Henry

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Christopher Caldwell on Michael Moore:

Mr Moore’s enemy … is the complexity of it. He rejects subtleties. His goal is not to break through to those who do not agree with him but to drown out the doubts of those who do. Those who sit down to watch Sicko without a broad knowledge of the US healthcare system will leave the theatre with a shallower understanding of the crisis than the one they arrived with. One should face up to the fact that this is the way Americans increasingly choose to get their information on all sorts of issues, not just healthcare policy. The appetite for slanted ideological dramas grows. Mr Moore is not alone in satisfying it. His anti-Bush documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, was met with the anti-Kerry adverts of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Perhaps the internet has made this kind of journalism easier. Mr Moore has been described as a “tireless researcher”, but you do not have to be, nowadays. He notes in his film that an online appeal for healthcare horror stories yielded 25,000 of them within a week. In a country of 300m people, any such appeal will provide enough anecdotal evidence to edit into a plausible and even rollicking case for pretty much anything – and to liberate a grateful populace from the heavy burden of level-headedness.

Doesn’t this prissiness about simple-minded propagandistic cherrypickers sit a little oddly when it comes from one of two senior editors at the _Weekly Standard_, the gutter-trawling publication that perhaps did more than any of the others of its ilk to propagandize for the Iraq war, to relentlessly simplify and smooth away the reasons why the occupation would fail, and to demonize those who argued against it? And so it continues. Kieran has already mentioned last week’s everything's dandy with the surge number from the Kagans, who, as he says, “get to author policy and neutrally report on it at the same time.” This week’s “The soldiers think they can win. Some Senators lose their nerve” version of the same theme from Caldwell’s boss, William Kristol isn’t exactly what you’d call a level-headed assessment of the facts either. And that’s not even getting into the Weekly Standard‘s list of associate editors, which includes such notable flinty-eyed pursuers of truth as Charles Krauthammer, Tucker Carlson and John Podhoretz. Slanted ideological dramas, how are ya.

I’ve just linked a paper at my political science papers weblog that seems potentially pretty interesting to CT readers and others. Joel Middleton and Donald Green have written a piece that tries to gauge the effects of MoveOn’s canvassers on voting turn-out. They estimate this by looking at situations where (a) the boundary of two voting precincts bisects a street so that people on one side of the street are in one precinct, and those on the other side are in the other precinct, and (b) where one of these districts had MoveOn organizers canvassing prospective voters, and the other didn’t. They then look at the voters on each side of the relevant street – this should eliminate potential bias (there’s pretty good reason to think that voters on different sides of the same street aren’t going to be measurably different from each other). When they do this, they find that people contacted by MoveOn canvasers seems to be 7% more likely to vote than the control population, which is a pretty significant difference. As Gerber and Green say, this is a nice result for the election turnout literature. But it has wider implications, as they note in an aside. There’s a lot of talk from Robert Putnam and others about how people are losing ‘social capital’ as the Internet becomes ever more important. Regardless of the underlying merits of the social capital thesis (personally, I’m pretty skeptical of it, at least in Putnam’s formulation), this provides smoking gun evidence that the Internet can enable greater participation than would otherwise have been possible, through allowing decentralized movements such as MoveOn to get the vote out more effectively.

Brad De Long posts an op-ed that my mate Jeff Lomonaco tried and failed to get published in the L.A. Times two weeks ago. [click to continue…]

Tyler Cowen points to a very interesting new paper by Daron Acemoglu and his colleagues (PDF – it was here this morning, but this link isn’t working for me any more; see here for a slightly earlier version) on the relationship between political and economic inequality. Tyler’s gloss is that this provides general insights into the “meme” of whether economic inequality is bad for growth, and concludes that “at least from that data set, the real problem seems to be rent-seeking behavior through the political process.” Thus, unless I misunderstand him (which is possible; he may just be blogging in shorthand), he is saying that this paper provides significant evidence suggesting that economic inequality isn’t the cause of slower economic growth; instead, political inequality and rent-seeking are at fault. [click to continue…]

