Henry

‘Angry Moderate’ made a comment on my post on plagiarism last week, which I’ve been meaning to respond to.

bq. Richard Ellickson’s marvellous book, Order Without Law, notes that the first and usually most effective sanction against violators of a community norm is, “truthful malicious gossip.” In my experience, this is quite common with regard to plagiarists – and the worst plagiarism is not copying off some web-site but stealing other scholars’ ideas and/or empirical material before they publish it – and quite appropriate and quite effective. The only problem is the equally large circulation of untruthful malicious gossip.

This seems to me to be the beginnings of an interesting take on the problem of plagiarism – like Robert Ellickson’s cattle ranchers in Shasta county, we could resolve the problem of plagiarism informally, if only we had an effective means of spreading truthful malicious (as opposed to untruthful malicious) gossip about who has plagiarized. The problem is, of course, that the informal personal networks of academia don’t seem up to the task – as the Chronicle reported, even the department chairs of some offending academics don’t seem to know that they have plagiarized. Thus, part of the problem is poor communications among academics. Here, the new institutional economics suggests that centralized communications can play an important role. Work by game theorists suggests that a centralized communications structure in which one actor is an “honest broker” of information about who has behaved badly and who hasn’t, can support honest behaviour among a much larger group of participants than a decentralized structure which relies on one-to-one gossip alone. As Avner Greif, Paul Milgrom and Barry Weingast have pointed out, this was one of the key functions that guilds played in the late mediaeval period – they had centralized communications systems policing the behaviour of guild members to ensure that they all played by the rules. Any member of the guild who broke the rules (by trading with someone who the guild was boycotting) would find that he was boycotted himself by other guild members.[1]

Of course, in academia, the closest equivalent to guild structures – the various professional associations – don’t play this role. As the Chronicle documents, they seem loath to discipline their members – and even more loath to publicize their disciplinary actions when they take them. Clearly, they don’t have the powers to punish plagiarists themselves. But by identifying and publicizing incidents of plagiarism they could do a lot to solve the problem, leaving the actual enforcement to one-to-one interactions among academics themselves, so that identified plagiarists would find it difficult to get jobs and grants. The current situation in which it’s difficult to distinguish ‘real’ incidents of plagiarism from malicious gossip, is in many ways the worst of all possible worlds. Of course this wouldn’t be a complete solution – some of the kinds of plagiarism that ‘Angry Moderate’ identifies would be hard to police – but it would go a fair way towards remedying the problem.

fn1. Greif, Avner, Paul Milgrom, and Barry R. Weingast. “Coordination, Commitment and Enforcement: The Case of the Merchant Guild.” in Explaining Social Institutions. eds. Jack Knight, and Itai Sened. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995

Maynard Handley, in comments to my recent post on plagiarism suggests that the recent kerfuffle over plagiarism can be traced back to the content mafia.

bq. Hypothesis: The current rash of stories on plagiarism is not simply a reflection of the fact that digital technology makes certain patterns easier to detect. Rather it is fanned and encouraged by the same media corporations that are behind perpetually lengthening copyright and the DMCA —- corporations whose larger goal is not simply to prevent you from copying a CD from your friend (and thereby avoiding paying them $15) but the construction of a system whereby everything non-material —- ideas, concepts, phrases on up, are owned.

He’s wrong, but in an interesting way – his hypothesis reflects a common confusion between copyright and attribution. Copyright is about the ability to control how your work is copied and disseminated – the granting of the right to make copies usually involves real money changing hands. Attribution is the (much weaker) requirement that any use that is made of your ideas or hard work acknowledges you in some sense as the author of those ideas. There’s no money involved – it’s an informal economy rather than a formal one. Academics usually don’t worry too much about copyright – they usually hand the copyright to their work over to publishers, and rarely receive much in the way of financial reward for it. They do, in contrast, care a lot about attribution, since this is the way that they make their reputation (and perhaps end up with cushy endowed professorships if they play their cards right). Academic publishers (which are a minor branch of the media industry) care very much indeed about copyright since this is their bread and butter, but don’t have much of an incentive to police attribution.

