Henry

In which it is revealed that John Q. has been hiding his light under a bushel – I hadn’t realized that he had recently been described in an editorial by the _Australian_ as a green activist with a totalitarian mindset. I obviously need to keep up a little better with his personal blog.

is profiled along with other academic bloggers (DeLong, Drezner, Shalizi) in Berkeley’s alumni magazine. Some discussion of CT, and changes in academic blogging included as part of the cover price. Two quotes:

Like DeLong, Holbo thrives on that public sparring. He finds the virtual salon a perfect antidote to the insulation of the ivory tower and the glacial pace of conventional scholarship. “I have a split intellectual life: these ant-like projects that evolve over months and years, and then this by-the-moment blogging life,” he says. “Blog posts take an hour, while an academic paper can take four years.” Yet even though the blogs reach a huge and influential audience compared to that of scholarly journals, the blogs are not recognized as scholarly publication and don’t count toward tenure.

Holbo admits he and his fellow pioneers have lost the “revolutionary fervor” of blogging’s early days. “I’m fortunate to be at the top of the food chain, to have these bully pulpits where I can stand up and know thousands of people will hear me,” he says. “But we all thought blogging was going to transform academic life, and that didn’t really happen.”

…

If there’s one thing Shalizi can’t stand, it’s misinformation bandied about in the name of science. “A lot of the time, when I’m motivated enough to post something, it’s because I think someone is ‘being wrong on the Internet,’ as the saying goes—and this cannot stand,” Shalizi says. “It’s usually something I’ve read more than once and it seems such a pack of lies, or utter misunderstandings, that I feel like writing something. I wish I wasn’t so destructively motivated, but I am.”

When asked how much time and effort that takes, he says, “Quite a bit, to be honest. Part of that is the fact that I’m way over trained as an academic, and part is also wanting to leave people no excuse or way out,” Shalizi says. “If I can show that they’re just totally wrong, thoroughly wrong, then I will try to do that.”

If anyone reading knows Randall Munroe (I’m pretty sure one regular CT reader at least does), he or she is hereby requested to get a new version of the famous cartoon commissioned; this time with the guy at the computer depicted with a Leon Trotsky beard …

This one from Megan McArdle, is a _very_ special example. It’s the blogospheric version of one of those avant-garde mechanical sculptures that starts to tear itself apart as soon as the clockwork key is turned. It’s worth quoting _in extenso_ so that you too can marvel at the beauty and ingenuity of the escapements.
[click to continue…]

So, when Michiko Kakutani (the daughter of the famous mathematician btw) writes an article deploring the tendency of modern culture towards semi-coherent mash-ups of other people’s work, and the article is itself a semi-coherent mash-up of the work of other people (mostly themselves deploring semi-coherent mash-ups), is she being obtuse, quite brilliant in a self-undermining way, or something else entirely? I genuinely can’t figure it out.

Guardian story here.

Tyler Cowen links to a post on a blog that I had hitherto been unaware of, True Economics (proprietor: Constantin Gurdgiev, Adjunct Lecturer in Finance with Trinity College, Dublin and Chairman of the Ireland-Russia Business Association), asking the question “How much did the Irish government subsidize housing?” I’m writing a review of Fintan O’Toole’s “Ship of Fools” which speaks specifically to this question, and the answer is ‘not very much at all.’

Gurdgiev’s post is both quite mad and oddly charming, combining denunciations of the ‘Stalinesque schemes’ to provide development funds for Western Ireland and a railway link thereto, with quite sincere-sounding suggestions that he wants to engage with his critics. His intent is to rebut Paul Krugman’s recent column on the Irish economic collapse (Krugman builds explicitly on this recent report by three Irish economists). But his post, entertaining though it is, cannot be taken as a reliable guide to housing policy in Ireland, or indeed to Ireland’s economic crisis.
[click to continue…]

Charlemagne's prediction ¹ that the Greek crisis would have no substantial effects for EU integration is looking decidedly wobbly.

