The incomparable Michael Dirda does a full-page review of Gene Wolfe’s The Knight in this week’s Washington Post. Dirda says that Wolfe “should enjoy the same rapt attention we afford to Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy” and he’s not blowing smoke. I’ve blogged before on Wolfe, who’s perhaps my favourite living writer. _The Knight_ isn’t quite as wonderful as Wolfe’s “New Sun” books, which together constitute his masterpiece, but is still quite wonderful indeed. Its setting most closely resembles that of his juvenile novel, _The Devil in a Forest_, but its story is rather more complex; as Dirda says, the surface smoothness of Wolfe’s language is “that of quicksand.” The prose-style of _The Knight_ is plain, plainer by far than the archaisms and loanwords of the _New Sun_ books, but it is possessed of the same gravity and music. Wolfe is staunchly conservative, and the book shows it. _The Knight_ presents a vision of chivalry and fealty in the Dark Ages that borrows from Tolkien, and that is likely to be signally unsympathetic to most lefties. But there’s something important there; like other good writers on both left and right, Wolfe’s understanding of human nature and society runs deeper than his immediate political sympathies. His depiction of life in a society on the margins of civilization (caught between the depredations of barbarism and the efforts of the monarchy to impose order) is note-perfect; Wolfe not only has an ear for the music of language, but for the rhythms of society. If you haven’t read Wolfe before, I still recommend that you start with the New Sun books (Shadow and Claw, and Sword and Citadel); but _The Knight_ is a worthy companion.
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Henry
The NYT has an article on anonymous reviews on Amazon, and how they’re manipulated in different ways by authors, authors’ friends, and authors’ most bitter enemies. It’s a real problem with a system that allows uncontrolled anonymity or pseudonymity – the information content of the average review quickly drops to zero, unless (like Tyler Cowen you’re interested in the degree of controversy that surrounds the book, rather than the ratio of positive to negative reviews). For an academic, the obvious point of comparison is peer review. Most halfway decent scholarly journals[1] get anonymous scholars to review any articles that are submitted to them so as to assess publishability. Although the editor of the journal usually has the final say, the anonymous reviewers’ findings count for a lot. There’s a lot of bitching and griping about this in the particular, especially because it’s sometimes not too difficult for the paper’s author to guess the identity of the ‘anonymous’ reviewer who did a hatchet-job on their cherished piece. The identity of particularly venomous reviewers is the subject of (frequently lurid) speculation and gossip.
Still, the system works reasonably well in the general, for three reasons. First, even if the reviewers are anonymous from the point of view of the article’s author, the journal’s editor knows who they are. This encourages at least some degree of responsibility on the part of the reviewer; even those with malice in their hearts may prefer not to run the risk of becoming known as a partisan hack by a journal editor, who may be receiving their own pieces in the future. Second, most journals will solicit at least two, and very likely three or four reviews, which ideally will be written by people from a variety of backgrounds, so that neither the author’s friends nor foes determine the article’s fate. This doesn’t always work as well as it should – but most journals at least make good-faith efforts to ensure that a piece receives a fair hearing. Finally, anonymity does provide some protection for fair criticism. Even in contexts where the disgruntled author of a rejected article can make a fair guess at who the reviewers were, they can’t be entirely sure; thus, it’s hard for them to retaliate, even when they’re powerful figures in the field. Anonymous peer review isn’t perfect – but by and large the articles that get published in the better known journals in the social sciences are reasonably good, interesting pieces (I don’t know other disciplines well enough to comment properly on their journals).
fn1. Legal journals are the most obvious exception.
Begging to differ (politely) from a comment that Scott Marten makes on the French headscarf ban:
bq. I just don’t understand how people who feel this law is justified because girls are being forced to wear headscarves can think that the solution is to force them to take it back off. If I hold a gun to your head and make you do something you don’t want to, is the correct police response to hold another gun to your head and tell you not to? What makes otherwise rational people think that the solution lies in that direction?
Well, perhaps because there are situations in which holding a gun to someone’s head _is_ the right thing to do, and is indeed in the interests of the person at gunpoint. I don’t think that the headscarf ban is one of those situations, but …
Ed Felten has a nice post on Google from a few days ago, suggesting that laments for the halycon days before people tried to manipulate Google are misconceived. His rejoinder: Google results don’t represent some Platonic ideal of the truth – they’re the product of collective choice.
bq. Google is a voting scheme. Google is not a mysterious Oracle of Truth but a numerical scheme for aggregating the preferences expressed by web authors.
