Henry

As a sort of coda to Chris’s post of a couple of days ago, _02138_ magazine ran an article a few years ago on how various well known Harvard professors used research assistants. The magazine has since gone belly-up, but the article has been preserved here and a few other places on the Internets. This bit on Dershowitz seems relevant to his various forays into public intellectualism:

Several of his researchers say that Dershowitz doesn’t subscribe to the scholarly convention of researching first, then drawing conclusions. Instead, as a lawyer might, he writes his conclusions, leaving spaces where he’d like sources or case law to back up a thesis. On several occasions where the research has suggested opposite conclusions, his students say, he has asked them to go back and look for other cases, or simply to omit the discrepant information. “That’s the way it’s done; a piecemeal, ass-backwards way,” says one student who has firsthand experience with the writing habits of Dershowitz and other tenured colleagues. “They write first, make assertions, and farm out [the work] to research assistants to vet it. They do very little of the research themselves.”

When one student couldn’t find a desired source for an HLS professor’s project, a Harvard research librarian commented, “Isn’t that the opposite of how you’re supposed to do it?” Other students point out that Dershowitz has been at the law school for four decades, and thus even his most apparently off-the-cuff suppositions are based on a long career of reading and practicing law. And Dershowitz does acknowledge researchers in his books.

The juxtaposition of two quotes in an article on Turkey in today’s _FT_ is pretty interesting.

bq. Susan Rice, US ambassador to the UN, attacked the “very unfortunate choices” by Turkey and Brazil, the other country to oppose the measures. “They are now the outliers,” she said of the two traditional US allies. “They are standing outside of the rest of the Security Council, outside of the body of the international community.” Russia and China, long doubtful about sanctions, voted in favour after a dogged US campaign for support.

and

bq. On Wednesday, Robert Gates, defence secretary, suggested European Union reluctance to admit Turkey as a member could be pushing it away from the west and expressed concern about the deterioration of Turkish-Israeli ties. “If there’s anything to the notion that Turkey is moving eastwards, it is in no small part because it was pushed, and it was pushed by some in Europe refusing to give Turkey the kind of organic link to the west that Turkey sought,” he said while visiting London.

American notions of ‘international community’ are pretty weird if you look at them at all closely. On the one one hand, Rice’s quote suggests that the ‘international community’ more or less reduces down to ‘states that are prepared to agree, however reluctantly, with the US belief that Iran needs to be punished.’ Turkey and Brazil are members of the UN in good standing – and on various counts (democracy etc), they have a lot more legitimacy than e.g. Russia and China. On the other, Gates’ view (entirely apart from its rather dishonest failure to acknowledge that US support for Israel may have done a wee little bit to alienate Turkey) suggests that membership of the European Union isn’t very much more than a generic recognition of Turkey as part of the ‘west’ (whatever the ‘west is construed to be). I’m very strongly in favor of Turkey becoming a member of the EU – but like everyone who has looked at this at all closely, I recognize that this would involve big changes to both Turkey and the EU, and that the EU is not a standard international organization. So on the one hand the US sees the international community as nothing more or less than the states which are prepared to go along with its priorities, and on the other hand, when the US encounters _actual_ communities in the international sphere, it thinks that they should hand out membership of this community without any debate because it would serve the US’s geostrategic interests. As I say, weird.

Update: see also Charlemagne.

In my inbox from the Cato Institute this morning.

_More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws_
(University of Chicago Press, 2010)

BOOK FORUM
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Noon (Luncheon to Follow)

Featuring the author John R. Lott, Jr.; with comments from Paul Helmke, President, Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence; and Jeff Snyder, Attorney and Author, Nation of Cowards: Essays on the Ethics of Gun Control (Accurate Press, 2001). Moderated by Tim Lynch, Director, Project on Criminal Justice, Cato Institute.