bq. Radical plans for a European version of the International Monetary Fund to bail out crisis-hit countries would need a new treaty and the agreement of all European Union member states, Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, has warned. Throwing her weight behind the proposals from Wolfgang Schäuble, her finance minister, Ms Merkel admitted that the European Union had lacked the tools to deal with the Greek debt crisis: “The sanctions we have were not good enough.” But she added that a full-scale negotiation of the EU’s 27 member states would be needed to set up a European Monetary Fund, which would be able to bail out eurozone members subject to strict budgetary conditions. “Without treaty change we cannot found such a fund,” Ms Merkel told foreign correspondents in Berlin yesterday.

[click to continue…]

The Washington Post runs an editorial on the topic of the financial data privacy controversy that I blogged about a couple of weeks ago. Predictably, it’s an ill-informed harrumph.

bq. THE PROGRAM has been credited with helping to capture the mastermind of the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings that killed more than 200 people, including some 50 Europeans. … Yet almost 400 members of the European Parliament want nothing to do with it and have effectively and indefensibly shut it down. … The tool in question is the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program, which the United States created shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks in hopes of using financial transactions to trace the whereabouts of suspects. … The European Commission hashed out an interim deal to allow the United States to continue operations, but the European Parliament objected, largely on the basis of bogus privacy concerns. … The Obama administration should work with E.U. leaders to push for reconsideration. If need be, additional oversight should be considered. But the administration must not go too far. Gutting a legal and effective program for the sake of imagined privacy gains would be as unwise and potentially dangerous as having no program at all.

I know that when the _WP_ editorial team sees the words ‘tracking terrorism,’ it responds with precisely that degree of judicious consideration which you apply when the doctor whacks your funny bone with a pointy rubber hammer. But the noxious guff about “bogus privacy concerns” and “imagined privacy gains” is just that – noxious guff. The program that the Washington Post is so fond of was implemented in blatant violation of EU law for years before the NYT had the guts to reveal its existence (despite strong pressure from the Bush administration not to do so). Nor are the European Parliament’s privacy concerns ‘bogus.’ The current administration has consistently refused to provide any guarantees whatsoever about how this data might, or might not, be shared with third countries. Given that many of our soi-disant allies in the war on terror have a distinctly robust attitude to the treatment and detention of possible terrorists, Europeans may very reasonably worry that any data they provide will be used to imprison and torture people, some innocent. I’ve talked about these issues with MEPs a lot over the last several years. Their memories of extraordinary rendition and the use of shared information (between the US and Canada in this instance) in the Maher Arar case left a very bad taste in their mouth. Nor is the US willing to talk about real redress or compensation for people unjustly targeted via this data.

In any event, like it or not, the editorial writers of the _Washington Post_ are going to have to learn to live with a transatlantic relationship where an actor which cares about privacy can veto security arrangements. Abe Newman and I recently wrote a piece on Foreign Policy‘s website that talks to this.

bq. To build support for counterterrorism cooperation, the United States must explicitly accept that the European Parliament will play a key role in future negotiations. … The U.S. administration must treat the Parliament as a true negotiating partner, along with the EU member states, on information sharing and domestic security. The U.S. administration can also address the Parliament’s substantive worries by creating its own privacy oversight structures and extending its protection to European citizens…. If the United States wants to rebuild the transatlantic relationship and promote its own security interests, it must stop treating the European Parliament as an irrelevant afterthought.

Via a CT reader, this rather horrifying attempt to hold an academic journal criminally responsible (PDF) for publishing a negative book review and then refusing to suppress it. As Joseph Weiler, the editor of the _European Journal of International Law_ describes the culmination of his saga:

… on 26 September 2008 I received a Subpoena to appear before a French Examining Judge in connection with an investigation of alleged criminal libel based on a complaint made by Dr Calvo-Goller essentially replicating the complaints in her first letter to me. … in libel cases, all investigations of the merits of the case are exclusively reserved for the Criminal Court itself and, therefore, as a direct consequence of the complaint being filed, it was necessary that I be referred to the Court for trial. The date for the trial has now been set for 25 June 2010.

