Kieran Healy

So I’ve been experimenting with various “Textile”:http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/ plugins for WordPress. The best one so far seems to be “Text Control”:http://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/TextControl, which allows for a lot of flexibility. In particular, it’s supposed to support per-post choices about which markup to use. But although I can set global options, no options menu appears when I’m editing a new post. Is this a known bug?

I’ve also been looking at various spam filters. “Spam Karma”:http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/ looks comprehensive, but so far has proved a little enthusiastic with the false positives. Sorry to those affected. I’ve turned down the volume on it a bit, so hopefully that will stop being a problem. Any advice on fine-tuning Spam Karma’s options?

Also, if you notice any severe slowdowns or other performance issues, please let me know.

CT has switched platforms from MovableType to WordPress. Thanks to lead WordPress developer Matt Mullenweg for doing the behind-the-scenes work on this. We hope this move will make things easier for our readers.[1] For one thing, it should be the end of double- triple- or even duodecuple-posted comments. These were becoming an embarrassing CT hallmark, thanks to our outdated installation of MovableType and way too much server load. Trackback spam and other blogging bugaboos should also become easier to manage. More generally, it’s good to move over to an open-source platform.

I expect there will be teething problems in the short-term, as we fine-tune the layout and learn how to use the new software. We hope you’ll bear with us. Right now, our main page doesn’t render properly in Safari: the right sidebar text ends up positioned on the left. This isn’t a problem on Firefox or IE. If there are any CSS gurus out there who want to suggest a fix, we’d be very grateful.

fn1. This is a test of footnotes.

In O’Hare airport, the Starbucks sells Lemon Poopy Seed muffins. At least they’re honest about it. Makes you wonder what’s in the coffee.

I have left the bitter “Sonoran desert”:http://www.desertusa.com/du_sonoran.html behind and am in balmy Chicago for a “conference about body parts”:http://www.law.depaul.edu/institutes_centers/health/pdf/body_parts.pdf. Packing my suitcase, I realized that I’m going to have some trouble keeping my own body parts at a reasonable temperature: where are all those Winter clothes I used to own? Didn’t I live in New Jersey and Connecticut for years? So I just brought everything I had.

The conference should be interesting. Mainly lawyers and bioethics people, along with some economists. I am the token sociologist. I’ll be talking about some work I’m doing on organ procurement rates in seventeen OECD countries, so obviously I am on the panel titled “The Battle Between Bioethics and Religion.” As it happens, my friend “John Evans”:http://sociology.ucsd.edu/faculty/EvansJ.htm wrote “the book”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226222624/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ on the battle between bioethics and religion. The final score was Bioethics 3, Religion 1.

“Go read”:http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/2005/02/how_social_secu.html. That’s all.

“Rep Sam Johnson (R – Texas)”:http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/003628.html, the other day:

bq. Speaking at a veterans’ celebration at Suncreek United Methodist Church in Allen, Texas….Johnson said he told the president that night, “Syria is the problem. Syria is where those weapons of mass destruction are, in my view. You know, I can fly an F-15, put two nukes on ’em and I’ll make one pass. We won’t have to worry about Syria anymore.”

“Randy Newman”:http://laeren.zoggins.net/music/lyrics/lyrics-politicalscience.php, some years ago:

No one likes us
I don’t know why
We may not be perfect
But heaven knows we try
But all around even our old friends put us down
Let’s drop the big one and see what happens

We give them money
But are they grateful?
No they’re spiteful
And they’re hateful
They don’t respect us, so let’s surprise them
We’ll drop the big one and pulverize them.

Maybe the GOP should hire Newman as a foreign policy consultant. Johnson’s decision to deliver the remarks in a church was a particularly nice touch. I wonder if he knows where the road to Damascus actually is.

Inside the top of the “Jones Soda”:http://www.jonessoda.com/ I just opened it says “Take Charge of Your Life and Decisions.” I’m wondering whether doing this is compatible with accepting advice from a soft-drink bottle.

