Henry

Both Ross Douthat and Matt Yglesias suggest that I was wrong to claim last week that Kristol and Kagan were more interested in Republican hegemony than in the actual worth of their foreign policy ideas when they wrote their famous 1996 essay on the virtues of a neo-Reaganite foreign policy. What I said then was short-hand for what I said at greater length in a paper that I wrote a couple of years ago for an APSA panel that Russell Arben Fox chaired on conservatism. The paper has never seen the light of day, and probably never will (it wasn’t really an academic paper so much as a glorified form of current commentary; something less than academic research but more than a blogpost), so I may as well link to it here and excerpt the key bit that speaks to this argument (below the fold). [click to continue…]

Alex Tabarrok and Dani Rodrik have moved from arguing about industrial policy into arguing about the blinkers (or otherwise) of libertarianism.

Dani

It is in that spirit that I have been mulling about the derision and incredulity with which my recent post on industrial policy was met among some libertarian bloggers. … The real revolutionaries here are the libertarians. They envisage a real good world out there that looks like nothing we have now (or have ever had), and they want us to get there. Second, there are really deep philosophical differences here that have nothing to do with economics per se. Most importantly, I believe government can be a force for good; they do not. But third, libertarians hold on to their priors so strongly that they seem impervious to evidence. They shrug off the fact that there is more freedom and more wealth in those parts of the world where the government is stronger, not weaker. With respect to industrial policy proper, they refuse to engage with the fact that every nation that has grown rapidly has made use of it. I look at the world and see some government programs that work and others that fail. I want to understand what determines these outcomes, and to know how we can improve the ratio of the first to the second. When libertarians look at the same programs, they see one wreck after another.

Alex

Dani Rodrik responds here to my pointed remarks on his argument for industrial policy. Rodrik’s response, however, is along the same lines of his earlier – “I’m sophisticated, your simplistic” – post on why economists disagree. In this case, it’s ‘libertarians are ideologues who are immune to evidence.’ Rodrik, however, has painted himself into a corner because he cannot at the same time say that the “systematic empirical evidence” for market imperfections in education, health, social insurance and Keynesian stabilization policy is “sketchy, to say the least” (also “difficult to pin down” and ‘unsystematic’) and also claim that libertarians are ideologues who are immune to evidence. Say rather that libertarian economists are immune to sketchy, unsystematic, difficult to pin down evidence. Rodrik is thus right that he is “not as unconventional as I sometimes think I am. The real revolutionaries here are the libertarians.” The libertarian economists are revolutionaries, however, not because they are immune to evidence but because they respect evidence so much that they are unwilling to accept “conventional wisdom” simply because it is conventional.

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From Glenn Loury’s excellent article in the new _Boston Review_ on why there are so many people in US prisons, and why so many of these people are black.

… something interesting seems to have been going on in the late 1960s regarding the relationship between attitudes on race and social policy. Before 1965, public attitudes on the welfare state and on race, as measured by the annually administered General Social Survey, varied year to year independently of one another: you could not predict much about a person’s attitudes on welfare politics by knowing their attitudes about race. After 1965, the attitudes moved in tandem, as welfare came to be seen as a race issue. Indeed, the year-to-year correlation between an index measuring liberalism of racial attitudes and attitudes toward the welfare state over the interval 1950–1965 was .03. These same two series had a correlation of .68 over the period 1966–1996.

Bruce Bartlett is advocating the introduction of Value Added Tax to America. This is a perennial proposal on the right, but it doesn’t appear to ever gain much political traction. The obvious reason why is that VAT is unpopular because it’s a regressive tax (the more people earn, the less they pay). However, this doesn’t explain why European countries which one would expect to be more attracted to progressive taxation systems have VAT, often at quite high levels.

