Henry

John makes a commonly heard “argument”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001762.html – that the problems at the root of the European Union’s governance system revolve around the weakness of its Parliament.

bq. The central problem with the EU is the lack of democratic accountability arising from a structure with a powerless parliament, under which all decisions are effectively made either by the unelected European Commission or by national governments in the Council of Ministers. The solution is either to keep the EU relatively weak and ineffectual, by maintaining national vetos over most issues, or to make the system more like a bicameral legislature, with some form of majority voting in both the Parliament and the Council.

I reckon that both analysis and solution are arguable. The Parliament isn’t nearly as weak as it’s reputed to be, thanks to the beefing up of the so-called “codecision” legislative procedure, in which both Parliament and Council have an effective veto over major areas of policy. Indeed, the common complaint heard around the Commission these days is that it doesn’t have much of a role – the European Council is increasingly usurping its agenda-setting powers, while the Council and Parliament stitch up deals together on important items of legislation. The European Union is increasingly looking like a bicameral legislature – but this hasn’t done much to solve the famous democratic deficit. As the Parliament has gotten more powerful, it has found itself being sucked into the Council’s traditional, rather secretive, way of doing business, and informal deal-making. Because voters don’t take the Parliament seriously (they often use European Parliament elections to punish their national governments), it’s easy for members of the European Parliament to get away with this. Thus, the problem is less a weak Parliament, than a Parliament which has accrued substantial power without serious electoral accountability. This is a much trickier problem to solve.

We’ve been having some server problems which have disrupted the publication of both posts and comments. They should now be resolved – you should be able to comment again without receiving weird error messages. There will probably be further short term disruption in a few days, when we move to a new hosting provider – watch this space for further details.

I’ve been reading Anthony Grafton’s “Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astronomer”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674006704/henryfarrell-20 which is a lot of fun. Grafton has a lively writing style, well exemplifed by the following (unfair but funny) dig at the dismal science.

bq. At the most abstract level, astrologers ancient and early modern carried out the tasks that twentieth-century society assigns to the economist. Like the economist, the astrologer tried to bring the chaotic phenomena of everyday life into order by fitting them to sharply defined quantitative models. Like the economist, the astrologer insisted, when teaching and writing for professional peers, that astrology had only a limited ability to predict the future. … Like the economist, the astrologer proved willing in practice, when powerful clients demanded it, to predict individual outcomes anyhow. Like the economist, the astrologer generally found that the events did not match the prediction; and like the economist, the astrologer normally received as a reward for this confirmation of the powers of his art a better job and a higher salary.

Want to lower your “Erdös Number”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001720.html in a hurry? “Bill Tozier”:http://williamtozier.com/slurry is flogging off the “right to co-author”:http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3189039958 a scientific paper with him on eBay. An undoubted bargain for social scientists, humanities types and others with high Erdös counts. Given Bill’s chops in complex systems and agent-based modelling, I’m half tempted to bid myself.

Still, prospective bidders should note his strict _caveat emptor_.

bq. However, the seller retains the right to refuse (and publicly ridicule) proposals for research in non-scientific fields, such as “Intelligent Design”. Such kooks need not apply.

I’ve just finished Neal Stephenson’s “The Confusion”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060523867/henryfarrell-20, the second volume in a projected trilogy. It’s a lot of fun, albeit a bit more sporadic than the first – a little patchy in the usual fashion of the middle volumes of trilogies where nothing is resolved. Stephenson’s intentions for the trilogy are becoming clearer. He’s making an argument about the historical sources of modernity. In the first volume as I read it, the “key passage”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000910.html asks about the nature of the whirlwind, the invisible force not only impelling social and economic change, but also transforming our understanding of who we are, and our place in the universe. In “The Confusion,” Stephenson begins to articulate his answer to this question, when he places Jack Shaftoe in an alley in Cairo, which is perhaps the oldest marketplace in the world.

bq. For this alley was the womb at the center of the Mother of the World, the place where it had all started. The _Messe_ of Linz and the House of the Golden Mercury in Leipzig and the Damplatz of Amsterdam were its young impetuous grandchildren. Like the eye of the hurricane, the alley was dead calm; but around it, he knew, revolved the global maelstrom of liquid silver. Here, there were no Dukes and no Vagabonds; every man was the same, as in the moment before he was born.

