Henry

“Miriam Burstein”:http://littleprofessor.typepad.com/the_little_professor/2008/10/halloween-blogging-2008-residents-of-madame-tussauds-chamber-of-horrors-in-the-late-nineteenth-century.html provides an annotated and hyperlinked list of the murderers modelled in the Victorian version of Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, taken from the 1886 Tussaud’s guidebook.

Reading Maria’s post below reminded me that I’ve meant to write a brief post about two ways in which there is much more information available about the current US elections than previously. The first is the availability of high quality polling information and analysis thereof. Here, somewhat rightwing sites (“Real Clear Politics”:http://www.realclearpolitics.com/ ), who-the-hell-knows sites (“Pollster”:http://www.pollster.com/ ) and definitely leftwing sites (“538”:http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/ ) provide much _much_ better information (or so it seems to me) than was available to the average politically obsessed punter four years ago, especially through the aggregation of state-level and national polls. And the fact that they lean in different directions and have different models/means of aggregating poll numbers means that you can more easily discount for ideological wishful thinking of the one or the other side than you could previously. This does, at least to some extent, help guard against the kinds of selectivity based on cherry-picked polls that lead many people (including me) to think that John Kerry was going to win in 2004. Second – there is much better information available to an _international audience._ In particular, there is a lot more good televisual content available via YouTube and the various TV stations’ own websites than there was four years ago. I suspect (but can’t prove of course) that this makes people in different countries feel more directly connected to the current US election than they have to previous ones – they’re able to observe it in a more visceral way, see speeches that would never get reported on their national TV stations etc. I don’t know whether either of these is having a broader political effect – but I do know that they are making US politics more fun for a wider swathe of people across the globe than they were previously.

“Arthur Goldhammer”:http://artgoldhammer.blogspot.com/2008/10/france-inc.html (whose blog on French politics is one of the treasures of the blogosphere).

Sarkozy has announced the creation of a French investment fund with a capital of $200 billion. He is also temporarily suspending the taxe professionnelle. Call it an investment fund or sovereign wealth fund. Call Sarkozy a socialist in wolf’s clothing (as one MEP did the other day). Mock his inconsistency or praise his political versatility. In fact he’s merely doing what leaders of all the advanced industrial countries will be doing shortly, if they are not doing it already: trying to minimize the damage of the recession by turning on massive government investment. This can do a lot of good, especially if it is seen not solely as countercyclical spending but as a chance to do something about decaying infrastructure and make foundational changes with a chance for long-term impact. In France it’s hardly unprecedented for major capital spending to be directed by the state, whether under the Commissariat au Plan, through state-controlled-or-influenced enterprises, or directly by the Ministry of Finance. Sarkozy always danced nimbly between the neoliberal and state-capitalist camps. If the last two decades were the neoliberal decades, the coming two are likely to consecrate the hegemony of state capitalism. Sarkozy has been quicker than most to draw that conclusion and try to get ahead of the tsunami. Let’s see what happens next.

Charles Doriean has written a new and topical paper with Scott Page seeking to measure the maverickyness of John McCain as a senator. They’ve asked me to publish it on CT – the PDF version is “here”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/mccain_maverick.pdf and a Flash embedded version is beneath the fold. In the authors’ description:

A maverick, … can be defined as someone who surprises us by voting against their party as often as they do, given their ideology. To determine whether a senator is a maverick (and how much of a maverick they are,) all we need to do is figure out how often we expect that senator to support their party, and then see how often they actually do support their party. The difference between the expectation and the reality can be called a “maverick measure.”

Under this definition, John McCain is very definitely a maverick. Indeed, he’s the seventh most mavericky Senator since 1877. However, he isn’t the most mavericky Senator in recent history; that honour goes to Lincoln Chafee, who comes in at number three. Also, McCain-ites who want to embrace this result should note that it is based on the same kind of measures of ideology (DW-Nominate scores) that have been “used to show”:http://voteview.ucsd.edu/Clinton_and_Obama.htm that Barack Obama, _contra_ the _National Journal_ and Republican mythology, is not (for better or worse) the most liberal Senator by a significant stretch.

Cross-posted at “The Monkey Cage”:http://www.themonkeycage.org
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From a short “NYT piece”:http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/mccains-camp-shaves-its-ad-targets/ on the shrinking McCain advertising budget in swing states.

But the McCain campaign also needs the extra money to keep up with its current plans, due to a quiet decision it has made that most voters will hardly notice. Until now, the campaign has been teaming up with the Republican National Committee to jointly produce a large percentage of its advertisements. By sharing the costs down the middle, Team McCain has been able to basically double the amount of advertisements it can run for its money. This is all legal: campaigns are allowed to split the costs of their ads with their affiliated parties. But there’s a catch: The spots must serve not only their campaigns but also the collective agendas of their congressional colleagues.

