Henry

So it appears that Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of _Freakonomics_ is “upset at various critics”:http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/03/20/freakonomics-what-went-right-responding-to-wrong-headed-attacks/. He is deeply unhappy with Andrew Gelman and Kaiser Fung, for having written what appeared to me to be a skeptical but intellectually generous take on the Freakonomics project. He is angry at Ezra Klein, whom he describes as someone who is ‘in the business of attacking at any cost’ on the basis of a tweet that Dubner presents in a “rather misleading fashion”:http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/03/21/annals-of-dishonest-attacks-stephen-dubner-edition/. And he believes that ‘a man named Chris Blattman’ (great title for a band btw), was insufficiently abject in his apologies for a post “in which he suggested”:http://chrisblattman.com/2012/01/28/more-on-yesterdays-cheap-shot-at-freakonomics-and-wsjideasmarket/ that _Freakonomics_ did not provide sufficient credit to other bloggers. Dubner is entirely right when he suggests that apologies should not be self-serving. So I hope that my own apology – long overdue – is not misinterpreted as same. I’d hereby like to sincerely apologize for having done my little bit to make Stephen Dubner and the whole _Freakonomics_ phenomenon what they are today.

Long-time readers will be familiar with the _Crooked Timber_ seminar that we did many years ago on the original _Freakonomics_ book. I can’t say what exact role it played in helping the book becoming the mass cultural phenomenon that it did, but the publicists seem to think that it played a significant role in generating publicity. Part of this was likely novelty – no-one had done anything quite like this before, so that lots of other bloggers linked to it. The revised and updated paperback edition of the book described the seminar as having provided the most astute analysis to date of the book’s arguments.

Doing this seminar was, I’m afraid, my initiative. I could try to defend myself. I (and others) were more interested in Levitt’s original academic work than the popularization. We sort of said this _sotto voce_ in the seminar, but only _sotto voce._ Nor has _Freakonomics_ been entirely bad. It’s gotten e.g. Justin Wolfers, who is excellent value for money, out into broader public circulation.

But even if it seemed a good idea at the time, I should have known better. Yes – Levitt is an interesting and original economist, but the glib contrarianism and breezy confidence that silly econometric results would tell us something valuable about the world were baked into the cake from the beginning of the _Freakonomics_ project, and perhaps before. D-squared’s perhaps never-to-be-published CT summation of his various posts on Freakonomics makes that clear. It’s a bit like one of those high-end fashion marques that begins with haute couture, and ends up over-extending its brand by using it on everything from cheap plastic novelties to toilet paper.

Both the blog and the second book were pretty dreadful. John has written about the contrarianism of the book, while as Andrew Gelman has hinted, he could have been a lot nastier had he wanted to be, pointing e.g. to the blog’s highlighting of results suggesting that ESP works, that the economy wasn’t actually all that bad in October 2008 etc. Nearly every time that I’ve seen _Freakonomics_ mentioned in the last several years, I’ve felt guilty and embarrassed that I had something to do with its rise to prominence. Very likely, it would have become prominent anyway (it had a very well organized PR campaign). But perhaps, given the chanciness of social contagion etc, it would not.

In any event, there really aren’t any excuses. I’m genuinely sorry for whatever push I gave to help start the _Freakonomics_ snowball rolling down the hill. There’s not much I can do about it now, but there you go.

In celebration of the day that’s in it, something from my past, and the past of a fair number of people from my generation. We were nearly the last to come of age when Irish culture was dominated by a combination of the Catholic Church and a particularly lugubrious nationalism. One of the early harbingers of its collapse was a television show, _Nighthawks_, which was broadcast on Ireland’s second station at 11pm a few nights a week, when the pious and well behaved had already gone to bed. The best bits of it were the occasional appearances by stand-up comic, Kevin McAleer, who stretched the conventions of Irish rural life, out and out and out, until they had become completely surreal and demented, all while staring at you with an expression of utter gormlessness, shot through with occasional bouts of craftiness. I mentioned this once before on Crooked Timber, and got an email out of the blue from McAleer, telling me that the tapes of _Nighthawks_ had long ago been erased, in the systematized auto-da-fe that was Irish television’s contribution to our cultural heritage (see also “Kieran”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/04/26/childhood-horrors/ ). But in the interim, someone (McAleer himself??) seems to have found some bits and pieces, and put them together with footage of his live show on Youtube, which should give people the flavour of the thing. Here are two. I’d be interested to know how readers react to them – I think they’re inspired myself but you may have to have the right cultural context to really get them. I’d be interested to know how they travel.

