3 Quarks Daily are running another competition, this time for best political post, with Tariq Ali as final adjudicator. Those so inclined should get over there and nominate. NB that this is not an implicit bleg to nominate CT posts – if you really want to, go ahead, but the major social benefit of competitions like this is to uncover posts and posters that would otherwise be unlikely to get much public attention. While CT’s readership is respectable rather than enormous, I suspect that most of the web-savvy people who would be inclined to like CT have probably already been exposed to it. Hence, any benefit that we receive is likely to be proportionately much less than would accrue to other, smaller blogs which don’t get nearly as much attention as they deserve.
Posts by author:
Henry
I am no fan of populism of either the left or right-wing variety. In my view, most populist movements exploit voter ignorance and irrationality to promote policies that tend to do far more harm than good. That said, I have been pleasantly surprised by the right-wing populist reaction to the economic crisis and Obama’s policies. With rare exceptions, right-wing populists such as Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and the Tea Party protesters, have advocated free market approaches to dealing with the crisis, and have attacked Obama and the Democratic Congress for seeking massive increases in government spending and regulation. They have not responded in any of several much worse ways that seemed like plausible alternatives a year ago, and may still be today. … True, much of their rhetoric is oversimplified, doesn’t take account of counterarguments, and is unfair to opponents. But the same can be said for nearly all political rhetoric directed at a popular audience made up of rationally ignorant voters who pay only very limited attention to politics and don’t understand the details of policy debates. On balance, however, the positions taken by the right-wing populists on these issues are basically simplified versions of those taken by the most sophisticated libertarian and limited-government conservative economists and policy scholars. There has been relatively little advocacy of strange, crackpot ideas or weird conspiracy theories.
I don’t agree with Somin on much of anything at all, but usually find him an interesting writer. This post, however, seems at best badly out of touch with reality. Somin is immediately challenged by one of his readers on the death panels slur and responds:
It is a badly flawed and unfair argument. But I think it’s actually just an extreme version of a genuine point against government control of health care: that government would have to ration care and make decisions denying life-saving treatment to many people — as actually happens in socialized medicine systems.
And as happens in free market medicine systems too – the rationing merely takes a different form as has been frequently pointed out on this blog. But more to the point – would Somin be similarly generous in allowing, say, that 9/11 Truthers were arguing “an extreme version of” the “genuine point” that the Bush administration could have and should have done more to prevent it? I doubt it – perhaps I’m wrong.
I’m not averse to a little populism, and I can sort-of understand how American libertarian intellectuals – who have never had a mass movement to call their own – might get a bit wobbly-kneed at the sight of marching teabaggers. But to suggest that Tea Party rhetoric is somewhat overheated and unfair, but based on a fundamentally sound view of government – wtf? And that’s not even to get into Glenn Beck’s defence of the “white culture” that Obama apparently hates so much …
Update: Somin responds in an update to his original post, to suggest that Beck’s claim that Obama hated ‘white culture’ was “stupid” but was an aberration. Personally, I would choose rather stronger terms than “stupid” to describe this statement, such as e.g. ‘viciously attempting to stir up race hatred’ – perhaps we have different levels of sensitivity to this kind of language. More generally, Somin seems to be sticking to his claim that there is “relatively little advocacy of strange, crackpot ideas or weird conspiracy theories” among rightwing populists, and that the examples that people are coming up with (e.g. Beck’s continued ‘investigations’ into purported concentration camps that the Obama administration is building to house dissidents) are old tropes and are not a ‘major part’ of the right wing reaction to the Obama presidency. This claim is, frankly, completely baffling. When Glenn Beck (whom Somin himself specifically namechecks in his original post as an exemplar of what he is talking about) repeatedly suggests that America is moving towards a totalitarian state, subordinated to a world government run by Maoists and Marxists, where dissidents are likely to be rounded up and sent to concentration camps, it is quite safe to say that “strange crackpot ideas” and “weird conspiracy theories” are close to the heart of the right wing populism that Somin likes. To believe otherwise seems to me either to reflect an absence of actual knowledge of what Glenn Beck regularly says, or to be labouring under the influence of a particularly dangerous form of delusion and denial. Somin also responds in comments here to suggest that the cases of 9/11 Truthers and death panels are not comparable – Harry responds better than I can. Finally, I note in passing that I at least think it good practice for a blogger responding to a criticism on another blog to link back to that blog in his or her response so that his or her readers can evaluate for themselves whether or not that criticism sticks.