Former CT guest blogger (and current GWU colleague and friend of mine) Kimberly Morgan has written a nice historical paper (Word file here )with Monica Prasad looking at how the US came “to have a tax code that is on many levels more hostile to capital accumulation than its peers” while France “which in some opinions has “never really been won over to capitalism” ” found itself relying on taxes that hit workers and consumers unusually hard. Simplifying drastically, she and Prasad argue that it can be explained by timing. Industrial capitalism arrived in the US before a real national state came into being, while the state preceded capitalism in France. The weak state in the US, and the willingness of business to ride roughshod over consumers, “led to an intense public interest in disciplining capital, which underpinned a movement toward income taxation that would punish capital and the wealthy.” In France, in contrast, well-founded fears of state intrusion led French citizens to fear direct taxation, and tax advocates to work against “fiscal inquisition” and the further expansion of the state into private life. This left French left-wingers ambivalent about the virtues of income taxes, so that a state crippled by war expenses had to turn to a sales tax to raise money. If this is right (and they provide a lot of historical evidence), some of the verities of left and right about France and the US should be turned on their head (this is one of the reasons why it’s a fun paper, for values of fun that include ‘detailed historical institutionalist arguments about causation.’)

Matt Yglesias takes issue with Michael Ignatieff’s _New York Times Magazine_ article about why he screwed up on Iraq. [click to continue…]

Marty Lederman on Jane Mayer’s extraordinary – and horrible – _New Yorker_ story on the routinization of torture in CIA ‘black sites’ (I suspect he’s also writing on the basis of his own sources here).

I have repeatedly argued here that there is no justification for keeping secret what interrogation techniques the CIA is permitted to use. In particular, it is absurd to “classify” something that is revealed to people outside the government who have no duty of confidentiality, i.e., to the detainees on whom the techniques are used. Those persons are free to disclose the information to others, as they have now done to Red Cross interviewers. Because of this, it becomes necessary to detain these persons, in isolation, presumably forever, _in order to impose a prior restraint on their speech concerning their knowledge of what our government has done to them._ In a strange sort of circular logic, the interrogation becomes the justification for indefinite detention, even long after the interrogation ends. Thus, as Jane writes, “[t]he utter isolation of these detainees has been described as essential to America’s national security,” so that they cannot reveal what happened to them.

I’d like to see some of our libertarian law professor colleagues give their views on this. For example, Eugene Volokh recently – and correctly in my view – has blogged about the problems in issuing a restraining order on a possible paedophile who hasn’t committed any crimes, talking about the dangers of “letting courts restrain movement simply based on people’s even repugnant ideologies and desires.” Does he believe that imprisoning people without trial (however repugnant their ideologies and desires), torturing them and continuing to imprison them indefinitely while preventing them from having contact with lawyers because they might reveal the methods that have been used to torture them is justifiable? One would hope not, but he and other prominent law professors in the blogosphere have thus far proved remarkably unwilling to express more then a certain degree of perhaps-eggs-must-be-broken-to-make-an-omelette type squeamishness about the topics of torture and indefinite detention before swiftly changing the subject to something more congenial. Some kinds of restraints on free speech are more worthy of comment than others, it would seem (perhaps they’ll prove me wrong).

This is a pretty weird post from Ross Douthat.

Ezra writes that it’s “very unfair” to apply the word “eugenics” to, say, the contemporary trend toward the elimination of Down’s Syndrome by selective abortion, because “traditionally, the term has been used to denote efforts to direct or encourage breeding by high status, socially dominant individuals in order to select for their characteristics, and discourage breeding by low status individuals (criminals, the insane, blacks, etc) in order to wipe their characteristics from the gene pool. For Ross to conflate that with parents who decide to abort infants with medically disastrous genetic mutations is a real stretch.” First of all, Down’s Syndrome is not a “medically disastrous” genetic mutation, unless you take an extremely broad definition of the term “disastrous.” Second, while the means of “traditional eugenics” were obviously very different from what’s emerging now – involving state power rather than parental choice, and selective breeding/sterilization rather than prenatal genetic screening and abortion – the ends were the same: the genetic improvement of the human species through the scientific management of the reproductive process.

Does Ross _seriously_ believe that people who have abortions because their foetus appears likely to have Tay-Sachs syndrome or Downs syndrome are doing so because their “end” is “the genetic improvement of the human species?” Can he even realistically contend that the genetic improvement of the human species crosses most people’s minds when they are making this kind of decision?? This claim seems to me to be ridiculous on its face, regardless of your underlying position on whether abortion is a good or bad thing.

What’s going on here, as best as I understand it, is something like the following. There’s a long-standing label in US politics called “progressive,” which used to mean something like “social democrat or non-revolutionary socialist.” As vaguely-left Democrats have increasingly become disenchanted with the term ‘liberal’ and its milksop connotations, they too have begun to embrace the term “progressive.” However, for them, it doesn’t mean ‘social democratic, but instead something like ‘vaguely pro-union liberal with balls’ (or ovaries depending … you get my drift). This in turn has led critics on the right to start harking back to some of the old-style socialist progressives’ sins, and to try to hang them around the necks of Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein and company.

