Henry

This is rather wonderful.

Harry’s post below reminds me that I’ve been meaning for years to recommend Michael de Larrabeiti’s Borrible trilogy (Powells, Amazon ) to parents of young ones with a certain disposition. Borribles are

generally skinny and have pointed ears which give them a slightly satanic appearance. They are pretty tough-looking and always scruffy, with their arses hanging out of their trousers. … The only people likely to get close to Borribles are ordinary children, because Borribles mix with them to escape detection by ‘the authorities’ who are always trying to catch them. … Normal kids are turned into Borribles very slowly, almost without being aware of it; but one day they wake up and there it is. It doesn’t matter where they come from as long as they’ve had what is called a bad start.

A section of the London police, the ‘Special Borrible Group,’ (the resonance is surely intended) is devoted to hunting them down and clipping their ears so that they turn into normal children. The best of the three books in my opinion is the first, _The Borribles_, in which a group of Borribles raid the warrens of the ‘ratlike’ and rather thinly disguised Rumbles, who live on Rumbledon Common, fight with pointed ‘rumble-sticks’ and are fearfully posh (‘you wevolting little stweet-awabs … how dare you tweat me in this fashion?’). The scene where a Borrible executes Great-Uncle Vulgarian by tossing an electric fire into his fancy bath-tub isn’t for the faint-hearted.

Also warmly recommended, although very different, is Ysabeau Wilce’s _Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog_ (Powells, Amazon, ). Well written, light and dryly funny, but (like Harry’s recommendation) with a considerable degree of psychological depth (the heroine’s relationship with her two, very different parents is touching and complicated).

Dan Drezner looks at the FT and wonders why economists are debating whether the euro might become the world’s reserve currency at the same time that EU citizens say that they don’t much like it. Perhaps some of the answer lies in the different priorities of citizens and central bank economists, as described in another FT article on the same topic.

But the results at least offer the European Central Bank comfort on one front: expectations of inflation-beating wage rises are not widespread. Just under half of adults in employment across the countries surveyed expect to receive a pay rise this year. Of those expecting a pay rise, roughly 23 per cent expect a rise above the rate of inflation but 24 per cent expect an increase below the rate. … Fears about inflationary pressures from the labour market are a main reason why the ECB has signalled further interest rate rises are likely.

This suggests that under 11.5% of citizens in the countries surveyed expect that their pay will increase in real terms this year (this at the same time, by the way, that London City types are writing op-eds telling readers how “we can all profit from million dollar City bonuses.”) Wage-inflation spirals how are ya. While the average punter may not draw the precise causal connections between (a) the institutionalized imperative for the European Central Bank to avoid inflation at all costs and (b) high interest rates and slow growth, he wouldn’t be all wrong to suspect that there’s something decidedly funny about the ECB’s priorities in setting monetary policy for the euro.

According to this article by Latanya Sweeney, one million hard disks with a total storage space of 90 terabytes were sold in 1983. My computer alone, purchased in late 2006, has one terabyte of storage space mounted in 2 RAID drives (I use them to back each other up). If my understanding that storage technology has yet to hit a brick wall is correct, it seems likely that a not-especially rich US consumer will have as much information storage capacity available to her as was available to the entire world in the early 1980s a few years down the line, if she wants it. (Sweeney’s article is really about the broader privacy issues that arise because of this expansion in the ability to store, and indeed to gather, personal information, but this figure hit me between the eyes when I read it).

Lifehacker links to an invention that I’ve thought for years would be a good idea (I’m sure that plenty of other people have had the same thought). Many people have their clocks running a few minutes fast, to encourage them to leave earlier for appointments to get there on time etc etc. The problem with this is that if you’re half-way rational, you’ll correct for the error, making it useless. So the solution is to have a probabilistic clock, where the clock is fast, but you aren’t sure _how_ fast it is within a given and relatively short time range. Thus, you’re more likely to depart early for your appointments and get there on time (or a few minutes ahead, most probably, in many situations). This is exactly what some bloke has programmed, although it doesn’t appear that it has an alarm feature yet.

I’m on Bloggingheads again, this time with Mark Schmitt, for thems thats are interested to watch.

I was going to do a review of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road last year, but then got stuck into an email dialogue with China Mieville about it. I then started to write a revised review, but abandoned it; my views on the book had changed as a result of what China said, and it didn’t feel honest to write without some reference to the conversation. So here, in lieu of a review, is a lightly edited version of the conversation (I’ve lost the first email in which I said, as best as I remember, that I thought The Road was great, but since that was the only critical judgement that the email had on the book, I don’t think that posterity is missing out on much). CM denotes China’s bits, and HF mine. NB that this is a personal email conversation (albeit one that’s posted with China’s permission) so the tone is more conversational than it would be in a book review. NB also that spoilers abound. The rest below the fold. [click to continue…]

Spotted off Wisconsin Avenue yesterday

Becks at Unfogged and Scott Lemieux both wonder why the hell the _New York Times_ publishes articles like this.

FOR some people, the most elusive aspect of owning a vacation home that sits beyond big-city borders isn’t finding the time to enjoy it. It’s finding someone to service the deluxe appliances inside.

“We called Viking over the holidays every year,” Rosemary Devlin said of her half-decade-long (and mostly futile) efforts to schedule manufacturer service for her mutinous dishwasher. The appliance was installed along with a suite of Viking cousins when Ms. Devlin and her husband, Fay, whose main house is about 20 miles north of Manhattan in Irvington, N.Y., built their six-bedroom ski house on Okemo Mountain in Ludlow, Vt.