On its initial publication in 1998, John R. Lott’s More Guns, Less Crime drew both lavish praise and heated criticism. More than a decade later, it continues to play a key role in ongoing arguments over gun-control laws. Relying on a comprehensive data analysis of crime statistics and right-to-carry laws, the book challenges common perceptions about the relationship of guns, crime, and violence. Now in this third edition, Lott draws on an additional 10 years of data — including provocative analysis of the effects of gun bans in Chicago and Washington, DC — that he claims lends even more support to his central contention that more guns mean less crime. Join us for a wide-ranging discussion of guns, self-defense, and public safety.

Why yes indeed. You could say that _More Guns, Less Crime_ drew heated criticism. But then, you might prefer to ask why John Lott became a public laughing stock before you got into detailed back-and-forths about the econometrics. Mysteriously disappearing surveys. The wonderful Mary Rosh, a former ‘student’ of John Lott’s who went after Lott’s critics on the Internet, and gushed about how “Lott was the best professor that I ever had….Lott finally had to tell us that it was best for us to try and take classes from other professors more to be exposed to other ways of teaching graduate material,” before she was revealed as a sockpuppet for John R. Lott himself. And finally, the famous lawsuit against Steven Levitt.

The people at Cato can hardly be unaware of this peculiar history. After all, one of their own research fellows, Julian Sanchez, did as much as anyone to uncover Dr. Lott’s various misdeeds. But they’ve chosen nonetheless to associate themselves with the notorious Dr. Lott, and to promote his work. If Michael Bellesiles was still working on gun issues, and the Center for American Progress was holding events to promote his work, it would be a problem. But Bellesiles’ hackwork is still treated as toxic by the left. Cato is an odd mix of genuinely smart and honest people (e.g. Sanchez, Brink Lindsey) and organized hackery. It’s not doing its reputation any favors by hosting this event.

Laura McKenna has an interesting claim and data point (PDF).

bq. However, the move from independent bloggers to paid staff members of important newspapers and interest groups had an impact on the old system of blogging. Perhaps because these newly professional bloggers felt pressured to distance themselves from their amateur roots, they stopped linking to independent bloggers. They were more likely to link to academic studies, foundation reports, newspaper articles, or live-blogged events.

bq. Matthew Yglesias is one of the superstar bloggers who went pro. … His new professional status has had an impact on his linkage patterns. In the last week of September of 2004, Yglesias wrote 30 posts with 31 hyperlinks on his independent blog. Fifteen of those links were to independent blogs, and the remaining sixteen links were to newspapers, websites, journals, or think tank studies. In the last week of September of 2009, he wrote 66 posts with 131 hyperlinks for his blog at the Center for American Progress. Only seven of 131 hyperlinks were to independent bloggers. The remaining 122 links primarily pointed readers to everything else, but primarily traditional newspapers and journals. Yglesias is writing a lot more, but referring to independent bloggers a lot less.

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Price Fishback’s paper suggesting that the US welfare state is bigger than Sweden’s and Denmark’s got a lot of attention a few weeks back on the right side of the blogosphere. Since I outsource most of my thinking on statistical comparisons of the welfare state to Lane Kenworthy, I’ve been waiting for him to assess the argument. He finally has.

bq. This looks like good news for the poor in the United States. Is it? Unfortunately, no. These adjustments change the story with respect to the aggregate quantity of resources spent on social protection in the three countries, but they have limited bearing on redistribution and on the living standards of the poor. … Begin with tax breaks. … . In the United States these disproportionately go to the affluent and the middle class. … Public transfer programs in Denmark and Sweden tend to be “universal” in design … To make them more affordable, the government claws back some of the benefit by taxing it as though it were regular income. All countries do this, including the United States, but the Nordic countries do it more extensively. So how well-off are the poor in the United States, with its “hidden welfare state,” compared to social-democratic Denmark and Sweden? One measure is average posttransfer-posttax (“disposable”) income among households in the bottom decile of the income distribution. Here are my calculations using the best available comparative data, from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS). (The numbers are adjusted for household size. They refer to a household with a single adult. For a family of four, multiply by two.)

bq. Government services — medical care, child care, housing, transportation, and so on — reduce material hardship directly. They also free up income to be spent on other needs. The comparative data, though by no means perfect, are consistent with the hypothesis that public services help the poor more in the Nordic countries than in the United States.

bq. Helping the poor is not, of course, the only thing we want from social spending. But it surely is one thing.