This means, as Felten suggests, that Google isn’t perfect, and can’t be. Indeed, the point is underlined by Arrow's possibility theorem which says, more or less, that any form of aggregate decision making is going to be flawed under certain reasonable assumptions. Felten’s insight is an important one – it opens the door for the application of a plethora of interesting results from the theory of collective choice to Google and other aggregators/search engines. There are some eminently publishable academic papers in there for anyone who’s familiar both with this literature, and with public choice theory. There’s a more general point too. Much of the early rhetoric about the Internet suggested that it somehow managed to escape from politics. Some people (Declan McCullagh for example) are still trying to peddle this line. It’s ridiculous. The Internet and other communications technologies involve real collective choices, with real political consequences, and the sooner we all realize this, the better.
The Washington Post says today that the Bush administration is proposing a new multilateral plan for the Middle East, which would link progress on democracy and human rights in Middle East countries to concessions on trade, aid and security from the advanced industrial democracies. It’s not clear to me that this represents a real policy shift yet; the Post’s major sources seem to come from the State department, which is naturally more sympathetic to multilateralism than other parts of the administration. However, if the Post is correct in suggesting that Cheney has signed on, this could be interesting – it’s certainly a far cry from the intoxicated proposals to remake the Middle East by force that were floating around among neo-cons last year.
Could this plan work? According to the Post, these proposals are modeled on the Helsinki accords, which led to the creation of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE, now OSCE ). A few years ago, Greg Flynn and I wrote a piece for International Organization arguing that Helsinki and the CSCE had played a key role in securing the democratic transition in Europe.[1] It wasn’t a popular argument at the time, so it’s nice to see that others are now making the same claim. Academic self-justification aside, I’m not at all sure that the new proposal has legs, even if you disregard the differences between Cold War Europe and the Middle East today. The factors that allowed the CSCE to transform Warsaw Pact countries aren’t likely to work in the same way.
Eugene Volokh opines that _The Bonobos_ would be a good name for an intellectual art-rock band. Already been done. Simon Green, one of the better artists on Ninja Tune, has been recording as Bonobo for several years. If you like the weird electronic music hits experimental jazz thang, he’s very much worth checking out. He’s also playing DJ sets in a number of North American cities this spring, together with the incomparable Amon Tobin, whose _Supermodified_, Permutations and _Bricolage_ albums are about the best and strangest drum’n’bass/experimental that I’ve heard in the last five years.
I didn’t blog much last week because Peter Katzenstein, a famous international relations scholar, was workshopping a book manuscript over three days at the University of Toronto; it was a fun and interesting discussion, but quite time consuming. One of Peter’s observations struck me as blogworthy – he was trying to get at the reasons why many US right wingers, and especially conservative legal scholars, have a visceral dislike for the European Union and all its doings.^1^ Part of the explanation is surely power politics, and the perception of the EU as a potential rival, but surely it goes beyond this. Much American debate gives the impression that the European Union is somehow worse for American interests and world peace than Russia or China. Peter’s take on it was that much of the animus derives from the hostility of the US right wing to internationalism in all its forms, and in particular to the idea that international law should take precedence over national law under certain circumstances. If, as Peter argues, the EU’s fundamental identity involves the primacy of public international law within the jurisdiction of its member states, then it’s easy to see why strict constructionists and others who believe in the primacy of the (US) constitution, would view the EU as abhorrent. On this account, the problem that the EU poses for the US right isn’t that it’s an incipient rival, or even a spoiler like France. It’s that if you take a certain stance on the relationship between international law and domestic sovereignty, the EU appears to be an abomination, something that shouldn’t exist. It’s not a state – nor is it likely to become one anytime soon. Nor is it a simple international organization. Instead, it’s something between the two – an unnatural hybrid of sorts, in which national policy makers increasingly become entangled in a supranational legal order. It’s enough to give Robert Bork hives.
^1^ For the record, Peter also had some hard words about anti-Americanism in Europe.
The Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, or SASE is a fun crowd of people; the society’s president is Colin Crouch, who taught me most of what I know about the relationship between economy and society when I was doing my Ph.D. They’re running a conference this year in Washington DC, July 8-11, on the theme, “Private Powers and Public Domains: Redefining Relations Among States, Markets, and Societies.” Highly recommended for renegade economists, maverick sociologists and geographers, and political theorists with a practical bent; paper submissions are due by March 1.
A cautionary tale – over the last couple of years, my wife and I have been using cheap prefix companies in Canada and the US to make long distance and international phonecalls. In the US we’ve been using 101-6868, a fairly popular – and cheap – service, which bills indirectly (you see the charge on your monthly phone bill from your carrier). No more. My wife changed phone carrier a few months ago, which apparently meant that PT-1 Long Distance, the proprietor of 101-6868 wasn’t able to charge us properly (I presume they didn’t have a relationship with our new carrier). PT-1’s reaction wasn’t to phone us, or to send us a bill – it was to refer the matter (involving the princely sum of $8.93) directly to a debt collection agency, which then sent my wife a dunning letter threatening the usual kinds of nastiness. A couple of very irate phonecalls seem to have sorted the problem out – but other users of the service (or its competitors) may want to take this under advisement. All the more so, as we’re apparently not the only people who’ve had this experience with PT-1 Long Distance; indeed, it appears that we’ve gotten off quite lightly in comparison.
