I’m up on Bloggingheads again, this time with Dan Drezner, for those as wants to watch.
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Henry
A few people have emailed me in the last few weeks saying that they’ve been unable to comment here (or, more precisely, that they have been commenting here and that their comments have been disappearing into the ether). If you’ve been having this problem, well … don’t comment here obviously, but email me with info about what has been happening, what your browser version is, what your internet service is, IP address if you have a fixed one, and anything else that might be helpful. If anyone has any idea what might be going on (we’re using WordPress 2.0.4) feel free to let me know either in comments or by email.
I’m writing this post in part to recommend Charles Stross’s _The Jennifer Morgue_ (publisher, Powells, Amazon, As Brad DeLong says, if you’re into Cthulhu mythos, operating system humour, spy novels and parodies of bureaucracy, this is the novel for you. But mostly, I’m writing it to perpetrate the pun in the title, which in addition to being atrocious is also almost certainly incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t read the book already. But it could have been worse … [worser]Goldfingerling? Branzino Royale? Flounderball?[/worser] _Much_ worse.
According to Scott Jaschik at _Inside Higher Ed_, David Horowitz’s ‘Bill of Rights’ movement has just suffered a stinging defeat in Pennsylvania. Some of the juicier highlights below:
Horowitz said that he was furious about the “breathtaking audacity of this theft of the report by the Democrats and the unions,” and that a “cabal” of faculty leaders had convinced “weak-spined Republicans” (who controlled the committee) to go along with the “theft.” … In the end, though, the panel on Tuesday stripped away what he had been citing as points of victory. The final report kept the language saying that it couldn’t find evidence of problems with students’ rights. … because the final vote on the report was unanimous — on a committee controlled by Republicans — the committee made it more difficult for Horowitz to blame his problems on liberals. … In getting the Pennsylvania House of Representative to create a panel to study these issues, Horowitz won his major legislative victory last year, so the report’s outcome has been highly anticipated. Last week, he said he viewed Pennsylvania as a model for what he hoped to accomplish elsewhere and that he would be working to create similar panels in other states next year. … Asked how he could claim victory when the legislative panel had worked so hard to identify student victims, and failed, Horowitz offered more stories of students who were being hurt. He said that he had spoken to a dance student who was upset about her paper’s grade and that he had encouraged her to file a grievance. She didn’t want to. Horowitz acknowledged that there was no political issue in the paper, but said her reluctance to go through the grievance machinery showed the problems that students face. … Horowitz, asked why he couldn’t document more of the cases of students being hurt — the basis of his movement — said: “Why do I have to run around the country finding these kids?”
There’s lots that I don’t agree with in Anatol Lieven’s reformulation of realism, but this quote from his LRB review of books on the Cold War (behind the subscriber wall) really has the number of the more rubble less trouble mob.
One important aspect of Westad’s book is the complex connection he makes between the US and Soviet modernising projects and racism. While both regimes insisted on their right to dictate values and solutions to the benighted peoples of the Third World, both also claimed that those peoples were capable of adopting them, doing so rapidly, and thereby joining the ‘socialist community’ or the ‘free world’. But because, in classic missionary style, both sides saw their truths as self-evident, their programmes as beneficial, and their own benevolence as beyond question, they often had no rational explanation to offer when their projects failed and their clients turned against them. In these cases, there was often an astonishingly rapid swing towards racist explanations. Currently, the neo-cons in America alternate between arguing that all Arab societies are capable of making rapid progress towards democracy (and that anyone who denies this is racist) and asserting that ‘Arabs understand only force.’
Jim Henley passed on one of those internets memes to me a few weeks ago which I’m finally responding to – name three authors whom you’ve given up on, and say why. Here goes …
[click to continue…]
Alex Müller emails to tell me that he’s singlehandedly translated the Susanna Clarke seminar that we ran last year into German (as best as I can tell it’s a very nice translation). When you do something under a Creative Commons license, you hope that people are going take it and play with it and do fun things that you can’t do yourself, and it’s wonderful to see it happening. Apparently the China Mieville seminar is next on his list …
The Communist Manifesto, a la Disney, Flintstones etc.