The review (in the _European Journal of International Law_ ) is decidedly pungent, but (without commenting on the legal aspects,which I know nothing about) it seems to my eyes to be well within the usual norms of academic book reviewing (where a general tendency towards back-slapping congeniality is leavened by occasional fits of vigorous criticism). Weiler asks that academics who are upset at Dr. Calvo-Goller’s novel approach to managing the fallout from negative book-reviews send letters of “indignation/support” by email attachment (preferably with letterhead and affiliation) to EJIL.academicfreedom@Gmail.com, especially if they are editors or book review editors for other journals. He also asks that people send scanned or digital copies of other caustic book reviews to this address, so as to demonstrate that Dr. Calvo-Goller’s unhappy experience at the hands of a critic is nothing unusual. As an occasional author of uncomplimentary book reviews myself, I encourage people both (a) to send such reviews in and (b) to link them in comments, especially if they are well written. I do wonder whether Dr. Calvo-Goller appreciated the notoriety that she would accrue through her actions; The _Chronicle_ already has a piece on this, _Inside Higher Ed_ won’t be far behind, and I wouldn’t at all be surprised at all if this story breaks out into the mainstream press.

The Guardian’s Ten Rules for Writing Fiction feature has gotten a lot of attention. Here are Tim Howard's supplementary guidelines.

3. “When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a meat lovers pizza in his hands.” (Chandler)

4. Never use a verb other than “ejaculated” to carry the dialogue, eg. “‘I don’t really know what to say to you, Ivan Ivanych,’ Nastasya Petrovna ejaculated tearfully.” (Chekhov)

5. Use as many exclamation points as possible! No! Really! Do! ! !

Feel encouraged to suggest others in comments. Via MJH.

Noted without comment, from the Chronicle.

Amy Bishop’s court-appointed lawyer says the professor accused of killing three of her colleagues appears to have paranoid schizophrenia and while she is “aware of what she’s done” and is full of remorse, she can’t remember the shootings. Roy W. Miller, the lawyer, told the Associated Press that her failure to get tenure at the University of Alabama at Huntsville was the likely key to the shootings. “Obviously she was very distraught and concerned over that tenure,” Mr. Miller said. “It insulted her and slapped her in the face, and it’s probably tied in with the Harvard mentality. She brooded and brooded and brooded over it, and then, ‘bingo.'”

Paul Krugman, like others before him, fails to do justice to Martin Feldstein’s perspicacity.

Today, Martin Feldstein suggests that Greece make a temporary return to the drachma, so as to regain cost competitiveness. In terms of the macroeconomics, this actually does make sense. But it’s also impossible; Feldstein needs to read Barry Eichengreen.

What he doesn’t realise is that Feldstein is playing a much deeper game here, and that his fundamental objections to the euro have nothing to do with macroeconomic theory

War within Europe itself would be abhorrent but not impossible. The conflicts over economic policies and interference with national sovereignty could reinforce long-standing animosities based on history, nationality, and religion. Germany’s assertion that it needs to be contained in a larger European political entity is itself a warning. Would such a structure contain Germany, or tempt it to exercise hegemonic leadership?

A critical feature of the EU in general and EMU in particular is that there is no legitimate way for a member to withdraw. This is a marriage made in heaven that must last forever. But if countries discover that the shift to a single currency is hurting their economies and that the new political arrangements also are not to their liking, some of them will want to leave. The majority may not look kindly on secession, either out of economic self-interest or a more general concern about the stability of the entire union. The American experience with the secession of the South may contain some lessons about the danger of a treaty or constitution that has no exits.

Obviously, Feldstein can’t write about this in public; Germans have, after all, been known to read the Financial Times. But perhaps if Greece extricates itself very, very carefully from EMU, and promises (however disingenuously) that it _really, really will_ return to the eurozone just as soon as it can, Angela Merkel will stand down the Panzertruppen she has amassed at the Greek border …

Update: see also Colm McCarthy.