It’s not at all surprising that most US media have yawned at “today’s news”:http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/manning-treatment-inhuman/ that a UN rapporteur has found that the US has treated Bradley Manning in a cruel and inhuman fashion. But it does highlight a rather interesting inequity.

On the one side of the balance sheet, we have Richard B. Cheney. This gentleman, now in private life, is a self-admitted and unrepentant perpetrator of war crimes – specifically, of ordering the torture of Al Qaeda detainees. Along with other senior members of the Bush regime, he is also guilty of the outsourcing of even viler forms of torture through the extraordinary rendition of individuals to regimes notorious for torturing prisoners (including the dispatch of Maher Arar, who was entirely innocent, to the torturers of Syria). The Obama administration has shown no enthusiasm whatsoever for prosecuting Cheney, or other Bush senior officials, for their crimes. While Obama has effectively admitted that they were torturers, he has indicated, both through public statements and continued inaction, that he would prefer to let bygones be bygones.

On the other, we have Bradley Manning. He appears to be a confused individual – but his initial motivation for leaking information, if the transcripts are correct, were perfectly clear. He was appalled at what he saw as major abuses of authority by the US, including incidents that he witnessed directly in Iraq. There is no evidence that his leaking of information has caused anything worse than embarrassment for the US. Yet he is being pursued by the Obama administration with the vengefulness of Greek Furies. While Manning was being kept in solitary confinement, and treated in an inhuman fashion, Richard Cheney was enjoying the manifold pleasures of a well-compensated private life, being subjected to no more than the occasional impertinent question on a Sunday talk show, and the inconveniences of being unable to travel to jurisdictions where he might be arrested.

It would appear then that the administration is rather more prepared to let bygones be bygones in some cases than in others. High officials, who ordered that torture be carried out and dragged the US into international disrepute, are given an _ex post_ carte blanche for their crimes, while a low-ranking soldier who is at most guilty of leaking minor secrets at the lowest levels of classification, is treated inhumanely and likely, should he be convicted, to face life imprisonment.

So here’s my proposal. It’s perfectly clear that Richard B. Cheney will never be prosecuted because a prosecution would be politically inconvenient. If that’s the Obama administration’s decision (and it’s pretty clear that it _is_ the Obama administration’s decision), then the administration should own it. The president should grant Richard Cheney a pardon for his crimes. Simultaneously, as an acknowledgement that the high crimes of state officials should not go unpunished while the lesser crimes of those who opposed the Iraq war are exposed to the vengefulness of the military tribunal system, Bradley Manning should receive a complete pardon too.

I can’t imagine that Richard B. Cheney would _like_ getting a presidential pardon. Indeed, I rather imagine that he’d vigorously protest it. It would serve as the best formal acknowledgment that we’re likely to get that he is, indeed, a criminal. Obviously, it would also be an unhappy compromise for those who think that he should be exposed to the full rigors of the law. But I personally think that it would be an acceptable compromise (others may reasonably disagree), if it were applied to both sides rather than just one.

