Henry

Ross Douthat, meet William Saletan’s brave summary of the emerging scientific consensus. I recommend that people click through Cosma’s links – the ‘scientists’ whom Saletan praises are demonstrable charlatans and cranks. As an aside – one of the most _aggravating_ things about Saletan, Sullivan, Douthat etc’s embrace of the scientiness of race and IQ is that they seem to have convinced themselves that they are bold truthsayers fearlessly committed to challenging commonly accepted falsehoods etc etc etc. Instead they’re new-style advocates for a long-established and intellectually discredited pseudo-science – people have been trying to use bogus statistics to prove that yer black/Jewish/Irish minority of choice is irredeemably stupid since at least the beginning of the last century. And this pseudo-science has hardened into its own orthodoxy¹ in certain corners of the right – witness, for example, the barracking that Tyler Cowen took in his comments section when he had the impertinence to suggest that Mexican villagers of his acquaintance who probably wouldn’t do that well on a standard IQ test were actually incredibly smart. Urgh.

Update: Ross Douthat, while not rowing back completely (as best as I can make out), acknowledges that his original characterization of the debate was “stupid” and “lazy” and retracts it. Fair enough.

¹ It’s a popular sect of the secular religion that John Sladek aptly dubbed “Reformed Darwinism” 20-odd years ago.

I’ve another bloggingheads with Dan Drezner. One of the topics that we talk about is the weirdness of the norms that govern regular op-ed page writers. In the _NYT_ at least, they seem to be discouraged from mentioning each other by name when they disagree/attack each other, this has become increasingly artificial seeming as they’ve become a bit bloggier, and started to engage each other more directly than in the past. The key example that Dan and I talk about is the recent back-and-forth over Reagan’s legacy and the Republican Southern strategy between David Brooks, Bob Herbert, and Paul Krugman (with other non-regular op-ed writers andbloggers piping up too). But as we suggest in the dialogue these norms are beginning to break down – this rather nasty piece by Ruth Marcus claiming that Paul Krugman is dishonest, has merited a pretty vigorous response on Krugman’s blog (see also Mark Thoma) which shows pretty convincingly that Marcus has taken some of the quotes that she uses out of context, so as to suggest that Krugman was making claims that he wasn’t in fact making (another quote that she uses is more accurate – but Krugman claims convincingly that he was writing at a time when the long term economic outlook for Social Security looked far more dire than it does today). Marcus’s attack is itself a response to Krugman’s previous criticisms of an unsigned _Washington Post_ editorial that she (Marcus) strongly hints that she wrote herself.

In general, this is all to the good. I can see the justification for the previous policy, I think – that you don’t want your op-ed pages to break down into bickering between a small group of elites, and that you want to preserve the ideal of the op-ed writer as a disinterested and magisterial figure taking the pulse of the American polity, etc, etc, etc. But this also allows op-ed writers to get away with a lot of self-serving bullshit while never being called on it. A more vigorous back-and-forth of the kind we’ve being seeing is a highly imperfect corrective to that problem – but it’s certainly better than the current system where regular op-ed writers are simultaneously put on a pedestal and never subjected to the processes of fact-checking that restrain traditional journalists.

Andrew Sullivan today on race and IQ, yet again.

In the end, the data demand addressing.

Yes, they do, Andrew. They do.

The FT reports that the OSCE has withdrawn from monitoring elections in Russia.

Europe’s main election monitoring group said on Friday it was scrapping plans to deploy observers to Russia’s forthcoming parliamentary elections in a decision that could cast doubt on the integrity of the poll. The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe claimed Moscow had imposed “unprecedented restrictions” on its activities. Russia had slashed the number of observers it would admit to the December 2 election and then repeatedly delayed issuing visas for OSCE monitors.

It may be that this is (as a quoted Russian deputy claims) the prelude to mass falsification of results, but my impression (as a non-Russia specialist) is that the government doesn’t need to do much falsifying of polls, if any, to win. They’ve already succeeded in stage-managing democracy so well that they won’t need to (admittedly, the more liberal parties in Russia haven’t done very much to help their own cause either). This is more likely a product of Russia’s general desire to revise the post-Cold War international order, and get rid of the bits (such as election monitoring) that it thinks limits its autonomy both at home, and in neighboring states (for background information, see this earlier post).

For me, there are two interesting questions going forward. First: are other countries (perhaps more importantly the EU than the US), going to take this quietly, or are they going to seek to embarrass the Russians in some way, claiming that there are problems with their democracy, and perhaps seeking to sideline Russia from complete participation in some of the clubs that it has joined since the demise of the USSR?

