Henry

I’m thinking of getting an electronic reader, now that display technologies are finally catching up, but have been unimpressed with reviews of the Sony Reader, which seems to be the market leader in the US. The iRex Iliad looks to have better specs, but I haven’t seen any proper reviews of it. It doesn’t handle proprietary DRM stuff, but that’s not what I’m interested in reading – I want it more to reduce the load of book and article manuscripts that I always seem to lug with me when I am going from place to place. Anyone out there who has this machine (or another competitor), and is prepared to offer advice/opinions?

The recent profusion of posts on beard shaving has attracted a slightly more sophisticated class of comment-spammer to CT than the usual midget-porn purveyors we hose out of the moderation queue every morning.

I’ve been hiding under my facial hair for so long because of life circumstances it was no point in getting involved. Now life is starting to look better and I’m not under such stress and crap. I might just have to get back in the game… How do I attract women? I suppose I need to do more than just shave or use the ever-popular [name of pheromone product deleted]. I’m gonna have to ditch my caveman culture and transform myself a little I guess. The secret is that i use pheromones [url deleted] for attracting women. They are like magic.

It’s unclear whether this is a good or a bad thing.

I haven’t seen much coverage in either US newspapers or the blogosphere of the developing crisis in Pakistan. Not knowing very much more than what I read in the newspapers, I’m not able to contribute much myself. But I do want to point to this FT article which provides what seems to me to be an excellent overview of the politics.

Not since September 12 2001 has Pervez Musharraf found himself under such pressure. … Five and a half years later, as blowback from the war in Afghanistan pushes anti-American sentiment in Pakistan to new levels, the political cost to Gen Musharraf of being seen as a puppet of the administration of President George W. Bush is becoming unsustainable. This week, Gen Musharraf revealed his own mounting unpopularity when he provoked nationwide protests by unceremoniously suspending the chief justice of the Supreme Court. The top judge, Iftikhar Chaudhary, is understood to have alarmed Gen Musharraf by taking an independent stand on a number of controversial cases and potentially jeopardising the general’s re-election plans. By accepting, in particular, that there should be an investigation into suspected “disappearances” of terror suspects, Mr Chaudhary seems to have overstepped the mark. … judge – who claims to have been roughed up and stripped of his mobile phone, car and passport – has become the rallying point for all the disaffected of Gen Musharraf’s Pakistan. … “It’s a whirlpool right now,” says Taffazul Rizvi, a US-trained Pakistani lawyer. “It’s an emerging situation, which can take down anyone, including Musharraf.” … Gen Musharraf’s political weakness will, in time, inevitably undermine his relations with the US, his chief patron, and prompt Washington to look for ways to bolster the credibility of its ally, possibly by encouraging the general to co-opt one or other of the two exiled political leaders in a broad coalition. … Diplomats in Islamabad worry it may be too late for such political fixes. Religious radicalism is spreading so rapidly that there is little time left to save Pakistan’s moderate political parties and institutions such as the Supreme Court that are central to the functioning of any future democracy.

Those more knowledgeable than myself should feel free to add to/contradict/etc in comments.

I came across James Fallows’ 1991 piece on _The Economist_ (to which my subscription has just lapsed), The Economics of the Colonial Cringe, and thought it pretty interesting. On the one hand, this seems a little dated:

In functional terms, The Economist is more like the Wall Street Journal than like any other American publication. In each there’s a kind of war going on between the news articles and the editorial pages. The news articles are not overly biased and try to convey the complex reality of, well, the news. Meanwhile, the editorials and “leaders” push a consistent line, often at odds with the facts reported on the news pages of the same issue.

If there’s any marked difference these days between the line touted in the editorial pages line and the perspective of the news articles, I can’t detect it. The _WSJ_ seems to still have a firewall between the two (although in fairness its editorial pages are also far loopier than those of the _Economist_).

On the other, this still seems bang on the mark.

The other ugly English trait promoting The Economist’s success in America is the Oxford Union argumentative style. At its epitome, it involves a stance so cocksure of its rightness and superiority that it would be a shame to freight it with mere fact. American debate contests involve grinding, yearlong concentration on one doughy issue, like arms control. The forte of Oxford-style debate is to be able to sound certain and convincing about a topic pulled out of the air a few minutes before, such as “Resolved: That women are not the fairer sex.” (The BBC radio shows “My Word” and “My Music,” carried on National Public Radio, give a sample of the desired impromptu glibness.) Economist leaders and the covers that trumpet their message offer Americans a blast of this style. Michael Kinsley, who once worked at The Economist, wrote that the standard Economist leader gives you the feeling that the writer started out knowing that three steps must be taken immediately — and then tried to think what the steps should be.