The “bad news”:http://www.annarbor.com/news/graduate-student-unionization-bill-heads-to-snyder/?cmpid=mlive – the Michigan state legislature passed the bill denying RAs recognition as public workers, on a party-line vote, and it is heading to the governor, who has announced he will approve it. The legislation has been hustled through incredibly quickly, to prevent the opposition from mobilizing. The interesting news – this, together with other similar of the Republican state government, is pushing Michigan unions into “looking for a referendum on organization rights”:http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120311/POLITICS02/203110303/.

bq. Michigan unions are fighting back with a sweeping proposal that would enshrine collective bargaining rights in the state constitution and put them beyond the reach of state lawmakers. The measure would serve as a pre-emptive strike against a possible right-to-work movement in Michigan, and potentially could undo some of what the state Legislature has done in the past 14 months related to unions and bargaining powers. It also could serve as a get-out-the-vote rallying point for Democrats as they seek to re-elect President Barack Obama this fall.

bq. … Union members and other supporters would need to collect at least 322,609 valid voter signatures by early July to put the proposed constitutional amendment before Michigan voters in November. The measure reads that “no existing or future law of the state … shall abridge, impair or limit” the collective bargaining rights outlined in the proposal. That could nullify possible Michigan efforts to pass a right-to-work law, which would prohibit labor contracts that require workers to pay union representation fees. Michigan Republicans are divided on the issue, but debate has intensified since Indiana recently became the first Rust Belt state to adopt such a measure.

I have no expertise _at all_ in Michigan state politics, but this seems a hopeful step. Rick Kahlenberg has a “recent op-ed”:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/01/opinion/a-civil-right-to-unionize.html?_r=1&ref=opinion and a “new book”:http://tcf.org/publications/pdfs/Intro_Kahlenberg-Marvit.pdf/++atfield++file (PDF of first chapter) arguing that the right to unionize ought to be included in the Civil Rights Act. That’s a long term project, but state-level efforts like the one starting in Michigan might help it along a bit (it would be nice to see “Scott Walker go down too”:http://www.postcrescent.com/article/20120312/APC010401/120312106/Photos-video-story-Walker-recall-effort-turned-930-000-signatures?odyssey=mod%7Cnewswell%7Ctext%7CAPC-News%7Cs while we’re at it).

Since it’s starting to “filter”:http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/economics-in-the-crisis/?pagewanted=all into “debate”:http://modeledbehavior.com/2012/03/06/in-which-i-am-won-over-by-paul-krugman/, it’s probably time that the paper that John Quiggin and I have written on Keynesianism in the Great Recession be released into the wild. It’s currently under journal review, but still has some holes (we figured it was at the stage where it would be helpful to have reviewers point out what we needed to do rather than try to model their likely responses internally). So, it’s here for downloading – and criticisms, comments and suggestions for improvements will be gratefully received. NB that both John and I have participated in this debate – but we have tried, as best as we can, to look at what happened not from the perspective of whether the people who were winning at any one point in time _deserved_ to win or not according to our subjective criteria, but instead, whether there are general explanations (independent of the quality of the arguments on the one side or the other) for the influence of different arguments at different times. In short, we’ve tried to write a paper about what happened, and why, rather than what should have happened. NB also, that we are aware of some holes (e.g. the fit between some of the theory, and the practical application is not as tight as we would like), and would love to hear suggestions for improvements.

Update: It would be particularly interesting to hear from people with strong, divergent perspectives, so as to make sure that the piece reflects as much information and as many points of view as possible. People should also feel free to email me at keynespaper@henryfarrell.net if they would prefer to make criticisms or suggestions privately rather than in public.

“Larry Lessig”:http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/18951520350/on-the-anonymous-donors-to-americans-elect argues (disagreeing with Rick Hasen) that there’s nothing wrong with the anonymity of the people behind the _Americans Elect_ non-partisan third-party initiative.

