Henry

Forbes is the latest magazine trying to capitalize on the blogging thing by holding a “best blog competition”:http://www.forbes.com/personaltech/2003/04/14/bestblogslander.html across various categories. It’s interesting to note that no less than “53%”:http://forums.prospero.com/n/mb/viewpoll.asp?webtag=fdcbiz&tid=187&lgnF=y&dlink=1&vote=6&submit=%A0Vote+%3E%3E%A0 of voters say that the best blog on the economy is “none of the above” (no other entry gets more than 11%). I imagine that the glaring absence of a certain Berkeley economics professor from the shortlist helps explain this rather peculiar outcome … (via “The Decembrist”:http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/2004/03/is_this_one_of_.html)

As Kieran “says”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001588.html, social scientists are very easily seduced by their models, even when these models are actively misleading. Good social science should not only develop models, it should test them. Which is all in the way of an extended health warning for the following argument, which I’ve no intention of testing, and am not even sure I subscribe to myself. It’s indisputable that US social scientists look down their noses at their mainland European colleagues, who in turn are quite naturally resentful. Americans often justify their snobbishness by pointing to the failure of most mainland European academics to publish in the top journals of the field (which are usually US or UK based). Europeans tend instead to publish in edited volumes or non-peer reviewed journals. What I want to argue is that this difference isn’t because Europeans are any stupider than Americans, or less able to write interesting pieces – it’s because both Europeans and Americans are responding rationally to different systems of resource allocation.

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Another interesting piece of information on states and private actors in the governance of the Internet. One of the more important parts of the Internet’s architecture is the management of domain names, like amazon.com, crookedtimber.org, and the various national top-level domain names (like .uk for Britain, and .ie for Ireland). People who study this sort of thing have a vague sense that domain name allocation is handled by private actors in most parts of the world. “Not so”:http://www.unicttaskforce.org/perl/documents.pl?do=download;id=448 according to a new paper by Michael Geist, who has preliminary results from 66 countries around the world.

bq. The most significant finding of this global survey is that, at least at the national level, governments are currently deeply involved in domain name administration. In fact, contrary to most expectations, virtually every government that responded to the survey either manages, retains direct control, or is contemplating formalizing its relationship with its national ccTLD. This is true even for governments, such as the United States, that generally adopt a free-market approach to Internet matters. Given the near ubiquitous role of government at the national level, it should therefore come as little surprise that governments have begun to seek a similarly influential role at the international level where policy decisions may have a direct impact on their national domains.

Geist’s evidence also suggests that the closer a domain name authority is to the private sector, the less likely it is to be interested in public interest goals, and the more likely its main concern will be flogging off as many domain names as possible. This isn’t exactly surprising, but it does offer food for thought, especially given “Verisign’s push”:http://www.circleid.com/article/538_0_1_0_C/ further to privatize control of the domain name allocation system.

Read Kip, at “Long Story; Short Pier”:http://www.longstoryshortpier.com/vaults/2004/03/25/to_do on what gay people, feminists and creationists _don’t_ have in common.

The WTO has just handed down a “preliminary ruling”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/3568281.stm that Internet policy wonks like myself have been waiting for with considerable impatience. Last June, the Caribbean island state of Antigua and Barbuda took a WTO case against the US for restrictions of trade. The issue: various US laws that have been applied to stamp out Internet gambling, with unpleasant consequences for the Antiguan economy. Antigua has just won in this first stage of the process.

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Markets versus Politics – The Real Choice: … Too often policy arguments proceed as follows: A) politics “fails” because it does not produce the theoretically optimal result, therefore B) market processes are necessary. But B does not follow from A. The failure of government to produce an optimal result does not ensure that market processes will do a better job. From a social democratic perspective – or any perspective that is inherently suspicious of privatization – the burden should be on those advocating market processes to explain why the marketplace can be expected to produce a better result than the political process. In such an inquiry, the theoretical virtues of a basic equilibrium model of perfect competition are no more relevant than Pigouvian theories of government intervention. Both are blackboard abstractions that often have little bearing on what occurs in the real world. What matters is how privatization — and make no mistake, the subordination of political decisions to the marketplace is always political — is likely to affect the status quo ante, and whether the consequences of such intervention (and the attendant rent-seeking, transaction costs, etc.) constitute an improvement in the real world.