Such advertisements – known in the political business as “hybrids” – tend to garble a presidential candidate’s message. So, for instance, a spot attacking Mr. Obama also has included references to “liberals in Congress’’ and figures like Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate majority leader, who is not as well known to everyday voters.

The campaign has started to phase out those ads in these final days, deciding to stick to advertisements it can devote fully to Mr. McCain’s campaign message. That will greatly disadvantage Mr. McCain as he struggles to keep up with the far better funded Mr. Obama. But Mr. McCain’s aides have clearly decided a trade of volume for greater clarity is worth it.

Now this is one possible interpretation of what is going on. But while mixed messages are a significant problem, I (as an admitted naif on these issues) would have thought that getting completely swamped by your opponent’s advertising is a rather bigger one. Isn’t a more plausible interpretation of this decision that the RNC are finally “pulling the plug”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/10/10/a-bit-of-horserace-commentary/ on their subsidization of the McCain campaign, and the McCain folks are trying to put the best face that they can on it?

Some unkind lefties (including “one of my co-bloggers”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2008/10/nation-of-whine.html) were a little dismissive towards “this post”:http://drhelen.blogspot.com/2008/10/how-much-of-financial-crisis-is.html by ‘Dr. Helen,’ blogger and Instaspouse of Professor Glenn Reynolds.

Why the crescendo of economic collapse right before the election? Why didn’t the media and congress act just as concerned some time ago or wait until sometime after the election to go into crisis mode? The timing of the current financial crisis seems too planned and calculating to be just a coincidence. Polls show that people’s number one concern right now is the economy and that for the most part, voters believe Democrats are somewhat more likely to help with the economy. Could it be that the liberal media and those in Congress, knowing that, is blaring the bad economic news from the rooftops in order to manipulate voters into voting for a Democrat? If so, it won’t be the first time.

But now “Barbara Ehrenreich”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/588.html (via “Cosma”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/588.html ) has let the cat out of the bag and it’s _even worse_ than Dr. Helen suspected.
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“Michael Froomkin”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2008/10/surveying_the_wreckage.html has a tale of terror.

Recently, the system has been a bi[t] weird, with very slow file access times (windows explorer would take forever to open, ditto with file dialogs in programs), and I also was worried that my copy of Firefox was compromised … First, I decided to take the plunge and migrate to a larger disk, and ordered up a “green” WD7500AACS. (Three quarters of a terrabyte! Whoohoo!) About three or four weeks ago, I copied my files on to it using using XXClone, a nice piece of freeware that basically makes an entire copy of Drive A (including operating system) onto drive B. … But things were still slow sometimes. I decided it was time to kill the trojan, or whatever, that seemed to be infesting my system. I also decided that I should go back to hardware RAID, since I don’t back up my files enough. … When I got back, the files were there, and I ran the first one. It duly called for a reboot and I did it — only to get error messages and a lockup. …at which point the disk wouldn’t boot any more. But no problem, I had my backup, the 160GB version. … But now that the two disks are in the system, with the 750Gb disk on the second pair of SATA ports, which are RAID capable (but were properly set for ordinary non-RAID use in the bios), the Windows system on the first 160GB disk decided they needed to be reactivated. … But the 750GB version worked. So that’s good. But now I’m nervous, things seemed jinxed. So I order up a second WD7500AACS, and plan to RAID mirror them. … Now, time extra backups. I’m a little nervous about hardware raid, in part because I’m a little dyslexic. … So I decided to make a software clone onto the new disk with XXClone, so that whichever way I copied the data would be OK. … I installed the disk, started up the format, and went of to do some stuff. When I got back, I found a blue screen of death, a 0024 failure (that I gather means a loose wire, something version one the sata hardware standard made all too easy). When I tried to reboot, I got a smart drive error – the disk is bad. I flip some disks around. One of the 160GB disks won’t boot either — “Disk error”. When the dust settles I have some very high-tech paperweights. … I’ve lost 3 weeks or more of personal data, only most of which can be reconstructed. . My work files, on the other hand, either on a unix server or on a USB stick, which I religiously back up at home and work, so that’s OK. My personal financial info, which isn’t backed up for the last 3+ weeks, I can recreate