bq. I’ve come around to support Americans Elect now, but only because I believe it could be a platform for a real reform candidate. If it doesn’t produce such a candidate, I won’t support supporting the candidate it produces. But in this spin, I have never been too worked up about “their transparency problem.” …When we hear that an anonymous contributor has given $10 million to a superPac supporting a particular candidate, we are and should be concerned about that contribution. But that’s because of two distinct, and independent reasons: We assume that even though we don’t know who the contributor is, the candidate will, AND We assume that the contributor’s contribution will lead the candidate to be responsive in ways that we won’t understand. If those two conditions are not met, however, our concern about anonymity should be different, and, in my view, much less significant. … What could the contributor be getting if the candidate couldn’t know who the contributor was? … If there is no plausible way in which the contributions would affect the work or the positions of the candidate, the cost of anonymity is different. … This second point is why I don’t think #AmericansElect has a “transparency problem.” I can’t begin to imagine how the identity of the contributors could possibly matter to the positions that any candidate would take on any of the issues. AE is building a platform to select candidates. They are promising a process to get access to the ballot in all fifty states. Whether a candidate is selected to be on that ballot depends upon his or her winning in the primary/caucus process. A candidate’s alignment with or against the substantive issues of one of the anonymous contributors isn’t going to affect that candidate’s ability to get nominated by AE at all.

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NB that there are two differences between this post and my last one. First – there are substantial spoilers beneath the fold. Second, Stross’s book (Powells, Amazon)is a _very_ plausible Hugo nominee for this year (MacLeod’s book isn’t, for the obvious reasons of publication dates etc). Hugo nominations close this week – I’ll try to cover another couple of books that I think could be nominated tomorrow.

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This is less a review of Ken MacLeod’s new novel, _Intrusion_ than a response to it. Ken is famous for having said that history is the trade secret of science fiction (also: for describing the Singularity as the “Rapture for nerds”) – but I can’t help wondering whether history is being overtaken by the cognitive and social sciences. Since Cosma Shalizi and I are both thinking and starting to write about some of the arguments that Ken takes on in his book, I’ll focus on drawing out the ideas. This is obviously dangerous if you do it naively – good novels of ideas play with their subject matter rather than expound it, and take care to leave a lot of space for ambiguity, counter-perspectives, the awkwardness of real human beings with human motivations and so on. And _Intrusion_ is a good novel of ideas. Even so, there may be value in drawing out the ideas that Ken is engaging with – I don’t think that the book mentions the names of Thaler and Sunstein once, but one significant skein of the book argues against them. NB that while I don’t _think_ that there are any major spoilers below the fold, some possible readers may reasonably want to preserve their reading experience from my conceptions and misconceptions of what the book is about. Certainly, people who have already read the book will get a lot more from this essay than people who haven’t. NB also that while I don’t know whether the book will have a US edition anytime soon, it can be ordered from the usual UK sources by US readers, who will also soon be treated to his robots-meet-Calvinism-and-contractarianism-and-the-illusion-of-free-will near future thriller, _The Night Sessions._

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_Red Plenty_, which I’ve written about several times, is now available (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/biblio/9781555976040?p_ti, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/entity/Francis-Spufford/B001HCV3N8/?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=ur2&qid=1330745629&camp=1789&sr=1-1&creative=390957) in a US paperback edition. It’s a fabulous book which should apply to a wide variety of CT readers – a mosaic novel that simultaneously speaks intelligently to the Soviet calculation debate, _and_ has engaging characters. It’s beautifully written to boot – this bit, which I’ve quoted before, will give you some sense of how its more cerebral passages flow.

bq. But Marx had drawn a nightmare picture of what happened to human life under capitalism, when everything was produced only in order to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became only an object to be traded. Then the makers and the things made turned alike into commodities, and the motion of society turned into a kind of zombie dance, a grim cavorting whirl in which objects and people blurred together till the objects were half alive and the people were half dead. Stock-market prices acted back upon the world as if they were independent powers, requiring factories to be opened or closed, real human beings to work or rest, hurry or dawdle; and they, having given the transfusion that made the stock prices come alive, felt their flesh go cold and impersonal on them, mere mechanisms for chunking out the man-hours. Living money and dying humans, metal as tender as skin and skin as hard as metal, taking hands, and dancing round, and round, and round, with no way ever of stopping; the quickened and the deadened, whirling on. That was Marx’s description, anyway. And what would be the alternative? The consciously arranged alternative? A dance of another nature, Emil presumed. A dance to the music of use, where every step fulfilled some real need, did some tangible good, and no matter how fast the dancers spun, they moved easily, because they moved to a human measure, intelligible to all, chosen by all.

