Henry

I’m pretty happy with how the Academic Blogs wiki that I started last September is working out. From a selfish point of view, it’s relieved me of the responsibility of manually updating the list (I do keep a regular eye on it to weed out spam etc). But more importantly, it provides serious coverage of parts of the academic blogosphere that I personally don’t have a clue about. CF for example the burgeoning list of blogs in religion and theology ; also the list of blogs in French, German, Danish etc. All this said, I’d like the list to be even more comprehensive than it is. The only way to do this is to get the word out, so I’m politely asking people who like the general idea of this resource to consider linking to it, in a post, in their blogroll, or (ideally) in both. The more people know about the wiki, the more people are likely to enter in details of academic blogs that they write themselves, or read. What I’d like to do in a few months is use the information in the wiki as the initial basis for a rough census of the academic blogosphere; who is blogging in what disciplines, at what stage of their careers and so on. I think this would make for pretty interesting reading, and the more comprehensive the wiki is as a map of the academic blogosphere, the more accurate the census will be.

This story from the _Irish Times_ ought to be of interest to US readers.

A Californian technology firm with only a handful of workers in Dublin funnelled revenues of almost $1 billion (€762 million) into an Irish holding company which made more than a quarter of its profits. SanDisk Manufacturing made a net profit of $105.96 million on revenues of $955 million in the eight months after its Irish unit started business in April 2005 …By accounting for such revenues in Ireland, they take advantage of the 12.5 per cent rate of corporate taxation on their profits, a rate that compares favourably with other EU states and the US. … SanDisk indicated last year that the total cost of setting up its Irish operation was less than $500,000. It said then that tax “certainly was part of the consideration” when moving here but that tax “certainly was not the determining factor,”

Sandisk isn’t the only company doing this, of course, but its (to employ the common euphemism) ‘tax-avoidance strategy’ is more blatant than most. The US is pretty vigorous about reclaiming taxes from citizens living abroad, but has been curiously supine in its attitude to the various schemes that US companies have come up withto relocate revenues outside the taxman’s grasp. Some of this is probably unavoidable – large multinational corporations have complicated internal flows of revenue which they can manipulate to make tax-dodges look legitimate – but the failure of companies like Sandisk even to try to hide what they’re up to suggests that they don’t expect much in the way of enforcement action.

I’m teaching James Scott’s _Seeing Like a State_ today (the only academic work I’ve ever read that made me want to dash off a fan-letter to the author), and on re-reading it spotted a passage that seemed possibly relevant to something I’ve sometimes wondered about. Scott is talking about how European states imposed universal last names on their populations, the better to tax and monitor them.

The legislative imposition of permanent surnames is particularly clear in the case of Western European Jews who had no tradition of last names. A Napoleonic decree “concernant les Juifs qui n’ont pas de nom de famille et de prenoms fixes,” in 1808, required Jews to choose last names or, if they refused, to have fixed last names chosen for them. In Prussia the emancipation of the Jews was contingent on the adoption of surnames.

Which may go some way to explaining the puzzle that I’m interested in – why so many Jewish last names of German (or perhaps Yiddish?) origin refer to natural phenomena, with endings such as berg (mountain), stein (stone), wald (forest), baum (tree), blum (flower) and so on. The Italian Jewish name Montefiore (mountain of flowers) is possibly an example of the same thing, but I don’t know whether it’s typical of a broader phenomenon or a singular aberration. If this is part of the story, I’d be interested to know whether these are names that 18th and 19th century European Jews chose for themselves, or were pressured to take by various German state authorities. Any historians of Jewish culture out there who know the answer?

Garance Franke-Ruta accuses John Edwards of having no foreign policy principles.

Was it really just a month ago that John Edwards was speaking to an Israeli audience at Herzliya and saying [that Iran was at the top of the list of threats to the world and Israel]. … Because Variety’s Peter Bart reports that he has rather dramatically changed his tune [saying that perhaps the greatest short-term threat to world peace was the possibility that Israel would bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities]. … How a serious presidential candidate could so rapidly go from taking a foreign policy position to saying that people who share that position are a grave threat to world peace is beyond me. … How is anyone supposed to trust that he means anything that he says now?

