Kieran Healy

In the course of a “silly piece”:http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20060830/opcom30.art.htm boosting Joe Lieberman against the loud but ineffectual online hordes, Bruce Kluger says:

If this wasn’t enough to drain the effervescence from the blogger bubbly, America’s noisy Web wags were dealt an even more sobering blow 10 days later when Snakes on a Plane opened nationwide to a decidedly flat $15.3 million box office. Before its premiere, Snakes had been the latest blogger darling, as swarms of online film geeks prematurely crowned it the summer’s big sleeper. This hyperventilating fan base even convinced Snakes’ distributor, New Line Cinema, to up the movie’s rating to R, to ensure a gorier, more venomous snake fest. But all that clapping and yapping couldn’t put enough fannies in the seats.

But what’s the right counterfactual here? I think it’s that _Snakes on a Plane_ is a cheap B-Movie that, in the absence of the jokey attention it got online, would have gone straight to DVD and never come close to the top of the box office for even a single weekend. If anyone was suckered by the “mythology of the blogosphere” it was New Line Cinema, who clearly had convinced themselves that they had another _Titanic_ on their hands. (Maybe they had — just the wrong one.)

It’s depressing to see a professor of demography pull “this sort of stunt”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/25/AR2006082500940.html in the Washington Post:

bq. Between March 21, 2003, when the first military death was recorded in Iraq, and March 31, 2006, there were 2,321 deaths among American troops in Iraq. Seventy-nine percent were a result of action by hostile forces. Troops spent a total of 592,002 “person-years” in Iraq during this period. The ratio of deaths to person-years, .00392, or 3.92 deaths per 1,000 person-years, is the death rate of military personnel in Iraq. … One meaningful comparison is to the civilian population of the United States. That rate was 8.42 per 1,000 in 2003, more than twice that for military personnel in Iraq.

What a joke. Note that the authors (Samuel H. Preston and Emily Buzzell) actually compare the crude death rate for the _entire population_ of the United States to that of U.S. service personnel in Iraq. Who knew so many people died in America from every conceivable cause every day? There ought to be a law.

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Via “PZ Myers”:http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/08/i_guess_you_can_be_innumerate.php, I see that the idea that liberals are going to be outbred by conservatives has made it to the “Wall Street Journal”:http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008831. PZ deals with some questions about the growth rates cited in the piece. But of course it’s not just about the math — “liberal” and “conservative” are not exactly stable features of a population with respect to their content. About six months ago “I wrote about a similar claim”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/03/15/demography-is-not-destiny/ from Philip Longman. Here’s what I said then.

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Now that there’s something like a ceasefire in Lebanon, I think what needs to happen is for Hezbollah to relocate to the DC area and start firing rockets at suburban homes in the region. This would have the advantage of combining two of “David”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_08_20-2006_08_26.shtml#1156342789 “Bernstein’s”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_08_20-2006_08_26.shtml#1156382394 three main interests in life. I imagine gleeful posts about the sudden drop in housing prices combined with dark suspicions over photos of dead realtors being carried out of the rubble. If the rockets could be launched from the safety of campus free-speech zones, we’d have the trifecta.

A couple of “chancers”:http://www.steorn.net/en/downloads.aspx?p=6 in Dublin calling themselves “Steorn”:http://www.steorn.net/ claim to have developed “a technology that produces free, clean and constant energy” — in other words, they say they have a perpetual motion machine. As they “helpfully point out”:http://www.steorn.net/en/technology.aspx?p=5, this “appears to violate the ‘Principle of the Conservation of Energy’, considered by many to be the most fundamental principle in our current understanding of the universe.” On the other hand, Steorn’s actions thus far confirm some more sociological principles, including the first of the “seven warning signs of bogus science”:http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i21/21b02001.htm, viz, “The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media.” Steorn have published a “challenge” in the Economist seeking a “jury of twelve qualified experimental physicists.”

All of this – and the media attention these guys are getting – makes me feel bad for some friends of mine at “Science Foundation Ireland”:http://www.sfi.ie/, who have worked very hard to build up Ireland’s scientific research infrastructure over the past few years. It also reminds me of a joke. Pádraig is walking along the beach when he finds a battered oil lamp. He rubs it an a genie appears, offering to grant him three wishes. “I’d like a bottle of Guinness that never runs out!” says Pat. The genie claps his hands and a bottle appears. Pat tips it upside-down and for a few minutes watches in delight as the stout pours endlessly from the bottle onto the beach. “That’s fantastic!” he says. “I’ll have two more of these, please.”