The introduction of market mechanisms into politics may be well intentioned, but that does not make it any more likely to generate positive results. Indeed, insofar as noble intentions leave the likely consequences of such interventions unexamined, such policies may make us all worse off.

(see “here”:http://volokh.com/2004_03_21_volokh_archive.html#108022995813874684 for original).

Kieran “suggests”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001576.html ” that people who subscribe to Intelligent Design theory need to have the perverse mechanics of childbirth explained to them.” Carl Zimmer “goes one step further”:http://www.corante.com/loom/archives/002449.html, and asks why the intelligent design crowd doesn’t embrace “one of the most successful, intricate examples of complexity in nature” – the cancer tumour.

bq. Cancer cells grow at astonishing speeds, defying the many safeguards that are supposed to keep cells obedient to the needs of the body. And in order to grow so fast, they have to get lots of fuel, which they do by diverting blood vessels towards themselves and nurturing new vessels to sprout from old ones. They fight off a hostile immune system with all manner of camouflage and manipulation, and many cancer cells have strategies for fending off toxic chemotherapy drugs. When tumors get mature, they can send off colonizers to invade new tissues. These pioneers can release enzymes that dissolve collagen blocking their path; when they reach a new organ, they can secrete other proteins that let them anchor themselves to neighboring cells. While oncologists are a long way from fully understanding how cancer cells manage all this, it’s now clear that the answer can be found in their genes. Their genes differ from those of normal cells in many big and little ways, working together to produce a unique network of proteins exquisitely suited for the tumor’s success. All in all, it sounds like a splendid example of complexity produced by design. The chances that random natural processes could have altered all the genes required for a cell function as a cancer cell must be tiny–too tiny, some might argue, to be believed.

“Invisible Adjunct”:http://www.invisibleadjunct.com/archives/000498.html has announced that she will be leaving academia and giving up her blog. It’s a very considerable loss – her blog has been wry, balanced, and very very smart. It’s become the core of a real community. She’s going to be missed.

“Brad DeLong”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000515.html speaks to the costs of Microsoft’s market dominance.

bq. I certainly think that I have been harmed by Microsoft’s bundling Internet Explorer with its Windows operating system. Remember the days when there was not one single dominant browser that came preinstalled on 95% of PCs sold? Back then there was ferocious competition in the browser market, as first a number of competitors and then Netscape and Microsoft worked furiously to upgrade their browsers and add new features to them. … And now? There is no progress in browsers at all. Why should anyone (besides crazed open sourcies) write a new browser? Why should Microsoft spend any money improving its browser?

It’s a point that’s made eloquently in Albert Hirschman’s _Exit, Voice and Loyalty_. Hirschman, who has had far greater influence on political scientists and sociologists than his fellow economists (Brad is an exception) points out that the real costs of monopoly are much greater than the inefficient prices they maintain to extract rents. Monopolies are lazy. They have no reason to respond to their customers – where else, after all, can dissatisfied customers go? Without the threat of exit, monopolies face few incentives to improve their service.

Of course, it’s far harder to model or to measure these effects than it is to measure the inefficiencies caused by monopoly pricing (and even that involves a fair amount of guesswork). Still, they’re the real reason for welcoming the EU’s forthcoming decision to restrain Microsoft’s shenanigans with media player software. If Microsoft has its way, we can expect to have similarly sloppy, bug-ridden media software, with infrequent updates and proprietary standards. This isn’t to say that Microsoft’s competitors have the consumer’s interests at heart: inside every lean, hungry entrepreneur, there’s a bloated monopolist struggling to get out. But without competition, there’s no restraint on firms’ ability to abuse consumers, and sometimes (as here) the maintenance of competition requires vigorous state intervention.