Below is an essay that I wrote for my undergraduate class last semester, providing them with my (doubtless idiosyncratic) ideas about how to write good political science essays. It’s also available under a CC license in PDF format, as well as MultiMarkdown (its native format), LaTeX and RTF in case someone wants to play around with it (e.g. by adapting it for another discipline). Feel free to suggest improvements, point out grammatical errors or typos etc in comments, or indeed to comment generally on good and lousy writing in undergraduate papers.

UPDATE: some small improvements made and Jottit version added.

[Cross posted to The Monkey Cage ]
[click to continue…]

Not wanting to keep on bashing the Economist‘s Charlemagne, who is actually one of my favourite bloggers/columnists,¹ but this piece on the sins of the European Parliament is a bit much. To summarize it a little unfairly, Charlemagne feels that the Parliament should really be less bolshie in its tedious efforts to try to increase its powers, and more bolshie about the really important stuff, like saving Brussels hacks five hour train rides cooped up with the _hoi polloi._ ² I suspect that both Charlemagne and Gideon Rachman's hostility (I like Gideon a lot, too) to the Parliament comes from their internalization of the Economist‘s perception of the European Union as a technocratic exercise in market integration that would work very nicely if only the member states and specialists were left to run it in peace.

But the EU isn’t merely a 'fairly impressive experiment in market liberalism.' There are lots of other things happening in the EU – most recently including lots of innovations in Justice and Home Affairs, some of them quite remarkably dubious. And it is here that the Parliament has recently proven its merits, by decisively rejecting the EU’s proposed financial data-sharing deal with the US.

bq. the parliament felt, by a 378-196 margin with 31 abstentions, that the US guarantees to protect the privacy of EU citizens were inadequate. Mr Buzek said: “The majority view in the European parliament is that the correct balance between security . . . and the protection of civil liberties and fundamental rights . . . has not been achieved.”

Now it’s worth pointing out that the Parliament’s rejection was not entirely motivated by concerns over EU citizens’ privacy. By vetoing the deal, it’s signalling that the member states (and indeed the US) have to take its policy prerogatives seriously. The member states had tried to rush the deal through the day before Parliament got jurisdiction over Justice and Home Affairs issue, but managed to screw up the technicalities, with unfortunate consequences for transatlantic security relations, but rather better results for the privacy of EU citizens. There would have been a good chance that the deal would have gone down anyway, but it probably would not have gone down in flames.

Which brings us to the main point. Just as it isn’t because of the benevolence of the butcher or baker that we get our dinner, it’s often because of the _amour-propre_ and power-lust of politicians that we get a system that works. The desire of the Parliament for a voice in international justice and home affairs issues, and of individual MEPs for the limelight, means that Parliament is likely to be a highly awkward customer. With any luck, it will continue to prevent security officials on both sides of the Atlantic from reaching mutually convenient deals that are likely to seem rather less politically attractive when they are exposed to the rigors of a public vote by elected representatives. As there are more and more of these deals being cooked up in the EU and elsewhere (a whole world of information sharing arrangements, some justifiable, some not so justifiable, but few exposed to processes of public justification,³ this would be a good thing. MEPs are surely as venal as the next bunch of politicians, but without the Parliament, there would be next to no public debate of these deals, let alone any possibility of vetoing them. It would be nice to see Economist type liberals (who care, I have no doubt about civil liberties, as well as market freedoms) acknowledging this every once in a while.

¹Although I may still have one more bout of impertinence in me, depending.

² Technically, this should really be “cooped up with hoi polloi” since ‘hoi’ is a definite article, but I’m not _that_ much of an arse.

³ The sad yet instructive tale of how the UK came to adopt the Treaty of Prüm being one counter-example where public exposure of the various shenanigans did diddly-squat to prevent it going through. Then, perhaps if it had gotten public traction in the Parliament as well as the House of Lords, it might have gone differently.