Not only are copyright and attribution different things, but they sometimes point in different directions. Academics would ideally like to see their work disseminated as widely as possible, as long as they retain attribution. They don’t make any money from it – the more readers, the better. Academic publishers, in contrast, clearly have an incentive to restrict reproduction of the work to those who are willing to pay for it.

In short, the informal economy of academic attribution is much more like the kind of alternative economy that, say, Creative Commons is trying to create than it is like the copyright industry. Academics are usually happy when others rip, remix or even parody their work – as long as the remix artists acknowledge them by name. Similarly, the Creative Commons licenses now include a requirement for attribution as standard (it used to be optional, but 97-98% of Creative Commons users wanted it in their licenses, so that the CC crowd decided that it was easier to make it the default). The requirement that people not plagiarize (i.e. that they not use others’ work without attribution) presents no problems whatsoever for ‘free culture.’

A couple of days ago, I got into a bit of a back-and-forth with Stephen Bainbridge about his interpretation of a Jonathan Chait piece. While I still think that he should have been more generous in his interpretation of Chait, I was less generous still in my response, and believe on reflection that I owe Prof. Bainbridge an apology. God knows, a bit of snarkiness here and there enlivens discussion in the blogosphere, but it also tends to drive out proper argument in favour of the venting of spleen on both sides. I think we could have had a proper argument here. My bad.

The _Chronicle of Higher Education_ isn’t a newspaper that you would normally associate with traditional investigative journalism. However, when it does investigate, it does a pretty good job; it’s just put up the report of an investigation into plagiarism where it names and shames four academics who look to be guilty on all charges. A cultural geographer who seems to have committed extensive serial plagiarism, including writing an article which had “several paragraphs that appear to be copied from a Web site on surf music.” A historian who was found guilty of plagiarism by the American Historical Association – but whose current employer seems to be unaware of the fact. Another historian who appears to have copied extensively from an obscure 1960’s book. And a British international relations scholar who copied five pages of the introduction to his book directly from an article in the well-known journal _International Studies Quarterly_. Another article (behind the Chronicle’s paywall) talks about a senior scientist (a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and member of the President’s Council on Science and Technology) who appears to have copied large chunks from an article written by one of his proteges without permission (something which I suspect is pretty common in many fields). As the _Chronicle_ reporters suggest, this is almost certainly symptomatic of a wider problem.

bq. While this article delves into a few cases we uncovered, our reporting suggests that what we found is not exceptional. Indeed, an editor at History News Network receives so many tips about purported plagiarism that he now investigates only those involving well-known scholars. A professor at Texas A&M International University was bombarded with hundreds of e-mail messages after writing about being plagiarized. Many of them were from graduate students and professors who believed that they, too, had been victims.

As the _Chronicle_ suggests, there isn’t any very effective means of policing plagiarism given current structures in the academy. Professional associations are reluctant to take on plagiarism cases, or to publicize them when they do. Individual departments may punish plagiarists, but there’s no guarantee that they’ll take action – and if they do, very often, nobody outside the department in question knows about it. The reluctance to take serious action against plagiarists isn’t a conspiracy – it’s due to a combination of a lack of resources, a reluctance to get involved in controversy, and, perhaps, a feeling of ‘there but for the grace of God …” (it’s every academic’s nightmare to be accused of plagiarism because of carelessness or sloppy footnoting). Yet it means that in practice there’s an implicit tolerance for plagiarism. It isn’t an endemic problem, but it’s a real and persistent one – most working academics will know someone who has been plagiarized at one stage or another. Academics frequently hark back to the idea that they form a sort of guild. If this has any meaning at all, the academy should do better in carrying out the primary job of a guild; policing the behaviour of their members.

Jefferson Morley of the Washington Post tells us that:

bq. There was noticeable reticence to pursue certain leads in the story. Annan is the most recognizable figure to catch heat for the scandal that occurred on his watch. But according to the Duelfer report, former French Interior Minister turned businessman, Charles Pascua, received oil vouchers from the Hussein regime that enabled him to sell more than 10 million barrels of oil on the international market. If you enter Pascua’s name in the French language version of Google News, the search engine is unable to find a single mention of Pascua’s name in the French press in the last 30 days.