Just finished James Hynes’ “Kings of Infinite Space”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/031245645X/henryfarrell-20, which I found a little disappointing after his very funny “The Lecturer’s Tale”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0312287712/henryfarrell-20. KOISP takes up a failed academic (his downfall is described in a previous Hynes novella) who ends up temping as a typist/technical writer for the Texas state government. There’s some clever, funny commentary along the way, including this description of the protagonist’s previous job working for a school textbook company.

bq. For eight months Paul sat in a little gray cube under harsh fluorescent lighting and composed grammar exercises for grades six through twelve. His job was to accommodate an old workbook by expunging any content that did not meet the textbook guidelines of Texas and California, the company’s two biggest markets. Fundamentalist Texas forbade even the most benign references to the supernatural (the first step towards the Satanic sacrifice of newborns), while nutritionally correct California forbade any references to red meat, white sugar or dairy products (the biochemical causes of racism, sexism and homophobia).

Still, the book just doesn’t have as much venom and verve as _The Lecturer’s Tale_. The setting isn’t as developed; the character sketches aren’t as pointed or as sharp. My very strong impression is that Hynes is much more comfortable describing academia than bureaucracy and office politics – his best jokes still riff off academic debates. Further, the main conceit of the book – downsized penpushers turned feral ghouls, scuttling through the ceilings and walls of office buildings – has been done before, and done better, in William Browning Spencer’s wonderfully droll “Resume with Monsters”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1565049136/henryfarrell-20. If you want to read a funny dead-end-job/comedy/horror mash-up, read Browning Spencer; if you want to read Hynes at his best, buy or borrow _The Lecturer’s Tale_. Unfortunately, _Kings of Infinite Space_ simply isn’t as good as either.

Apparently, Coke has nicked its “business plan”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,1174127,00.html for _Dasani_ from Trotter’s Independent Trading – “bottled tap water with added contaminants”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/onlyfools/christmas/1992.shtml. Does it glow in the dark too?

“Another Damned Medievalist”:http://www.blogenspiel.blogspot.com worries in “comments”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001522.html about the perils of blogging for the untenured academic.

bq. I’d like to ask those of you who already have tenure and may be on hiring committees — what happens if you know a candidate from the blogosphere? Should people on the market blog (Ms Mentor says to be careful)? If the blog is not academic, is it relevant to the search (although I can’t imaging that it wouldn’t have some influence on whether a candidate is a ‘good fit’? Inquiring minds want to know!

As an untenured faculty member meself, I have little wisdom to offer.

There’s an interesting poll by Pew, which suggests that anti-Semitism has actually “declined significantly”:http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=206 in France and Germany since 1991. I imagine that much of the decline, especially in Germany, can be traced to older anti-Semites dying as time progresses. Even still, the percentage of Germans who view Jews “unfavorably” is unacceptably high, at 20% of the population. I’d like to see a breakdown of the difference between former East and West Germany (some 500 people were polled – probably enough to make a decent first attempt at identifying sub-national differences). My suspicion is that there are substantially higher numbers of people from former East Germany with anti-Semitic views. They missed out on most of the collective self-recrimination about Germany’s behaviour towards Jews in the 1933-1945 period (the East German regime preferred to propagandize the martyrdom of Communists in the concentration camps, for obvious reasons). Via “Norman Geras”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/03/european_attitu.html.

Congratulations to Kevin Drum for having effectively “taken over”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/ the Washington Monthly’s website with his rather excellent blog. I note for the record that I “argued”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001372.html last month that hybridization with blogs was likely the way forward for magazines of opinion. Clearly the proprietors of the Washington Monthly agree. It’s a magazine that has been doing quite well the last year; I suspect that its links to the blogosphere (through Josh Marshall and Nick Confessore) have already been helping it get the word out to potential subscribers. More power to them.