Henry

Via Duncan Black, Mark Halperin comes up with a doozy of a metaphor.

Why is Drudge highlighting the McCain story, but has not touched other political hot potatoes that are swirling in the ether?

Those potatoes, turning this way and that as eddies and currents in the aether pull at them, heated to the boiling point by its luminiferous qualities. It’s almost as good as David Brooks’ famous depiction of the Kossacks as squadrons of rabid, venom-unleashing command-lambs. Any other nominations for the most hilariously mangled metaphors and bad political writing of 2007? Halperin sets a high standard, but there must be other competitors out there …

The new issue of _Perspectives on Politics_ has an interesting back-and-forth between Larry Bartels and Skip_Lupia_et_al. on Bartels’ 2005 article about voter ignorance and the Bush tax cuts. Unfortunately the dialogue is behind the paywall (Bartels usually posts his papers on his website but hasn’t done so with this one yet), but this bit jumped out from his riposte:

Well-informed people are sometimes quite wrong about things—even when it comes to straightforward factual matters. For example, well-informed conservatives in the 2002 and 2004 NES surveys were significantly more likely than less-informed conservatives to _deny_ that differences in income between rich people and poor people in the United States had increased over the past 20 years—a denial “grossly out of kilter with available evidence.” Here, as in many other instances, better-informed people seem mostly to have grasped the biased world-view of “their” political elites rather than an accurate perception of real social conditions.

Alan Reynolds should be taking a bow sometime around now. Bartels appears to be giving us a preview of one of the findings of his forthcoming book, _Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age_, which is coming out from Russell Sage/Princeton next year and sounds very interesting.

Update: This response by Ross Douthat to David Frum’s much vaunted attack on conservative anti-intellectualism also seems sort-of on topic

Huckabee’s Fair Tax zeal and Paul’s anti-Fed enthusiasm are genuinely foolish; there is a touch of Miers-ish identity politics in the evangelical community’s Huckaphilia, and Frum’s larger worry about anti-intellectualism in the contemporary Right is one I share in spades. But if you’re going to be hard on the current crop of Republican candidates for making bogus claims about public policy, it seems awfully unfair to leave out the candidate given to running ads in which he announces: “I know that reducing taxes produces more revenue. The Democrats don’t know that. They don’t believe that.” (They don’t believe it, of course, because in the current fiscal landscape you can’t find a serious conservative economist who thinks it’s true.) … If you’re looking for cases where the Right’s anti-elitism has shaded into outright anti-intellectualism – for cases where, in Frum’s words, a GOP politician has deliberately failed to “study the problem, master the evidence, and face criticism” – Giuliani’s frequent channeling of Larry Kudlow seems like at least as telling an example as anything Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul are peddling.

(the point being, although Douthat doesn’t spell it out explicitly, that Frum is one of Giuliani’s senior policy advisers).

My colleague Lee Sigelman, at _The Monkey Cage_:

In 1993, I was contacted by Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, who was then president of this fair university. He said that he had recently dined with a prominent U.S. Senator who had agreed to give a speech about the U.S. presidency. This senator (who will remain unnamed here) told Trachtenberg that he was a bit nervous about giving this speech because he wasn’t an expert on the presidency. Never fear, Trachtenberg replied, we’ve got this hot new guy in our political science department. I’ll send him over and he can brief you. And so Trachtenberg called me.

I immediately enlisted the involvement of a colleague who was teaching our presidency course, and at the appointed hour we trooped over to the Cosmos Club for our date with destiny.

The senator was obviously preoccupied with what apparently would be his major decision of the day — the selection of an appropriate bottle of wine. With that preliminary finally completed after only half an hour or so, he turned to the task at hand. Well, he declared, because he had spent some time in England, he thought it would be a nice touch to talk not only about the U.S. but about England as well. And then: “I know something about the President of the United States, but I don’t know much about the President of England. What can you tell me about the President of England?”

I swear that the foregoing is true, and I have a witness.

The Wikimedia folk have been muttering for a while about taking on Internet search companies such as Google, but I suspect that Google is more likely to be able to displace them than vice-versa.

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. … A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read. The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions. Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content … For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. … People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. … Once testing is completed, participation in knols will be completely open, and we cannot expect that all of them will be of high quality. Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge.