The NYT has an “article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/26/nyregion/26video.html?ex=1267160400&en=1d48bf539f85dc0e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland about Gary Brolsma, the “Numa Numa”:http://www.google.com/search?q=numa+numa guy. If you haven’t seen the video, “go watch it”:http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/numa.php and come back in a minute.

Now tell me what you think of the article’s summary of the story:

There was a time when embarrassing talents were a purely private matter … But with the Internet, humiliation – like everything else – has now gone public. … Here, then, is the cautionary tale of Gary Brolsma, 19, amateur videographer and guy from New Jersey, who made the grave mistake of placing on the Internet a brief clip of himself dancing along to a Romanian pop song. Even in the bathroom mirror, Mr. Brolsma’s performance could only be described as earnest but painful.

Utter bollocks. Mr Brolsma’s performance could only be described that way by someone with no capacity at all to recognize good comedy. The video is hilarious and, to anyone with eyes in their head, was supposed to be. It’s not earnest, it’s deadpan. I am sorry to say that Americans are renowned for their inability to grasp this distinction. Despite the article’s efforts to draw a parallel, it’s obviously a real performance, not a private bit of wish-fulfillment maliciously released into the wild like the “Star Wars Kid”:http://www.jedimaster.net/ video. The guy’s friends agree:

His friends say Mr. Brolsma has always had a creative side. He used to make satirical Prozac commercials on cassette tapes, for instance. He used to publish a newspaper with print so small you couldn’t read it with the naked eye. “He was always very out there – he’s always been ambitious,” said Frank Gallo, a former classmate. “And he’s a big guy, but he’s never been ashamed.” … “He’s been entertaining us for years.”

Sadly, the Times will not be diverted from its dumbass interpretation. It should come as no surprise that Brolsma “is distraught, embarrassed. His grandmother, Margaret Telkes, quoted him as saying, just the other day, ‘I want this to end.'” You would too, if you were getting shoehorned by the NYT into a “fat kid makes ass of self on internet” story:

The question remains why two million people would want to watch a doughy guy in glasses wave his arms around online to a Romanian pop song.

Because it’s funny, you gobshites! And it’s _meant_ to be! I’d bet that if Brolsma weren’t overweight, the Times wouldn’t have had as hard a time seeing this.

More correspondence, this time from a soldier stationed in Iraq who saw my “recent post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003185.html about the terrible shooting in Tal Afar. I reproduce the post below the fold. I should say that I can’t verify the identify of my correspondent, but I have no reason to doubt what he says about himself.

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A correspondent writes that “my complaints”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003260.html about the “Summers controversy”:http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html are unfair to Larry Summers. If you’re interested, his case and my reply are below the fold.

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Now that Larry Summers has begun to live up to his putative commitment to open, freewheeling inquiry by finally releasing a “transcript of his infamous remarks”:http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html, various people are commenting on it. “Matt Yglesias”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2005/02/summers_redux.html says

bq. I don’t think you can reasonably expect any given university (or corporation, or person) to singlehandedly shoulder the burden of changing a set of social expectations that’s become very well entrenched over a very long period of time. At the same time, you can’t just do nothing about it, either.

“Bitch, PhD”:http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/2005/02/open-mouth-insert-dick-larry.html addresses this issue pretty well, as does “a correspondent of Mark Kleiman’s”:http://www.markarkleiman.com/archives/_/2005/02/larry_summers_redux.php. The main point is the first step toward addressing what Matt properly calls “a set of social expectations that’s become very well entrenched over a very long period” is — contrary to what Summers did in his remarks — to _stop_ treating it as a more-or-less simple result of the expression of individual preferences. Now, in other social-policy contexts, economists will jump all over you for not properly considering the incentives that shape people’s choices and smugly wheel out one-liners like “People respond to incentives, all else is commentary.” There’s a lot to that observation. But in contexts like gender and the labor market, the emphasis instead gets put on individual preferences as the mainspring of choice, rather than considering the social origins of the incentive structure.

