Henry

Should use my GWU address farrellhRemoveThisBit@gwu.edu. My gmail address is down – extra storage space that I had purchased from Google expired (it was linked to a credit card that I had lost), and while I’ve purchased some new storage from them, they appear to be in no particular hurry to apply it. This is all _especially annoying_ as the only notice I had that there was a problem was a single email a few weeks ago (which I missed in the flood and have only seen ex post), and in cancelling my storage space, they have also likely permanently deleted some space which I had as a legacy user of their storage service before Google Drive. Apologies for wasting the bandwidth of 99% of Crooked Timber readers with this (although you can take it if you like as an instructional example of the hazards of entrusting a large chunk of your life to a company that is usually efficient on big-scale stuff, but not particularly concerned about managing its relationship with small end-customers to those customers satisfaction).

We have a few seminars here at Crooked Timber over the next eight or nine months. The first, which will be coming out in a few weeks, is on Jack Knight and James Johnson’s recent book _The Priority of Democracy_ ( Amazon, Powells). It proposes a pragmatist understanding of how democracy works because, not despite of, the stark conflicts of interest and ideas within it. It’ll make for some good arguments.

In addition, we have advanced plans for the much delayed Erik Olin Wright _Real Utopias_ event, for Ken MacLeod’s various novels, for Felix Gilman’s _The Half Made World_ and its about-to-be-published sequel, _The Rise of Ransom City_, and Strongly Formulated Intentions for a couple of other events to be announced at a later date. Those who haven’t read Gilman’s book yet may want to take advantage of a Tor deal for the e-book edition – for this week, and this week only, it can be purchased for $2.99 at “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/The-Half-Made-World-ebook/dp/B003P8QSAA/ref=redir_mdp_mobile?redirect=true&tag=henryfarrell-20, “Barnes and Noble”:http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/half-made-world-felix-gilman/1100357766?ean=9781429949248&itm=1&usri=half+made+world and “Apple”:https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/the-half-made-world/id376226529?mt=11. In Cosma Shalizi’s words:

A splendidly-written high-fantasy western. (It is by no stretch of the imagination “steampunk”.) Gilman takes great themes of what one might call the Matter of America — the encroachment of regimented industrial civilization, the hard-eyed anarchic men (and women) of violence, the dream of not just starting the world afresh but of offering the last best hope of earth — and transforms the first two into warring rival pantheons of demons, the third into a noble lost cause. (I think Gilman knows _exactly_ how explosive the last theme is, which is why he manages to handle it without setting it off.) Beneath and behind it all lies the continuing presence of the dispossessed original inhabitants of the continent. A story of great excitement and moment unfolds in this very convincing world, tying together an appealing, if believably flawed, heroine and two finely-rendered anti-heroes, told in prose that is vivid and hypnotic by turns.

Some of the bits of the Web that I pay close attention to are trying to figure out how to react to the “Republican Study Committee’s new thinkpiece on copyright”:http://rsc.jordan.house.gov/uploadedfiles/rsc_policy_brief_–_three_myths_about_copyright_law_and_where_to_start_to_fix_it_–_november_16_2012.pdf. On the one hand, they want to cheer on every word of the document, even if it is written from a more directly market-oriented perspective than their own. E.g.:

bq. Copyright violates nearly every tenet of laissez faire capitalism. Under the current system of copyright, producers of content are entitled to a guaranteed, government instituted, government subsidized content-monopoly … It is a system implemented and regulated by the government, and backed up by laws that allow for massive damages for violations. These massive damages are not conventional tort law damages, but damages that are vastly disproportionate from the actual damage to the copyright producer. … we do know that our copyright paradigm has … Retarded the creation of a robust DJ/Remix industry … Hampering scientific inquiry … Stifling the creation of a public library … Free 12-year copyright term for all new works – subject to registration, and all existing works are renewed as of the passage of the reform legislation. If passed today this would mean that new works have a copyright until 2024.

On the other … Republican Study Committee. Republican Study Committee claiming the mantle of protector of DJ culture, scientific inquiry and public library. But still. Republican Study Committee.