Finally, we’re going to do a Crooked Timber seminar on it in a few months. This should give plenty of opportunity to those of you who want to join the discussion to get your hands on a copy and read it.

This isn’t funny at all – the Republican state legislature in Michigan is trying to forestall a vote on RA unionization at the University of Michigan by passing legislation declaring that RAs are not public employees, and hence have no right to organize. A Senate bill was “introduced”:http://www.michigandaily.com/news/sen-richardville-introduces-senate-bill-regarding-gsra-unionization on February 17 and “swiftly passed”:http://www.michigandaily.com/news/senate-bill-passes-will-soon-move-house. It is now before the Michigan House.

bq. Introduced by state Senate Majority Leader Randy Richardville (R–Monroe), the legislation will restrict graduate students from achieving status as public employees, thereby preventing them from claiming collective bargaining rights and obtaining representation from a union. Yesterday’s vote comes just one day after it had passed through the Senate Government Operations Committee, and the bill will now move on to the state House of Representatives. The vote also comes on the heels of an emergency meeting by the University’s Board of Regents to pass a resolution in opposition to the bill. The regents voted 6-2, along party lines, to approve the resolution and instructed Cynthia Wilbanks, the University’s vice president of governmental affairs, to garner support among state legislators to vote against the bill. Bob McCann, communications director for Senate Minority Leader Gretchen Whitmer (D–East Lansing), said Senate Republicans approved the bill so quickly — it was introduced last week — to avoid interference from negative public feedback.

The negative public feedback bit is where you come in. I don’t know how many CT readers are Michigan residents – I strongly encourage those who are to contact their state level representatives, whether Democratic or Republican, politely but firmly telling them what a horrible idea this is. I’d also be grateful if those who have useful information (i.e. relevant email addresses of political figures) or other helpful suggestions could leave them in comments. Time is of the essence; I also get the impression, perhaps mistaken, that graduate student union have only very limited resources to fight this kind of fight (they don’t have the direct political connections to local policy makers that other collective actors have. So please do what you can, and spread the word.

Update – Patrick O’Mahen supplies some useful phone numbers in comments.

Mark Ouimet District 52 (517) 373-0828
Rick Olsen District 55 (888) 345-2849
Pat Somerville District 23 (517) 373-0855
Nancy Jenkins District 55 (855) 292-0002
Kevin Cotter District 99 (517) 373-1789

Jase Bolger is the Speaker of the House and is always useful to bother on these issues (as he’s a veto point and all): (517) 373-1787

Finally, governor Rick Snyder can be reached at (517) 373-3400.

From David Marsh’s “book on the origins of the euro”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300176740/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0300176740, some indication that the last few years of gold standard lunacy were baked into the cake from quite early on.

bq. The two leaders [Giscard d’Estaing and Helmut Schmidt] professed the common aim, at a wider European level that superseded national borders, to regain monetary stability forfeited through a century of war and disruption. According to Giscard, the road to a European money was part of a journey that had been abandoned when the Gold Standard ended:’During the second half of the nineteenth century, up to the 1914 war, France enjoyed continuously successful economic growth, and a steady build-up of its engineering industry, with a currency that was totally stable. With their roots in a rural economy and their cultural leaning towards the fundamental values of savings and thrift, the French as a nation cannot cope with an inflationary economy and a weak currency. They thrive on stable money.’ Schmidt, too, affirmed a link between the goal of EMU and the Gold Standard:’We had a currency union up to 1914 in Western Europe – the Gold Standard. From a historical point of view, I would draw a direct parallel.’ (p.69)

In a blogpost in July of last year, David Graeber talked about why he wrote Debt.

But in a way, Keith had it exactly right. The aim of the book was, indeed, to write the sort of book people don’t write any more: a big book, asking big questions, meant to be read widely and spark public debate, but at the same time, without any sacrifice of scholarly rigor. History will judge whether it’s still possible to pull this sort of thing off (let alone whether I’m the person who will be able to do it.)