I’m waiting to see what Eszter and Siva have to say about this before I can start to think in earnest about this, but given Google’s clout and resources I imagine that this project is much more likely to have legs than, say, Citizendium.

Update: See also Nicholas Carr.

Two great new blogs by academics who I admire but have never met. First, Lane Kenworthy, author of many articles and a few books on the comparative politics of inequality, is now blogging at Consider the Evidence. This post, for example, does a nice job of bringing together some of the data on economic risk (on which more soon), and looks at how the incipient credit crunch and the high number of families that already have two parents in the workforce means that lower income households simply don’t have much margin to cope any more with unexpected financial emergencies.

households now appear to be more sensitive to serious short-run financial strains — job loss, a medical problem that results in significant cost (due to lack of health insurance or inadequate coverage), a hike in rent, a rise in mortgage payments (as a low-interest-rate adjustable mortgage rolls over). A generation ago a household could adjust to this type of event by having the second adult take a temporary job to provide extra income. During the economic boom of the late 1990s they might have been able to switch jobs in order to get a pay increase. In the past ten years they could run up credit card debt or take out a home equity loan. For many households with moderate or low incomes, these strategies are now foreclosed.

Second, Eric Rauchway at UC Davis is blogging together with Ari Kelman at The Edge of the American West. One of his posts gets stuck into the recent outbreak of the liberal bias in the academy thing in the Washington Post op-ed pages, and generates an interesting conversation in the comments section about where you can find intelligent and intellectually honest conservatives in the US. I’d add Steve Bainbridge to the people listed in the comments section; also Clive Crook and Clive Davis (who I don’t follow as much as I should now that he’s at the Spectator and doesn’t have his own RSS feed any more). Both of the latter are Brits, of course. Does anyone have other nominations for interesting conservatives in the blogosphere or elsewhere? Please: no need to list obvious suspects at high profile blogs like Orin Kerr, nor to state that there ain’t any such thing as an interesting honest conservative. I know that this latter view has some adherents among CT readers, but its restatement in response to questions of this sort is kinda like telling people who are troubleshooting their PCs that the obvious solution is to buy a Mac.

Anyone who has recent-ish Irish ancestry may be interested to know that Ireland's National Archives are putting up the data from the 1911 Irish census. At the moment, only data from Dublin are available – but this was enough to allow me (after a bit of foostering around – the data was under “Mac Neill” rather than “MacNeill”) to find the census data for my great-grandfather and his family (not including my grandmother, for the excellent reason that she wasn’t yet born).

When leafing through a copy of the _New York Review of Books_ from a few weeks back, I came across Patricia Meehan’s review (behind paywall, unfortunately) of Giles MacDonogh’s _After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation._ It’s an eye-opener. [click to continue…]

John Sides at _The Monkey Cage_ asks whether whites are more likely to support the death penalty when they think black people are being executed, and finds that the answer is yes.

In a 2001 survey conducted by Mark Peffley and John Hurwitz, a random subset of whites was asked:

“Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?”
Somewhat favor: 29%
Strongly favor: 36%

Another random subset of whites was asked:

“Some people say that the death penalty is unfair because most of the people who are executed are African-Americans. Do you favor or oppose the death penalty for persons convicted of murder?”
Somewhat favor: 25%
Strongly favor: 52%

That is a 12-point increase in overall support

See more here (and original paper here.

Isn’t it just enough that the _National Review Online_ seems to have published dodgy reporting on massive (and apparently entirely imaginary) Hezbollah invasions of chunks of Beirut, without the source of said reportage being the co-author of _The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Intelligent Design_ ? ? Sweet.

This has been another episode of what Cosma said

In my first post about this, I said that there were two possible interpretations of Saletan’s actions: that he didn’t know that the ideas he was spread were crap, or that he did, but spread them anyway to advance an agenda. Saying that the second interpretation was more charitable wasn’t _just_ a joke. Sadly, this partial _mea culpa_ supports the first interpretation, that of incompetence. To put it in “shorter William Saletan” form, what he is saying is: I am shocked — shocked! — to discover that the people who devote their careers to providing supposedly-scientific backing for racist ideas are, in fact, flaming racists. And he does seem to be shocked, though it is hard (as Yglesias says) to see why, _logically,_ he should strain out those gnats he displays for our horrified inspection while swallowing the camel of group inferiority (and telling his readers that camel is really great and the coming thing). This indicates a level of incompetence as a reporter and researcher that is really quite stunning …