Via Jonathan Chait, _Right Wing News_ is running a competition

bq. One of the most popular articles at RWN last year was, The 15 Hottest Conservative Women In The New Media. So, when you have a big hit, what could make more sense than doing a sequel?

It seems to me a wee bit unfair that all them healthy heterosexual Republican gals (and, for that matter, the five or six Log Cabin Republicans who have stuck it out despite all) can’t get in on the fun. So let me propose an alternative competition to find the Hottest Conservative Man In The New Media. And by one of those funny coincidences, the eight finalists for this much coveted award are the members of the “distinguished panel of judges” that _Right Wing News_ has chosen to adjudicate which of the laydeez is the smokingest.¹ Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:

Glenn Reynolds

Jonah Goldberg

Andrew Malcolm

Dan Gainor

‘Van Helsing’ from Moonbattery (artist’s depiction)

Alfonzo Rachel

James Joyner (who is actually a good bloke imo who really ought to have known better)

And remember! You can only pick _one._

¹ It occurs to me that ditch-hurlers might want to point out in comments that I myself am not possessed of what used to be called matinee-idol good looks. This would be a wonderful way of missing the point, reinforcing it, or both.

Apropos of my piece on Ireland’s bubble economy for the _Washington Monthly,_ it does no good thing for a country’s reputation when they start naming tax dodges perfectly legitimate tax avoidance strategies after you.

bq. On advice from Ernst & Young, Forest Laboratories Ireland reorganized that year, dropping the country from its name. The newly dubbed Forest Laboratories Holdings Ltd. established a registered office in Hamilton, Bermuda, declaring the island its tax residence. This unit took control of licensing the patents. A second subsidiary in Ireland inherited the old name. It handled the manufacturing, sublicensing the rights to the patents, according to a corporate disclosure and an internal Forest flow chart tracing the arrangement that was reviewed by Bloomberg. The change helped the Irish subsidiary cut its effective tax rate to 2.4 percent from 10.3 percent the year before the reorganization, according to its annual reports. It did so by deducting from its taxable income the fees that went to Bermuda, which has no corporate income tax. Charlie Perkins, a spokesman for Ernst & Young, one of the so-called Big Four accounting firms, declined to comment on its work for Forest. International tax planners have a nickname for the type of structure the drugmaker adopted: the Double Irish. …

bq. Even though Forest described its Bermuda office as the Irish subsidiary’s “principal place of business” in a 2008 court filing, it has no employees on the island. The closest it comes to an actual presence is its registered office at Milner House, at 18 Parliament Street in Hamilton, a beige building nestled among the pastel structures of the island’s main commercial area. There, Coson Corporate Services Limited, part of law firm Cox Hallett Wilkinson, provides “corporate administrative services” for Forest Laboratories Holdings, according to Jeannette Monk, who identified herself as the company’s corporate administrator. Asked whether Forest had any employees there, she said, “This is a law firm.”

But perhaps “Double Dutch” would be better …

bq. To avoid another Irish tax, Forest’s profits don’t fly direct to Bermuda. They have a layover in Amsterdam. Fees paid to the Bermuda unit pass through yet another subsidiary, Forest Finance BV in the Netherlands, according to the internal Forest document, Dutch corporate records and a person familiar with the transaction. That route bypasses a 20 percent Irish withholding tax on certain royalties for patents, according to Richard Murphy, a U.K. accountant who worked on similar transactions and is director of Tax Research LLP. The structure takes advantage of an exemption from the levy if payments go to a company in another EU member state, Murphy said.

A really good article from Bloomberg – go and read it.