Soon after I moved to the United States in the autumn of 1995, I went to visit a friend in Boston. We went to a pub in Cambridge called — possibly — Grafton Street. It was an early example of the Irish Pub in a Box, sold as a unit and built to look like a slightly heightened version of the real thing back home. On the way I asked whether was like an Irish pub really, or just a poor imitation. “Well,” my friend said, “it’s not too loud, the tables are clean, and you can find the bathrooms. So not like an Irish pub at all.”

“Via Alan Schussman,”:http://www.schussman.com/article/1364/foode-newse I see that a similar thing has arrived in Tucson, just down the road from my office. (Or, if it’s good, just up the road from my old office.) The “website”:http://www.aulddubliner.com/Tucson/ says the pub will “echo the pathos of rural Ireland to a tee,” which does not augur well. [click to continue…]

By the time I got to Chicago yesterday my flight to Montreal had been cancelled and I got re-routed through Toronto. (One Canadian city is as good as another, eh?) My bag went on a mysterious and still-unfinished journey of their own. As a consequence, I did something I’m slightly ashamed to admit I rarely do these days: I read a novel. I picked up Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in Chicago and by the time I arrived in Montreal I had just finished it. The main protagonist is Oskar Schell, a nine-year-old boy whose father was killed in the World Trade Center, and the novel is told mostly from his point of view. When we’re not inside Oskar’s head, the voices of his grandmother and grandfather (who have complicated stories of their own) take over.

It’s a good novel. I was unconvinced by some aspects of each of the main characters, and I thought the central plot device could have been handled better. But at the same time, the book drew me in and I found parts of it quite moving. It is exceptionally difficult to write plausibly about the inner world of a child, if only because it’s so easy to forget what being a child is like. Foer’s strategy is to make Oskar irresistibly kinetic: high-energy, endlessly talkative, exceptionally smart, and independent to an almost absurd degree. It mostly works, except of course when the plot requires that Oscar not be as smart as all that. It would have been easy to have Oskar come off as a kind of miniature Woody Allen, neurotically roaming New York in search of something or other. But Foer manages to make you like him.

It strikes me that Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha would make for a good comparison with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Paddy is ten and Oskar is nine. They are both quite talkative. In different ways, bad things happen to both. Yet Paddy is ordinary and Oskar is one of a kind. Paddy lives a routine existence in late 1960s Dublin. Oskar is on the Upper West Side. Paddy’s parents fight. Oskar’s father was killed in a terrorist attack. I read Paddy Clarke when it came out (ten or more years ago I think), and remember being astonished by how well Doyle got the reader inside Paddy’s world, especially the way he showed how awful even ordinary domestic problems can seem when you are ten and don’t fully understand what is happening. I may be biased because it’s easier for me to identify with Paddy’s life and mode of speech, but I think Doyle meets the challenge of writing from a child’s point of view better than Foer. Perhaps Foer’s problem is that the weight of 9/11 is just too much for Oskar as a character to bear, just as within the novel it is too much for him as a person to manage.

Well, I picked a good day to be taking an international flight. At least I’m not in the UK. Next time I travel, I’ll be sure to check to see whether “John has identified any empirical regularities”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/08/09/two-point-scales/ about my mode of transport and act accordingly. This is why economics is the queen of the social sciences.

Here in Tucson’s airport, people are pretty good-humored about it all. The TSA staff aren’t making any exceptions, though: while in line waiting to be screened, I saw an octogenarian in a wheelchair have her bottle of Chanel tossed in the bin.

I’m off to Montreal for the “American Sociological Association Meetings”:http://www.asanet.org, which naturally are being held in Canada this year, as part of an ongoing arrangement whereby the Canadian Sociological Society will meet next year in Australia, and the American Economics Association will have their meetings run by the Indian Society of Chemical Engineers. Be on the lookout for amusing articles in the newspaper picking out papers with embarrassing titles.

My new book, Last Best Gifts: Altruism and the Market for Human Blood and Organs has just been published by the University of Chicago Press. You can buy it from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powells or of course any bookseller worth the name. There’s a website for the book, too. Amongst other things, there you can learn more about the cover image, which the people at Chicago did such a nice job with after I came across it by chance.

