CT extends its hearty congratulations to Congressman Billy Tauzin (R-La), who’s demonstrating his sincere attachment to free market virtues by retiring from politics and selling himself to the highest bidder. For the last couple of weeks, there’s been a “bidding war”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42531-2004Jan23.html?nav=hptoc_p between the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) for Tauzin’s services. The MPAA had paid its outgoing head lobbyist, the unlamented Jack Valenti, more than $1 million a year. Apparently this wasn’t nearly enough for Tauzin, who held out for a substantially larger sum – and got it from PhRMA. As it happens, PhRMA is a particularly unpleasant organization – it played a dishonorable role in the AIDS drugs licensing for Africa controversy a few years ago, and has been up to its eyeballs in other controversies and backroom arrangements, up to and including the recent Medicare porkfest. Needless to say, Tauzin has been assiduous in his efforts to protect the interests of “big pharma”:http://energycommerce.house.gov/107/news/06072001_270.htm and the “content industry”:http://www.mpaa.org/Press/Broadcast_Flag_Tauzin_Roundtable.htm over the last couple of years; it’s hard to believe that his grossly inflated salary is unconnected to services previously rendered. The phenomenon of Congressman-turned-lobbyist is hardly a new one; but the openness and extent of the greed on display is unusual, even for Washington. A sign of the times.
Posts by author:
Henry
According to our log-analysis program, Crooked Timber received its 1,000,000th unique visit today; a nice milestone. I think it’s fair to say that none of us anticipated how well CT would do when we started it in July. Thank you all for reading us.
Two interesting perspectives on literary theory and related pursuits; one from “Elaine Showalter”:http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i20/20b00901.htm ^1^ and one from “Scott McLemee”:http://www.mclemee.com/id4.html (scroll down to January 10).
Patrick Nielsen Hayden “says”:http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/archives/004559.html#004559 about this NYT “story”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/magazine/18POOR.html?ex=1389762000&en=ac9ac775c3fc94c3&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND
bq. State of the union. The great feminist science fiction author Joanna Russ once remarked to me, “Homophobia isn’t there to keep homosexuals in line. Homophobia is there to keep everyone else in line.”
bq. Caroline Payne is in her condition in order to keep the rest of us in line.
What he said. I feel angry and ashamed.
Update: via Kip of “Long Story Short Pier”:http://www.longstoryshortpier.com/ in comments, comes this “charming response”:http://www.iwf.org/inkwell/default.asp?archiveID=135 from the so-called “Independent Women’s Forum.”
bq. I must have a heart made of granite, but I just can’t feel sorry for Caroline Payne, the off-and-on welfare mother/credit-card binger who’s supposed to an example of our nation’s beleaguered working poor, the “millions at the bottom of the labor force who contribute to the country’s prosperity” but don’t get anything back, as writer David K. Shipler puts it in “A Poor Cousin of the Middle Class,” this week’s sob story in Sunday’s NYT magazine—in which Caroline whines about her $6.80-an-hour job at a convenience store.
bq. From the way I read Caroline’s saga, it’s prosperous America that’s been handing out tens of thousands of dollars worth of freebies to Caroline over the years (Shipley is coy about her age), and Caroline who’s given very little back. One big reason that Caroline hasn’t moved up the economic ladder looks pretty simple to me: She refuses to wear her (free, Medicaid-supplied) dentures (check the photo). Sorry, Caroline (and oh-so-politically correct Shipler, who remarks sarcastically that Caroline is “missing that radiant, tooth-filled smile that Americans have been taught to prize as highly as their right to vote”). This may sound harsh, but if you want a job that entails interacting with the public or supervising employees, you gotta have teeth. Ask George Washington
This doesn’t leave me angry or ashamed. It leaves me disgusted. There’s something vicious and depraved (in the strongest sense of the word) in the unwillingness of many US conservatives and libertarians to admit that people can get screwed by the market through no fault of their own. D-squared is fond of quoting Galbraith’s dictum that “the project of the conservative throughout the ages is the search for a higher moral justification for selfishness” – this seems appropriate here. I still think that a principled conservatism is possible in theory – I just don’t see much evidence of it in the US today. A little, but not much.
