Henry

I didn’t know him, although I did know and love his novels – Patrick Nielsen Hayden knew man and work both, and has more of substance to say than I ever could. John Clute reviewed his most recent book a couple of weeks ago, and quoted a poem that he published in the _Paris Review,_ “The Moon on the Crest of the New-Fallen Snow.” I liked it a lot.

Pain

Has its place—and pity, too—but it is not here.
Here all is calm and cold and luminous.
The snow has smoothed over the tracks of the deer.

Matt Yglesias on patriotism:

American liberals and American conservatives are both Americans so our American patriotism is very similar. We just have different ideas about politics. Specifically, I would say that liberals do a better job of recognizing that much as we may love America there’s something arbitrary about it — we’re just so happen to be Americans whereas other people are Canadians or Mexicans or French or Russian or what have you. The conservative view is more like those Bill Simmons columns where not only is he extolling the virtues of this or that Boston sports team or moment, but he seems to genuinely not understand why other people don’t see it that way. But of course Simmons is from Boston and others of us aren’t.

By coincidence, this is something I’ve been thinking about the last few days (as I’m not a political theorist, I offer no guarantees whatsoever that my thoughts on the topic are original, or that they haven’t already been comprehensively refuted by someone somewhere). My best guess approximation is that even if we accept that patriotism/loyalty-to-our-sports-team or whatever is in some absolute sense _contingent_ (if we grew up elsewhere, we would be patriotic about a different country, or root for a different sports team) it doesn’t imply that there is something wrong or silly about being patriotic. Here, a good analogy might be with our love for our children. That I have one child, and not another is contingent, given the realities of biology, on a very improbable event – that two particular cells fused together (the odds against a particular combination of cells being chosen are surely in the order of billions to one). Yet once I have a child, my love for that child isn’t in the least invalidated by the contingency of the event, even if I know in some abstract sense that I would equally love another child that might have been conceived if a different pair of cells had combined. Moreover, we would think that there was something very strange about somebody who wanted to revisit that moment of combination and choose a different outcome.

I’m not sure how far the analogy can be pushed, and I am sure that there are other good arguments against patriotism (George Kateb’s book on the topic has been sitting unread on my shelf the last couple of years, causing me occasional moments of guilt). But it gets at a slightly different critique of certain kinds of vainglorious patriotism than the one that Matt presents. Nearly all parents are quietly sure that while all children are wonderful, _their_ children are the most wonderful of all. But equally so, most people find parents who insist on blowing their childrens’ trumpets, insisting on their unique skills, intelligence etc to be both silly and obnoxious. Perhaps we should have the same attitude towards the more overblown forms of braggart patriotism.

Update: Siva has some interesting thoughts on patriotism as a second generation immigrant.

This column from Wolfgang Munchau is a keeper. Challenged by Gideon Rachman last week to reveal the theory under which he believed that the Irish could be kicked out of the EU for having had the impertinence to vote ‘No’ a couple of weeks ago, Munchau obliges:

My own hunch is that they will try to find a way to enforce the Lisbon treaty without the non-ratifiers. As a first step, they will try to offer the No-sayers a quit-and-rejoin deal. It would be the least divisive option of all, but unfortunately, it may also be one of the least realistic. … … In Ireland’s case it may require a referendum to get out and another one to get back in. … If this is not possible, there are several other options involving varying degrees of involuntary separation. For example, everybody would formally remain inside the EU on the basis of the Nice treaty, but the ratifiers would organise their areas of co-operation outside the EU and its institutions – on foreign policy, immigration, economic governance, maybe even on energy and the environment. … There is, of course, the ultimate threat; not a trial separation, but permanent divorce. The Lisbon ratifiers formally leave the EU, and re-group under a new rival organisation. In reality, this is not so much an option, but the thing you do when you have run out of options, the strategic choice of last resort. Like a nuclear bomb, it is a useful device to be used in an emergency, not something you plan for.

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Eric Lawrence, John Sides and I have just finished writing a paper which looks at the first decent dataset that allows us to figure out what blog readers look like. This isn’t a final version (there are comments from Eszter and a couple of other readers that we want to incorporate – further comments and criticisms welcome), but it is just about fit for wider human consumption. The paper is available at SSRN (if you’re signed up with them, we’d love you to download it from there cos it’ll bump up our hit count), and at http://www.themonkeycage.org/blogpaper.pdf if that’s more convenient. So what do we find?
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We’d like to welcome Clay Shirky, who will be guestblogging with us for a week. Clay is a consultant, journalist, sometime academic, and general _provocateur._ His recent book, Here Comes Everybody (Powells, Amazon) is a very good, well-written and interesting take on how the Internet has lowered the transaction costs of group formation, and the consequences this has for politics, commercial relatoins etc. It’s one of the best books on the Internet that I’ve read in the last few years. We’re happy to have him on board.