I should really have blogged the outcome of the Treaty negotiations before this, but haven’t had time to comb through the fine print of the agreement. Three points though that are pretty clear. First, as discussed in my earlier post, the presumption of the member states that this can and should be shoved through on a nod and a wink is both unwarranted and likely to do long term damage to the EU’s legitimacy if it succeeds. See further Glyn Morgan on why the UK in particular should have a referendum:

The ethical rationale for an EU referendum is even more important than the political rationale. It is not healthy in a democracy for people to believe – as they will, if there is no referendum – that the political classes are a rule unto themselves, heedless of public opinion, and eager to remove from the political agenda fundamental constitutional issues. It doesn’t matter that the current proposals change little, and much of what they do change is in Britain’s interest. It matters that people, rightly or wrongly, believe that the EU has gone too far, too fast and without their proper consultation. For that reason alone, Britain needs a referendum.

[click to continue…]

Scott E. Page, _The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies_ (Princeton University Press). Available from Powells, Amazon.

Scott Page, who’s in the political science department at University of Michigan, has written a book that’s valuable on two levels. First, it provides a more rigorous take on some of the issues that James Surowiecki dealt with in his popularizing book, _The Wisdom of Crowds_. To say that Surowiecki’s book is written for a popular audience of course isn’t to say that it’s bad (to the contrary, see dsquared’s review), but it certainly doesn’t go to the same kinds of lengths as does Page’s to establish careful definitions, dot terminological i’s, and cross conceptual t’s. Page also goes rather further than Surowiecki in specifying his arguments about group decision making (providing a very good, if individually flavoured, account of the relevant cognitive science literature in the process), which means that he’s able to offer more specific claims than Surowiecki about the circumstances under which groups will or will not be able to beat experts. Second, Page uses this to offer a broad defence of the cognitive virtues of diversity. When the members of a group have diverse sets of mental tools, group decision making (under certain assumptions) is less likely to get stuck at suboptimal solutions, and more likely to arrive at superior ways of doing things. As Jim Johnson pointed out a few months ago, this means that Page is able to offer a _pragmatic_ defence of diversity practices in hiring, education etc – having a diverse set of points of view in a group means better decision making. [click to continue…]

Norman Podhoretz on the _National Review Cruise_, 2007.

“Aren’t you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?” Buckley snaps at Podhoretz. He has just explained that he supported the war reluctantly, because Dick Cheney convinced him Saddam Hussein had WMD primed to be fired. “No,” Podhoretz replies. “As I say, they were shipped to Syria. During Gulf war one, the entire Iraqi air force was hidden in the deserts in Iran.” He says he is “heartbroken” by this “rise of defeatism on the right.” He adds, apropos of nothing, “There was nobody better than Don Rumsfeld. This defeatist talk only contributes to the impression we are losing, when I think we’re winning.” The audience cheers Podhoretz. The nuanced doubts of Bill Buckley leave them confused. Doesn’t he sound like the liberal media? Later, over dinner, a tablemate from Denver calls Buckley “a coward.” His wife nods and says, “Buckley’s an old man,” tapping her head with her finger to suggest dementia.

Ted Barlow on the _National Review Cruise_, 2003.

4:00 (Lounge 3) Seminar: Dealing with Cognitive Dissonance: Economics

Lie down and relax, as the staff of the National Review explain, in soothing tones, how the massive growth in government spending, net loss of jobs, the steel tariff, and explosive deficit growth during the Bush presidency are all part of a clever, clever plan. So clever. (Featuring ambient mix by Mobius Dick- Glenn Reynolds samples the first Orb album in its entirety and then adds, “Indeed” in a dreamy voice. CDs available.) (Note: Dealing with Cognitive Dissonance: Iraq attracted more interest than anticipated. We will cover WMDs in a special session on Thursday)