I don’t know anything about the motivations of the aide who wrote this paper. However, I think it’s reasonably safe to speculate that if the Republican party takes this up, it will be less because of its burning desire to promote a healthy remix culture (‘tho perhaps their desperation to appeal to the kids might play a small role), and more because they’d like to screw an industry largely composed of people who give to the Democratic party (think movie stars and record industry executives as trial lawyers). One could be more cynical still, and see this as a shakedown intended to encourage entertainment industry people to give lavishly to Republican PACs so as to sway them away from the cause of righteousness (personally, I doubt this was the rationale for the paper, but it certainly might end up describing the outcome).

Even so, it poses an interesting question. Would we be better off in a world where this position prevailed, so that (a) copyright law was much looser, (b) the entertainment industry was much poorer, and (c ) giving to the Democratic party and other liberal causes was significantly lower as a result? Personally, my answer is emphatically yes, but there is a tradeoff here, where others might reasonably disagree (and perhaps even convince me that I’m wrong …).

I’m thinking about getting a “Samsung Chromebook”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009LL9VDG/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B009LL9VDG&linkCode=as2&tag=henryfarrell-20 as a replacement laptop (primarily for light text editing and web browsing). The con appears to be a not very widely used operating system (although I use Google products a lot), the pro is that it looks to be both adequate for purpose and relatively very cheap. Before buying though, I wanted to see whether the hivemind has any useful information on how well ChromeOS stacks up etc. Opinions and information gratefully received …

“Paul Krugman”:http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/scoop-dupes/ writes about journalists’ obsession with the quest for insider knowledge.

bq. A lot of political journalism, and even reporting on policy issues, is dominated by the search for the “secret sauce”, as Martin puts it: the insider who knows What’s Really Going On. Background interviews with top officials are regarded as gold, and the desire to get those interviews often induces reporters to spin on demand. But such inside scoops are rarely — I won’t say never, but rarely — worth a thing. My experience has been that careful analysis of publicly available information almost always trumps the insider approach.

I’ve meant to blog for ages about a similar illusion – the remarkably widespread belief that policy forums in DC (think tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations) provide insiders with a lot of information that is unavailable to outsiders. As a political science professor here, it’s not hard to get to go to all sorts of off-the-record discussions on foreign policy questions; indeed, the more vexing problem is refusing invitations so that you can get your work done, without annoying people. However, I’ve almost never learned any _new_ information about questions that interest me from these kinds of events. Sometimes, people are slightly less discreet than they are in public. But only sometimes, and usually not very much. Likely, there are more important events and workshops that I’m not invited to (after all, from the point of view of the organizers of such events, I’m usually a warm body with vaguely relevant sounding professional qualifications; good to swell a progress, but not much else), but I suspect that there aren’t very many of them that aren’t mostly vaguely disappointing in this sense.

This actually isn’t surprising, when you think about it. Most of the people who work on foreign affairs in Washington DC and who make up the potential audience for such events, are generalists, because they have a variety of briefs. They’re not necessarily looking for exciting new information – they’re looking for digestible summaries of issues that they vaguely know are important, but don’t have time to form educated opinions on themselves. And, even more importantly, they’re looking for opportunities to stay in the loop by talking to other people in the same world about who has gotten which new job, who is on the way up, and who is on the way down. This is the insider information that actually _counts_ for the people going to these events – and it’s at best of anthropological interest to the rest of us. These meetings and briefings serve much the same professional role as do the annual meetings of academic associations, where most of the people attending are sort-of-interested in going to a few panels, but definitely-very-interested in catching up on the latest disciplinary gossip. Going to the former serves as a necessary justification for finding out about the latter.

Which is a longwinded way of agreeing with Krugman – most of the time, you can learn as much or more from intelligently consuming publicly available information as you can from attending purportedly insider briefings. And, as a secondary matter, if you graze free-range from a variety of sources, rather than re-masticating a pre-chewed monocrop diet of selected facts and opinion, you are likely to end up with a _less biased_ understanding. Communities of generalists relying on a very limited set of information sources are peculiarly vulnerable to self-reinforcing illusion. I wasn’t in DC during the run-up to the Iraq war, but from what I’ve been able to piece together in the aftermath, the reasons for the apparent near-unanimity among foreign policy specialists that going into Iraq was a good idea was a combination of bad sources (reliance on people like Ken Pollack, who had a patina of apparent credibility), careerism (the general sense that you would do your career no favors by publicly dissenting from senior Republicans and Democrats), and substantial dollops of intellectual (and indeed non-intellectual, more or less flat-out) dishonesty.