Second, how are autocrats in other states (e.g. those in Central Asia) going to respond? My best guess is that those countries that see benefits from closer integration with the West (e.g. Georgia, the Ukraine) will continue to invite external election monitors, while those that don’t will follow Russia’s lead. If this prediction bears out, we will see a little bit of Cold War politics beginning to seep back, with an increase in hostility between Russia and its satellites in Central Asia and elsewhere (anomalies such as Belarus and Moldova) on the one hand, and West and Central European democracies on the other, with both sides contending for influence over shaky democracies in between (such as Georgia and the Ukraine). All of which would intersect in complicated ways with energy politics in the region. This is only a best guess from a non-expert on the region (albeit someone who does know a fair amount about the OSCE) – agreements/disagreements welcome in comments.

Update 1: The second half of the seminar is now available below. Those who prefer to read the posts in hard copy (or in a nicely formatted PDF) can download it here. Those who want to remix the text using LaTeX or similar, can download the .tex file here. John Holbo will probably be doing a prettier remix of the PDF sometime over the next few days.

Update 2: David Warsh supplements the post below with a very interesting analysis of what Rodrik’s arguments mean in the broader debates over economics and development.

Update 3: Kieran has done some LaTeX-fu on the PDF, providing a much nicer looking and more functional product – hence I’ve replaced the original file with his updated version.

Dani Rodrik’s new book, _One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions and Economic Growth_ ( Powells, Amazon ) is a major contribution to debates on globalization, economic development and free trade. It brings together much of his existing work bringing together an important critique of the Washington Consensus with positive suggestions about how best to encourage economic growth, and how to build a global system of rules that can accommodate diverse national choices. We’re pleased and happy that both Dani and several other guests have agreed to participate in a new Crooked Timber seminar. This seminar will be published in two parts – the first today (featuring Henry Farrell, John Quiggin, Mark Thoma and David Warsh), the second tomorrow (featuring Daniel Davies, Dan Drezner, Jack Knight, Adam Przeworski, and Dani’s reply post). As with previous Crooked Timber seminars, it is published under a Creative Commons license (see below). Tomorrow, I will post a PDF of the entire seminar (plus a LaTeX file for anyone who wants to play around with it). If you have specific comments about the contributions, please post them in the relevant comments section for the specific post. For general technical glitches etc, post comments here.

The (non-CT regular) participants in the seminar are, in alphabetical order:

(1) Dan Drezner blogs at http://www.danieldrezner.com/blog/. He is an Associate Professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, at Tufts University. He has written two academic books on international political economy (looking at sanctions and globalization), as well as a Council of Foreign Relations report and numerous articles. He possesses specific expertise on the intersection between celebrity culture and global politics.

(2) Jack Knight is Sidney W. Souers Professor of Government at Washington University in St. Louis. He is author of a widely cited book on institutional theory, _Institutions and Social Conflict_ as well as numerous articles. He has a new book co-authored with Jim Johnson on rational choice, pragmatism and deliberative democracy, which will be published next year.

(3) Adam Przeworski is Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor of European Studies and Professor of Politics at New York University. He is the author of several monographs and numerous articles on topics including social democracy, democratic transitions and economic development. This interview (previously discussed in this CT post) gives a good overview of his life, politics, and academic work.

(4) Dani Rodrik blogs at Dani Rodrik's Weblog. He is Professor of International Political Economy at the Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University, where he teaches on international development issues. He has written two books, copious numbers of academic articles and policy papers, and was recently awarded the inaugural Albert O. Hirschman Prize of the Social Science Research Council.

(5) Mark Thoma blogs at Economist's View, which has quickly become established as one of the key forums for debate of economics and politics on the Internet (with occasional interjections by Paul Krugman and others). He is professor of economics at University of Oregon, where he has published numerous articles on aspects of macroeconomics theory.

(6) David Warsh is the editor of Economic Principals. He previously covered economics issues for _The Boston Globe_ and _Forbes Magazine_ for 25 years, and is the author of a widely acclaimed (and rightly so) intellectual history of the new growth theory in economics, _Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations_

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

A good way to start thinking about Dani Rodrik’s genuinely excellent new book is to contrast its statement of objectives with a programmatic statement from another new book on international economics, Roberto Unger’s _Free Trade Reimagined_.