Now Edwards has been less than adept in talking about foreign policy issues, but not only is it clear to me that these points of view are compatible, but they arguably follow from each other. One of the arguments that I’ve heard repeatedly in informal discussions with Iran hawks is that the US needs to talk tough on Iran, and take direct action against it, because if it doesn’t, Israel will, perhaps provoking a major regional conflagration. In other words, you can both be in favour of (a) not taking the option of US bombing off the table, and (b) worry about what would happen if Israel decided to bomb Iran. To be clear, I’m vigorously opposed to bombing Iran myself (if nothing else, bombing is likely to be useless in achieving its express aims). I suspect that Edwards isn’t too keen on the idea either, and is more interested in rattling sabres to deter Iran’s nuclear efforts than in declaring war on Iran (although I suspect that his maladroitness has left some serious hostages to fortune if he gets the nomination and runs against a more hawkish Republican). But it’s clear to me that Franke-Ruta is flat out wrong in suggesting that this particular statement is evidence of untrustworthiness – it may attract political controversy (which is why the campaign seems to be back-peddling) but it’s a pretty unexceptionable claim. You don’t have to be either pro- or anti-Israel to recognize that Israeli action against Iran is likely to have pretty nasty consequences for the entire region. This is a broadly shared analysis, even if it isn’t often directly articulated; cf the first Gulf War, Hussein’s efforts to drag Israel in by lobbing Scuds, and Israel’s restraint, partly at the urging of the US, from retaliating.

Note to commenters: as usual, I will be policing comments and anything that drifts into a general discussion of the merits and demerits of Israel/Palestine etc will be ruthlessly deleted. I’ll be paying particular attention to the comments of past repeat offenders (yes, abb1; that means you).

Eszter is the CT expert on life-enhancing information technologies, but I thought that some readers might be interested in a service, Airset, that my wife and I have been using for the last several weeks. We’d been looking for a long while for some sort of scheduling software that would allow us to keep track of our respective obligations and to synch with Palm and Outlook, but hadn’t found anything very good. Yahoo! calendar synchs, if you’re prepared to beat some very badly documented software into submission, but the calendar isn’t very flexible. Google calendar is considerably better, but it doesn’t synch (there are some third party packages out there that allow synching with Google’s service, but for one reason or another, they weren’t what we were looking for). Airset synchs and does a lot more besides, allowing us to maintain separate calendars, to share events as needed, and really organize our lives. And (unless you want an optional service allowing you to maintain your calendar from your phone), it’s free. It’s straightforward, nicely designed, and incredibly easy to use – vastly better than any other competing product I’ve come across so far. Another worthwhile software package is Foxit reader – a pdf reader which is smaller, neater, and much better behaved than Acrobat, and has recently been substantially upgraded. Other technology recommendations welcomed in comments (I discovered Foxit thanks to a similar thread at Jim Henley’s place back in the day).

“The problem with espousing hatred of gay people and darkly suggesting they “shouldn’t exist”? It creates problems for homophobes.”

Full explication/evisceration at Julian Sanchez’ place.

Charlie Cray forwarded me a link to this forthcoming documentary on the demise of independent bookstores and the rise of chains. This is something that I have more ambiguous feelings about than many lefty academics. On the one hand, there are independent bookstores in DC and elsewhere that I love, cherish, and try to shop in whenever I get a chance. But on the other, I grew up in a small town without a bookshop of any description whatsoever, a place which was a little like Penelope Fitzgerald’s Hardborough before Ms Green arrives. A couple of times a year I would go to Fred Hanna’s when we visited relatives in Dublin, but the rest of the time I relied on what I could get from the local library or the small rack of paperbacks at the local newsagent. I’d have killed for a chain bookstore somewhere close by, and I find it hard to imagine that my teenage equivalent somewhere out there in the heartland today wouldn’t feel the same way.