More on the Mickey Tax, courtesy of a set of talking points forwarded by my person in the Travel Industry Association, which are (to put it mildly) quite unconvincing on the major points of contention. I’ve decided to adopt this piece of legislation in the same way that some people and organizations adopt highways – expect more on this over the coming months. Also, NB that this is one of those activities where the Internet really _has_ changed everything – it would have been infeasible for me to investigate this stuff without Congresspedia, online access to Her Majesty’s Government’s taxation guidance documents for airlines etc. Talking points and response below the fold.
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When I saw that the Mickey Tax¹ issue had been taken up by Atrios and Kos, I guessed that it wouldn’t be long before I started seeing some pushback. A former student of mine did some research a couple of years ago that suggests that Kos is the most widely read blog on the Hill, with a fair readership among Republicans (who want to see what’s coming down the pike) as well as Democrats, and I’d imagine that Markos’ fulminations got some attention in the right places. Sure enough, I got an email last night from a flack at the Travel Industry Association (the lobby group that’s been most heavily involved in pushing the Mickey Tax), offering to set me right on my various misconceptions about this Act. I replied that I would be happy to receive any proposed corrections/new information, but reserved the right to publish them on this blog. I haven’t gotten any response and don’t expect one, but will update this post if I’m wrong.

In the meantime, I’d like to take advantage of CT’s cross-national readership, and encourage those of you who live in visa-waiver countries to hassle your politicians, and write to your newspapers about the Mickey Tax. This, unlike the Iraqi translators appeal, is not a life or death issue, but it _will_ lead to substantial amounts of money ($200 million) being transferred from tourists’ pockets to an outrageous boondoggle fund unless it gets stopped.

I _particularly_ encourage you to use the terms ‘Mickey Tax’ or (Markos’s coinage) ‘Disney Tax’ in your communications. I imagine that the fervor of the Disney corporation for this particular rip-off would be dampened if incoming tourists to the US came to understand the political origins of the fee, and were able to draw the relevant conclusions about where to spend, or not to spend, their hardwon money once they had gotten in. The terms ‘Mickey Tax’ and ‘Disney Tax’ seem to me to draw these causal connections in a straightforward and useful way. Of course, Irish people in particular may think that the Mickey Tax is even more outrageous than it is, but that doesn’t necessarily seem to me to be a bad thing.

¹ Term a trademark of This Blog, although I’m grateful to Atrios for seeing that it made for a better title than throwaway aside.

I was at a sort-of DC power lunch yesterday with staffers from the Hill (the first such lunch I’ve ever gone to, and likely to be the last for a while), and the conversation turned to a piece of legislation that’s being pushed hard by lobbyists for big players in the tourism industry, the so-called Travel Promotion Act. The Act is supposed to create a $200 million fund to promote tourism, by levying a charge on visitors to the US. The charge is non-trivial – the estimates I heard suggested that in order to raise $10 a head to give to the travel industry’s promotional fund, the government will likely have to impose a total fee of $25 to cover administrative overheads.

This seems to me to be one of the more straightforwardly stupid legislative proposals of the recent past. As someone who used to visit the US a lot before I became a permanent resident, I can testify that I would have found it extremely galling to have to fork over $25 to subsidize glossy brochures for the US tourist industry, and would have likely restricted my travel to the US as a result. For that matter, I’ve heard strong resentment expressed by US citizens who have to pay similar fees when they visit certain countries in Latin America. Even so, it sounds as though the bill has a lot of support – 44 senators are co-sponsoring it already.

This is one of those instances where public choice theory works – a number of big players in the tourist industry (whom, one suspects, will reap the lion’s share of the benefits) are trying to impose costs that will very plausibly hurt travel to the US as a whole, even as it directs more of the tourists who do come in their direction. The major villain in the story is the Disney Corporation – the _Washington Post_ ran a good story a few months ago, Mickey Goes to Washington, on Disney lobbyists’ involvement in the campaign behind the proposed Act. The Act’s financial consequences are partly obscured because non-US citizens are expected to take a lot of the hit. But I hardly think that it will promote travel.

More generally, there should be some phrase or term for bills or proposals that are likely to have the opposite effect to that which their title suggests – this is hardly an unique phenomenon. Suggestions welcome in comments.

Update: Thanks to Maurice Meilleur in comments, we have a winner. NEGISLATION (n): A legal act which, by design or accident, achieves the opposite effect to that which it purportedly intends. Examples include the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, and the Travel Promotion Act (the Mickey Tax Act) of 2008. See also _negulation_.

