political, moral, social or spiritual, is economics” developed at length, he only needs to go back and read Marx’s _Capital_. Second, Reaganite economics didn’t have much of anything to do with the kinds of arguments that Levitt is putting forward. Indeed, in an important way, they’re antithetical to the kind of social science that Levitt is trying to do. _Contra_ Sutherland, the intellectual justification for Reagan’s tax cuts was, insofar as it was anything, the Laffer curve. To state it politely, the idea behind this curve was not driven by data. Levitt’s work, in contrast, isn’t scrawled down on the back of a restaurant napkin ; it’s driven by what the data show. This, I suspect, is why Levitt has some harsh words for John Lott in the book – cooking your numbers is a mortal sin.

I’ve read _Freakonomics_ pretty carefully (you’ll be seeing more on this topic before the end of the week). My guess is that Levitt is somewhere to the right of the political center, but it’s only a guess. His broad political orientation is impossible to discern from his writing on economics. Sutherland’s article is completely off the mark, and is, in a certain way, anti-intellectual. He identifies a particular style of thought that he doesn’t like, and then damns it on the basis of its purported link to a right wing political agenda. And in so doing, he seems to argue that the examination of incentives and what they tell us about how to make policy is fundamentally morally problematic. That’s a far reaching claim, and, I believe, one that is deeply misconceived. Sutherland is usually a good book reviewer, but he’s gotten this one very badly wrong indeed.

(Thanks to Chris for the link).

China Miéville has just won the Arthur C. Clarke award for _Iron Council_, which we ran a seminar on in January. He seems to be on a bit of a roll the last month or two; he’s also interviewed in the current issue of _The Believer_. Look out next month for some more Miéville-related goodness.

It doesn’t seem to me to be unreasonable to guess that there’s an indirect link between this NYT story on evangelizing Christians making life uncomfortable for non-believers in the armed forces, and the riots in Afghanistan that followed a _Newsweek_ report that a copy of the Koran had been flushed down the toilet by Guantanamo interrogators. Other services than the Air Force have a spotty track record in the area of Christian-Muslim sensitivities; to the best of my knowledge, General Boykin was never disciplined for the flagrantly offensive comments that he made in 2003.

This is important stuff; as Robert Kaplan said in the _Atlantic_ (sub required) a couple of years ago, the US armed forces are what administer the American imperium, such as it is. Kaplan claimed that this was a good thing, pointing to the positive role that army officers could play, and quoting Winston Churchill’s dictum that the Americans were ‘worthy successors’ to the British Empire. However, the inheritance may run in different directions than those that Kaplan highlighted. What’s happening in Afghanistan is reminiscent of the rebellion of 1858 in India, where false rumours that the British were issuing cartridges smeared with the body fat of cows and pigs were lent credibility by the efforts of Company officers from Britain to evangelize among their troops. There’s no evidence whatsoever that fundamentalist Christians were responsible for any decision to flush Korans down the toilet. Indeed, I suspect that they weren’t; if the _Newsweek_ story bears out, this is more likely to be a general cultural problem in the military than something that can be specifically attributed to a sub-group of officers. But still, an organization’s culture is in part a product of the actions that are tacitly encouraged or discouraged by its leaders. A military establishment in which extremists who believe that Allah is a “false idol” can not only survive, but prosper and reach high military rank, and in which non-Christians can experience systematic bullying and intimidation, is likely to have problems when it not only has to deal with “idol worshippers,” but has to take their beliefs seriously. Certainly, I can’t imagine that interrogators in the US military would ever have flushed a Bible down the toilet to shock a Christian prisoner into cooperation, regardless of whether this was likely to have worked or not.

Update: _Newsweek_ is now saying that it erred in its report.

Brad DeLong revisits the Guenter Grass question.

bq. UPDATE: Well, the original title is wrong: Guenter Grass is not minimizing the holocaust by comparing Nazi Germany to globalization. And I should not call him crypto-Nazi scum.

bq. But there is, still, something very wrong with claiming not that the neoliberal approach to economic reform is wrong, and that the analyses of people like me and my friends are flawed, but that we and I are the standard-bearers of a new totalitarianism. There is something very wrong with claiming that that the decision of the Social Democratic Party to push Harz IV is not a mistake, but rather a reflection of the Social Democratic Party’s subservience to multinational capital.

bq. Chancellor Schroeder is working for the interests of the German people as he sees them, and deserves a better quality of critic.

There aren’t many (any?) political bloggers who haven’t made overly-hasty or sweeping judgments at one point or another. But there’s a lot more rhetoric out there about the “self-correcting blogosphere” than there are selves who are willing to correct where correction is appropriate. More power to Brad for doing this.