A third post mentioning Tyler Cowen in less than a week; this time for his post on the rationality of boycotting. I was thinking of this already today, after reading Steve Bainbridge on the change in the _New York Times_ paywall policy. As of today, anyone with a .edu email address should be able to access Times Select for free. I never subscribed to Times Select, mostly because it was a bundled package. I would happily have paid $40 a year to read Paul Krugman’s column on its own – but didn’t, because I would have been paying for Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman and Brooks too (the last of whom I used to find the most infuriating of the lot when I was able to read him, because I felt that he was smart enough to write, think and argue so much better than he did).

Tyler suggests that in general it’s better just to send money to the people that you want to help, but that boycotting may make sense if you want to hurt the individual being boycotted, and know that your boycotting is likely to hurt him/her. I don’t think that the latter this is my motivation here – I’ve no particular desire to hurt any of ’em (although I’d probably pull on Friedman’s mustache of understanding if I was in the lift with him, just because). It’s more that I’d feel uncomfortably intimate if I paid for the service; I’d feel as though I was specifically choosing to support a crowd of people whom I have no desire to support. Which is to say that decisions to buy can sometimes be less market-rational than they are expressive. I suspect that the same is true of many boycotters (though certainly not all) – they aren’t necessarily seeking to achieve concrete results so much as they’re expressing their identity through market choices.

Gonzales a couple of minutes ago at his press conference:

Let me just say one thing. I’ve overcome a lot of obstacles in my life to become attorney-general. I am here not because I [pause] give up. I am here because I learn from my mistakes, I accept responsibility, and because I’m committed to doing my job. And that is what I intend to do for the American people.

I reckon that’s a Galbraith Score of one right there.

Ted Moran and Gary Hufbauer contemplate the unthinkable in the _Financial Times_; a world in which the US actually had to live up to basic International Labour Organization standards. [click to continue…]

Tyler Cowen has a pretty interesting essay.

The more wealth we have, the more government we can afford. Furthermore, the better government operates, the more government people will demand. That is the fundamental paradox of libertarianism. Many initial victories bring later defeats. I am not so worried about this paradox of libertarianism. Overall libertarians should embrace these developments. We should embrace a world with growing wealth, growing positive liberty, and yes, growing government. We don’t have to favor the growth in government per se, but we do need to recognize that sometimes it is a package deal. … We need to recognize that some of the current threats to liberty are outside of the old categories. I worry about pandemics and natural disasters, as well as global warming and climate change more generally (it doesn’t have to be carbon-induced to be a problem). These developments are big threats to the liberty of many people in the world, although not necessarily Americans. The best answers to these problems don’t always lie on the old liberty/power spectrum in a simple way. … Intellectual property … Another major problem – the major problem in my view – is nuclear proliferation … In short, I would like to restructure classical liberalism, or libertarianism — whatever we call it — around these new and very serious threats to liberty. Let’s not fight the last battle or the last war. Let’s not obsess over all the interventions represented by the New Deal, even though I would agree that most of those policies were bad ideas.

The essay seems to me to glom together two, quite different theses – that the demand for government increases along with wealth, and that new, complex global problems require more government intervention than most libertarians would care for. Even so, his call for a pragmatic libertarianism seems on target to me (I’d vastly prefer a political debate in which smart libertarians acknowledged that global warming was a major problem in need of a political solution, and contributed insights from their own perspective, to a debate in which many libertarians either minimize the problem or suggest that no real political solution is possible).

Tyler Cowen has a “new post”: which clarifies why he objects to pro-union legislation.

Labor-run firms are common in law, book agency, real estate, landscaping, and many other sectors; we even see them in airlines. When labor in charge creates more value, labor starts its own firms or buys out the capitalist or buys greater control rights. Growing capital markets make these evolutions easier all the time. Cooperatives, which are governed by consumers, also are found. Mutuals, non-profits, and yes unionized firms are common too. I heart all of these organizational forms. Keep in mind that if both workers and customers will be better off, yes it probably can happen; it is naive to think that liquidity problems are the major issues preventing workers from enjoying greater control rights. In the short run, the mental model of the left-wing bloggers is a bunch of janitors trying to get better working conditions but opposed by employers. In the longer run what is striking is the competition across different organizational forms. It doesn’t always make sense to give labor residual control rights over capital goods, or the right to halt production.

[click to continue…]

It’s probably getting on towards bedtime in the Netherlands, so Ingrid may not have seen that Michael Brintnall, executive director of APSA, has responded in comments

The annual meeting papers are not meant to be sold, and All Academic is taking them down. It was a mistake that caused them to be up for sale at that site, and we regret it. … The papers are on-line at www.politicalscience.org as part of the PROl initiative. This is an open-access site, operated as a collaboration of APSA and a large number of other political science associations. It’s an extension of APSA’s PROceedings site, where papers are posted for each annual meeting, and it brings together scholarship from a host of other annual meetings too. It’s a good place to search for early scholarship, and I encourage you to use it. All-Academic is the contractor that we use to set up the site. There was some recent confusion about their including our papers in their own for-sale data base. None of the papers from the politicalscience.org project is meant to be at the All Academic site for sale and they are removing them. … I hope this hiccup with All Academic doesn’t fuel any cynicism about making early scholarship like this available on an open access basis – it’s the purpose of the politicalscience.org project, and it’s what academic discourse is about.