Some life lessons here – the most obvious being the frequently repeated one of backup, backup, backup and _keep non-local copies of your data_ in case of massive system breakdown/fire/nuclear war etc. If it can happen to Michael Froomkin, who is much more technically adept and conscientious about backing up than you are (for most local values of ‘you’) it can happen to anyone. Happily, Michael appears to have lost nothing more than some easily recreatable data (and a lot of time, assuming he can get refunds for non-functioning hardware). If he were someone who didn’t religiously back up his material, he’d be in far worse shape. Non-local file backup is pretty easy to do these days, and relatively cheap. I use “Sugarsync”:http://www.sugarsync.com/ which synchronizes my three Windows machines very nicely ¹ and as a side-benefit provides me with backups against local hardware errors. Kieran discusses a couple of alternatives “here”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/workflow-apps.pdf (PDF), but whatever system you use, I really recommend that you institute _some system for doing this_ and that you _do it today_ rather than putting it on the long finger (which will most likely mean, given most people’s heuristics for this kind of stuff, that you won’t do it until you REALLY NEED TO, at which point it will sadly be too late).

¹ I understand that it doesn’t work as well for Macs, which to my deep and everlasting regret isn’t a problem for me. The week before last, my university unexpectedly delivered me a lovely new MacBook Pro, which I had some eight hours to fall in love with before I discovered that it had been sent to me thanks to an administrative error, and that it in fact belonged to one of my colleagues. I’m still bitter, as you can tell (but in the unlikely event that an Apple executive is reading this post, and wants to reach out to the crucial academic-blogger constituency by handing out one of their new machines, they can find an enthusiastic evangelist for their product at this address …) More generally (and to get back from the griping), be aware that Sugarsync is not designed as a back-up product as such, and will do _nothing_ to save you from user generated errors (indeed it may make them more devastating). If you delete the one and only copy of your dissertation datafile from a synchronized folder, you will find of course that it is deleted from the copies of this folder on your other machines too. So caveat emptor.

I’ve done the tallying and the results are below the fold, in reverse order.
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Many thanks to the CT readers who’ve come up with examples of wingnuts’ heads exploding as a result of Paul Krugman’s Nobel prize. Now it’s decision time. I’ve narrowed the field down to the five most impressive spontaneous human combustions that commenters here, at Kathy G.’s and at Brad DeLong’s have reported. And you get to choose the winner by voting in the comments section below. The wingnut with the most votes after a voting period to be determined by meself will be allowed to display both this “still”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/shocho/221986094/ from David Cronenberg’s _Scanners_, and an electronic certificate attesting that he/she has won the ‘Oh Noes! My Head Asploded” award for 2008, on his/her website. He/she will also of course have all associated bragging rights. The contestants, in no particular order, below the fold …
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As Kieran notes in comments below, the comments thread to Tyler Cowen’s (perfectly reasonable) “Krugman post”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/10/paul-krugman-wi.html is pretty hilarious. But given Krugman’s place of pride in the wingnut demonology, I’m sure that this is only a mere scraping of what’s out there on the Internets today. It furthermore occurs to me that someone (i.e. Me) should do a comments thread to collate and conserve the _very bestest_ blogposts and comments on the Vast Nobel Prize Conspiracy. My “opening bid”:http://volokh.com/posts/1223906449.shtml#459727, from ‘derut’ at The Volokh Conspiracy.

Excellent. He was a pseudo Nobel prize. That he deserves. As his politics is pseudoscientific. Great. Now I can applaude. I am sure many of you have watched him on cable networks. Has anyone else noticed he seems a little off. He speaks like a mouse and his beady eyes have a strange stare. He looks like if someone droped a glass he would scream.

It’s the spellings of ‘applaude’ and ‘droped’ that give it that special something. Anyone able to top that?

Update: “Kathy G.”:http://thegspot.typepad.com/blog/2008/10/warmest-congrat.html had this idea before I did.

As a quick addendum to my most recent post, Patrick Ruffini at _The Next Right_ effectively calls for the RNC “to give McCain the shiv”:http://www.thenextright.com/patrick-ruffini/save-the-filibuster. It’s worth quoting _in extenso_ for added schadenfreude. [click to continue…]

So I hear (via a prominent member of the sane Republican faction) that the word on the right side of the street is that the Republican National Committee is about to pull the plug on its joint ads with the McCain campaign, and devote its resources instead to trying to save a couple of the senators who are at serious risk of losing their seats. Now this is gossip, albeit of the high class variety; take it with the requisite pinch of salt. But it points to some real vulnerabilities in the McCain campaign’s finances. McCain’s decision to opt for public funding has meant that he’s had enormous difficulty competing with the Obama money raising machine. He’s been able to partly compensate by co-financing ads with the RNC (this “skirts the limits of the legislation that he himself co-wrote”:http://www.democracy21.org/index.asp?Type=B_PR&SEC=%7BAC81D4FF-0476-4E28-B9B1-7619D271A334%7D&DE=%7B349C2D62-1860-4F9A-8FDB-B6F8F1BB864B%7D but is just about legal). This has kept him competitive in TV advertising, albeit still significantly outgunned. But if the Republicans are as worried as they should be about the impending elections, there will be a _lot_ of calls on that money, and the RNC is going to have to make some tough choices. Should it keep spending money on the presidential campaign in the hope that McCain will win despite the polls, or should it instead try to minimize the damage of a McCain defeat by doing its best to stop the Democrats from making big gains in the Senate? Decisions, decisions …