First of all, Rodrik:

First, this book is strictly grounded in neo-classical economic analysis. At the core of neoclassical economics lies the following methodological predisposition: social phenomena can best be understood by considering them to be an aggregation of purposeful behavior by individuals – in their roles as consumer, producer, investor, politician, and so on – interacting with each other and acting under the constraints that their environment imposes. This I find to be not just a powerful discipline for organizing our thoughts on economic affairs, but the only sensible way of thinking about them. If I often depart from the consensus that “mainstream” economists have reached in matters of development policy, this has less to do with different modes of analysis than with different readings of the evidence and with different evaluations of the “political economy” of developing nations. The economics that the graduate student picks up in the seminar room – abstract as it is and riddled with a wide variety of market failures – admits an almost unlimited range of policy recommendations, depending on the specific assumptions the analyst is prepared to make … the tendency of many economists to offer advice based on simple rules of thumb, regardless of context (privatize this, liberalize that), is a derogation rather than a proper application of neoclassical economic principals

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While looking for something entirely different (research on the Italian mafia), I just came across this absolutely fascinating new paper (pdf) by Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog on engineers and Islamic terrorism. There’s been a lot of speculation about the visible elective affinity between education in certain technical disciplines and propensity to join Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, none of which has stopped some loons from claiming that the jihadists were led astray by trendy leftist post-modernist academics in the humanities and social sciences. Gambetta and Hertog use a combination of illustrative statistics, qualitative data and logistic regression to show not only that there _is_ a strong relationship between an engineering background and involvement in a variety of Islamic terrorist groups, but to arrive at a plausible hypothesis as to why this relationship pertains.

Their preferred explanation lies in the combination of a particular mindset given to simplification, monistic understandings of the world and desire that existing social arrangements be preserved, with key environmental factors (most importantly, frustrated professional aspirations due to a lack of opportunities). Interestingly, Gambetta and Hertog suggest that the same mindset which drives engineers in the Islamic world to become terrorists, may lead to the marked tendency of US engineers to adhere to strongly conservative political views. This is the kind of topic that lends itself to the worst kind of uninformed pop-journalism academics, but as best as I can tell (I’m a consumer rather than a producer of the statistical literature) Gambetta and Hertog are extremely careful about their analysis, and up front about the limitations of their data. I’ve copied the piece’s abstract beneath the fold.

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This FT article is pretty entertaining. First the shock horror headline and findings.

Cheats rife in Swedish welfare system

Swedes say they despise people who cheat the country’s generous welfare system at the same time as many do so themselves, government research has concluded.

A two-year study by the Delegation Against Benefit Fraud and Errors said 95 per cent of Swedes condemn cheating but up to a third have no problem either bending the rules, keeping unearned payments or defrauding the system.

The conclusion exposes the underbelly of one of Europe’s most successful welfare states by revealing that Swedes eagerly support their famed Nordic model while simultaneously tapping it for extra cash because “everyone else is doing it”.

Then the interesting figures:

The delegation said such activities cost the government about SKr20bn (€2.2bn, $3.2bn) last year, around 4 per cent of total social welfare payments from the country’s 60 social security systems of SKr520bn – far higher than has been estimated previously.

So 4 per cent of total social welfare payments seem to go to frauds. Isn’t this shockingly … low????? Perhaps this is enough to scandalize the Swedes (although the article hints that the public may be more upset by the fact that 10 out of 15 cabinet members in the newish right wing government have been caught cheating on taxes for their household employees), but by the standards, say, of US military subcontractors, 4% wastage doesn’t even qualify as chump change.

Over the last few years, Crooked Timberites, myself included, have given some grief to Jonathan Adler both under his own name and his ‘Juan non-Volokh’ pre-tenure pseudonym for failing to say very much about torture, abuse of state power etc. So it’s only fair to note that he has recently been much more willing to directly criticize Bush administration overreach than in the past and seems to be moving towards saying that waterboarding is indeed torture. Unfortunately, Alan ‘if torture was good enough for the Nazis, it’s good enough for us‘ Dershowitz seems, if anything, to be getting worse.

Megan McArdle claims that I got Michael Franc’s op-ed wrong.

Democrats indisputably represent more rich voters than Republicans; their constituency is the people in their district, not the people in their district who voted for them. Moreover, politically, this matters a great deal. The guy from Heritage is actually making a good point: the constituency of the Democrats will force many of them to support the interests of the rich, even where they might ideologically prefer to oppose, because doing so is good for their district.

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The Financial Times, for reasons best known to itself, serves up this steaming heap of buffalo dung from Heritage Foundation Vice-President for Governmental Affairs, Michael Franc, on its op-ed page.