The competition among Weblog competitions is heating up; in the last two months, we’ve had Wizbang’s “Weblog Awards”:http://wizbangblog.com/poll.php#BGB poll; the “Warblogger”:http://www.rightwingnews.com/special/warblogger2003.php awards, the Koufax awards at “Wampum”:http://wampum.wabanaki.net/ and now the “Bloggies”:http://www.fairvue.com/?feature=awards2004. It’s all very confusing: which competition should you be paying attention to? To help answer that question, I’m proposing the Best ‘Best Weblog of 2003 Competition’ Competition. I’m sure that y’all can come up with appropriate categories and nominees – in order to start the ball rolling …
*Most egregious award decision*
The winner by a mile: Wizbang’s “Best Overall Blog” award for _Little Green Footballs_. In fairness, this isn’t Wizbang’s fault; I imagine that thousands of slavering trolls from LGF’s comment section were clambering over each other in their frenzied efforts to cast their vote for the Dark Lord. Like a scene from the siege of Minas Tirith. If LGF were really the best overall blog on the Internet, I’d want to give up, right away.
*Vote early, vote often award*
A number of hot contenders for this one – lots of fishy business of one kind or another in various competitions. “Dive into Mark”:http://diveintomark.org/ at the very least deserves special mention for his script ensuring that anyone who clicked on the Wizbang awards from his site would find themselves willy-nilly “voting for him”:http://wizbangblog.com/archives/001268.php.
*Awards competition that is most likely to be any use*
A tie between the Koufax awards, and the Warblogger awards, I reckon. Given the vast diversity of blogs, it makes much more sense to concentrate on a limited section of the blogging community than to try to cover the whole gamut. Readers are more likely to find new blogs that are of interest to them among the nominees, which is presumably the point of the exercise.
*Most glaring omission*
Why the hell has “The Poor Man”:http://www.thepoorman.net/ not gotten a nomination in any of the broader competitions?
Update: Andrew Northrup does a perfect blog-post on the State of the Union speech within moments of its ending, “as if to prove my point …”:http://www.thepoorman.net/archives/002291.html#002291http://www.thepoorman.net/archives/002291.html#002291
Michael Crichton has made millions by writing mass market thrillers that either regurgitate partially understood scientific factoids, or pander to the nasty little revenge fantasies of male white middle-managers. He’s not averse to spicing his novels up with a hefty pinch of racism (the ‘Fu Manchu’ in a three-piece suit Japan bashing in _Rising Sun_) or sexism (in the rather revolting Disclosure). All in all, it’s rather surprising that Caltech should have asked him to deliver a prestigious lecture. The content and tone of that “lecture”:http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches_quote04.html, however, aren’t surprising at all. The speech – which argues that global warming is pseudo-science – is as specious a bit of argumentation as I’ve seen in a while.
Worth reading:
“Michael Froomkin”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2004/01/florida_taliban_3.html on a story that should be getting a lot more play; how a Florida Judicial Nominating Commission has been asking potential judges whether they’re “God-fearing.”
“Brad DeLong”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000065.html on Seabiscuit versus Elmo the Banana Slug.
“Mrs. Tilton”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000261.php on long-haired wastrels and the end of conscription in Germany.
“Chris Brooke”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000251.php on British Conservative party deviationism.
“Ken MacLeod”:http://kenmacleod.blogspot.com/2004_01_01_kenmacleod_archive.html#107396002535502694 on Marxist sectarianism. Ken namechecks the British and Irish Communist Organization, a defunct grouplet that I’ve always been fond of for their ability to argue themselves from one position to its radical opposite (viz. from a 32 county solution to the Northern Ireland problem, to advocating the region’s full integration into the UK).