The George Osborne micro-scandal (apparently, he doesn’t like mixing with the plebs “on the train”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-20011736, but doesn’t like paying the first class fare either) is reminiscent of the C.E.M. Joad train ticket scandal of 1948. Joad was the “Julian Baggini of his day”:http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=6532414

bq. best remembered for his appearances on “The Brains Trust”, a B.B.C programme in which a panel of well-known people were invited to give unprepared answers to questions from the audience. He appeared on almost every edition of this from the very first programme, on New Year’s Day 1941, until April 1948

His career as a public ethicist ended abruptly, when he was caught in the first class railway carriage with a third class ticket.

bq. Joad pleaded guilty at Tower Bridge Magistrates Court to fare evasion on the railways, and was fined two pounds plus costs of 25 guineas. It emerged that … Joad had an obsession about trying to defraud the railways, and he used to carry pocketfuls of penny tickets, lie about which station he had boarded the train, and even scramble over hedges and fields to avoid ticket collectors. He was replaced on the next edition of the programme and never appeared on it again. Possibly as a result of this, in his last years he changed from atheism to religion, as detailed in his final book, “Recovery of Belief” (1952).

I doubt that Osborne travels with pocketfuls of cheap tickets, and while the image of him and his entourage scrambling over hedges with enraged ticket collectors in hot pursuit is delightful, it’s also rather improbable. Even so, it appears as if Osborne, like Joad, is a “repeat offender”:https://twitter.com/Larrylarrylal/status/207150475680821250. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next (the pleb-belaboring “Chief Whip”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-rt-us-britain-politics-mitchellbre89i10d-20121019,0,285047.story has just done the sacrificial-lamb thing and resigned, but I suspect this will whet the public appetite rather than damping it down).

“Eric Rauchway”:http://history.ucdavis.edu/people/rauchway, historian at UC Davis, and co-founder of _The Edge of the American West_ is joining Crooked Timber as a blogger. He’s been a guest blogger for us in the past, and is, I suspect, pretty well known to most CT readers. We’re very happy to have him as part of the group.

Since someone mentioned that they couldn’t find it in comments, and since it’s obviously relevant, mutatis mutandis to arguments below, it is probably no harm to link again prominently to dsquared’s classic post about how you actually aren’t obliged to vote Democrat, strong lesser-of-two-evils arguments are intellectually incoherent etc. Nut graf:

> The argument I want to establish here is that the decision about whether or not to vote Demcrat (versus the alternative of abstaining or voting for a minor party) is a serious one, which is up to the conscience of the individual voter to make, and which deserves respect from other people whether they agree with it or not. Obviously in making that argument, I’m going to have to venture into a number of unpalatable home truths about the Democrats as they are currently organised (abstract: ineffectual, cowardly, surprisingly warlike, soft-right, generally an obstacle to the development of social democratic politics), but let’s get this clear right up front – voting Democrat might often be the right thing to do in any given case, depending on local conditions; it might even usually be the right thing to do. What I’m not going to accept, however, is that it is always or definitionally the right thing to do.

[Conor Friedersdorf](http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/09/why-i-refuse-to-vote-for-barack-obama/262861/) (if Lot were to look for One Honest Conservative Commentator to save the tribe from divine wrath, he’d likely have to lump for Friedersdorf), [says no](http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/09/why-i-refuse-to-vote-for-barack-obama/262861/).

> Obama has done things that, while not comparable to a historic evil like chattel slavery, go far beyond my moral comfort zone. … Obama terrorizes innocent Pakistanis on an almost daily basis. The drone war he is waging in North Waziristan isn’t “precise” or “surgical” as he would have Americans believe. It kills hundreds of innocents, including children. And for thousands of more innocents who live in the targeted communities, the drone war makes their lives into a nightmare worthy of dystopian novels. … Obama established one of the most reckless precedents imaginable: that any president can secretly order and oversee the extrajudicial killing of American citizens. Obama’s kill list transgresses against the Constitution as egregiously as anything George W. Bush ever did. It is as radical an invocation of executive power as anything Dick Cheney championed. The fact that the Democrats rebelled against those men before enthusiastically supporting Obama is hackery every bit as blatant and shameful as anything any talk radio host has done. … Contrary to _his own previously stated understanding_ of what the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution demand, President Obama committed U.S. forces to war in Libya without Congressional approval, despite the lack of anything like an imminent threat to national security.