Details here. Michael Dirda wrote a lovely article on his last book (which I haven’t read) a few months ago. I don’t know whether I prefer Gardner’s “Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science” (one of the two lodestones of this literature, along with Sladek’s “The New Apocrypha”), his collections of light articles on mathematics, or the “Annotated Alice.” They were all wonderful.

getting interesting …

Wolfgang Schäuble in the Financial Times

bq. Indeed, far from reflecting a growing German Euroscepticism, Mr Schäuble and Ms Merkel have both revived calls for closer political union to underpin economic and monetary union. “When we introduced the euro in the 1990s, Germany wanted a political union and France did not. That is why we have an economic union without a political union,” he says. “Political union naturally means a bit of federalism in the German sense of federal. It means that one can no longer take certain decisions on a national level. That is very hard for the UK. It’s often not so simple for France, but France finds it easier to take European decisions.

bq. “Germany has a lot of experience with federalism, more than the UK or France. If you want to create a federal organisation, you must be ready to have a certain amount of redistribution within it. You can dismiss that by rudely calling it a “transfer union”. But strong and weaker states both have their responsibility. We are asking a lot of the weaker ones, but the strong also have their responsibility, and we must explain that as well.

bq. “We must say very clearly to Germany: we can play our role, but we must know that means there will be decisions taken against us. The weekend before last [in the negotiations over the eurozone stabilisation mechanism], we saw that it was not in the German interest to be standing alone. That is also a good learning process for the German public.”

And Scott (at IHE) is not happy with his new publisher

bq. It is true that he drew the ire of the National Rifle Association, and I have no inclination to give that organization’s well-funded demagogy the benefit of any doubt. But gun nuts did not force Bellesiles to do sloppy research or to falsify sources. That his scholarship was grossly incompetent on many points is not a “controversial” notion. Nor is it open to dispute whether or not he falsified sources. That has been exhaustively documented by his peers. To pretend otherwise is itself demagogic.

bq. If a major commercial press wants to help a disgraced figure make his comeback, that is one thing, but rewriting history is another. The New Press published many excellent books by important authors. It is out of respect for that record that I want to invite it to make a public apology for violating the trust its readers have in it.

So I deleted my Facebook account about a week ago – the most recent changes to their privacy policy were one step further than I wanted to go (and it seemed certain that there were going to be many such steps ahead). This post today by Michael Zimmer does a nice job of capturing the reasons that Facebook was making me ever more uncomfortable.

bq. But, today, I found a new statement that brings Zuckerberg’s hubris to a new level.

bq. SocialBeat has a very thoughtful piece urging Zuckerberg to be forthright and explain what he truly and genuinely believes about privacy. While searching for evidence of Zuckerberg’s broader philosophy of information, a passage from David Kirkpatrick’s forthcoming book, The Facebook Effect, is quoted:

“You have one identity,” he emphasized three times in a single interview with David Kirkpatrick in his book, “The Facebook Effect.” “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He adds: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

… Zuckerberg must have skipped that class where Jung and Goffman were discussed. Individuals are constantly managing and restricting flows of information based on the context they are in, switching between identities and persona. I present myself differently when I’m lecturing in the classroom compared to when I’m have a beer with friends. I might present a slightly different identity when I’m at a church meeting compared to when I’m at a football game. This is how we navigate the multiple and increasingly complex spheres of our lives.

To Goffman, I’d add Richard Sennett, whose brilliant but elliptical _The Fall of Public Man_ (Powells, Amazon) is all about the collapse of people’s ability to create public personae for themselves that differ radically from their private selves. Sennett’s idealized version of coffee house culture is in a way an idealization of the Internet before its time – a place where no-one, as the New Yorker cartoon put it, knows that you’re a dog. Facebook appears to be deliberately and systematically making it harder and harder for people to vary their self-presentations according to audience. I think that this broad tendency (if it continues and spreads) impoverishes public life. Certainly, the self that I present on this blog is very different from the self that I present in private life (I’m a lot more combative, for better or worse, in electronically mediated exchanges, than I am in person). It’s also very different from the self that I present on the political science blog that I contribute to. Both differ drastically from the self I present to my students. I don’t think I’m unique in this. And one of the things I like about the Internets is that I _can_ present myself in different ways. This isn’t the result of a lack of integrity – you need to present different ‘selves’ if you want to engage in different kinds of dialogue.

