Kieran Healy

French Church Street, Cork. To avoid excessive nostalgia, below the fold is an equivalent photo from my current location, Tucson. Merry Christmas, everyone.
[click to continue…]

I’m sure you’re all tearing your hair out with frustration or worry, so I apologise for not posting much. For the past week I have been on a very tiny island on the south end of the “Rangiroa”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rangiroa atoll, in French Polynesia. No internet access there. Also no electricity.

In other news, it turns out that if you write a book called “Last Best Gifts”:http://www.lastbestgifts.com then the website for it gets a _big_ surge in hits from Google searches in the weeks before Christmas, but not because people are suddenly interested in the topic.

Aha, via “Andrew Gelman”:http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2006/12/the_averaged_am.html I see that a book I’ve been waiting for has just been published. Sarah Igo’s The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public is a study of the history of quantitative social research in America, documenting how Americans came to think of themselves as the subjects of social science, and how the categories of survey research got embedded in our culture. From the publisher:

bq. Igo argues that modern surveys, from the Middletown studies to the Gallup Poll and the Kinsey Reports, projected new visions of the nation: authoritative accounts of majorities and minorities, the mainstream and the marginal. They also infiltrated the lives of those who opened their doors to pollsters, or measured their habits and beliefs against statistics culled from strangers. Survey data underwrote categories as abstract as “the average American” and as intimate as the sexual self. With a bold and sophisticated analysis, Igo demonstrates the power of scientific surveys to shape Americans’ sense of themselves as individuals, members of communities, and citizens of a nation. Tracing how ordinary people argued about and adapted to a public awash in aggregate data, she reveals how survey techniques and findings became the vocabulary of mass society–and essential to understanding who we, as modern Americans, think we are.

I knew Sarah in grad school and heard her present parts of the project once or twice. It seemed to me then that she was going to write an absolutely first-class book. Apparently it’s just won the Social Science History Association’s President’s book award, so it looks like I was right.

Although we’ve been on the same panel once before, Minnesota sociologist “Chris Uggen”:http://www.chrisuggen.com/ clearly travels on a “rougher conference circuit”:http://chrisuggen.blogspot.com/2006/12/mickey.html than me.

Just to piggyback on “Henry’s post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/11/30/starship-stormtroopers-how-are-ya/ about Orson Scott Card’s “new novel”:http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2006/11/today-in-aesthetic-stalinism.html, I was pleased to learn from the excerpt Scott Lemiuex “posted”:http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2006/11/today-in-aesthetic-stalinism.html that, like me, the hero spent his grad student years at “Princeton”:http://www.princeton.edu.

bq. Princeton University was just what Reuben expected it to be — hostile to everything he valued, smug and superior and utterly closed-minded. … Yes, a doctorate in history would be useful. But he was really getting a doctorate in self-doubt and skepticism, a Ph.D. in the rhetoric and beliefs of the insane Left. … In other words, he was being embedded with the enemy as surely as when he was on a deep Special Ops assignment inside a foreign country that did not (officially at least) know that he was there.

Fantastic! Princeton’s a great university, though in the past I’ve said myself that it can be a bit closed minded and smug. _I_ had thought this might grow out of its role as the “Southernmost Ivy”, its culture of selective Eating Clubs, its astonishingly loyal, cranky and tradition-worshipping undergraduate alumni, its “historically”:http://www.cia-on-campus.org/princeton.edu/consult.html “close”:http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pwb/00/0110/p/espionage.shtml connections with the CIA, stuff like that. But now I know better. “All together now”:http://tigernet.princeton.edu/~ptoniana/oldnassau.asp, “Tune every heart and every voice …”

“Dan Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/003030.html takes an online quiz and finds he has a “midland” accent. His evaluation says:

bq. “You have a Midland accent” is just another way of saying “you don’t have an accent.” You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas.

The number of people who sincerely believe they do not have an accent is quite astonishing. Maybe quizzes like this are partly to blame.

Via “Jeremy Freese”:http://jeremyfreese.blogspot.com/2006/11/why-get-help-when-you-can-help-science.html, a poster for a Mass General Hospital study. As Jeremy says,

Do you have not one, but two separate problems that are associated with making bad decisions? If so, why don’t you choose to have a 50% chance of forgoing treatment for both for three months, in exchange for _$600_?… Don’t worry: you can rest assured you’ll be in the most capable, professional hands — just look at the quality of our graphic design! Yes, that’s a picture of a human brain we got off the web, with a martini glass superimposed on top of it. And, see, there’s a photo of an anguished woman, just below a photo of a cartoon man so excited he’s raising his arms with glee.

This reminds me of one of my favorite books, encountered during research for Last Best Gifts: Ed Brassard’s Body For Sale: An Inside Look At Medical Research, Drug Testing, And Organ Transplants And How You Can Profit From Them. This is a how-to guide for selling the renewable and non-renewable bits of yourself and also for getting accepted into paying clinical trials of all kinds.