Looks like the Thursday session ended up getting delayed again …

Ezra Klein asks

This is one of my perennial bafflements, but the lack of suggestions on my request for political science blogs reminds me how odd the robust representation of economists in the blogosphere really is. Between Tyler Cowen, Mark Thoma, Brad DeLong, Max Sawicky, Dani Rodrick, Greg Mankiw, Kash Monsori, the folks at Angry Bear, and all the other econobloggers out there, a fairly broad channel has arisen for publicizing and popularizing relevant economic research in the political sphere. Not so with relevant political science research, even as it it would seem, if anything, more relevant. Why have economists taken to the blogosphere in so much greater numbers, and with so much more apparent success, than practitioners of other disciplines that also intersect with contemporary politics?

and the blogosphere delivers, sort of. I’ve set up a blog to link to new political science papers that are likely to be of interest to a general audience (where ‘general audience’ denotes the kinds of people who read Ezra, CT, Dan Drezner’s blog etc). At the moment, it consists of nothing more than abstracts of interesting papers and links to them. I hope over time to do a bit more than that (but not for a couple of months; I also have a book to finish over the summer). This is intended to be somewhat more specifically pol-sci focused than _Political Theory Daily Review_ (now at Bookforum) but also to appeal to people who aren’t cardcarrying political scientists. Please feel free to email me suggestions for papers to link (I know that there are a fair few political scientists who read CT, including a couple of journal editors; send me stuff and if it’s appropriate, I’ll happily link to it). Such suggestions should include the abstract or other relevant info for the paper, the bibliographical details, and, of course, the URL. Feel free also to make suggestions as to how the site can be improved (it’s rather barebones at the moment, but will get a little prettier over time).

I’d started to write a short post responding to the first of Michael Gorman’s essays on the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ blog about the Eclipse of Reason in the Age of the Internet, but given up. However enjoyable the shoddiness of Gorman’s reasoning and grotesque luxuriance of his metaphors (the new digital barbarians are associated in succession with creationists, global warming deniers, Maoists, hive mind wannabes, dirty Haight-Ashbury hippies, and some sinister Borg-like collective), it was hard to get into it with a piece of which nearly a quarter was an extended rejoinder to our old friend, Some Dude in a Comments Section Somewhere. Thankfully, Scott has taken up the grim task of responding from his berth at _Inside Higher Ed_. This bit towards the end seems to sum it up nicely:

The tone of Gorman’s remedial lecture implies that educators now devote the better part of their day to teaching students to shove pencils up their nose while Googling for pornography. … But the idea that new forms of media require training in new kinds of literacy hardly counts as an evasion of the obligation to cultivate critical intelligence. Today the work of acquiring knowledge on a given subject often includes the burden of evaluating digital material…. let’s not pretend that such nostalgia is anything but escapism at best. What really bothers the neo-Luddite quasi-Mandarin is not the rise of digitality, as such. The problem actually comes from “the diminished sacredness of authority,” as Edward Shils once put it, “the reduction in the awe it evokes and in the charisma attributed to it.”

I can see why the _Encyclopedia Britannica_ has an urgent interest in pushing this line, but I don’t understand why the intellectual standards of argument among its appointed critics is so low (and they aren’t an aberration; I understand that they’ve made somewhat of an effort to publicize these pieces and get them talked about). There’s a quite reasonable and serious case to be made about the flaws of Web 2.0 type technologies (I tend meself to think that these flaws are greatly outweighed by the advantages, but I certainly recognize that they exist and can be quite important). However, I’m not aware of anyone, apart from the odd blogger in the odd blogpost who is making that case in a compelling and sophisticated way (I’d be grateful to be pointed towards any counterexamples by commenters).

As mentioned below, the member states of the EU are starting a new round of negotiations on a replacement for the constitutional treaty that went down in flames thanks to referendum defeats in 2005. Below the break my own doubtless idiosyncratic take as to what is at stake and what is important. [click to continue…]

I’m just back from a conference/research trip to Europe, where this recent piece by Adam Michnik in the _New York Review of Books_ was recommended to me by an expert in Polish affairs as an indispensable account of the Kaczyński regime and its lustration law. Regardless of the underlying debate about whether or not former collaborators should be made to reveal their actions, Michnik’s piece makes for grimmish reading:

But the lustration law was only one act among many in a systematic effort by the ruling Law and Justice party and its supporters to undermine the country’s democratic institutions. Since their election victory in 2005, the Kaczyńskis and their governing coalition have attempted to blur the separation of powers in order to strengthen the executive branch they control. … In the ministries and state institutions, numerous civil servants have been summarily replaced by unqualified but loyal newcomers. The independence of the mass media—especially of public radio and television— was curtailed by changes in personnel instigated by the government and by pressures to control the content of what was published and broadcast. The Kaczyński administration’s efforts to centralize power have limited both the activities of the independent groups that make up civil society and the autonomy of local and regional government. …

Today, Poland is ruled by a coalition of three parties: post-Solidarity revanchists of the Law and Justice party; post-Communist provincial trouble-makers of the Self-Defense Party; and the heirs of pre–World War II chauvinist, xenophobic, and anti-Semitic groups that form the League of Polish Families. That coalition is supported by Radio Maryja, a Catholic nationalist radio station and media group that is fundamentalist both in its ethnic Polish nationalism and its commitment to Polish Catholic clericalism…. The Constitutional Court stood up to its responsibilities and, after repeated government efforts to postpone the court’s session and to impeach its judges, it reviewed the new law and found it unconstitutional.

As my informant notes, the Kaczyński brothers have not themselves indulged in anti-Semitic rhetoric. Furthermore, their distrust and suspicion of the intentions of Germany (more on this when I write about the EU Treaty negotiations) is to some extent justified – the German government has shown itself entirely too willing to sell its eastern neighbours out in order to keep Russian gas flowing. Even so, there’s something decidedly creepy and worrying about their apparent willingness to trample over civil liberties in order to go after their enemies.

As a follow-up to the op-ed discussed below, the _Financial Times_ are running a questions and answers session with Vaclav Klaus on global warming. I warmly encourage CT readers with an interest in maintaining the high quality of scientific discussion in our business press to contribute questions to the conversation. These questions should be polite (I presume that overly impolite ones will be zapped by the moderators in any event), but I don’t see why readers with scientific expertise shouldn’t make some pointed and specific queries regarding the state of debate, and Mr. Klaus’s own particular take on it. Details below.

Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, argues in the Financial Times that ambitious environmentalism is the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity.

Mr Klaus writes that “global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem” and the issue “is more about social than natural sciences and more about man and his freedom than about tenths of a degree Celsius changes in average global temperature.”

Do you agree? Or do small climate changes demand far-reaching restrictive measures? Mr Klaus will answer your questions in an online Q&A. Post a question now to ask@ft.com or use the online submissions form below – his answers will appear on Thursday June 21 from 1pm BST.

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I didn’t think they made them like this anymore. Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, tries to figure out how many denialist cliches can be squeezed into a single 700 word op-ed . The results aren’t edifying.

One exceptionally warm winter is enough – irrespective of the fact that in the course of the 20th century the global temperature increased only by 0.6 per cent – for the environmentalists and their followers to suggest radical measures to do something about the weather, and to do it right now. … Al Gore’s so-called “documentary” film … The author Michael Crichton stated it clearly … global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem. It requires courage to oppose the “established” truth, although a lot of people – including top-class scientists – see the issue of climate change entirely differently. They protest against the arrogance of those who advocate the global warming hypothesis and relate it to human activities. … I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. …The environmentalists … do not believe in the long-term positive impact of economic growth and ignore both the technological progress that future generations will undoubtedly enjoy, and the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society, the higher is the quality of the environment. … Does it make any sense to speak about warming of the Earth when we see it in the context of the evolution of our planet over hundreds of millions of years?

_Und so weiter_

Update – I somehow neglected to quote the best bit – Klaus’s exhortation to “resist the politicisation of science and oppose the term “scientific consensus”, which is always achieved only by a loud minority, never by a silent majority.”

I’ve been planning to write up something on Dan Nexon and Tom Wright’s _APSR_ piece on the politics of empires, which I think is a really important piece of work in international relations theory but haven’t gotten around to it yet (other promised reviews to finish first – next up Scott Page’s new book). Luckily, Alex Cooley has done it for me. The original article is available as a PDF here.