The book is a study of the social organization of exchange in human blood and organs. In a nutshell, it tries to show that gift exchange can do both more and less than we think when it comes to organizing the blood and organ supply: more, because there’s a lot of heterogeneity in actually-existing systems of donation. Some countries and regions do much better than others, and, in many cases (especially cadaveric donation), market incentives would probably not work any better. But also less, because gift exchange is not some magical mechanism for generating social solidarity out of thin air, especially in a procurement system that is increasingly rationalized and globalized. The book argues that the consequences of rationalizing the blood and organ supply are in many ways more important than the consequences of commodifying it. In particular, the logistical demands of procurement systems — short-run, nuts-and-bolts stuff about finding bodies and procuring organs — are in tension with the public account of donation as a sacred gift of life.

I’d like to think that the book has something new to contribute to the ongoing debate about commodifying human blood, organs and tissues. And I’d like to think that it’s written in an accessible and engaging way. And while I’m waiting for UPS to deliver my pony, I’d like you all to go and buy it, not just for yourself, but for your friends, and for the sake of this small kitten beside me. You wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to the kitten, would you?

Radley Balko’s study of the increase in paramilitary police raids by SWAT teams “is now available”:http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6476 from Cato. They’ve also produced a “map of botched raids”:http://www.cato.org/raidmap/, using Google Maps, to show the distribution of raids that involved some kind of serious error. I’d like to see a table of that data as well (or, because I’m greedy, the whose dataset). There are a lot of things one could do with the data beyond just plotting the incidents on a map, though this is certainly an effective way to draw attention to the issue. The “monograph itself”:http://www.cato.org/pubs/wtpapers/balko_whitepaper_2006.pdf contains summaries of a large number of the botched raids. The rise of paramilitary policing is a serious problem in itself — just on the very narrow grounds that mistakes are common — but is also clearly bound up with larger questions of criminal justice policy in the United States, and America’s “astonishingly high”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/05/26/incarceration-again/ rate of incarceration.

I am here in Palo Alto at the “Center for Advanced Study”:http://www.casbs.org/, for a Summer Camp Institute, and am drowning in readings on global convergence, divergence and trajectories of global capitalism, while trying to punch above my weight with a bunch of smart people. (World Cup mixed metaphors have infected my writing: not “Not waving but drowning” but “Drowning and Punching”. Hmm.) Palo Alto is like Princeton West, only somewhat larger. Meeting my co-campers has added significantly to the list of books and articles I need to read, let alone write. For instance, there’s Len Seabrooke’s “The Social Sources of Financial Power”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0801443806/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20, Josh Whitford’s “The New Old Economy”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0199286019/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20, and Monica Prasad’s “The Politics of Free Markets”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226679020/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20. Fortunately I have no internet access where I’m staying to distract me.

Meanwhile, “Omar Lizardo”:http://www.nd.edu/~olizardo/index.html is “blogging”:http://wordpress.com/tag/guest-bloggers/ at “OrgTheory”:http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/. Go read him. I’m on Omar’s dissertation committee so I take full credit for all the good stuff he says, including the title of this post.

Senator Ted Stevens is getting a lot of stick for “his description”:http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/index.blog?entry_id=1512499 of how the Internet works:

bq. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

Now, Net Neutrality is great and everything, and Stevens is on the wrong side of that issue (and many others), but why all the snickering? Sure, he rambles a bit, and in the long version he accidentally says “an internet was sent by my staff” when he clearly means “an email.” It seems, though, that it’s his saying “tubes” and “a series of tubes” that’s provoking most of the derision. But network nerds the world over regularly refer to the availability of bandwidth in terms of fat or narrow “pipes”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Pipe, which is essentially the same imagery. Odd.

Just drawing in toward half time. Good game so far. Germany look good. (The Referee has done very well, too.) I hope Germany edge it in regulation.

_Update_: 72nd minute. Very funny incident w/the Italian No. 16, who fell down writhing with the agonies unto death. The Ref ran back to him, clearly said something like “Get up you fucker or I’ll book you,” and the guy jumped up and ran off double-quick.

_Update_: Well, that was a dramatic last two minutes. Fair dues to the Italians.

Is “this”:http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/worldcup06/2006/07/02/zidane_conjures_up_more_magic.html some kind of record?

bq. France began this tournament saddled with worries about the ageing legs at the heart of their team, but they have changed their tune.

We’re just missing a fascist octopus singing its swan song.