If he spelled Charles Pasqua's name correctly he’d find 101 of them (although in fairness, his main point stands – I could only find 2 that mentioned Pasqua in connection with the UN shenanigans).

I downloaded Google Desktop a couple of weeks ago, and have found it invaluable – it’s greatly superior to the standard Windows search tools. But up until a few minutes ago, I didn’t realize that it could serve as a sort of rough-and-ready backup tool to boot. I loaded up a Word document that I’d been working on recently, and found (as occasionally happens) that most of my work had somehow disappeared, through the vagaries of Windows, or my having pressed the wrong key at some stage or another, or some combination of the two. None of the temporary files were still on my hard drive, so I more or less resigned myself to having to recreate several days work. But then I decided to use Google Desktop search to trawl my hard drive on the off chance that it was still in existence somewhere – and discovered that Google creates and retains several caches of all Word documents that you are working on, so that you can go back and see earlier versions, and, if necessary, cut and paste old material that has somehow gone missing back into your document. It’s not an ideal solution (you lose formatting etc) – but it beats the hell out of having to rewrite something that you had already spent a lot of time on.

Apropos of Dan’s post below, it’s interesting how unconcerned Jim Lindgren and many other critics of European anti-semitism appear to be when it’s European Muslims who are at the receiving end of the jackboot. Lindgren links approvingly to a ‘fascinating’ (read: bizarre and very possibly deranged) article by Victor Davis Hanson at the National Review Online about the ‘Ents’ of Europe. Apparently, Europeans, like Ents, have slumbered through the threat from Islamofascism. Hanson hopes that the Dutch Ents at least are waking up to the dangers that they face from the Islamists in their midst, and finishes by calling for a European Demosthenes who will ‘soberly but firmly’ demand an end to multiculturalism and the internal threat from radical Islam. It’s quite unfair to note in this context that the leader of the racist Belgian Vlaams Blok party has just called for the European far right to join forces to combat the ‘Islamization of Europe.’ But it’s not at all unfair to see something disturbing and even disgusting in the way that Hanson glides over the mosque-burnings and racist and religious violence that have happened over the last several weeks as a consequence of the ‘waking up’ of the Netherlands. As I’ve mentioned before, I much prefer it when the more ignorant members of the American right-wing commentariat limit themselves to attacks on European anti-semitism, even if they grossly exaggerate its extent and effects. It’s much more disturbing when they praise Europe than when they damn it – they invariably latch onto the nastiest and most atavistic aspects of European politics and policy.

Stephen Bainbridge, in the course of attacking Jonathan Chait’s recent article on the dearth of conservative academics, makes an interesting leap of logic.

bq. “Second, professors don’t particularly want to be Republicans. In recent years, and especially under George W. Bush, Republicans have cultivated anti-intellectualism.” In other words, conservatives are stupid. *Wrong again*. As I also pointed out in my TCS column, Data from the widely used General Social Survey (GSS) consistently show that Republicans are better educated than Democrats (on average, they have more than half a year more education and hold a higher final degree). In addition, Republicans score better than Democrats on two tests included in the GSS. As for Chait’s argument that conservatives are anti-intellectual, how about all those fine public intellectuals who write for opinion journals like Policy Review, Commentary, or First Things, to name a few? Or how about all those policy wonks working at places like AEI or Heritage?

How exactly does the observation that “Republicans cultivate anti-intellectualism” imply that the observer believes that Republicans are stupid? This is a complete non-sequitur, and a misleading one at that – Bainbridge is trying, not very successfully, to change the subject to one that he feels stronger on (I’m sure that there’s a technical term for this sort of rhetorical manoeuvre, but I don’t know what it is). Nor does the fact that Republican intellectuals exist contradict the fact that there is a strong strain of anti-intellectualism to Republican Party rhetoric, and Republican attempts to appeal to voters (as, for example, the pillorying of Al Gore for using big numbers and complicated ideas). While this anti-intellectualism doesn’t completely explain the dearth of Republican academics by any stretch of the imagination, it surely helps contribute to the hostility of many in the academy, as does the open hostility of many Republicans to evolutionary biology and the very real scientific consensus on global warming.