I suggested a couple of days ago that the partial nationalizations of national banking systems that we’re seeing ¹ was likely to be a temporary phenomenon, albeit one with long lasting implications for market actors’ expectations. I’m beginning to have second thoughts; I now suspect for two reasons that bank nationalization may be a lot harder to reverse than I thought.

First is the move towards more or less complete deposit guarantees that many Western states are offering (most explicitly Ireland, less explicitly the UK, Germany and others). This is a move that is going to be hard to undo any time soon without risking a further grave crisis of confidence. But it is also one that exposes taxpayers to risks that are far greater and difficult to quantify than the previous system (where many or most advanced industrialized states guaranteed deposits up to a set figure). The moral hazard problems are obvious, and states will want to have as many tools of control to make sure that they don’t get taken for a ride. Large stakes in the relevant firms are one such means of control.

Second – historical institutionalists in political science (Paul Pierson, Jacob Hacker, Kathleen Thelen etc) talk a lot about the importance of sequencing and timing in explaining institutional change. Their arguments might lead one to break up the responses to the crisis into two phases, one of which is likely to build on the other. The first phase is the current one – trying desperately to stop the entire system from breaking down through a variety of measures including injections of liquidity, interest rate cuts, and, most prominently, taking stakes in banks and other financial institutions. The second phase hasn’t really started yet, but will involve trying to build longer term institutions at the domestic level, and (to the extent that agreement is possible), the international level too to prevent this kind of thing from happening again.

The key point here is that the second phase isn’t going to begin _ex nihilo_; instead, it’s going to begin in a world that has been reshaped by the emergency measures that are being taken at the moment. And these measures will offer a set of possible tools and means of influence for government that will prominently include use of governments’ ownership stakes in large chunks of the financial system. It will be very tempting indeed for governments that want to secure financial stability to take up these tools and make them part of their permanent apparatus. Nor do the free marketeers seem in a very good position to win the ideological fight against this kind of initiative given their current disarray. Although the _Economist_ and other stalwarts are bravely battling on, “as Dani Rodrik notes”:http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2008/10/will-globalization-be-reversed.html, Samuel Brittan of all people has “declared himself today”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a0b384ea-9612-11dd-9dce-000077b07658.html to be a closet Keynesian and is pushing the case for an expansionary fiscal policy.

¹ Or, in Iceland’s case, full nationalization; see also “Paul de Grauwe”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3c29a40a-9617-11dd-9dce-000077b07658.html) in the FT this morning for a more general full nationalization proposal.

Two current debates about generations and what they mean. First, Siva Vaidhyanathan’s “recent article”:http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i04/04b00701.htm in the _Chronicle of Higher Education_, expressing skepticism about the concept of “Digital Natives”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/09/22/at-berkman/.

Gomez writes. “For this generation — which Googles rather than going to the library — print seems expensive, a bore, and a waste of time.” When I read that, I shuddered. I shook my head. I rolled my eyes. And I sighed. I have been hearing some version of the “kids today” or “this generation believes” argument for more than a dozen years of studying and teaching about digital culture and technology. … Every class has a handful of people with amazing skills and a large number who can’t deal with computers at all. A few lack mobile phones. … almost none know how to program or even code text with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Only a handful come to college with a sense of how the Internet fundamentally differs from the other major media platforms in daily life. College students in America are not as “digital” as we might wish to pretend. And even at elite universities, many are not rich enough. All this mystical talk about a generational shift and all the claims that kids won’t read books are just not true.

Second, Matt Yglesias on whether it’s important that the “kids love Obama”:http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2008/10/youth_decay_2.php.

I used to sometimes think that the relatively left-wing views of the under-30 generation were basically just a reflection of the fact that the under-30 cohort contains many fewer non-hispanic whites than does the over-30 cohort. This new report from Amanda Logan and David Madlan makes it clear that’s not right — young whites have substantially more progressive views on a whole range of key issues than do older whites … if you hunt down a copy of the current issue of The Atlantic you should find … a piece by yours truly observing that the present day conservative coalition seems to mostly be stuck with the shrinking slices of the demographic pie. This data shows us one of the major driving factors behind that.

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