He further advised that writers of such books should:

back up your statements with extensive, detailed references that actually do say what you think they say. Good scholarship is more appreciated by popular audiences than academic ones. This is a bit scandalous but I have found it to be true. I have about 100 pages of notes and bibliography in the book and non-academics commenting on the book rarely fail to note, approvingly, that I don’t ask anyone to take my word for what I say, but back up all my claims with numerous references. Some show signs of actually having checked a few to make sure I was on the level. It’s an interesting comment on academia that we almost never do this.

There’s a lot to like about Debt, but I don’t think that it delivers on this promise (or, at least, not on the scholarly rigor bit). Much of the specific historical discussion in the book is beyond my pay grade – while I’m interested in the discussion, and enjoyed Graeber’s reconceptualization, I can’t say that much about it. Hence, this response will focus on the stuff that I do know a little more about – today’s international political economy, and the relationship between money and military force within it.

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NPR ran a good piece on the Elsevier saga before the weekend. I found one part of the broadcast particularly interesting. A director of Elsevier, Alicia Wise, makes the case for Elsevier as follows.

We have full-time scientific editors, who are mediating the peer review process, and finding editors, and finding reviewers, ensuring those reviews are returned on time. They also are tasked with ensuring that the published articles are bias free. … publishers are doing more work, they have more submissions, and we are incurring the costs of ensuring that peer review and quality control happens.

According to NPR, Wise acknowledges that Elsevier has done a poor job communicating with academics, and has been going online to engage with Elsevier’s critics. I hereby invite Dr. Wise to do so in the comments section here (we are online after all, and a reasonably visible blog) to provide specific answers to a few focused questions. Commenters should feel free to add more questions of their own, but I do ask them to maintain minimum standards of civilty so as to promote debate &c&c.

(1) Which aspect of keeping the academic publishing process ‘bias free’ drove Elsevier’s decision to take drug company money to repackage articles supporting these companies’ products in ways that explicitly suggested that these packages were real academic journals? It’s all very nice that Elsevier’s CEO has expressed his ‘regret’ that this ‘took place’ (rather in the same way that he might have expressed sorrow at an earthquake, a monsoon or a similar natural calamity beyond his control), but did he do anything to reaffirm Elsevier’s stalwart commitment to bias free research, such as e.g. firing the executives responsible?

(2) In a recent Science article on how journals put pressure on academics to cite work previously published in these journals (so as to bump up the journal’s impact factors artificially), four of the five worst journals were Elsevier publications. How does this comport with Elsevier’s purportedly ironclad commitment to quality control and elimination of bias in the peer review process? Skeptics might hypothesize that things have not improved as much as one might like after Elsevier was forced by public outrage among scientists to take action in the notorious “Journal of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals” case, in which an obscure journal managed to become the highest-impact journal in mathematics, thanks in large part to generous, indeed exuberant, levels of self-citation (which were, however, very plausibly not the product of coercion on the part of its editor, who was the co-author of many of the pieces involved).

(3) Why is it that Elsevier obliges libraries buying its products to sign non-disclosure agreements so that they can’t tell anyone what they are paying for their journal bundles without getting sued? Cynics might see this as a textbook example of a semi-monopolist doing everything it can to engage in price discrimination. But perhaps there is an entirely innocent answer.

I would be delighted to see Dr. Wise respond to the particulars of these questions (vague and generic restatements of corporate goals and policies will be greeted with rather less enthusiasm). There is much that remains unknown about Elsevier’s internal processes of decision making, and how they have brought this corporate publishing behemoth, and the academic publishing industry that it has sought so assiduously to reshape) to the state that it is now in.

Rich Yeselson will be writing a couple of guest-posts for us over the next couple of weeks. Formerly an organizer with Change to Win, Rich is the smartest public intellectual that you’ve probably never heard of – his work prevented him from playing a public role, but hasn’t prevented him from being a crucially important person in all sorts of less public conversations, brokering ties between the worlds of labor organizing, electoral politics and intellectual debate. First up, a take on Erving Goffman and Mitt Romney …