Update 2: Title changed to make it punchier

So last week, the rightwing phrase-du-jour was “I am aware of all Internet traditions.” This week, it’s “John McCain is aware of the Internet” (via). I sense a certain moderating of ambition …

via Ethan Zuckerman, a really nice visualization (with clickable information) of the political blogosphere here.

I am excited to announce that I am finally ready to write my next book. It’s going to be great. And here’s the best thing of all: you can help me write it! It’s about the Internet and how it’s changing the world. I’ve got the outline done and I was just thinking I need a research assistant to fill in the details. Then I thought – well, why just one? There are a million research assistants out there – let’s crowdsource!

Any book about the Internet needs a big idea. Not just a kind-of-big idea either, but a Great-Big-Fuck-Off-Massive Idea. The kind of idea that is so big you can’t get your head round it, and yet which you can put in a short phrase so you can trademark it. My Idea is that there are _now more ideas in the world than ever before._ What’s more, these ideas are not just stuck inside people’s heads doing nothing, but thanks to the Internet everyone is putting their ideas out there for the world to see. And then these ideas spark other ideas. So with more ideas than ever before, and better ways of getting ideas acted on, the future just has to be insanely great.

More … much more … to be found here. The title of Chapter 6 (With Enough Eyeballs, All Ideas Are Shallow) is especially cruel. For years, I’ve been planning a vaguely similar book, which would aim at selling millions of copies to both the pop-business-sociology and ev-psych markets. It would be entitled (tada!) _The Blink Slate._ My fundamental problem has been figuring out a way to use deprecated HTML tags on hardback book jackets (sorry oldstyle Internet Explorer users – you’re not going to get the joke). Perhaps I too can crowdsource this problem to the masses of CT readers …

This seems to me to be the most interesting analysis I’ve read so far.

A glance at the electoral map suffices to confirm what earlier opinion polls had indicated: the Irish vote divided along class lines in a stark and disturbing fashion. In the most affluent constituencies of Dublin, such as Dun Laoghaire, where even a modest home can cost upwards of €1 million (although that is changing), 60% or more voted for the treaty. In working class areas of the city, it was the no vote which scored in excess of 60%. Brouard and Tiberj (2006) show that precisely the same division between rich and poor, or the skilled and unskilled, can be discerned in the French 2005 vote. …

The argument would be that globalisation generally, and European integration more narrowly, has overwhelmingly favoured skilled workers, at least in affluent countries such as France, Ireland and the Netherlands. Unskilled workers, by contrast, feel under threat from Romanian (or Asian) competition, or immigration from Eastern Europe and further afield. And while those of us who are more fortunate might regret it, it is hardly surprising that — in accordance with Heckscher-Ohlin logic — they vote accordingly. … Unbelievably, given the importance of the vote, there were no exit polls taken which might give us an indication of why those who voted no did so. But I have to say that my bet is that the gap between middle-class and working-class voting patterns has a lot more to do with different interests, real or perceived, than with supposed differences in political sophistication. …

If this interpretation is correct, then the Irish referendum result, in one of the most pro-European members of the Union, should serve as a wake-up call to politicians that if they want to maintain the benefits of open international markets, as I do, they will simply have to take more notice of the concerns of those who are being left behind.

Update: The Eurobarometer report on a flash survey they did immediately post-referendum is available at Irishelection.com. Thanks to Simon in comments for the pointer.

For thems thats interested, I have a new dialogue with Dan Drezner up at Bloggingheads. Perhaps the most valuable bit for me was that as a result of our discussion of the famous Jeremy Paxman demolition job on Michael Howard, one of the Bloggingheads crowd dug up the video on YouTube, and linked to it. Here it is.

I’m also blogging in the discussion of Clay Shirky’s new book _Here Comes Everybody_ (Powells, Amazon ) at TPM Cafe. A post on how the proliferation of groups doesn’t end status competitions here, and one about power laws and inequality here.

There’s been a lot of outrage expressed by other Europeans (and by some members of the Irish elite )at the Irish vote on Lisbon. Some of this seems fine to me – obviously it is perfectly reasonable to feel annoyed, or even angry, when people vote for what you feel to be the wrong option. Some of the anger, however, seems to me to rest on an unjustified implicit or explicit belief that the Irish were somehow obliged to vote Yes in the referendum. Below the fold, I lay out all the serious reasons I can think of for why you might think the Irish were positively obliged to vote Yes, and why I don’t think that any of them hold (I imagine that there will be vigorous disagreement from many commenters, but reckon that this disagreement will be more useful if the bases of argument are clearer). The emphasis here is on ‘serious’ reasons – I’m not going to get into the it's because they don't like Johnny Foreigner, you know stuff, which doesn’t seem to me to deserve proper attention or rebuttal. [click to continue…]