Here, Ross has been trying to assert in a series of posts that there is some sort of continuity between ‘old’ progressives’ views on eugenics, and ‘new’ progressives’ views on abortion. Which is kinda nonsensical. The modern liberal position on abortion isn’t rooted in the imperative towards genetic improvement of the species, or anything like it. It’s rooted in a particular notion of individual rights. That’s why they call it ‘choice’ rather than ’embrace your genetic duty by destroying imperfect foetuses for the benefit of mankind.’ The old-style eugenics of H.G. Wells, Swedish social democrats, Anglo-American family planners etc has _nothing to do_ with modern liberalism, or with liberals who have started to call themselves progressives. Instead, if it’s an embarrassment for anyone, it’s an embarrassment for social democrats like myself, who have some real continuities with that older tradition (although hopefully not with that particular part of it).

Bill Sjostrom tells me via email that the 2006 Irish Census figures are out, and that 14.7% of respondents weren’t born in Ireland. This is one of the reasons that I don’t blog very much about Ireland any more; the country has changed dramatically since I left. I departed in 1993 at the tail-end of the economic slump, when no self-respecting immigrant would want to come near the country (over half of my university class emigrated as best I remember; I imagine that most of them have since gone back). According to Bill, 0.6% of Ireland’s population were born in the US; a pretty significant reversal of the previous trend. This picture from the Irish Times suggests that changes are afoot in the North of Ireland too.

The caption reads:

The Free Derry Wall gets a coat of paint for the gay and lesbian Foyle Pride Festival. Members of the gay men’s health promotion agency the Rainbow Project painted the wall for the festival, which starts on August 13th.

Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries have used wall-slogans and murals (often quite detailed and extensive) as a means of marking off their territory and scaring off outsiders for decades. To have gay activists start doing ’em over in pink suggests that things are … a little different than they used to be.

_Making Light_ has a fairly vigorous discussion about Wikipedia policies going at the moment, which has wandered onto the topic of whether people should or shouldn’t be able to decide what their names are for themselves, or whether some other (whether it be Wikipedia, a government agency or whatever) should be able to restrict their choices. One comment
comes from someone whom I presume from their name is Japanese:

Toru Ranryu: To what extent are people entitled to choose their own name? Where I come from, to steal an expression from the Flamer Bingo thread, there are strict rules for how children obtain their names, as well as for when name changes are allowed and what names are acceptable. All of this is enforced by a no-nonsense government agency. Incidentally, under these rules it would not be allowed for Patrick Hayden and Teresa Nielsen to both take Nielsen Hayden as a last name. Are these rules repressive? Do they deny some fundamental freedom or human right? I don’t think so. From birth, your name is not what you call yourself but what others call you. There are ways in which you can change your name, basically by asking people to call you something else, but in the end the decision is always made by other people.

This reminded me of a job talk that a candidate gave in my department last year, describing the politics of women’s surnames in Japan. As I remember (I may be mangling this), it’s impossible for a Japanese woman to keep her birth name for official purposes after marriage; if, say, she wants a passport, she’s obliged to get it under her husband’s surname. But divorce is extremely easy in Japan (you basically have to fill out a form to inform local officialdom and that’s it) so that women who don’t like this rule have taken to divorcing their husbands temporarily before travelling abroad, getting a passport under their birthnames, and then remarrying their ex-husbands on their return. To the extent that my memory isn’t garbling the candidate’s account completely, this suggests that Mr.(???) Ranyu’s views on names aren’t shared by some of his compatriots; it’s also a nice illustration of the lengths to which people will go to creatively reinterpret institutions so as as to undermine egregious official restrictions.

Tyler Cowen is somewhat suspicious of an FCC Commissioner’s statistical claims about broadband penetration. Given the FCC’s past form, a general suspicion of any statistics that it trots out on broadband penetration is entirely warranted. The FCC has generated copious statistics to support their claims that there is a thriving competitive market among broadband providers. However, as the General Accounting Office points out (pdf) in polite governmental administratese, their numbers are a crock. They pump up the number of competitors in a given local market by including satellite (not a significant option for most consumers), lumping together data on specialized business services and consumer broadband, and failing to consider whether the fact that two cable companies operate in the same zipcode means that they actually compete with each other (their coverage areas may not in fact overlap). When these biases are corrected for, the GAO finds that the median number of providers for a given respondent is two, and 9% of respondents have no access to broadband at all. Given the near-total lack of resemblance between these figures and the reality that American consumers have to deal with, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that they were generated with the purpose of muddying debate.