For Stephenson, as for many economic historians, the invisible whirlwind is the market. It acts as a Universal Solvent, dissolving social bonds, and uniting an unlikely congeries of characters (including a Vagabond, a Dutch captain, an Armenian, a crypto-Jew, an Electress and a pirate-queen) in the pursuit of wealth. It works further alchemy as King Solomon’s gold and the wellsprings of credit become one and the same thing. The creation of complex financial markets conjures money from thin air, just as alchemists sought to transform lead into gold.

Stephenson’s history is, quite literally, a Whig one – the Whigs and merchants who seek to uproot the rotten pilings of the feudal order are the heroes of his narrative. This has clear costs in terms of historical veracity – Stephenson glosses over the “corruption”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0394730860/henryfarrell-20 endemic in Whig politics. Yet he continues to succeed in carrying off the difficult task of taking economic history seriously while maintaining an entertaining narrative. Recommended.

An interesting topic of bar-room discussion at the Mid-West – the peculiar psychology of rejection at elite universities. Several of the top universities (Harvard, Yale, Princeton etc) are notorious for how rarely they give tenure to assistant professors in the social sciences and humanities. Smart young people come to the university as assistant profs, teach for several years, are refused tenure _en bloc_, and depart for other jobs, usually at less prestigious institutions. The tenured professors in these places have usually come from outside – they’re nearly all recruited at a senior level from other universities (sometimes including former rejectees who have done well in the meantime). This creates a very strange atmosphere among junior faculty – they all know that the odds are against them getting tenure, hope that they will be among the rare exceptions, and point with admiration to the few who have managed to buck the system. What’s even more intriguing is the story of those professors who get rejected by an elite university and expelled into the outer darkness, but are then invited back to tenured jobs in the same place a few years later. Anecdotal evidence over beer suggests that a surprisingly large percentage of them accept the offer from the place that rejected them, even when they have other, more attractive offers from equally prestigious universities. If there’s a psychological mechanism to explain this, it’s one that goes against my expectations – _ex ante_, I would have predicted that people would take some pleasure in rejecting offers from places that had previously rejected them. Revenge, after all, is a dish that’s best served cold. Instead, quite a number of people seem to have a different set of motivations. So what’s going on?

I’m flying to Chicago for the “Mid West Political Science Association”:http://www.indiana.edu/~mpsa/conferences/conferences.html meeting tomorrow, and will be there until Sunday morning. If any of you spot me wandering between panels, feel free to accost me. Other non-native attendees may also want to check out this “NYT article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/14/dining/14CHIC.html on eating out in Chicago.

Via my colleague David Rayside, this extremely helpful “compilation”:http://www.aei.org/docLib/20040402_Homosexuality4.pdf of survey results on US attitudes to gay rights over time. _Mirabile dictu_, it’s a product of the American Enterprise Institute, which is apparently making itself useful for once. On a related note, Brett Marston offers “a further data point”:http://marston.blogspot.com/2004_03_28_marston_archive.html#108076126163016075 regarding the effects of gay marriage on heterosexual behaviour.

The “Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60804-2004Apr8.html reports on the interesting – but problematic – approach of Virginia to prosecuting spammers. Authorities in Virginia have arrested three suspected spammers from North Carolina. Their basis for asserting jurisdiction: that the spammers ‘went through’ servers in Virginia in order to disseminate spam.

bq. Although all of the suspects are from North Carolina, Cantrell said, “they went through a server in Virginia, and as long as they go through Virginia then we can prosecute them under our Virginia statutes.” Northern Virginia is a major hub for Internet traffic, and because of that Virginia has an opportunity to snag many more “spammers,” Cantrell said.

It’s not clear from the newspaper article how close the spammers’ relationship is with the server in Virginia – whether this is a server that they themselves used intentionally, or merely a server that their mail passed through en route to its final destination. But it certainly sounds as though Virginian authorities are asserting a general right to prosecute spammers (and jail them for up to twenty years), on the basis that their emails pass through Virginia at some point in their travels. Since roughly “50% of world Internet traffic”:http://www.reuters.com/locales/newsArticle.jsp?type=internetNews&locale=en_US&storyID=4778933 passes through Virginia, that’s a very far-reaching jurisdictional claim indeed. Of course, it’s nice to see spammers getting walloped with serious penalties (although 20 years of jail time would be a bit much). But it’s not at all clear to me that Virginia state authorities should appoint themselves arbiters of the world’s Internet traffic, with extraterritorial reach. If nothing else, it’s likely to lead to competing claims for jurisdiction from other authorities, in the US and elsewhere, and an incredible mess for individuals and firms trying to determine their legal liabilities. As Michael Geist “observes”:http://www.law.berkeley.edu/journals/btlj/articles/vol16/geist/geist.pdf, jurisdiction on the Internet is murky enough as it is. It looks as though it’s about to get a whole lot murkier.