There is something being lost as independent bookstores close; a lot of valuable, local knowledge possessed by smart, book-obsessed employees who could give good leads on other books that you ought to read if you liked or were interested in _x_. But the increase in choice provided by the spread of chains (and the Internet) to places that were badly served in the past isn’t to be discounted either. What is a more unalloyed tragedy in my eyes (and not only mine; I think I’m stealing this claim from Teresa Nielsen Hayden) is the demise of the kind of variegated paperbook rack in the newsagent/drugstore that got me reading in the first place. These mixed together bestsellers, unabashed junk, and all sorts of other obscure, semi-obscure and eccentric books. They got me hooked on reading. My impression is that these racks aren’t out there any more, in either Ireland or the US – the places that had them have either gotten rid of them altogether, or only use them to sell the same five or six bestsellers that everyone else is selling.

I read this post by Jodi Dean a week or two ago, and found one of her claims a little annoying; in the middle of criticizing efforts to ‘define’ the subject matter and approach of various intellectual approaches, she opines:

Can it mean anything, then, to reject or criticize political theory as a whole? If one is a formal modeller, yes. One is saying that only with formal methods can anything significant be said about politics. But, this is not a critique. It is simply a rejection. I don’t critique formal modelling in my work. I simply reject it. I find it uninteresting and irrelevant.

Now this may quite likely just be unfortunate wording on her part, but it reads to me as though she is ‘defining’ formal modellers as people who argue that only formal methods allow you to say anything significant about politics. Which, if this were indeed what she meant to say, is not only a sweeping generalization, but quite untrue.

But this post isn’t meant to be a gotcha; I accept that it’s quite likely that she meant to say something different. What I want to write about is something else altogether. When someone from a particular intellectual community rejects another intellectual community _tout court_, as Jodi Dean is doing here, what might you recommend them to read in order to show that the intellectual product of this community has meaning on _their_ terms, as best as you understand them?

In this particular case, I think I’d recommend Jodi read Donald/Deirdre McCloskey’s _The Rhetoric of Economics_, possibly together with Ariel Rubinstein’s “Comments on the Interpretation of Game Theory” (Econometrica 59 (1991):909-24) to show how questions of rhetoric and interpretation are absolutely central to unresolved difficulties at the heart of formal theory. If I were trying to persuade a Habermasian, I’d suggest instead that they take a look at Jim Johnson’s “Is Talk Really Cheap? Prompting Conversation Between Critical Theory and Rational Choice.” (American Political Science Review 87 (1993):74-86) instead. If I were trying to persuade a skeptical formal modeler to go in the other direction, I might suggest Bourdieu’s _Distinction_. Which makes for a broader point, I think. There are very few intellectual communities that are so completely antithetical to each other that there aren’t some points of tangency between them, books; articles, essays that potentially speak to both. These points of tangency are probably not going to be part of the core conversation in either community, but they’re usually the more interesting for that. Any others out there worth mentioning?

Another bloggingheads, this time with Megan McArdle on global warming, minimum wage and healthcare, for those as wants to see (not as much in the way of fireworks as those who have seen our interactions in the blogosphere might expect).

As “Brad”::http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/02/could_this_be_t.html mentioned a couple of days ago, Ethan Zuckerman has an interesting and worrying factlet on his blog.

Having tea with my friend Abe McLaughlin this afternoon, he mentioned that, of the two hundred fifty foreign correspondents, one hundred are employed by the Wall Street Journal. I wondered about the geographical distribution of that hundred and the other reporters – would we find a huge concentration of journalists in Iraq and Israel? Would we find any in Africa other than in Cairo and Jo’burg?