Via BoingBoing
Dan Drezner disagrees with Chris Hayes about whether Econ 101 is a form of right wing indoctrination, saying that his own first micro class waxed rhapsodic about the joys of technocratic intervention, and that he didn’t discover the public choice critique of government until grad school. Now public choice _is_ an unabashedly ideological approach to the world, at least if the co-editor of the flagship journal in the field, Charles Rowley, is to be believed. In his introduction to the Edward Elgar public choice reader, he describes public choice as a “program of scientific endeavor that exposed government failure coupled to a programme of moral philosophy that supported constitutional reform designed to limit government,” and suggests that its opponents are “scholars who had rendered themselves dependent on the subsidies of big government and whose lucrative careers in many instances were linked to advising … agents of the compound republic.”
There is a strong strain in economics more generally that is unabashedly ideological too. Take this effort to figure out a sort of Nicene creed that would allow ‘real economists’ to profess their faith and thus distinguish themselves from bluffers like Kenneth Arrow and Robert Solow. “Real” economists apparently believe that demand curves always slope downwards, even when empirical evidence tells you that they don’t (I’ve always preferred the Apostles' Creed myself). Now this doesn’t say, _contra_ both some economists and some of their sillier critics, that a commitment to the kinds of models that economists use _necessarily_ makes you predisposed to be right wing (Jack Knight and Jim Johnson, two rational choice lefties, have an interesting forthcoming piece discussing how rhetorical slippage between general equilibrium and partial equilibrium models provides a bogus ideological justification for many pro-market arguments). But it does mean that many people who take economics courses, as they are typically taught in this country, end up coming out of these courses more right wing than they were going in, and perhaps more right wing than the actual theory itself would support, if it were looked at carefully. I think (although I can’t find it using Google, so I may be wrong), that there’s actually empirical evidence supporting the first of these claims – a survey someone did a few years back measuring the political opinions that people had entering graduate programs in economics, and their political opinions after a few semesters of coursework, which found that there was a pronounced and statistically significant shift to the right (if anyone knows where this survey is to be found, feel free to point to it in comments).
Update: I’ve found the survey via Google Scholar, although it isn’t a longitudinal study as I thought it was; the findings are reported in The Making of an Economist Redux in the _Journal of Economic Perspectives_.
The large majority of [students surveyed in seven top ranked econ grad programs] (80 percent) felt that their political views did not change in graduate schools, although that changed by year, with 10 percent of first-year students reporting a change in their views, but 32 percent of fourth- and higher-year students reporting a change in their views. In particular, 10 percent of first-year students considered themselves conservative; by the fourth and fifth year, this number had risen to 23 percent. There was also a large drop by year in students who considered themselves radical; that percentage fell from 13 percent of first year students to only 1 percent of fourth-year and higher students.
Yesterday gave me a warm glow of happiness that I haven’t gotten from election results in a long while (not that I’m enthusiastic about some aspects of the Democratic party, but they’re vastly superior to the other shower on most things that I care about). Even so, it seems to me to be less a decisive victory than an important first step. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been reading Michael McDonald and John Samples’ edited volume, _The Marketplace of Democracy: Electoral Competition and American Politics_ ( Powells link to be supplied, Amazon )which is the most accessible and useful discussion of the increasing lack of competition in US electoral politics that I’ve come across, describing not only House and Senate races, but also primaries, state legislatures and so on. On first glance, yesterday’s victory looks like a refutation of claims that American politics is no longer competitive; we’re seeing what looks like a Democratic electoral blowout. But only at first glance. Gary Jacobson’s chapter describes the forces limiting electoral competition in the House and Senate. He argues that the importance of both gerrymandering and spending have been exaggerated. What best explains observed outcomes is partisan balance within Congressional districts (and to a lesser extent, states for the Senate). Congressional districts that highly favor one party in the Presidential election are far less likely to elect a candidate from the other party to Congress than in the past. Congressional districts (and, to a lesser extent, states) that favour Republican presidential candidates are _especially_ likely to reproduce this bias. This has given Republicans a key competitive advantage; Democrats’ ability to win Republican-leaning seats “has dropped dramatically since the 1980s.”