As an aside – this may be a good place to note one of my other selves. I now do a lot of the round-up ‘this is interesting but I don’t have time to blog on it’ link selection that I used to do on Crooked Timber when I had time via a Google Reader feed (apart from the brief Buzz debacle, I’m generally more comfortable with the ways that Google intrudes upon my privacy than Facebook). People who are interested can find my feed at http://www.google.com/reader/shared/henry.farrell (if you have Google Reader or whatever, you can subscribe to this in the usual ways). The latest item shared is this great Boston Review symposium on the corrupting influence of money on medical academia.

Have just finished writing two papers with hard deadlines – now in the throes of grading – so two quick points, which either sort-of-resonate-with or half-contradict each other in ways that I don’t have time to think or write about.

First: ungovernability. Or, rather, “ungovernability.” Chris got a lot of flak in comments for suggesting that centrists and center-right people in the media were going to come out with suggestions that a bit of dictatorship might not be a bad idea. As he pointed out, there used to be a lot of people on the right and center-right who made these arguments – and not just about countries in the developing world. Crouch and Pizzorno’s _The Resurgence of Class Conflict in Western Europe_ is particularly good on this, as I recall. That said, unlike Chris, I don’t have strong expectations that this set of rhetorical tropes is going to emerge in the very near future (although it may in the medium term). The old crop of center-right dictator-fanciers were fans of dictatorships not because they were opposed to democracy _tout court_, but because they were opposed to certain parts of the economy being subject to political control. This is not so much of an issue these days. From a certain point of view, the European Central Bank is a more-than-acceptable functional substitute for General Augusto Pinochet. Indeed, being less publicly embarrassing, it is arguably superior. One of these days soon, by the way, I’m going to write my post on the editorial policy of the _Economist_ during the Irish Famine – it wasn’t one of its finer moments.
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About eight weeks ago I left my MacBook on the DC Metro. Not a wonderful experience, as you can imagine – especially as repeated calls to the Metro’s Lost & Found, advertisements on Craigslist with reward promised and other such measures failed to produce any results. But then, last week, I got a call from Ross Sirbaugh at Computer Warehouse in Falls Church. Someone had brought in the computer and asked them to reinstall the operating system. Ross smelled a rat, took a look at the machine, figured out my name and other details, then tracked me down and called me. And then, to put the icing on the cake, refused to accept any reward whatsoever for his pretty considerable efforts. So I figure the least I can do is to give a WWW shout-out to Ross and his colleagues at Computer Warehouse, for their willingness to go that extra mile and then a couple of miles again (please – don’t anyone tell the Heritage Foundation though). I think it is a pretty safe surmise that if this is the level of due diligence that they exercise when they don’t have _any economic incentive whatsoever_ to do it, the level that they’ll exercise when they do have such incentive (because you’re paying ’em for something) must be super-duper awesome. So, go to Computer Warehouse for all your needs (it looked like they had some pretty good value in laptops – and clearly, their tech people are strongly recommended). Did I mention their name? Computer Warehouse – right on Leesburg Pike.

Also – in the spirit of locking the barn door after the horse has gone but to your very great surprise been returned later through the benevolence of strangers – recommendations for minimizing the pain of stolen machines.

(1) _Back Up Everything Important_ somewhere external. This is the one measure I did take – and the pain would have been far, _far_ greater had I lost my work along with the machine. I use Sugarsync which keeps the work documents on my various machines in sync with each other as well as giving me an online back up – others swear by DropBox, SpiderOak and other services.

(2) Make sure that your account is password protected. I didn’t do this – remarkably stupidly – but appear to have gotten away without loss of personal information. You shouldn’t take this risk. I won’t again.

(3) Set up a firmware password if you have a recently made Mac. Makes it much harder to wipe the OS.

(4) Consider buying anti-theftware like Undercover. Depending on your tolerance for risk, this may be too expensive for the benefits provided (me: my risk tolerance has decreased substantially since this happened to me).

Other suggestions or recommendations welcome in comments.

Comment away!