“Milton Friedman has died”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6156106.stm at the ripe old age of ninety four. Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution “writes a brief appreciation”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6156106.stm from the point of view of a fan. As “Harry said”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/11/10/adam-swifts-political-philosophy-an-beginners-guide-for-students-and-politicians/ around here only the other day, everyone should read “Capitalism and Freedom”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226264211/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20 at least once.

_Update_: The “Milton Friedman Choir”:http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6407847019713273360&q=milton+friedman sings about corporations, markets and social responsibility. (Hat tip: CB.)

I just got an email from a stranger with a flair for delegation:

Hello ,
I am a BSc student with the [X University] external program and a course that I am taking requires the reading of the book ” Sources of Social Power volume 1 by Michael Mann ” . Now while surfing i came across your email and i would like to know if you could give me a brief overview about this book and probably help me if i get stuck while going through it. I have just started reading this book and its a topic that i find really intresting and will be awaiting your reply.

Maybe I could write his final paper for him as well.

I came across “The Cambridge Companion to Keynes”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1163114559/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20 in the bookshop yesterday and went to add it to my Amazon wishlist this morning. When I looked it up in the catalog I saw that it had a rating of only 2 stars and my first thought was: I bet _that_ guy is responsible! And I was right. A while ago I was poking around in the literature on Keynes and Post-Keynesianism and anytime I checked a book on Amazon there would be a review from “Michael E. Brady”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A1UI9T8WKJPZN5/ref=cm_cr_auth/002-9644667-3828001. Typically, it would be a long, desnely-written single paragraph of criticism, complete with page references to the literature and especially to Keynes’s works.

In fairness, his “complete list of Amazon reviews”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A1UI9T8WKJPZN5/002-9644667-3828001?ie=UTF8&display=public&page=3 (333 of them at current count) shows he is perfectly capable of writing a generous review. But he does have a couple of bees in his bonnet. “He”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product//B0006C2TOW/ref=cm_aya_asin.title/002-9644667-3828001 “doesn’t”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product//1858986532/ref=cm_aya_asin.title/002-9644667-3828001 “like”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product//0802022960/ref=cm_aya_asin.title/002-9644667-3828001 people who Get Keynes’ Macroeconomics Wrong at all. Even beyond the macro stuff, however, he gets very annoyed at critics of Keynes’ “Treatise on Probability”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product//1596055308/ref=cm_aya_asin.title/002-9644667-3828001, whom he sees as slavishly following the “allegedly mistaken”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product//0199279551/ref=cm_aya_asin.title/002-9644667-3828001 (and ad hominem) views of Frank Ramsey. In a way, Brady’s own reviews on this topic can be read as an effort to undo the effects of what “he clearly thinks”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product//9812384081/ref=cm_aya_asin.title/002-9644667-3828001 of as the worst book reviews of all time, namely Ramsey’s 1922 and 1926 comments on Keynes’ _Treatise_, whose malign effects have propagated down through the literature. A true believer. Here is “his own book”:http://www.amazon.com/Essays-Keynes-Michael-Emmett-Brady/dp/141344959X on Keynes.

“Calvin from the outside.”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA64g3pi97M It ain’t pretty.

I was browsing in the campus bookshop over lunch and saw the “UK/Australia edition”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/Freakonomics-Economist-Explores-Hidden-Everything/dp/0141019018/ of “Freakonomics”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0061234001/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20 for sale — this is the recently released revised and expanded version. Looking to see what had changed, I was surprised and gratified to see that the new version incorporates much of Steven Levitt’s “response”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/23/response/ to “our seminar on the first edition”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/category/levitt-seminar. The essay is prefaced by a generous comment from Steve to the effect that the CT seminar is the best available discussion of the book. Unfortunately the new edition doesn’t contain our essays (though it does give the seminar’s URL), and so we won’t be getting any royalties for our efforts. This shows why traditional models of publishing are doomed in the era of free online content.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to participate in the “discussion on Sheri Berman’s book”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/10/30/seminar-the-primacy-of-politics/, perhaps out of residual guilt at not completing her Comparative Politics seminar back when I was a graduate student. But here’s a somewhat related new paper by “Marion Fourcade”:http://sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/fourcade-gourinchas/ and myself on “Moral Views of Market Society”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/drafts/moral-order.pdf [pdf] which touches on some of the Polanyian themes in the discussion, particularly debates about the relationship between the market and the moral order, broadly conceived.

Via the “common-as-dirt PZ Myers”:http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/10/how_common.php comes “this site”:http://ww2.howmanyofme.com/search/, which alleges it will tell you how many people in the U.S. share a name with you. The results are not encouraging.

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 0 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

[click to continue…]