The problem, it seems to me, isn’t only about geographic distribution of interest; it’s about the kinds of issues that these correspondents are likely to write stories about. As conventional newspapers cut down on their overseas reporting, it’s ever more necessary to turn to specialized newspapers such as the _Wall Street Journal_ and the _Financial Times_ to get solid, detailed coverage of what’s happening outside the US. But even if these are both genuinely great newspapers (the WSJ’s news reportage, as opposed to its editorial pages, is excellent), they tend necessarily to focus on issues that US and UK businesspeople are interested in, and subtly to spin their stories accordingly. This means that plenty of stories that would be of interest to non-business people don’t get reported on at all well in the major English language press, and that when they do get reported, their coverage often subtly reflects the priorities of a pretty specific and limited set of social interests. Nor are the blogosphere and related forms of information gathering at all a perfect solution for this problem. Even if blogs like Abu Aardvark provide insight into the Arab media that you don’t get from the mainstream press, Ethan’s research on ‘global attention profiles’ suggests that the blogosphere is actually worse in some respects than mainstream media in drawing attention to under-reported parts of the world (elite bloggers tend to do a little better, but not much). I suspect (but don’t have any smoking gun evidence to prove this) that the same kinds of distortion characterize issue coverage too.

Putin’s speech on the evils of US unipolarity has gotten a lot of chewing over in the press and blogosphere, but one part of his argument hasn’t gotten much attention.

Finally the president turned his attention to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which has always gotten a strong response from him. “They are trying to transform the OSCE into a vulgar instrument designed to promote the foreign policy interests of one or a group of countries. And this task is also being accomplished by the OSCE’s bureaucratic apparatus, which is absolutely not connected with the state founders in any way. Decision-making procedures and the involvement of so-called nongovernmental organizations are tailored for this task. These organizations are formally independent but they are purposefully financed and therefore under control.”

[click to continue…]

From the acknowledgements page of Christopher Howard’s _The Hidden Welfare State: Tax Expenditures and Social Policy in the United States_ (Powells has cheap hardbacks).

No one in his right mind would choose to study and write about tax expenditures (better known as tax loopholes) knowing in advance that it entailed a ten year commitment. Investigating the ins and outs of the byzantine U.S. tax code is simply not its own reward, which is why many people pay lawyers and accountants good money to do it for them. If someone were going to study tax expenditures for longer than a day or two, he or she would need to come upon the topic by accident. Over time, that someone might develop a curious affection for tax expenditures, much as one does for a stray dog or cat that keeps hanging around the house. Even then, one would have to remind oneself constantly that studying tax expenditures was not the ultimate goal, but a means of saying something interesting about a larger issue, like U.S. social policy. At least that has been my experience.

I just took a cab to work, trying in vain to get to an interesting talk before it started, and got stuck in traffic. While stranded in a traffic jam somewhere around Connecticut and L I was somewhat bemused to see a whopping big advertisement on the back of the bus in front of me for The Hill‘s Pundit Blog. I tried to get a photo with my phone, but screwed it up. It made me feel pretty weird; it’s a very different blogosphere to the one that I started off in (I suspect the disconnect for the real old-timers is even bigger).

When I saw this story yesterday in the _FT_, my first reaction was to wonder what Tyler Cowen would think of it (not only does my mental model of Tyler often sit on my shoulder while I blog, making polite and well reasoned libertarian criticisms of my arguments, but the man has a direct interest in the topic at hand).

Indonesia, the country worst hit by the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus, has stopped sharing human genetic samples of the highly pathogenic illness with foreign laboratories, raising fears it could slow international efforts to prepare for a pandemic. … Officials say Indonesia stopped providing samples internationally last month, hindering efforts to confirm whether the virus killing its citizens is H5N1 and limiting production of vaccines to help prevent its spread. … “all will be revealed” on Wednesday, when Indonesian officials are due to announce they are collaborating with Baxter International, the world’s biggest maker of blood-disease products, on a vaccine.

The answer is that Tyler doesn't like it much. More generally, I think this is a pretty tough case for people (among whom I don’t count Tyler) who make overly strong claims about the benefits of intellectual property law for the spread of information, the production of drugs and the protection of human well being. At the least, it suggests that there are important instances where these arguments don’t work very well. It also presents some difficulties for those on the left who argue on behalf of giving intellectual property over drugs produced, say, from indigenous plants, to governments in the developing world; while there are still good equity arguments for doing this, there’s no necessary reason to think that these governments will use these rights more wisely or selflessly than big pharma (they’re more likely to be subject to popular pressure, but will often have material incentives that point the wrong way).