But let me back up a minute to the bit about relying on “peer review and rebuttals to expose any relevant issue”. There are two problems here. One has to do with the fact that, as I said, it is really very easy to find the rebuttals showing that Rushton’s papers, in particular, are a tragic waste of precious trees and disk-space. For example, in the very same issue of the very same journal as the paper by Rushton and Jensen which was one of Saletan’s main sources, Richard Nisbett, one of the more important psychologists of our time, takes his turn banging his head against this particular wall. Or, again, if Saletan had been at all curious about the issue of head sizes, which seems to have impressed him so much, it would have taken about five minutes with Google Scholar to find a demonstration that this is crap. So I really have no idea what Saletan means when he claimed he relied on published rebuttals — did he think they would just crawl into his lap and sit there, meowing to be read? If I had to guess, I’d say that the most likely explanation of Saletan’s writings is that he spent a few minutes with a search engine looking for hits on racial differences in intelligence, took the first few blogs and papers he found that way as The Emerging Scientific Consensus, and then stopped. But detailed inquiry into just _how_ he managed to screw up so badly seems unprofitable.

This Atlantic Monthly piece from 1957 on sex and the college girl is quite entertaining, in the ways that you might expect it to be entertaining. My favorite paragraph:

Even more complicated to deal with is the intellectual-amoral type of man, who has affairs as a matter of course and doesn’t (or says he doesn’t) think less of a girl for sleeping with him. He is full of highly complicated arguments on the subject, which have to do with empiricism, epicureanism, live today, for tomorrow will bring the mushroom cloud, learning about life, and the dangers of self-repression, all of which are whipped out with frightening speed and conviction while he is undoing the third button on his girl’s blouse.

The howls of derision greeting the announcement of the Amazon Kindle last week reminds me that I never got around to reviewing the iRex Iliad that I bought some months ago. I can’t provide a proper comparison of the two; not only do I not own a Kindle, obviously, but I haven’t even used the Iliad to read DRM-protected books (this has only become a possibility in the last few months; before that you were limited to PDFs and the like). But for my particular purposes as an academic, the Iliad works very well. It’s still a first generation technology, and has several kinks that could, and should, be ironed out. Even so, what I’ve seen convinces me that academics are likely to become early adopters of this technology _en masse_ when it comes down in price and becomes a little more user friendly.
[click to continue…]

My (longish) review of Roberto Saviano’s _Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System_ is now out in _The Nation_. I liked the book quite a lot – as I say in the review it’s a little like Ryszard Kapuscinkski’s melanges of fiction and journalism, but it’s far starker, more direct, and angrier in its conclusions. One of the things I found most interesting about the book (although I don’t think his argument ultimately works), is Saviano’s efforts to connect together the Camorra and global capitalism. This is something that the NYT reviewer didn’t get – he complains that the first chapter of the book (on Chinese smugglers) doesn’t say anything about the Camorra at all. As I read the book, that was rather the point that Saviano was trying to make – that the fundamental problem lies not so much in the florid stories about the Camorra clans as in the underbelly of globalization; the myriads of clandestine and informal markets and of relationships between the legal and illegal economies that help sustain global capitalism. The book is at least as much about markets as about crime – two extended quotes after the jump give some of the flavor. [click to continue…]

Since it looks as though Andrew Gelman has already announced it, I figure that I’m now allowed to publicize a new political science blog, The Monkey Cage. It’s written by three of my colleagues at GWU, David Park, John Sides, and Lee Sigelman (who’s received previous mention at CT for his groundbreaking collaborative research on Supreme Court Justice betting pools). One interesting post on the costs of wars:

Recent days have brought a shower of media attention to the long-term economic cost of the war in Iraq. … According to Clayton, the pattern of long-term costs associated with American wars indicates that “the bulk of the money is spent long after the fighting stops” — and when Clayton said “long after,” he meant it. The primary reason: veterans benefits, which for the Civil War, World Wars I and II, and the Korean War averaged 1.8 times the original cost of the wars themselves.

It would be interesting to know whether this is likely to hold for the Iraq war. Will veterans’ benefits be as costly for an all-volunteer army? Has the ratio of technology costs to manpower costs changed substantially since the earlier wars discussed? I know next to nothing about the minutiae of military budgets – any CT readers have leads??