So as Ingrid notes, EU member states have chosen Von Rompuy as the new President of the European Council. To use the terms that Euro-politicians have themselves been using (which were nicked, presumably by Brian Cowen, from the title of a political science text on Irish Taoisigh), they have decided to go for a chairman – someone with a low international profile who is good at conciliating warring factions – rather than a chief. I have no doubt that Von Rompuy will do very good work, but he surely will not be a colossus bestriding the world stage, banging the heads of Sarkozy, Merkel and Brown together to force them to agree common European policy and so on. This means, I think, that the interesting stuff will be happening at the level of the foreign policy representative, Baroness Ashton. This too is unlikely to be a high profile post in the short term – but unlike Von Rompuy, Ashton will have a very substantial set of bureaucratic resources to draw upon, with links both to the Council and Commission, as well as her own European External Action Service, which will have an independent budget line. This could add up to something pretty interesting in a few years time. (Update: via Matt Y. Annie Lowrey makes more or less the same point).
Turning to _real_ European politics, the crisis continues but looks set to come to no good outcome. FIFA shows no interest in scheduling a rematch, despite Thierry Henry’s statement that a rematch would be the fairest option. Those involved seem determined to do a _reductio ad absurdum_ on Richard Posner’s arguments about responsibility. French footballers (and – judging from Trappatoni’s discreet circumlocutions – perhaps Irish footballers too) clearly feel that it is their obligation to push the rules as far as they can go and further – and if the referee doesn’t spot the odd match-and-qualifying-round-determining handball here or there; well, the culprit has no obligation to seek anything but his own advantage, and anyway, it all balances out in the end, doesn’t it? Incompetent regulators shrug their shoulders and refuse to take any responsibility for the mess. And Irish and French politicians deplore the outcome – but declare themselves powerless to do anything about it. Whether this spells out a possible case for world government to prevent such atrocities occurring in the future, I leave to the theorists. However, I don’t think anyone can deny that the end result is manifestly contrary to even the most minimal principles of justice, fairness and efficiency, completely exploding Posner’s arguments in the eyes of all fairminded individuals.
bq. I’m not sure what Sarah Palin’s favorite work of postmodern theory might be (all of them, probably) but she seems to take her lead from Jean Baudrillard’s _Seduction._ Other political figures use the media as part of what JB calls “production.” That is, they generate signs and images meant to create an effect within politics. For the Baudrillardian “seducer,” by contrast, the power to create fascination is its own reward.
More from Scott, here.
[self-promotion]My first book is out from Cambridge (and has been for a few weeks). Entitled _The Political Economy of Trust: Interests, Institutions and Inter-Firm Cooperation in Italy and Germany_, it sets out a rational choice account of how institutions affect the ways in which people do or do not trust each other, and applies it to explain cooperation among firms in Italy and Germany, as the title suggests, as well as among Sicilian mafiosi. I received some help from CT readers on Sicilian dialect, which is duly acknowledged in the book itself. I’ve set up a basic website for the book at http://www.explainingtrust.com with information, blurbs and the book’s introductory chapter. The book is an academic hardback, and hence not cheap, but those with (a) an interest in the topic, and (b) a research budget/substantial discretionary income, or (c ) a friendly institutional librarian are warmly encouraged to take all appropriate steps (if it sells well, it will then go into paperback). If you order directly through Cambridge before the end of the year, you can use the discount code E09FARRELL which will get you 20% off the book, and indeed any other purchases you make (as far as I can make out, this is the cheapest source). Alternatively, you can buy it at Powells, Amazon, Barnes and Noble or Amazon UK. And if you do read it, comments, rejoinders etc are all warmly welcomed.[/self-promotion]
I wrote a couple of blog posts last year on the Mickey Tax, or, as its promoters would prefer to describe it, the ‘Travel Promotion Act’ bill, which would seek to ‘promote’ travel to the US by imposing a fee on anyone entering the country which would in turn be handed over (after costs were deducted) to an advertising slush-fund. Now the FT is reporting that the European Union is threatening to retaliate against it by imposing visas on US visitors.