“Here is an old post of mine”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000432.html, written in response to something “Jane Galt”:http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/004361.html (aka Megan McArdle) wrote. It addresses this issue a bit, with some pointers to accessible and practical discussions of it by specialists — some of the literature that Summers just baldly ignored, or was inexcusably ignorant of. As I said “back then”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000432.html,

bq. Jane’s initial question — “Should we [women] stay home, or shouldn’t we? It’s a difficult question for professional women” — effectively concedes the case as lost from the get-go. It frames the problem as wholly belonging to the prospective mother. Dad has no responsibility towards his potential offspring, is not required to make any work/family tradeoffs, and indeed has so much autonomy that a woman who chooses kids over career is “taking a huge financial bet on her husband’s fidelity.” … The institutions that structure people’s career paths may have deep roots, but that’s not because they spring naturally out of the earth. Cross-national comparison shows both that there’s considerable variation in the institutionalization of child care, and that this variation can have odd origins. … [They] aren’t immutable, either. In fact, in the U.S. they’ve changed a great deal since the early 1980s … Looking at the problem this way makes one less likely to fatalism about tragic choices, wanting to have it all, and the inevitable clash of work and family. … It also has the virtue — as C. Wright Mills put it forty years ago — of letting us “grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society,” rather than forever being stuck at the level of individual women facing insoluble work-family tradeoffs.

None of that is particularly original, by the way. It’s a well-developed perspective with plenty of empirical evidence and theoretical elaboration, and even a little bit of reading in this area would make that evident. That’s why Summers’ audience was so ticked off. In fairness to the guy, at this stage his perilous position has little to do with the remarks themselves anymore, and has become an ouster by opponents dissatisfied with his Presidency in general.

My friend “Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas”:http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~pog/ has co-authored a “very interesting paper”:http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~pog/academic/IFA/ with “Hélène Rey”:http://www.princeton.edu/~hrey/ called “International Financial Adjustment.” (Here’s the “PDF version”:http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~pog/academic/IFA/ifa.pdf.) You might think that’s not a title to set the world on fire, but don’t be fooled. A more appealing — though perhaps less responsible — alternative would be something like “Dude! We can predict exchange rates!” Here’s the abstract:

bq. The paper proposes a unified framework to study the dynamics of net foreign assets and exchange rate movements. We show that deteriorations in a country’s net exports or net foreign asset position have to be matched either by future net export growth (trade adjustment channel) or by future increases in the returns of the net foreign asset portfolio (hitherto unexplored financial adjustment channel). Using a newly constructed data set on US gross foreign positions, we find that stabilizing valuation effects contribute as much as 31% of the external adjustment. Our theory also has asset pricing implications. Deviations from trend of the ratio of net exports to net foreign assets predict net foreign asset portfolio returns one quarter to two years ahead and net exports at longer horizons. The exchange rate affects the trade balance and the valuation of net foreign assets. It is forecastable in and out of sample at one quarter and beyond. A one standard deviation decrease of the ratio of net exports to net foreign assets predicts an annualized 4% depreciation of the exchange rate over the next quarter.

Now, I am not a macroeconomist so I should leave further discussion to Daniel and John. The guts of the paper are really beyond my competence to evaluate. But this is a blog, so naturally I will carry on regardless and make three points anyway.

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“Matt Yglesias”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2005/02/hiatt_on_social.html should be pleased to hear that Princeton University Press has re-issued Harry Frankfurt’s well-known essay, “On Bullshit,” as a small book. You can “buy it”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691122946/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ at Amazon. There’s a nice piece in the Times about it, distinguished by the fact that the newspaper’s stylebook forbids the word “bullshit” — though of course its pages are filled examples of the stuff — so it’s referred to throughout as “[bull]” instead. As I think Matt’s also observed, journalism would be serving its readership much better these days if it were possible to write headlines like “More Bullshit from White House on Social Security Reform.”

Our own Henry Farrell was on “NPR this morning”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4461850 talking with Scott Simon about blogs and their role in propagating rumors.