Sasha Volokh cries out for some intelligent Marxist analysis in the blogosphere – right on! However, he seems to be arguing that Marxism and the kinds of methodological individualism beloved of modern economists are antithetical to each other. This isn’t necessarily so at all. A big chunk of interesting contemporary work in Marxist theory starts from the premise of methodological individualism, and very frequently from the kinds of rational choice microfoundations that economists are attached to. Jon Elster’s work on Marx is an obvious starting point; Adam Przeworski’s _Capitalism and Social Democracy_ looks at exactly the relationship between class identity and collective action that Sasha is interested in, and how it shaped the turn to social democracy in the early decades of this century. I’m also very fond of John Bowman’s _Capitalist Collective Action_, which examines how capitalists have used trade unions in order to organize themselves collectively. While all Marxists haven’t become methodological individualists, a fair number of them have, and arguably have greatly improved the rigor and clarity of Marxist thinking by so doing.
A little belatedly, some thoughts on _After the New Economy._ Other Timberites are still in the throes of writing their posts, so we’ll do a linkage post pulling the various responses together (as well as the responses of non-CT people such as Brad DeLong), when we’ve all reported. First take – this is a very good book indeed. It provides a trenchant response, not only to the New Economy hype, but also to the political project that it implies. Most importantly (and unusually, for a book about the US economy) it’s solidly based in a comparative framework, examining not only the relationship between the US and the world economy, but also showing that the experience from other countries (European social democracies) suggests that large welfare states aren’t necessarily a drag on growth. Brad DeLong notes somewhere or another on his blog that the economic success of the statist Scandinavians is a real puzzle for economic theory; this is something that should give pause to gung-ho US advocates of unfettered free markets, but rarely does. It’s nice to see the lesson being drawn out in a book that isn’t aimed at an academic audience. Furthermore, as Kieran has already noted, _After the New Economy_ avoids falling into the trap of bucolic communitarianism; Henwood makes a guarded – but thoughtfully argued – case for the potential benefits of globalization for societies in both the West and the developing world. He’s right on all fronts, I think – but there’s still something missing in the book, which reflects a wider absence in the political debate. Not only is there not much in the way of a pro-globalization left; what there is doesn’t have much in the way of a positive alternative vision to offer. This means that Henwood is able to make a strong case for the prosecution, but doesn’t have very many positive arguments to defend his own vision of globalization.
Quote of the week from Tyler Cowen.
bq. I’ve been an economist for so long that I don’t flinch when the paper abstract starts as follows:
bq. “This paper models love-making as a signaling game. In the act of love-making, man and woman send each other possibly deceptive signals about their true state of ecstasy. Each has a prior belief about the other’s state of ecstasy. These prior beliefs are associated with the other’s sexual response capacity…”
David Bernstein has a couple of very weird posts, railing against the liberals in his head for not liking George W. Bush. His main proposition: that liberals stereotype their opponents, and hate them when they don’t live up to their stereotypes. Seems to me that Bernstein is engaged in a wee bit of stereotyping himself. Chez Bernstein, liberals are obsessed with massive spending increases, clumsy protectionism, and boondoggles in space; all good reasons to love George W. The fact that they don’t demonstrates their fundamental irrationality (in fairness, Bernstein says that conservative Clinton-hatred was irrational too).
Bernstein’s non-argument rests on the premise that there’s no good reason for liberals not to like Bush – he’s overseeing a massive increase in government spending. I don’t need to belabour the obvious – there are many, many legitimate, policy-related reasons why liberals may believe the Bush administration to be a disaster. There are even more reasons for social democrats like myself. Under Bush, the relationship between who bears the brunt of the tax burden, and who gets the benefits of government spending is tilting further, so that politically well-connected corporations are prospering at the expense of of poor and middle-income taxpayers. That’s not something that any liberal or social democrat worth their salt is going to want to sign up to, and Bernstein knows it. The only explanation that I can think of for these truly strange posts is Bernstein’s own discomfort with Bush. He doesn’t like the Bush administration much, but isn’t much happier with the company that he’s starting to keep. I guess he’s afraid he might get liberal-cooties or something.
Update: Michael Froomkin has similar thoughts; see also Brad DeLong.
Hell on Earth would be a World Government run by Crooked Timber
Do you agree with this proposition? Do you disagree? Discuss, with reference to the assigned readings.
As part of our never-ending quest to increase shareholder value, I’ve munged up a stripped down version of Crooked Timber for people with mobile devices of one sort or another; it’s available at https://www.crookedtimber.org/mobile/ (there’s a link in our left sidebar too). Comments from people who actually live in the 21st century and have mobile devices with Internet access would be appreciated. Thanks to Dive Into Mark for the basic templates.