bq. US plans to levy fees on European Union tourists and business travellers visiting the US have come under fire in Brussels and could prompt the EU to enact its own visa-like system for US travellers, according to diplomats. … In the past, most Europeans visiting the US for less than 90 days have not had to make pre-departure arrangements. The same applies to US visitors to the EU under visa-reciprocity guidelines. “If this tax is indeed introduced, the Commission will have to re-evaluate once again whether it is tantamount to a visa,” said a spokesman for Jacques Barrot, the commissioner for justice and home affairs, on Tuesday.
If the EU carries through on this threat, American tourists to Europe who have to pay visa fees, wait in queues at overworked consulates etc, should know who is responsible – the Walt Disney Corporation of America.
bq. JAY RASULO STOOD IN FRONT OF TWO MASSIVE SCREENS, each projecting his balding visage, and did what he loves to do: sell a big idea. The dapper, diminutive chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts implored 500 tourist industry executives to ask the federal government for an expensive favor. … Executives from tourism giants such as Marriott, American Express and Hertz buzzed with excitement — and skepticism. Getting taxpayers to underwrite overseas commercials had been the travel industry’s Holy Grail for decades. But the idea had never gotten very far in the councils of government. … A big lobbying push was needed for a big Ask — the term lobbyists use to describe what they are pleading for from Congress.
It’s an interesting story. When it became clear that the travel industry was unlikely to get US taxpayers to pay for a $200 million travel promotion campaign, lobbyists started looking for alternative ways of raising money – and the most obvious was to top up the industry’s own efforts with the Mickey Tax. Hence the bill, and hence the possible retaliatory measures from Europe. All thanks to Jay Rasulo and his balding visage.
Paul Krugman links to an excellent take-down by Elizabeth Kolbert of the notorious climate change chapter in _Superfreakonomics._
what’s most troubling about “SuperFreakonomics” isn’t the authors’ many blunders; it’s the whole spirit of the enterprise. Though climate change is a grave problem, Levitt and Dubner treat it mainly as an opportunity to show how clever they are. Leaving aside the question of whether geoengineering, as it is known in scientific circles, is even possible—have you ever tried sending an eighteen-mile-long hose into the stratosphere?—their analysis is terrifyingly cavalier. A world whose atmosphere is loaded with carbon dioxide, on the one hand, and sulfur dioxide, on the other, would be a fundamentally different place from the earth as we know it. Among the many likely consequences of shooting SO2 above the clouds would be new regional weather patterns (after major volcanic eruptions, Asia and Africa have a nasty tendency to experience drought), ozone depletion, and increased acid rain.
Kolbert’s closing words are, however, a little unfair.
To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness. All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us.
Not unfair to Levitt and Dubner, mind you, but to science fiction. After all, two science fiction authors, Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, had their number down way back in 1953 with _The Space Merchants_ (Pohl, amazingly, is still alive and active).
The Conservationists were fair game, those wild eyed zealots who pretended modern civilization was in some way “plundering” our planet. Preposterous stuff. Science is _always_ a step ahead of the failure of natural resources. After all, when real meat got scarce, we had soyaburgers ready. When oil ran low, technology developed the pedicab.
This <em>Boston Review</em> piece by Tom Barry is very much worth reading, as a background briefing to the prison funding shenanigans recently described by _Talking Points Memo._
These immigration prisons constitute the new face of imprisonment in America: the speculative public-private prison, publicly owned by local governments, privately operated by corporations, publicly financed by tax-exempt bonds, and located in depressed communities. Because they rely on project revenue instead of tax revenue, these prisons do not need voter approval. Instead they are marketed by prison consultants to municipal and county governments as economic-development tools promising job creation and new revenue without new taxes. The possibility of riots usually goes unmentioned. … Initially, most speculative prisons were privately owned, a case of the federal government outsourcing its responsibilities. But prison outsourcing is rarely that simple anymore. The private-prison industry increasingly works with local governments to establish and operate speculative prisons. Prison-town officials have a mantra: “If you build a prison the prisoners will come.”