“Julian Sanchez”:http://www.reason.com/links/links040504.shtml notes that some of the outrage at Kos is a bit rich, considering it comes from the likes of the LGF crowd. Charles Johnson and friends seem never to have met an Arab they didn’t want to string up. Now Johnson seems to be on a rampage, egging his commenters on to spew filth at “Kathryn Cramer’s”:http://www.kathryncramer.com/wblog/archives/000492.html and “Nathan Newman’s”:http://www.nathannewman.org/log/archives/001636.shtml#001636 blogs. Their tactics include posting Kathryn’s address and telephone number, making death threats, and threatening her children. This isn’t just trollishness – it’s an attempt to intimidate and to silence. Not a proud moment for the blogosphere. Via “Rivka”:http://respectfulofotters.blogspot.com/2004_04_01_respectfulofotters_archive.html#108127482205377604.

fn1. Title borrowed from one of Nathan’s commentators.

From Steven Brust, _The Lord of Castle Black_, p.128.

bq.. “It is sad,” observed Grassfog, “that our friend here is dead, and we have no wine.”

“It is your custom,” inquired Piro, “to become drunk when a friend dies?”

“Not in the least,” said Grassfog. “I was merely making an observation about two conditions that are both true, and both regrettable.”

Via “Tyler Cowen”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/04/evolutionary_th.html , a rather wonderful example of the absurdities of gung-ho evolutionary psychology. Edward H. Hagen, Paul J. Watson and J. Anderson Thomson Jr. “propose”:http://itb.biologie.hu-berlin.de/~hagen/HWT.pdf that severe depression is adaptive – it serves a functional purpose. It compels others to help the victim and thus redounds to his or her long term advantage. In short, depression is “an unconsciously calculated gamble to gain greater long-term benefits.”

This is a near-perfect example of what might be dubbed (with no apologies whatsoever to “Cosmides and Tooby”:http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html) the Standard Evolutionary Psychology Model. First, take some human trait or behaviour. Bonus points if it’s something weird like “slash fiction”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000398.html that’s likely to attract the interest of the Sunday supplement editors. Second, construct an “ad hominid argument”:http://homepage.mac.com/jholbo/homepage/pages/blog/blog19.html#201 claiming that this trait or behaviour served some functional need for hunter-gatherers on the veldt. Third, use your findings to justify some right-wing shibboleth or another, showing that hunter-gatherer societies hardwire us for perfectly competitive markets or the like (in fairness, Hagen, Watson and Thomson jr. don’t do this). Fourth, write article. Repeat as often as necessary to get tenure and/or the attention of the popular press. Of course, at no stage of the process need you deign to provide convincing empirical evidence that might sully the clarity and vigour of your argument. It’s wretched stuff, that doesn’t do any favors to Darwinian theory. That our minds are undeniably the product of evolutionary forces doesn’t and shouldn’t provide a license for half-baked functionalist explanations of the psychology of everyday life.

The newest political scientist in the blogosphere, Daniel Geffen, brings up an “important reason”:http://geffen.blogspot.com/2004_03_01_geffen_archive.html#107988195454245271 why Iraq is unlikely to become a democratic exemplar for the Middle East. Oil. Heavy oil exporters have a miserable democratic record, with the sole exception of Norway. There’s little reason to expect that Iraq will be any different.

[click to continue…]

One of the better indicators of statistical significance is the so-called “interocular trauma test.” It’s only satisfied when you have results that are so glaringly obvious that they hit you between the eyes. “Nasi Lemak,” a barely anonymous political scientist, uses pollingreport.com data on Bush’s approval ratings to come up with “two graphs”:http://nasilemak.blogspot.com/2004_03_28_nasilemak_archive.html#108066053879869096 that pass this test with flying colours. Of course, trends can change over time, but there sure looks to be something important happening here …