The _Financial Times_ (which has its biases, but is still in my opinion the best newspaper out there), has an entire bloody weekend supplement devoted to this kind of stuff, with the classy title How To Spend It. While a fair number of its readers are presumably City types who can afford the pieds-a-terres and fancy toys lovingly detailed in its pages, I would imagine that most of its readers aren’t. Someone who I was chatting to about this recently suggested that it’s an aspirational thing; while most of its readers can’t afford this stuff, they’d like to be able to, and are more likely to buy a newspaper that allows them at least to daydream about it. Or perhaps the marketing types think that readers would prefer to be addressed _as if_ they were in a position to “Spend It” even when they aren’t. Any other plausible explanations?

This column by Gideon Rachman in the FT is pretty interesting; he argues that what’s wrong in right wing foreign policy discussion in the US is that there are too many journalists and former journalists.

An editor of The Economist in the 1950s once advised his journalists to “simplify, then exaggerate”. This formula is almost second nature for newspaper columnists and can make for excellent reading. But it is a lousy guide to the making of foreign policy. … the journalists are a vital part of a neo-con network that formulated and sold the ideas that took the US to war in Iraq and that is now pressing for confrontation with Iran. The links between journalists, think-tanks and decision-makers in the neo-con world are tight and there is plenty of movement from one area to the other … You get the same combination of overstatement and ancestor-worship in Mr Stelzer’s introduction to The Neocon Reader, when he writes of the “formidable intellectual firepower behind neo-conservative foreign policy”, which “has probably not been seen since George Kennan led a team that formulated America’s response to the threat of Soviet expansionism.” The comparison with Kennan is instructive but not in the way Mr Stelzer intends. The main difference is that Kennan had a profound knowledge of the part of the world he was writing about. … Neo-conservative columnists have tended to follow the trial lawyers’ approach to expertise. First, decide what you want to argue then find an expert who agrees with you. … The current debacle in Iraq is what you get when you turn op-ed columns into foreign policy.

To which I’d add that right-wing house-organs such as _Commentary_ have also shaped these commentators’ style, by creating a culture in which you get ahead by smearing your opponents (to illustrate this, it’s worthwhile to read through, say, a selection of Norman Podhoretz’s old columns, or Charles Krauthammer’s more recent attempts in _The National Interest_ to claim that Francis Fukuyama is an anti-Semite). This isn’t to say that things are much better among the centrist and Democratic divisions of the foreign policy commentariat; they also have their own exaggerated simplifications. Here, the tendency seems to be to argue over grand and abstract paradigms for foreign policy making, without any real attempt to account for the actual human costs that this or that paradigm will have, if implemented. This seems to me to be the more fundamental problem that lies behind recent complaints that commenters who got the Iraq war wrong have done quite well out of it; that there’s a fundamental disconnection between the DC-centric arena of foreign policy debates, and the world in which the results of these debates play out. This intellectual disconnect isn’t only a sin of journalists; it’s a sin that academics are often guilty of too (I suspect that the problem with Henry Kissinger’s behavior as Secretary of State wasn’t exactly that he was a Metternichean realist, but that he was an academic _trying_ to be a Metternichian realist). But it’s a pretty fundamental sin, and a pretty fundamental problem.

Many thanks to everyone who chipped in with comments on my reading list; I enclose the final (assuming that I can track down a scannable copy of the DiMaggio JITE reading for Week 1) version beneath the fold. Also, the syllabus that I linked to for Jonathan Zeitlin’s course on institutions at UW Madison last week was apparently incomplete; the full version is here.

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I’m teaching a Ph.D. level course this semester on institutions and politics, which is intended to provide our students with an introduction to the three main varieties of institutionalism as I see them – rational choice, historical institutionalism and sociological and ideational approaches – with a few classes at the end devoted to comparing the different ways in which they tackle the same, or similar phenomena. I’d be grateful to any interested CTers who have comments on things that I should or shouldn’t be including in the syllabus – it’s the first time I’m teaching it, and there may likely be interesting stuff out there that I’m not aware of. NB that the reason that I include a couple of pieces of my own in the syllabus isn’t because I think that these are classics of modern thought on the topic, but because I’m better aware of the strengths and flaws of these pieces as applications of institutional theory, and can thus use them to provide guidance for students contemplating how to deal with their own dissertation projects etc. The reading list is beneath the fold.

Update: This syllabus for a course that Jonathan Zeitlin teaches in sociology is a very helpful alternative, covering some debates in depth that my syllabus only touches in passing, if at all.
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Scott has an interesting new column up at _Inside Higher Ed_ suggesting (not entirely tongue in cheek) that George W. Bush may qualify as being a great man under G.W.F. Hegel’s definition of what a great man (sexism direct from the original source) is [click to continue…]

I flew into Prague a couple of days ago; before boarding my flight, I spent a little time in the Dulles Borders browsing. I was a bit surprised to see a big display in the impulse buy area beside the cash register for “Snakes on a Plane.” Seems like a fairly odd marketing strategy to me – I don’t imagine that it’s likely to be the kind of movie that many people would want to watch on a plane, or even buy on the spur of the moment just before getting on a plane. The fun of watching people trying to deal with poisonous snakes in a confined space would pall quite quickly, I imagine, if you were in that confined space while watching it. I asked the asst. manager at the register how many he’d sold; he said none so far, but it was the first day it was on display. Not that I have any great wisdom to impart on this or anything, but just thought it was a little odd.