A legislative proposal that was once on the fast track is suddenly dead. The Senate will not consider a plan to extract billions in extra taxes from mega-millionaire hedge fund managers. … Far from embarrassing, this episode may reflect a dawning Democratic awareness of whom they really represent. For the demographic reality is that, in America, the Democratic party is the new “party of the rich”. More and more Democrats represent areas with a high concentration of wealthy households. Using Internal Revenue Service data, the Heritage Foundation identified two categories of taxpayers – single filers with incomes of more than $100,000 and married filers with incomes of more than $200,000 – and combined them to discern where the wealthiest Americans live and who represents them. …Democrats now control the majority of the nation’s wealthiest congressional jurisdictions. More than half of the wealthiest households are concentrated in the 18 states where Democrats control both Senate seats. …

Soon this new political demographic may give traditional purveyors of class warfare the yips. To comply with new budget rules, liberal Democrats on Capitol Hill are readying a tax increase of at least $1,000bn over the next decade. Ms Pelosi says she wants to extract all of this from “the wealthy”. When has a party ever championed a policy that would inflict so much pain on its own constituency? At what point will affluent Democrats crack and mount a Blue State tax rebellion?

A hint to the people at the _Financial Times_ (a group whom I usually hold in considerable esteem): when an op-ed’s argument rests on a statistical fallacy so howlingly awful that it’s obvious to someone like me, it’s not a good idea at all to publish it. More generally, when a Heritage Foundation vice-president proposes a piece to you, et numeri ferentes, _especial_ attention to the basis of those figures is not only warranted but necessary. If it is true that Democrats tend to represent richer districts, both basic logic and an elementary grasp of statistics should tell you that this _does not imply_ that they represent richer voters. Indeed, not only does it not imply this, we _know_ that it isn’t true. See further Andrew Gelman et al.

Do richer voters still support Republicans? If so, how can we understand the pattern that the Democratic do best in the richer “blue states” of the Northeast and West, while the Republicans dominate in the poorer “red states” in the South and between the coasts? … The Republicans have the support of the richer voters within any given state but have more overall support in the poorer states. Thus, the identification of rich states with rich voters, or more generally, the “personification” of so-called red and blue states, is misleading. For example, in the context of the Brooks quotes above, within an “upscale” area that supports the Democrats, the more “upscale” voters are still likely to vote Republican. … The pattern that richer states support the Democrats is _not_ a simple aggregation of rich voters supporting the Democrats.

And so on. I have a lot of respect for the _Financial Times_ – they do a better job in my estimation than any other newspaper of preserving a high quality of debate and are usually quite scrupulous about factual detail. This makes it all the more odd that a piece like this, which is better suited for publication in an introductory statistical textbook as a particularly egregious cautionary example of the fallacy of aggregation, could have made it in. Better filters please.

Ezra Klein, responding to this blog and others, lists off the five bloggers whom he misses most. Prominent among them, of course, being the Fafblog, “the only blog that’s ever really mattered.” See also Dan Nexon on how “the fact of the matter is… and now I’m going to get choked up and grieve for a minute about the gaping hole its lack of updates has left in the blogmarch… almost any random selection from Fafblog would beat out the competition.” Which is so completely and obviously true. But even as the Library of Congress is cataloguing and preserving blogs of “historical importance to the Congress and to the American people,” the Fafblog’s archives, a genuine national treasure if ever there was one, are 404ing (I’m sure that both Brewster Kahle and Google have them stashed away somewhere but what a pain). In order to collate and preserve material of vital historical significance, I ask you, Crooked Timber readers, to link to, quote _in extenso_, and thus preserve your favourite Fafblog posts of all time. As my contribution – this reminder of how, long before there were glibertarians, there were Gibletarians.

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Jonathan van Antwerpen at the Social Science Research Council emails to tell me about a new blog that they have set up examining questions of “secularism, religion, and the public sphere.” They’re starting off with a discussion of Charles Taylor’s new book, _A Secular Age_, including posts by Taylor himself, Robert Bellah and others. Unsurprisingly given my own interests in academic blogging, I’m happy to see the SSRC doing this – it’s a great way to broaden debate about these issues beyond the usual suspects.

Also worthy of note for pol theory types is Public Reason, a new blog set up to:

create an open forum for political philosophers and theorists to post their own papers, along with conference announcements, ideas about philosophical problems, etc., in a way that is conducive to discussion among and communication between political philosophers/theorists

Jim Henley, Matthew Yglesias, Brad DeLong, Dan Drezner, and now Scott Lemieux have various nominations for the Best Blogpost or Best 5 Blogposts ever. If (in a blatant act of ballot-box stuffing), we count posts that have been nominated by more than one of the above-gathered experts once for each time they have been nominated, we arrive at the startling conclusion that _50% of the bestest blogposts ever have been written by Crooked Timber contributors! ! !_ Of course, none of those posts was actually published _at_ Crooked Timber, a fact over which we will pass swiftly, and in silence. To even the odds a little, nominations are invited below for the 5 Best Blogposts Ever by Non-CTers. Please be specific – ‘everything by Fafblog’ does not count as a vote, whereas 5 individual links to 5 individual Fafblog posts does .