The last of these seems weaker to me than the first two (I was, and still am, against the Libya intervention, but don’t think that the War Powers Resolution question is a moral one). But the first two are pretty damn awful. On key foreign policy and human rights issues, Obama hasn’t been a disappointment. He’s been a disaster. You can make a good case, obviously, that his main opponent, Mitt Romney, would be even worse. But it isn’t at all clear that the consequences of _voting_ [^voting] for Romney over the longer term, would be any worse than the consequences of voting for the guy who was supposed to be better on these issues, and was not. Indeed, the unwillingness of American left-liberals to criticize the opprobrious foreign policy of a Democratic president (and the consequent lack of real public debate over this policy, since most of the right tacitly agrees with the bad stuff) weighs the balance in favor of voting against Democrats who you know are going to sell out. Personally, I’m on the fence, if only because the current Republican party is so extraordinarily horrible. But I think that there is a very strong case to be made for not voting for Obama, and I wish that there were more publicly prominent lefties making it.

[^voting]: Abstracting away the question of whether individual votes have any consequences.

A coda to the coda – Mike Beggs’ [piece](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/debt-the-first-500-pages/) on Graeber’s Debt in _Jacobin_, and the ensuing discussion in comments [here](https://crookedtimber.org/2012/08/29/debt-the-first-five-hundred-pages/) at CT, has given rise to a further exchange in which J.W. [Mason](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/09/in-defense-of-david-graebers-debt/) defends Graeber on money, and Mike [Beggs](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/09/on-debt-a-reply-to-josh-mason/) restates and extends his position.

Mason:

> Mike sees _Debt_ as “a move in an interdisciplinary struggle: anthropology against economics.” But most of the key arguments of Debt are better seen as part of an intradisciplinary struggle within economics. Admittedly it takes some unpacking, but Debt‘s key themes are in close harmony with the main themes of heterodox economics work going back to Keynes; while the “economics” that Beggs opposes to him represents only the discipline’s more conservative wings. … Debt‘s demonstration that money obligations are historically prior exchange of goods maps onto the insistence of Marx, Keynes and their successors that under capitalism, money values are logically prior to the production and consumption of real goods and services. … Debt‘s distinction between money and credit systems is not just an exercise in classification, but corresponds to a distinction that has has preoccupied many classical and modern economists, and has important implications for monetary policy in addition to the vaster cultural and political-economic ramifications Debt focuses on. … when Mike says that Debt exaggerates the importance of the system of payments, it is because he is coming from a narrowly orthodox view of what monetary economics is about, and why money matters. If your economic vision is shaped by more heterodox traditions — or by the responses to the financial crises of the past few years — the economics of Debt will seem more congenial.

Beggs:

> The debate between Josh and I centers on the question of whether or not the distinction between a ‘commodity/fiat money economy’ and a ‘credit money economy’ is a useful one in understanding our present economic system and its history. He thinks it is so useful as to be the central dividing line in economics; I think it is liable to mislead. The rest of the disagreement comes, I think, because Josh conflates the commodity/fiat-credit money economy divide with other divides in economic thinking. So he seems to that if I challenge that distinction, I must be a quantity theorist, must believe that money is simply a veil, neutral in its economic effects, and must misunderstand how banking works. In fact we are on the same side in all those other dichotomies, but Josh for some reason continues to maintain that if I disagree over the core distinction, I must be standing on the other side of all the others. … I think the ‘commodity/fiat money economy’ – ‘credit money economy’ divide is a problem; and … that the rest of his criticisms rest on the conflations with other theoretical dichotomies.

Detailed here at [Wired](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/aaron-swartz-felony/all/).

>Federal prosectors added nine new felony counts against well-known coder and activist Aaron Swartz, who was charged last year for allegedly breaching hacking laws by downloading millions of academic articles from a subscription database via an open connection at MIT. … Like last year’s original grand jury indictment on four felony counts, (.pdf) the superseding indictment (.pdf) unveiled Thursday accuses Swartz of evading MIT’s attempts to kick his laptop off the network while downloading millions of documents from JSTOR, a not-for-profit company that provides searchable, digitized copies of academic journals that are normally inaccessible to the public. n essence, many of the charges stem from Swartz allegedly breaching the terms of service agreement for those using the research service.