Most of the time, these public-private prisons are speculative ventures only for bondholders and local governments, because agreements signed with federal agencies do not guarantee prisoners. For the privates, risks are low and the rewards large. Usually paid a set fee by local governments to operate prisons, management companies have no capital investment and lose little, other than hefty monthly fees, if inmate flows from the federal government decline or stop.
… Prisons are owned by local governments, but local oversight of finances is rare, and the condition of prisoners is often ignored. Inmates such as those in Pecos are technically in the custody of the federal government, but they are in fact in the custody of corporations with little or no federal supervision. So labyrinthine are the contracting and financing arrangements that there are no clear pathways to determine responsibility and accountability. Yet every contract provides an obvious and unimpeded flow of money to the private industry and consultants.
The piece isn’t perfect – it can’t quite decide whether it is a story about the problems of the prison system or about the problems of the US approach to immigration. The two are of course closely connected, but each is very complicated in its own right, and trying to explain both at once makes for a top-heavy account. I would also have liked to have seen more aggregate data to support the specific arguments that the author is making (I suspect though that one of the problems with keeping this metastasizing system under control is that there isn’t any source of good general data out there). But it is an eye-opening piece of investigative journalism, looking at a story that doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it deserves. Recommended.
So we were down for a few hours this afternoon thanks to a massive flood of comment spam. Tyler Cowen had a post a few weeks ago on the cognitive benefits of spam, which made me realize that much of my knowledge of the society I live in comes from trawling this spam and deleting it. At least 80% of the (presumed) female celebrities whose nude pictures are yours if only you click on this dodgy-sounding address are known to me from spam and spam alone (Jessica Simpson???). I would have no idea that “Ugg boots” (whatever they are) existed, let alone that anyone cared about them, were it not that a particularly persistent Chinese spammer tries to tell the users of my academic blog wiki about them at every possible opportunity. Sadly, given the existence of Chris Uggen, I can’t just ban page changes using the term in question.
There’s a quasi-serious point buried in there, which is that the Internets, and the possibilities it offers to non-regular TV watchers like me to retrieve the information that we are interested in _and no more_ can lead to deficits in certain kinds of common cultural knowledge. Not the kinds of civic knowledge that Cass Sunstein etc care about – but celebrity gossip, junky pop culture etc.1 Targeted advertising – to the extent that it actually works – is obviously no solution. But spam, designed as it is to cater to the lowest and broadest of tastes actually provides me with significant information that I probably wouldn’t pick up otherwise. Not that it makes spam trawling worthwhile or anything, but at least it gives me _some_ benefit.
1 Not that I am above these things at all; just that I don’t usually have the time, energy and attention to dig it out. It has to be a Jon Stewart-worthy scandal, preferably involving Republican senators, highly specialized providers of intimate services, and greased porcupines or the like, to make it through my filters.
Being the second part of my reply to Eric Posner …
Eric Posner has two responses to my earlier post on international law. I’ll be writing two responses to the responses – the first (on Eric’s second rebutting post) beneath the fold [click to continue…]
Just after Mary Robinson announced that she was not interested in the EU Presidency, former Irish Taoiseach and outgoing EU ambassador to Washington John Bruton has put his hat in the ring. I know him and like him enormously (he’s a very decent right winger), so I won’t speak to the merits of his candidacy on grounds of manifest personal bias. But if I was a betting man (and there were a contract at Intrade), I’d think him well worth a considerable flutter. He fulfils the informal desiderata (Christian Democrat from a small state), but even more importantly seems like a very plausible compromise candidate. The Germans are likely to veto Blair, while the UK is almost certain to want to veto overly enthusiastic federalists like Jean-Claude 'I am not a dwarf' Juncker and Guy Verhofstadt. Bruton is plausibly acceptable to both sides – he is pro-European enough to keep the mainlanders happy, but very well liked in the UK. At the moment, I’m not seeing any other declared candidate who could plausibly get a consensus behind him or her. I’ll try to write more on the candidates as the politicking continues …
