Henry

“Ed Felten”:http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000509.html 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”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A520372 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”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24025-2004Feb8.html 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”:http://www.osce.org ). A few years ago, Greg Flynn and I wrote a “piece”:http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/Piecing_together.pdf 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.

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Eugene Volokh “opines”:http://volokh.com/2004_02_08_volokh_archive.html#107617848788089115 that _The Bonobos_ would be a good name for an intellectual art-rock band. Already been done. “Simon Green”:http://www.ninjatune.net/ninja/artist.php?id=38, 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”:http://www.sase.org/aboutsase/aboutsase.html#SOHFECC 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”:http://www.sase.org/conf2004/callforpapers/callforpapers.html 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”:http://www.pt-1.com/, 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”:http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~tien/consumer/pt1-others.html who’ve had this experience with PT-1 Long Distance; indeed, it appears that we’ve gotten off quite lightly in comparison.

“Sasha Volokh”:http://volokh.com/2004_02_01_volokh_archive.html#107583183283237142 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”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001213.html, _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.

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Quote of the week from “Tyler Cowen”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/01/the_economics_o.html.

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”:http://volokh.com/2004_01_25_volokh_archive.html#107539429183475975 “posts”:http://volokh.com/2004_01_25_volokh_archive.html#107535418002229960, 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”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2004/01/what_david_bernstein_doesnt_want_to_get.html has similar thoughts; see also “Brad DeLong”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000163.html.

“Hell on Earth would be a World Government run by Crooked Timber”:http://www.catallarchy.net/blog/cgi-bin/archives/000885.html

Do you agree with this proposition? Do you disagree? Discuss, with reference to the “assigned readings”:https://www.crookedtimber.org.

As part of our never-ending “quest”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000727.html 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/”: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”:http://diveintomark.org/ for the basic templates.

I’m running to catch a plane, so I’m taking the lazy blogger’s way out.

Read:

“Steven Berlin Johnson”:http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000138.html and Jack Balkin (“here”:http://balkin.blogspot.com/2004_01_18_balkin_archive.html#107480769112109137 and “here”:http://balkin.blogspot.com/2004_01_25_balkin_archive.html#107504723738260601) on whether the Internet is destroying democracy.

“Ed Felten”:http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000502.html on why Republican Senate file-snoopers may have indeed broken the law.

“Jessa Crispin”:http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2004_01.php#001423 and “About Last Night”:http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/archives20040118.shtml#67229 on changes afoot in the NYT Book Review (I’m with both of ’em – read the Washington Post’s “Book World”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/print/sunday/bookworld/, and especially the incomparable “Michael Dirda”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/style/columns/dirdamichael/ instead).

“Belle Waring”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/01/roses_really_sm.html on wusscore, a rapidly expanding musical genre.

“Amity Wilczek”:http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/natureisprofligate/2004/01/13#a145 on slugporn.

Norman Geras sees some “overlap”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/01/the_guardian_on.html between a recent interview with Benny Morris (where Morris “qualifies”:http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/386065.html some of the arguments attributed to him previously), and a “piece”:http://www.dissentmagazine.org/editors/from/10_2/fourwars.htm that Michael Walzer wrote for Dissent in 2002 on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Morris argues that the ‘war being waged against us’ [in Israel] needs to be seen in the context of three overlapping conflicts; Walzer argues that there are no less than four ‘Israeli-Palestinian wars’ now in progress. But apart from the basic organizing metaphor, there doesn’t seem to be much overlap at all – Morris and Walzer are making very different (and perhaps radically opposed) arguments, for very different purposes.

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