This seems to me to be a perfectly gracious response and explanation. As noted in comments, I would like to see APSA consider a different technology – politicalscience.org’s current system has session specific links, which means that e.g. bloggers can’t easily link to interesting political science papers. A system with permalinks like arXiv would allow for much better circulation of political science papers in the general public conversation. But that’s a topic for a different day.

Julian Sanchez is right. That is all.

I’ve a new bloggingheads with Will Wilkinson up. The first topic (and unsurprisingly the one we disagree about most vigorously) is unions and card check (Will is skeptical that employers either have asymmetrical bargaining power vis-a-vis workers, or are likely to abuse their position). I’d wanted to refer in our debate to a story that provides strongly suggestive evidence regarding the real reason why employers and their political allies are opposed to card check but couldn’t find it on the interwebs in time; Kris Raab (who, unlike me, has access to the _Daily Labor Report_ ) was able to find it for me later.

A legislative proposal that would make it easier for labor unions to organize workers through a union authorization card process would allow them to bypass a formal election process and could prevent employers from making a case for why workers should not join a union, former Labor Department [deputy secretary] Steven Law told a wholesalers and distributors industry group Feb. 1. … Speaking at an executive summit of the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors (NAW) in Washington, Law advised the group’s members to focus their lobbying efforts against the labor-friendly Republicans who co-sponsored previous versions of the legislation. … Law told the NAW meeting that unions view the card-check process as key to building their membership. He said the bill would make it more economical for unions to organize smaller companies. “This is a holy grail solution to build themselves up and become a fighting force once more.” … At least one person in the audience did not seem have a problem with the legislation and complained during a question-and-answer period that Law’s comments portrayed union organizing as “heinous.” Law replied, “If you think that unionizing is a great thing, then this (legislation) is a great thing.” He later told BNA that his comments were not meant to portray unions as good or bad, but to emphasize that the card-check legislation could bypass the secret ballot process [HF-you can almost hear the reporter’s incredulity leaking through]. Also during the question-and-answer period, another audience member spoke out against EFCA, voicing disapproval of the legislation, and saying the bill is “very, very dangerous.” According to that audience member, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters sought to organize 30 of his company’s drivers in 2003, but obtained only 11 signed union authorization cards. Unless an employer learns of the organizing drive, “You have no chance to retaliate–I shouldn’t say retaliate,” he said to peals of nervous laughter from the audience. Rather, he corrected himself, “You have no chance to say [as an employer] what’s going on.”

Opposition to card check is all about stopping unionization, and providing opportunities for employers to retaliate against pro-union employees. Not that this is exactly news to anyone who follows this stuff (the National Association of Manufacturers have never been the most credible-sounding converts to the cause of democracy in the workplace), but it’s unusual to see it stated as bluntly as it’s stated here.

Brad DeLong on China and Jeff Faux:

In general, we have a choice between policies. We can eliminate or sharply restrict trade with an odious regime–as we do with Cuba–in the hope that it will put pressure on it for reform. We can encourage the maximum possible trade with an odious regime–as we do with China–in the hope that the more economic, cultural, and political contact there is the more we strengthen the forces over there that we like. Which of these policies we follow will have impacts on domestic income distribution–but much smaller impacts than do our educational, social insurance, and tax policies which do much, much more to move wealth and opportunity down or up the American income distribution. I tend to be on the side of free trade abroad and social democracy at home. But I am not sure that I am right. I am sure, however, that painting the issues as Davos plutocrats (and their water carriers) and commissars-turned-capitalists on one side and America’s working people on the other doesn’t move us forward at all.

I don’t agree with Brad that ‘painting the issues as Davos plutocrats … doesn’t move us forward at all.’ The consonance between mainstream political opinion on China and the interests of American businesses hungry for access to the Chinese market surely reflects in part the efforts of think tanks and politicians who depend on aforementioned businesses for funding and donations. But I do agree that there’s more to the story. The most interesting piece I’ve read on this recently is James Mann’s long article (behind paywall) in the current issue of _The American Prospect_. [click to continue…]

This short, funny paper on the “denialist’s deck of cards” by Chris Hoofnagle does a pretty good job at identifying a stock set of lobbyist/glibertarian responses to various proposals for consumer legislation.

Most of these arguments can be cogent in certain contexts. Sometimes the industry is correct on the facts and the issues. In others, the arguments [are] not. … The point of listing denialists’ arguments in this fashion is to show the rhetorical progression of groups that are not seeking a dialogue but rather an outcome. As such, this taxonomy is extremely cynical, but it is a reflection of and reaction to how poor the public policy debates.

Not as short and to the point as Whale Central Station but pretty useful nonetheless. Via Larry Solum.