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Attention Conservation Notice: A few hundred words in the key of Someone Not On the Internet[^deceased] Is Wrong
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Brad DeLong has a “post”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/09/brad-delong-resmackdown-watch-cosma-shalizi-argues-that-brad-delong-is-an-atypical-economist.html#more defending his claim that the actually existing microfoundations of economics are based around Lockean theories of exchange. A detailed point-by-point response below the fold [also: “Cosma Shalizi”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/942.html ].

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I don’t have much to say about the politics of the “new ECB proposal”:http://www.ecb.eu/press/pr/date/2012/html/pr120906_1.en.html that I haven’t said at “greater length”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/01/03/the-ecb-method/ already. Matt Yglesias is “right”:http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox.html to see this as a power shift, but it’s one that’s been in the making for quite a while. The policy of ‘comply with our demands for austerity or we’ll pull the plug’ was executed through “confidential”:http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2012/0901/1224323462647.html “letters”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15104967 rather than public announcements up to recently, but it was still the same policy. And I’m not sure that it’s a power _grab_ as such – I don’t think the ECB has planned this, so much as been pulled into a vacuum created by the corrosive cross-national politics of conditionality and implicit or explicit transfers.

Which brings us to the Bundesbank’s public opposition to the deal – it describes the purchases as “tantamount to financing governments by printing banknotes.” There’s a relevant quote in Harold James’ excellent forthcoming history of European Monetary Union, which I don’t want to talk too much about, since I’ll be reviewing it elsewhere. One of the very interesting discoveries he has made is a non-public speech that Helmut Schmidt, then the German Chancellor, made to the Bundesbank at a somewhat similar juncture in the 1970s. Germany was being pushed to support the then-European Monetary System (a complicated class of a dirty float that was supposed to lead, somehow, someday, to proper monetary union), but the Bundesbank wanted a stipulation that Germany could opt out of unlimited intervention, if this threatened domestic price stability. Schmidt secretly agreed (the precondition was discovered later), albeit with some hesitation. From the speech (which James quotes in extenso – there is plenty more juicy stuff that I’m leaving out):

bq. What interests me here is a part of the third point of your letter. I must say to you openly that I have quite severe misgivings about a written specification of this sort, a written specification of the possibility of an at least temporary release from the intervention. Let us first of all assume that it appeared tomorrow in a French or Italian newspaper. What accusations would the newspapers then make in editorials against their own Government who got them mixed up with such a dodgy promise with the Germans … In the matter itself I agree with you, gentlemen, but I deem it out of the question to write that down … there has been a beautiful saying in the world for two thousand years: ultra posse nemo obligatur. And where the ultra posse lies one decides for oneself. My suspicion is that, if it came to a real crisis, … the debtor countries clear out first and not the creditor countries. But it could perfectly well be the case that the creditor Federal Republic might one day have to clear out; it is all thinkable, only one cannot write such a thing down.

The Bundesbank’s ostentatious dissent from the ECB program is plausibly both a genuine statement of disagreement, and an implied statement that there are stark limits to what Germany will bear – that if the program does turn into unlimited support for weaker states, Germany will exercise its _ultra posse_ and pull out of its obligations. This threat doesn’t have to be explicit to be understood. This in turn highlights the complexity of the expectations that the EU has to manage at the moment. On the one hand, the EU wants to convince financial markets that this is all going to work – that the ECB will do whatever is needed to keep EU going, in the hope that this calms down expectations, so that it doesn’t actually have to use the big bazooka. On the other, the EU (and in particular Germany) wants to convince countries such as Spain that ECB support is conditional on politically ruinous austerity measures. The Bundesbank’s public disavowal of ECB policy arguably makes the latter argument a little more credible, by signalling that this is the best deal that Spain is likely to get. However, by hinting at the limits of German support, it also suggests that the ECB’s ‘unlimited support’ may in practice be more limited than it sounds, generating the risk of market uncertainty.

Gene Wolfe writes in the _Book of the New Sun_ of an executioner:

bq. a certain Master Werenfrid of our guild who in olden times, being in grave need, accepted remuneration from the enemies of the condemned and from his friends as well; and who by stationing one party on the right of the block and the other on the left, by his great skill made it appear to each that the result was entirely satisfactory.

The EU will have to do its damnedest to emulate Master Werenfrid if it wants to pull this off.