Interesting times for the European Union’s Growth and Stability Pact, according to an “Economist”:http://www.economist.com/World/europe/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2349980 story that touches on a disagreement between Dan Drezner and I. Over the last couple of years, big member states such as France and Germany have been flouting the terms of the Pact, which is supposedly binding. It’s looked as though they were going to escape any punishment for doing this.
“Jack Balkin”:http://balkin.blogspot.com/2004_01_11_balkin_archive.html#107428705909763064 on the Pickering appointment.
bq. I don’t have much of a problem with Bush appointing judges he believes in to recess appointments. Presidents should appoint the best people possible to the federal judiciary. My problem, rather, is that the fact that Bush believes so strongly in Pickering says something deeply troubling about Bush’s politics.
Via “Cosma Shalizi”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/archives/000161.html, a very nice “article”:http://octavia.zoology.washington.edu/publishing/BergstromAndBergstrom04.pdf on the economics of academic publishing in the _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences_. The authors provide compelling empirical evidence of a large differential between the price of commercial journals and the price of journals put out by professional societies and academic presses, which isn’t explained by journal quality. The graphs almost jump from the page – there are dramatically different relationships between price and number of citations, depending on whether you are looking at commercial or non-commercial journals. Furthermore, according to the authors, the differential between the two has increased over time. Commercial journals are lousy value for money – but they’re apparently hard to displace in the marketplace.
The authors’ wider argument is also interesting – and worrying. Increasingly, academic publishing is moving towards a model based on the licensing of electronic access to a bundle of journals to universities and other research institutions. The authors’ model suggests that site licensing of journals by commercial publishers will leave scholars worse off on average than if each scholar purchased individual licenses to the journals that she wanted to read. While site licences to larger groups are more efficient, these efficiency gains are more than absorbed by the sellers, if the sellers are profit maximizing firms.
Economists who are interested in new economy issues, like “Brad DeLong”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000033.html, usually focus on the massive productivity gains that we can expect from information technology. While these are important, so too are the distributional consequences – the ways in which new technologies affect who gets what. Even if new technologies, such as electronic publishing, are more efficient in some broad sense of the term, the efficiency gains may be distributed in ways that are difficult to justify.
Via “A Fistful of Euros”:http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/000252.php, I see that Norberto Bobbio has died at the age of 94. Like all the best Italian intellectuals, he played an important role in public life; unlike some of them, his contribution to political debate was marked by an extraordinary level of personal integrity and decency. His approach to political theory was difficult to categorize in the usual terms – while he drew both on liberal and social democratic ideas, there was a more radical and subversive tinge to his thought than is usually associated with either of those schools. The “Guardian obit”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,1121657,00.html has it about right; “to his credit, he founded no school, while influencing many.” He’ll be missed.
I’ve always admired the science fiction of Jack Vance; he has a baroque yet precise prose style, like steel draped in velvet. But one of his novels, _The Killing Machine_, rests on a premise that I always thought was a little silly. The money of Vance’s future society cannot be forged; fake-detecting machines can invariably tell the real banknotes from the bogus. The hero of the novel finds out why – the paper of real banknotes is crimped in a manner that is spaced “in terms of the square root of the first eleven primes” – and he’s able to print himself up a small fortune’s worth of undetectable forgeries. This sort of legerdemain always seemed rather implausible to me.
No longer. Now I discover via “Ed Felten”:http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000497.html that
bq. some color copiers look for a special pattern of five circles (usually yellow or orange in color), and refuse to make high-res copies of documents containing them. Sure enough, the circles are common on paper money. (On the new U.S. $20 bills, they’re the zeroes in the little yellow “20”s that pepper the background on the back side of the bill.) Markus called the special five-dot pattern the “constellation EURion” because he first spotted it on Euro notes.