Update: Stephen Bainbridge responds in an update to his original post:

bq. One would have thought my point was obvious, but let me spell it out. Point one: There are a lot smart conservatives out there interested in intellectual matters and the life of the mind. They’re qualified to be academics and likely would pursue an academic career if they had a fair shot at landing one. Point two: Even if Chait and Farrell are right that there is a streak of anti-intellectualism in the Republican party, so fricking what? Why does that justify the academic left’s discrimination against conservatives? (You’ll note Farrell just sort of glides past that point.) Would Farrell say that environmentalists should be excluded from the academy because some eco-nuts commit the grossly anti-intellectual act of vandalizing laboratories doing animal research? Of course not. So spare me your stereotypes and generalizations. And stop using Karl Rove’s (highly successful) campaign tactics as your spurious justification for discriminating against conservative academics. Just because your Democrat party can’t beat Bush doesn’t justify taking our your anger on right-of-center job applicants.

He’s either having serious comprehension problems with a perfectly straightforward argument (namely that there is a major non-sequitur in his original claims), or he’s being intellectually dishonest. I don’t at any stage offer any “spurious justification for discriminating against conservative academics” (or indeed any non-spurious justifications either). I simply point to a major flaw in Bainbridge’s argument; he egregiously misinterprets Chait for his own rhetorical purposes. This has no bearing on the underlying question of whether there is, or is not, discrimination against conservative academics. In Bainbridge’s response, he doesn’t even bother to try and justify his misinterpretation; instead he tries to change the subject again by claiming (without any evidence whatsoever) that I’m trying to justify anti-conservative discrimination. Weak, silly bluster – I’d have expected better from him.

Jennifer Howard of the Washington Post has a longish article-cum-book-review in the most recent Boston Review on “the uses of fantasy,” where she gets it very badly wrong, but in an interesting way. She takes a critical hatchet to Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (which I and others on this blog and elsewhere liked quite a lot) and to modern fantasy in general, but rather than attacking it for being too ridden with the cliches of genre, she attacks it because it isn’t genre enough. For Howard,

bq. When the news strays so far from the familiar moral contours of the struggle between Good and Evil, it’s tempting to lose ourselves in stories in which this battle is fought in clear terms and on an epic scale.

bq. Good over here, Evil over there—call it the Lord of the Rings model, in which heroes may be flawed but are always recognizably heroes, and their enemies want nothing less than to stamp out (as one of the good guys puts it in Peter Jackson’s recent film adaptation) “all that’s green and good in this world.” Many other fantasy classics work this territory, too; think of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, for instance, with its underpinning of Christian allegory.

Thus, Howard finds that JSAMN is a failure; it’s “a possibly fatal degree of academic remove away from epic sweep and the big moral questions.” More precisely:

bq. aren’t the showier sorts of magic—magic that battles for the soul of the world—exactly what we need, now more than ever? … Clarke’s novel doesn’t parody the genre; it displays in a lifeless cabinet of wonders all its elements—every element, that is, but the epic sense of Good and Evil, of things larger than ourselves, that makes the best fantasy so powerful and so necessary.

I’m not disputing that escapist fantasy can’t be good stuff (when it’s well written, it’s wonderful), but I do think it’s rather unfair to pillory Clarke for not writing the kind of book that she clearly didn’t want to write in the first place. Clarke isn’t especially interested, as far as I can make out, in epic battles between good and evil; instead, she’s rather more concerned with the tensions between the magical and the mundane. She’s not copying Tolkien; if anything, she’s riffing on a very different tradition of fantasy that goes back to Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist. For which purpose, the incongruence between the world of Faerie and the social niceties of Regency England works extremely well – it not only provides Clarke with the makings of good comedy, but allows her to get at the fundamental _thinness_ of the British social order. The key moments in the book are those where you realize that Jonathan Strange and Dr. Norrell’s dispute is at most a sort of shadow play, a prelude to something much stranger and wilder. From Clarke’s novel:

bq. He had meant to say that if what he had seen was true, then everything that Strange and Norrell had ever done was child’s-play and magic was a much stranger and more terrifying thing than any of them had thought of. Strange and Norrell had been merely throwing paper darts about a parlour, while real magic soared and swooped and twisted on great wings in a limitless sky far, far above them.