Jacob Levy’s beginnings-of-a-response to Linda Hirshman’s piece on Rawlsianism as the root of all evil seems to me to be a fair bit off-target (this, from Matt Yglesias, is much better).

I recommend and second Marty Peretz’ reflections on the replacement of the word “liberal” with the word “progressive” over at The Spine. … At a somewhat different level of abstraction: “progressive” as a concept is tied up with a partly-inchoate philosophy of history that I’d have thought long since discredited. It doesn’t share in Marxism’s rigid determinism; but it does always tell a story in which one’s own side in political disputes happens to be the side of the future and the march of events. That tied together the racist imperialism of the Progressive Era, its anti-constitutionalism, and its technocracy: we enlightened white Americans with university degrees and a sense of good order and planning will drag non-white people, the uneducated, the messy chaos of the economy, and an archaic governing structure based on archaic ideas on the limits of state action into the future. Liberalism as such doesn’t believe it will necessarily win. Liberalism a la Isaiah Berlin and Judith Shklar, and behind them figures like Montesquieu and Tocqueville, is deeply inflected with a sense that freedom might be precarious, and the humane and human accomplishments of liberal politics might be precarious. The liberal sense of history is not necessarily pessimistic, but it shares none of progressivism’s certainty.

Jacob’s jibes about racist imperialism aside (it wouldn’t exactly take much effort to drag up some of the more sordid bits from the history of classical liberalism), his argument seems to me to rest on a false comparison. When Jacob talks about progressivism, he talks about it as a political movement; when he talks about liberalism, he talks about it as a tradition within political theory. This rather predetermines his conclusions; if your political ideals are thoughtfulness, recognition of limits etc, it’s … unsurprising that political theorists are going to come out looking better than politicians and political commentators. If you set up a fairer comparison, say by contrasting whatever tendencies there are towards overweening triumphalism among progressive political commentators with whatever tendencies there are among soi-disant liberal commentators, I suspect you’d arrive at a quite different set of conclusions (there seemed to me to be _rather a lot_ of liberal triumphalism about the march of history and dragging non-white people and archaic governing structures into the future going around a few years ago; I’m not hearing so much of it now for all the obvious reasons).

Vernon Bogdanor has a review of Sheri Berman’s _The Primacy of Politics_ (which we ran a seminar on last year) in the TLS, Large parts of the article are good and perceptive, but Bogdanor also seems to be using the book to make his own, rather odd claims.
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While messing around on Cosma Shalizi’s website (surely the _Wunderkammer_ of the blogosphere) I came across this piece on Scott Page’s ideas about diversity, which sums them up rather better and more crisply than I did in my own review of Page’s new book from a few weeks back.

Like, it seems, umpteen others, I set up a Facebook profile for myself a couple of weeks ago. When I did, I found that plenty of friends from widely scattered parts of my social network had done the same thing, mostly around the same time. This does seem to me to be a genuine tipping phenomenon. I’ve been feeling a little guilty about not knowing more about Facebook and MySpace, given that I teach classes on how the Internet is changing politics and society. But I didn’t feel ready to actually set myself up, partly because I wasn’t sure what the point was, and partly because I was worried that I’d end up without any friends, exposed to the scorn and pity of the multitude. As my sister Maria said (before joining up herself and finding that she had lots of friends), Facebook is an opportunity to play the social game again – and lose. If other people shared our apprehension, it’s perhaps not surprising that lots of them have decided to join at the same time, when everybody knew that there were enough other people who they knew doing the same thing that the risk of public embarrassment was relatively slight.

Via Rebecca MacKinnon, this post by Mark Glaser has additional speculation on why so many lemmings plunged over the cliff at the same time, and why they plunged into Facebook in particular. I’d be interested to know why CT readers have or haven’t joined Facebook or other social networking type sites; I should also let people know that there is now a Crooked Timber group on Facebook (content currently consisting of a few photos of CTers mugging at the camera; more surely to follow).