Henry

Over the last couple of months, Brad de Long has been documenting how difficult it is to find independent academic economists who are prepared to defend Bush administration policy. I haven’t seen anyone else saying this, but the same is true of international relations scholars. For a long while, the consensus among right-leaning realists, as well as liberal and lefties, has been that the invasion of Iraq was a disaster. I don’t know of any serious IR scholars who are prepared to defend Bush’s foreign policy (I’m not counting policy wonks in AEI etc, who face what we may politely describe as a different incentive structure). There have to be some out there – but as best as I can tell, they’re keeping very quiet.

Which is all by way of context for John Mearsheimer’s paper on “Lying in International Politics,” to be presented at the forthcoming APSA meeting in Chicago (thanks to Martin Weiss for bringing it to my attention).

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Daniel Drezner posts an extract from a _Wall Street Journal_ article (subscription only, and I don’t have a subscription), suggesting both that there is a serious shortage of skilled machinists in the US, and that “U.S. apprenticeship programs have dwindled as the large American companies that once provided the bulk of such training have cut back to save money and now outsource some of the work.” As I’ve noted before, there’s a serious case to be made that both these problems reflect underlying weaknesses in the US model of capitalism.

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Wandering around the blogosphere, I came across this rather interesting page. It seems to be a little outdated, but it provides an approximate count of the relative importance of different languages in the blogosphere. English comes first, unsurprisingly, then French. Portuguese is third, and Farsi fourth. This may seem a little surprising to those who aren’t familiar with the proliferation of Portuguese and Farsi blogs – both linguistic communities have also made substantial inroads into social network services like Orkut.com too. This leads to an interesting sociological question – why these communities and not other linguistic communities of similar size – have reached takeoff in the blogosphere. Equally interesting is the lack of any Arab language blogs on the list. This may be a result of how the authors have seeded their survey or parsed their results – but it may also quite possibly reflect reality. As far as I know, there are less than 70 Iraqi blogs (many of which are in English). I’m not aware of any substantial blogging communities in other Arabic-speaking countries – but I’m happy to be enlightened if I’m wrong. The root causes may perhaps include cultural factors – but I would bet that restrictions on Internet access and poor technological infrastructures also play a very important role.

Prominent German historian, Wolfgang Mommsen has died while swimming in the Ostsee. He was the scion of an astonishingly prolific family of German historians and thinkers (his great-grandfather, Theodor Mommsen, won the Nobel Prize; Max Weber was a relation by marriage). He is likely to be remembered for his prominent and honorable role in the _Historikerstreit_ (historians’ controversy), in which he along with several others (Jurgen Habermas, _Kaiserreich_ historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler, social historian Jurgen Kocka) battled with conservatives who seemed to be trying to normalize the Nazi period of German history. See Rhine River blog for more. Thanks to Nathanael Robinson for letting us know.

Steven Johnson has written one of the smartest political essays that I’ve read in a long while, using a simplified version of complexity theory to explain why the Dean campaign went bad. Johnson argues that the Dean campaign was based on a simple positive feedback loop in which more volunteers and donations led to increased publicity, leading to yet more volunteers and donations _usw_. However, its radical decentralization and lack of complex communication meant that it wasn’t able to cope when the environment changed, and the feedback was interrupted, it couldn’t adapt. Like slime moulds and pheronome-induced ant trails, the Dean campaign was “great at conjuring up crowds … [b]ut … lousy at coping.”

Johnson suggests that other forms of emergent behaviour cope better with changes to the environment, but that they don’t scale very well. They’re probably not suited to large-scale national campaigns in complex polities like the US. This seems to me to be a useful corrective to some of the hype about new kinds of campaigning and fundraising. They are having important effects on politics – but it is unclear (at best) whether they can radically reshape politics at the national level. Johnson suggests that the political lessons of emergence apply more clearly and easily to Jane Jacobs style urbanism and local politics. It’s a fascinating little essay, which packs a lot of punch into seven pages. Go read.

Joseph Cirincione and Alexis Orton at the Carnegie Endowment have just put out a very useful short analytic brief on Iraq’s putative efforts to obtain uranium in Niger.

Their conclusion:

bq. The numbers tell us that Iraq’s alleged interest in Niger uranium – even if true – never represented an immediate or significant threat to the United States. Simple math and common sense confirm that the claim should never have appeared in administration statements as evidence of an Iraqi nuclear weapon program.

Tom W. Bell has a fun post analyzing surfing as a system of non-state enforced property rights. Surfers apparently have a very-well developed set of norms regarding who gets which wave. Bell, who is a hard-core libertarian, sees this as mostly reflecting surfers’ “profound respects for property rights.” Surfers, by his account, behave like Lockeans when divvying up the waves. However, there’s an alternative explanatory framework that does a better job, I reckon, of explaining what’s going on – Lin Ostrom’s account of common pool resources, and the rules governing them.