The Arar case has rightly attracted a lot of attention; Brian has already linked to Katherine’s great series on the subject at “Obsidian Wings”:http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/. Still, it seems to me that there’s one angle that hasn’t received enough attention in the US debate. The Bush administration aren’t the only bad guys in this story. It appears that “elements in Canada’s RCMP”:http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040110/ARAR10//?query=Arar leaked erroneous information to US authorities, which caused them to take a particular interest in Arar’s travel plans and activities. This points to a more serious underlying problem – the creation of more or less unaccountable networks involving and intelligence and law enforcement officials across different states. Indeed, without networks of this sort, the US wouldn’t have sent Arar to Syria to be tortured in the first place; US intelligence officials wouldn’t have had access to any information that he might have revealed.
Transgovernmental networks have been around for a while in various policy areas; a few years ago, Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote a highly relevant “paper”:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/delivery.cfm/000209651.pdf?abstractid=209319 on the problems that they pose for democratic legitimacy. They’ve grown vastly more important – and more troubling in their implications – since then. Accountability disappears into a maze of shadowy relations between states – it becomes impossible to figure out who is to blame for any particular decision, and whom to hold responsible. Certainly, it has made it very difficult for Paul Martin to criticize the US; his officials seem to be “engaged in a cover-up”:http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040114.wspector0114/BNStory/International/.
I haven’t been blogging the last couple of weeks, because I and my wife have been on a belated honeymoon in Venice and Florence. For Venice, I brought along one of my favourite books, Italo Calvino’s _Invisible Cities_. Calvino’s book is a series of accounts of imaginary cities – thin cities, hidden cities, trading cities, continuous cities, cities of signs – each of which is Venice, or refers to Venice, or points to Venice by virtue of Venice’s absence. By happenstance, I also brought along “Steven Berlin Johnson’s”:http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com _Emergence_, which I’ve been meaning to read for a while. To my surprise, Johnson’s book also turns out to have a chapter that is more or less about cities of signs, and moreover uses Florence as its main example of how the city makes itself legible to its inhabitants. Johnson talks about how the organization of cities into neighborhoods, each of which may be a discrete and specialized cluster of activity, stores knowledge and makes it legible. If you are a Florentine who wishes to buy silk products, you know that you need to go to Por Santa Maria. Similarly, if you are a producer of silk, it may behove you to locate your activities close to other silk producers in Por Santa Maria, so that you may more easily exchange ideas, goods and services. In this way, neighborhoods may serve to collate, exchange, and represent information. All of this is of particular interest to me – the larger part of my Ph.D. research was on the “clustering of economic activity in Italy”:http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/farrell-knight%20Final.pdf. More importantly, Calvino’s and Johnson’s books offer refreshing and unusual vantage points on two cities which are a little stale to many tourists because of the overwhelming conventional wisdom about where you should go and what you should do.
“Fabio Rojas”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/01/violence_and_ec.html has an interesting entry at _Marginal Revolution_ on the the evolution of organized crime in Russia. He suggests that one of the more interesting features of the Russian Mafia is “that Russian business and organized crime have become symbiotic,” as gangsters have come to act as guarantors of transactions. As it happens, this is true of the original Mafia too, as Diego Gambetta points out in a “classic essay”:http://www.sociology.ox.ac.uk/papers/gambetta158-175.pdf on the evolution of the Mafia in Sicily. Gambetta argues that the Mafia’s main traditional role has been to enforce local monopolies, and to guarantee transactions between economic actors. However, he also points out that Mafiosi may sometimes have an interest in brokering bum deals – they will want to regulated amounts of distrust into market transactions in order to prevent people from coming to trust each other independently, and thus to maintain their own effective monopoly as enforcers of market deals. This analysis suggests that Mafia-style rackets may lead to the long term persistence of markets in which people don’t trust each other, and transaction costs are high.
Gambetta is an economic sociologist who likes game theory. His analysis reminds us that from the point of view of economic theory, the state and the Mafia are functional equivalents in several important respects. Both enforce agreements among economic agents in exchange for a slice of the profits. Indeed, the modern state very likely had its origins in Mafia-style protection rackets, a point made eloquently in another classic of the literature, Chuck Tilly’s “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime”:http://www.jesusradicals.com/main/library/tilly/warmaking.html.