Given recent ambiguous FTC mutterings, it is probably no bad thing that I make it clear that I receive lots of free copies of forthcoming books (partly because of CT; partly because I help out the Book Salon people at FireDogLake), and that any reviews I do are likely as not of books that I have gotten for nothing. When I first decided to write this post a few days ago, I was going to talk about all the things that I’d like to get for free but don’t, starting with good f/sf books (nearly everything I get is non-fiction) and in particular _Unseen Academicals_, then moving rapidly through ever more preposterous requests for technology (the new Barnes and Noble e-reader looks quite interesting; I would _happily_ review one of the new Macs with the 27 inch screens), and finishing with the frankly unethical/completely implausible – books that didn’t exist but that I promised to review favorably if only the authors in question would get their arses in gear and produce them. I figured that I’d be prepared to trash my integrity for a complete and definitive edition of _Bloom County_, or indeed for an ARC of _A Dance With Dragons_ (my come-on – George R.R. Martin Is Not My Bitch – but _I’ll be his_ if only he gets it finished). But then I saw (via Laura) that Volume I of the complete _Bloom County_ has just come out _without any inducements whatsoever_ on my part. Can this be taken as a sign from the Fates that the GRRM logjam too is about to break …
There’s been a lot of discussion of Ayn Rand the last few days, because of the new (and very-interesting sounding) biography. Personally, I could never stand her work, not because of the libertarian philosophy (I like me mid-period Heinlein just fine), but the excruciatingly bad writing. If Chris Hayes is right, she finally has a worthy successor. Ladies, gentlemen, I give you Ralph Nader and Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us.
As a novel it is a dismal affair: gracelessly written, ploddingly plotted, and long. Oh God so long. And as a political tract it advances a conception of politics both grossly condescending and depressingly elitist. Democracy, Nader seems to say, could be ours: if only the oligarchs would get behind it. The basic plot goes like this. Moved by pity to travel to New Orleans in the wake of Katrina to oversee relief efforts, Warren Buffett encounters one desperately poor and grateful recipient of his charity who announces, “Only the super-rich can save us.” This gets Buffett thinking, and he proceeds to convene a top secret meeting in a Maui resort. There he gathers an eclectic group of the super-rich: Paul Newman, George Soros, Bill Gates Sr., Ted Turner, Barry Diller, Peter Lewis (owner of Progressive Insurance), and, somewhat randomly, Yoko Ono, among others, to create a “people’s revolt of the rich.”
This is apparently not a satire. But it does raise the question of whether there are any genuinely good, genuinely political novels out there. Since we’re coming up on the weekend, I’ll throw this out as an open thread (I have a few nominations myself, but don’t want to bias the sample). Have at it.
I wrote a review a couple of weeks ago of Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger’s “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age” (Powells, Amazon)
Information technology has grown so entwined with our lives that it is easy to overlook the marvels flowering forth from it. … But if Viktor Mayer-Schonberger is right, these technologies may grow to entangle and choke us. They create a kind of external memory, recording our actions and interactions in digital video footage and thousands upon thousands of digital photographs. … Mayer-Schonberger argues that these developments challenge how we organise society and how we understand ourselves. … At its heart, his case against digital memory is humanist. He worries that it will not only change the way we organise society, but it will damage our identities. Identity and memory interact in complicated ways. Our ability to forget may be as important to our social relationships as our ability to remember. To forgive may be to forget; when we forgive someone for serious transgressions we in effect forget how angry we once were at them. … Delete argues that digital memory has the capacity both to trap us in the past and to damage our trust in our own memories.
I probably should have linked to it before, but didn’t, because I wanted to combine the link with a short review of Tyler Cowen’s recent book “Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World” (Powells, Amazon) As I mention in the review, Tyler’s book presents a very interesting contrast to Viktor’s. What Tyler sees as evidence of individual empowerment, Viktor sees as as a serious threat to personal identity. Viktor fears that technologies will undermine our sense of self, and our ability to remake ourselves in order to respond to a changing social environment. Tyler sees new technologies as valuable precisely _because_ they allow us to remake ourselves and our identities, creating our own ‘economies’ (here, I think he is harking back to the Greek origins of the term) or internally ordered environments by picking and choosing “small cultural bits” and assembling them according to our own personal hierarchies.
[click to continue…]