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Both Dan and Matt Yglesias provide us with empirical evidence that the number of insurgents in Iraq is snowballing. It’s a far cry from the ridiculous predictions of Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Reynolds that jihadists from across the Arab world would get sucked into Iraq, leaving the US safer. Indeed, if the Brookings people are right, the number of foreign insurgents has grown only slightly since December, while the number of domestic insurgents has grown fourfold. Flypaper, my ass. This whole nonsensical theory was never more than _ex post_ wishful thinking masquerading as foreign policy analysis – as I argued last year, it seemed to be based on the fallacious notion that there was a limited “lump of terrorism” floating around in the international system that could be absorbed by a conflict in Iraq. Instead, entirely predictably, we’re seeing what seems to be an enormous increase in recruitment to anti-American forces – an eightfold increase over the last fifteen months. The dynamic effects are swamping the constant ones. I don’t see how this can be anything but bad news.

Update: I’d forgotten that Ted too posted on this eleven months ago.

bq. I’m going to make a prediction that I feel pretty good about: a year from now, no one will be very proud of the flypaper theory.

And I reckon that Robert Schwartz owes him $100 …

I’ve just finished Elizabeth Hand’s Mortal Love, which I recommend very highly; it’s the best novel she’s ever written. Her earlier work is sometimes extraordinary (if you can find a copy of _Winterlong_, buy it without hesitating) but it’s never quite under control – one has the impression of an artist struggling with her materials and every once in a while being overwhelmed by them. She’s overcome this in her recent shorter work – in particular “Cleopatra Brimstone,” and The Least Trumps. Both these stories have a technical mastery that was only sporadically present in her early work. They’re acute and sharp.

_Mortal Love_ repeats this success at novel length. It has a wealth of materials – Richard Dadd (lightly disguised), Pre-Raphaelites, Henry Darger style outsider art – but handles them with style, grace and economy.

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As I’ve remarked before, the Washington Post’s Michael Dirda is a prince among fiction reviewers. Dirda has wide-ranging tastes and an altogether infectious delight in the books that he loves (see here for a collection of his recent reviews). It’s a pity then that the NEA’s “Reading at Risk” report has provoked him into a fit of the Birkerts.

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I’m preparing an introductory course on game theory at the moment, and selecting readings for the week on communication and games of limited information. One of the key contributors to this literature is Joseph Farrell (no relation) who has done seminal work on how “cheap talk” (costless communication) may affect rational actors’ behaviour when it conveys useful information about an actor’s type. He also shows that “babbling equilibria” are always possible, in which actors’ communication conveys no information about their type whatsoever, and is consequently always ignored by others. This seems to be a rather abstruse argument with little real world relevance – but I reckon that one nice way to bring it home to my students is to point to how it helps explain DC taxi-cabs. In many (perhaps most) cities, cabs use their cab-sign to signal whether they are available or not. A lighted cab-sign indicates that the taxi-cab is free; an unlighted sign indicates that the cab is occupied. Washington DC, for some reason, is different. As far as I can tell, whether or not a cab’s sign is lighted bears no relationship to whether it is occupied. Thus, after some initial confusion, newcomers learn to ignore whether the cab has a lighted sign or not, instead squinting as best they can into the interior, to see whether they can spot any passengers. This is about as close to a babbling equilibrium as one may reasonably expect to find in the real world. How this came about in DC, and not in other American cities, is anyone’s guess.

I’m just back from a week in the Bay Area, with limited web access – John H mentions a friendly argument that we had last year over China Mieville and the economics of fantasy. My two posts on the subject are on my old blog, which is a bit difficult to access these days – for those (if any) who are interested in the topic, I’ve posted them below the fold. I note that I’ve mellowed a bit on the topic in the meantime, partly in response to criticisms from PNH and others.

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Hunt Stilwell has let me know via email that the Netflix fallacy that I talked about last week seems to replicate a very interesting experiment on the psychology of intertemporal decision-making. His email (with permission, and some light editing) is reproduced under the fold.

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Experimental psychologists are fond of pointing to examples of economic irrationality in every day life – for example, people respond in very different ways if an article is priced at $9.99 and if it’s priced at $10. Through detailed examination of my own and my wife’s behaviour, I think I’ve identified another such example – the “Netflix fallacy.” Netflix, for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, is a subscription service where you pay a set amount each month to rent movies. You can have three DVDs out at any one time – when you are finished with one, you send it back, and receive a new DVD from your list of picks by return post. In theory, it’s an ideal way to make sure that you have the movies you want, when you want, and an excellent deal if you rent more than 3-4 DVDs a month.

In practice, it’s different – at least in my experience. Movies that we’ve rented sometimes sit there for two or three months before we watch them, or eventually, reluctantly, decide to send them back without seeing them. To my shame, this happens most often with the interesting, difficult films with sub-titles. I suspect that this is because we’re accustomed to thinking of DVDs as stocks rather than flows. Because we have physical possession of the DVD, we’re disinclined to give it back until we’ve actually watched it. Of course, this means that we face substantial costs – we may very easily end up paying more money to rent the damn movie than we would have to pay to buy it and keep it forever. Meanwhile, Netflix is laughing all the way to the bank. It’s much smarter to think of the rental service as a flow – you’re likely to be happier if you keep the movies coming along in a steady stream, even if you don’t watch them (the latter may be useful information about your actual preferences, as opposed to the preferences that you would like to have). I suspect that virtually any reasonable decision rule along the lines of ‘send the movie back if you haven’t watched it within two weeks’ is likely to produce better results than our current policy of watching the movies whenever we get around to it. Or, more typically, don’t get around to it.