Magic, in Susanna Clarke’s novel, is profoundly unsettling, in a way that it isn’t in Howard’s preferred forms of fantasy; it threatens to disrupt the social order. There’s a sort of dynamic tension between it and reality, rather than a simple escape from our complex world. If the usages of Regency England are so fragile, so vulnerable to disruption from without, then what of our own settled ways of doing things? Howard clearly doesn’t like this mode of writing, which is her right, but it seems to me at the least peculiar that she should prosecute the book for not being what it doesn’t want to be in the first place, and then convict it on all counts. There’s more than one mode of fantasy out there, and if JSAMN doesn’t conform to her preferred type, then that’s really not Clarke’s fault, nor does it reflect on the book itself so much as on the lack of sympathy between the book and a particular kind of reader.

I’m trying very hard to imagine what the film version of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is going to be like if The Times is to be believed. According to an article today, the film’s director is cutting all references to God and the church from the script, for fear “of a backlash from the Christian Right in the United States.” Instead, the sinister ‘Authority’ (read horrid amalgam of Calvinism and the Catholic Church) of the novel will be taken as representing any old repressive establishment that you might care to oppose yourself – totalitarian, Marxist or what-have-you. This seems to me (and I suspect to most of Pullman’s readers) to be utterly mad – the entire point of the series is that it’s an extended diatribe against organized religion. Pullman is a vociferous member of the Devil’s party, even if his vague humanistic alternative to Christianity (described in the greatly inferior final volume of the series), is decidedly droopy.

It also says some interesting things about the comparative state of debate over religion in the UK and the US. In the UK, the Anglican establishment seemed to be quite delighted with Pullman’s books – that someone took Christianity seriously enough to attack it was cause for celebration. In the US, in contrast, the movie’s financial backers are clearly terrified of a backlash from fundamentalists who are anything but interested in vigorous debate about the merits and defects of organized Christianity. Anti-semitic movies about the Passion are all very well and good, but pull-no-punches atheism and criticism of organized religion apparently are not. Of course, this may just be nerves on the part of the money people (in fairness, Gibson’s magnum opus got squeamish responses from potential backers too), but it is interesting how little public space there is for the expression of atheistic views in the US. I’m neither religious nor a card-carrying atheist myself (I’d describe myself as a mostly-lapsed Catholic), but it seems to me that it doesn’t do any great service to genuine religious debate if a well argued and intellectually coherent perspective on religion is denied any space in popular culture.

Update: slightly revised following comments.

Robert Irwin gets tough with Kahlil Gibran.

bq. As a thinker, Gibran is easy to liken to Madeleine Basset, characterised by Bertie Wooster as ‘one of those soppy girls riddled from head to foot with whimsy. She holds that the stars are God’s daisy chain, that rabbits are gnomes in attendance on the Fairy Queen, and that every time a fairy blows its wee nose a baby is born, which, as we know, is not the case. She’s a drooper.’ I cannot imagine Wooster falling for Gibran either, for he, too, was a drooper. Nowhere in his essays, short stories or dramatised dialogues is there any humour, sex or surprise. His writing conjures up fields of grey ectoplasm inhabited by plaintive souls. If Gibran is right about the universe, then we are all living in a banal and sentimental nightmare.

bq. He seems to be a favourite poet of those who don’t like poetry. Similarly, I suspect that Gibranian spirituality suits those who cannot face the more specific demands that a real religion might make. The only thing you have to do as a follower is read more Gibran, plus, of course, ‘see’ more deeply, ‘listen to the language of the heart’ and so on.

Or more succinctly: “Gibranian spirituality seems to be designed to get one out of going to church on Sundays.” Seems about right to me.