What does this suggest? If Jacobson is right, we’ve seen a Democratic tidal wave, but we can’t be at all sure that we’ve seen any underlying structural changes. Many of the Democratic gains are likely to be reversed again when the Republicans start to do better, _unless_ the Democrats cement them by reshaping the partisan balance within these districts, so that they start to favor Democrats systematically, not just when the voters want to throw the bums out. In Jacobson’s words:
A pro-Democratic national tide would, by definition, shake up partisan habits, at least temporarily, counteracting the Republicans’ structural advantage. But absent major shifts in stable party loyalties that lighten the deepening shades of red and blue in so many districts, after the tide ebbed the competitive environment would likely revert to what it had been since 1994
In other words, unless the Democrats can bring through a secular shift in party allegiances in the districts and states that they’ve won, they’re going to be left high and dry when the tide goes out again. How do you bring about this kind of shift? It seems to me that you do it by constructing a vigorous populism which speaks to the economic interests of voters in Ohio, Indiana and elsewhere, while scooping up soft libertarians in the Rocky Mountain states who are disgusted with conservative hegemony. And there are pretty clear signs that some Democrats get this. But if this is going to happen, it’ll be no thanks to the DC punditocracy, or to senior Democrats such as Rahm Emanuel whose main concern is to shove Republicans away from the K Street feeding-trough so that they can get their own snouts stuck into the swill. This, it seems to me is going to be the defining battle among Democrats over the next couple of months. Are they going to try to create an agenda that can reshape politics in their favour in the long term? Or are they going to revert to a Democratic-tinged version of business as usual?
(see further Rick Perlstein and Ezra Klein )
CNN is saying that Rumsfeld is stepping down …
Glenn Reynolds on a speech by Chris Hedges in May 2003.
He recycles the looting lies, too. He sounds like a talk-radio caricature of a liberal, and he’s flat-out racist in his dismissal of Arab prospects for democratic self-government. “Iraq was a cesspool for the British. . . it will be a cesspool for us as well.” Yep. Racist.
An approvingly blurbed quote in November 2006 from one of Glenn’s anonymous email correspondents.
The ball is in the Iraqis’ court. We took away the obstacle to their freedom. If they choose to embrace death, corruption, incompetence, lethal religious mania, and stone-age tribalism, then at least we’ll finally know the limitations of the people in that part of the world. The experiment had to be made.
Glenn himself goes on to argue:
On the other hand, it’s also true that if democracy can’t work in Iraq, then we should probably adopt a “more rubble, less trouble” approach to other countries in the region that threaten us. If a comparatively wealthy and secular Arab country can’t make it as a democratic republic, then what hope is there for places that are less wealthy, or less secular?
Is there any reasonable way to read this other than Glenn Reynolds denouncing Glenn Reynolds as a ‘flat-out racist’? Inquiring minds would like to know.
[edited slightly for punchiness]
I’ve received an email chivvying me into linking to the new Economist blog with the irresistible hook that now I “can attack [them] directly.” The new blog would appear to be at least in part a subdivision of Megan McArdle industries. Consider it linked.
Just in case they were wondering. The riots in France weren’t Muslim riots that are only likely to end “when the muezzin summons the faithful to prayer from Notre Dame.” Nor does anyone except Stanley Kurtz and the more or less deranged (but I repeat myself) believe that France is descending into a ‘civil war’ where ‘Islamic militias [will] tear [the] capital apart.’ To quote two sources that, like, actually know what they’re talking about.
Mitchell Cohen in _Dissent_.
Media often made it appear that everyone detained in last fall’s violence was North African, but recent studies complicate the picture. A study of the Yvelines suburb near Paris showed that 33 percent of those questioned by authorities were “European” in origin, 35.5 percent were North African, and 28.9 percent African.
Last week’s Economist
When the riots started, they were treated in some quarters as a “suburban intifada”. “Jihad comes home”, ran one newspaper headline. Some American observers regarded the uprising as further proof of Europe’s inability to control the spread of radical Islam. … A report into the riots by the French Renseignements Généraux, the domestic intelligence-gathering service, however, found the opposite. Islamists had “no role in setting off the violence or in fanning it,” it concluded. Clichy’s mayor agrees. “I completely reject the idea that the riots were an Islamist plot,” he says. “During the rioting I never heard of a young man burning a car in the name of Allah; but I heard of plenty of Muslims saying, ‘go home in the name of Allah’.” Instead, the intelligence officers reckoned, the rioting was a “popular revolt” provoked by a toxic concentration of social problems: joblessness, poverty, illegal immigration, organised crime, family breakdown and a lack of parental authority. France had been so preoccupied with watching Islamic radicals, said the report, that it had neglected the wider problems in its banlieues.