Kieran mentioned Jonathan Coe’s vicious and funny take-down of Thatcherism, “What a Carve-Up” in passing a couple of days ago. It reminded me of a bit in Coe’s more recent novel, The Rotter’s Club, where he identifies the ‘death of the Socialist dream’ with the extinction of prog-rock.

bq. He giggled like a little maniac, and stared at me for a second or two before running off, and in that time I saw exactly the same thing I’d seen in Stubb’s eyes the day before. The same triumphalism, the same excitement, not because something new was being created, but because something was being destroyed. I thought about Philip and his stupid rock symphony and I swear that my eyes pricked with tears. This ludicrous attempt to squeeze the history of countless millennia into half an hour’s worth of crappy riffs and chord changes suddenly seemed no more Quixotic than all the things my dad and his colleagues had been working towards for so long. A national health service, free to everyone who needed it. Redistribution of wealth through taxation. Equality of opportunity. Beautiful ideas, Dad, noble aspirations, just as there was the kernel of something beautiful in Philip’s musical hodge-podge. But it was never going to happen. If there had ever been a time when it might have happened, that time was slipping away. The moment had passed. Goodbye to all that.

I don’t agree with the sentiment or the identification, but it’s an interesting and clever metaphor. I’m also curious to know from UK/Irish readers whether the sequel to the Rotter’s Club is as good as the first volume – hasn’t been released on this side of the Atlantic yet, I don’t think.

Dan Drezner recommends Kenneth Waltz’s Man, The State and War as one of his December books of the month. This reminds me of something that I’ve always been curious about – the eyepopping price of Waltz’s even more influential Theory of International Politics (only $73.43 in paperback to you mate, with free Super Saver shipping). It’s not so expensive because there’s low demand – every graduate student in international relations has to read it. So is this just a simple case of gouging by the publisher, or is there some other reason why it’s so expensive?[1]

Update: Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution suggests that the problem is that these are textbooks assigned by professors who don’t have to buy the books themselves, and draws an analogy with health care. My best guess is that this isn’t the problem in this case – I don’t think that “Theory of International Politics” is usually assigned to undergraduate classes (it’s pretty dense, with lots of philosophy of science discussion _inter alia_). Instead, as Daniel suggests in comments, it’s more likely to be an inelasticity of demand problem – pretty well every serious IR academic has to have a copy on his or her shelves. If there’s an analogy to healthcare, it’s not that the key decisions are made by the people who don’t pay the costs, it’s that (like life-saving drugs etc), the demand is inelastic enough that suppliers can extract substantial rents.

Update 2: Matt Yglesias describes my comment that “it’s not so expensive because there’s low demand” as being ‘rather naive’ – he’s misunderstanding what I’m getting at here. Academic presses do sometimes publish books for which there’s low demand, and need to charge a lot for each individual copy of the book in order to recoup their costs. What I’m saying is that this very clearly isn’t one of those cases. As Matt (and d-squared, and I) suggest, the probable reason why Waltz’s book is as expensive as it is because of inelasticity of demand with respect to price. Basic monopoly pricing, in other words.

fn1. Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye’s similarly indispensable Power and Interdependence lends support to the price-gouging hypothesis – it’s $65.60 in paperback.

Via About Last Night , SF author John Scalzi presents us with the ten worst Christmas specials ever. Starting with Dorothy Parker and gang.

bq. An Algonquin Round Table Christmas (1927)

bq. Alexander Woolcott, Franklin Pierce Adams, George Kaufman, Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker were the stars of this 1927 NBC Red radio network special, one of the earliest Christmas specials ever performed. Unfortunately the principals, lured to the table for an unusual evening gathering by the promise of free drinks and pirogies, appeared unaware they were live and on the air, avoiding witty seasonal banter to concentrate on trashing absent Round Tabler Edna Ferber’s latest novel, Mother Knows Best, and complaining, in progressively drunken fashion, about their lack of sex lives. Seasonal material of a sort finally appears in the 23rd minute when Dorothy Parker, already on her fifth drink, can be heard to remark, “one more of these and I’ll be sliding down Santa’s chimney.” The feed was cut shortly thereafter. NBC Red’s 1928 holiday special “Christmas with the Fitzgeralds” was similarly unsuccessful.

Ayn Rand’s ‘A Selfish Christmas,’ the lost Star Trek special (‘A Most Illogical Holiday’) and the David Cronenberg Canadian Christmas special (‘The virus causes Santa to develop both a large, tooth-bearing orifice in his belly and a lustful hunger for human flesh, which he sates by graphically devouring Canadian celebrities Bryan Adams, Dan Ackroyd and Gordie Howe on national television’) also excel.