The University of Arizona’s “news service”:http://uanews.org has done a little “press release”:http://uanews.org/cgi-bin/WebObjects/UANews.woa/6/wa/goSBSArticle?ArticleID=9577 covering a “recent paper of mine”:http://uanews.org/pdfs/69304-healy.pdf about the social organization of cadaveric organ procurement in the United States. One way to think about the paper is in relation to ongoing debates about offering commercial incentives to donor families. These debates are conducted in individual-level terms — they are about appealing people’s to selfish rather than their altruistic impulses — and they rely on a straightforward contrast between giving and selling. By doing so these arguments (both for and against markets) miss the role of organizational infrastructure and logistical effort in donor procurement, and the wide range of variation in procurement rates associated with it.
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Kieran Healy
First week of the Fall semester in “sunny Tucson”:http://www.cs.arizona.edu/camera/. New classes, new students — including the undersocialized ones who come into your office asking to use the phone — and an uptick of amusing activity in the “Police Blotter”:http://wildcat.arizona.edu/papers/98/2/01_50.html. The Blotter is kind of a litany (“reports stated”) of the joys of being young, engaged in illegal activity, and perhaps a little slow off the mark:
A student was referred to the diversion program for possession of marijuana in the courtyard between Coronado and La Aldea, 822 E. Fifth St., Friday at 10:23 p.m., reports stated.
Police smelled burning marijuana coming from the area and saw the student who had red, bloodshot eyes and whose breath smelled of marijuana, reports stated.
Police asked the student if he had any marijuana on him and he said he had smoked earlier but didn’t have any on him and said, “You can check me,” reports stated.
At that point he put his hands in his pockets and said “Oh yeah, I have a little,” reports stated.
These are the people I have to interest in the transition from Feudalism to Capitalism. As it turns out, it can be easier than you might think (when they’re not stoned). For instance, you can go a long way with a discussion of the division of labor that begins with the question “Why the hell are there nearly a million people living here in the desert?”
Greg Mankiw’s “Op-Ed”:http://nytimes.com/2004/08/22/opinion/22mank.html made me feel much better, no matter “what”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004-2_archives/000023.html Brad DeLong “thinks”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004-2_archives/000020.html.
This morning I cut myself while shaving. It was just a “superficial wound”:http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040822/D84KGLT00.html, but as I was coming out of the bathroom the doorbell rang and there was this army officer in full dress uniform at the door. He presented me with a Purple Heart. I expressed some surprise but he just said “Standard medal-issuing “procedure”:http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2004/08/22/big_lies_for_bush?mode=PF, Sir,” adding that his job had been made much easier by “the new Homeland Security Surveillance Cameras.” I asked him did he want to come in for a cup of coffee, but he said he had to run down to Number 27 to award a Silver Star to a woman who’d just caught the pancake-batter bowl before it went all over the kitchen floor.
David Adesnik posts “here”:http://oxblog.blogspot.com/2004_08_15_oxblog_archive.html#109306453754409344 and “here”:http://oxblog.blogspot.com/2004_08_15_oxblog_archive.html#109306102432801244 about the whole Swift Boat Veterans thing. The posts are funny:
I still haven’t gotten to the heart of the matter, which is who is telling the truth, the Vets or the Times. … While it is hard to trust anyone’s memories of events that happened thirty-five years ago, it is extremely hard to trust such memories when they’re coming form individuals who had different memories of the same events quite recently … contemporary records confirm Kerry’s account and Louis Letson, the army doctor who says Kerry lied, admits that “I guess you’ll have to take my word for it” … According to Larry Thurlow, one of the Swift Vets who witnessed the events in question, there was no enemy fire. However, the WaPo recently got a hold of the citation for Thurlow’s Bronze Star (which he won during the same battle). In it, there are multiple reference to enemy fire. … As I said before, *I haven’t come to any firm conclusions about the Swift Vets accusation. My mind is still open* and I’ll be happy to look at further evidence. But so far, things are looking pretty good for John F. Kerry.
Amazing. In his “earlier post”:http://oxblog.blogspot.com/2004_08_15_oxblog_archive.html#109306102432801244 David even chastises those politically naive people who complain that the Ads are being funded by unscrupulous rich Republicans:
But more importantly, who do you expect to fund anti-Kerry attack ads? The College Republicans? No, of course not. It’s going to be rich and well-connected GOP backers who take it on themselves to be the President’s hatchet men.
Sooo, the charges contradict the contemporary written records, they contradict previous statements by the SBV people praising Kerry’s conduct, and hard-headed political observers like Oxblog know the only reason we’re hearing any of these guys is that they’re being financed by “hatchet men” for the Bush campaign. But don’t expect us to make up our mind in favor of Kerry! For exit-strategy purposes, David’s conceding that “things are looking pretty good” for Kerry but still, this is not the time to “come to any firm conclusions.”
Look, if you don’t like Kerry or have no confidence in the New York Times as a news source, or don’t see anything wrong with unsupportable hatchet-jobs, let’s just come out and say it, OK? But honestly — the kind of faux “open-mindedness” that refuses to draw warranted conclusions from the evidence is better left to “the Tortoise and Achilles”:http://www.fecundity.com/pmagnus/achilles.html.
“Alan reports”:http://www.schussman.com/article/815/headphones-down that
bq. Students in the incoming Class of 2008 at Duke University each “get a brand-new iPod”:http://www.chronicle.duke.edu/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/08/20/412620dfa7d23, to be used, says the university’s IT wonks, as part of a project exploring innovative classroom technologies.
I’m thinking of using an iPod in my graduate seminar this semester. The idea is that the students divide into groups and then buy me an iPod and, um, that’s it. Perhaps also items from my Amazon wish list, for the advanced ones.
As it happens, I do know of a student at Arizona who used an mp3 player as an innovative classroom technology: he was noticed wearing headphones during his final exam and it turned out he’d recorded himself speaking the answers to likely exam questions.
Draft review of “A Man After His Own Heart”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1565847709/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/, by Charles Siebert. (Final version to appear in “The Drawing Board”:http://www.econ.usyd.edu.au/drawingboard/.)
The language of the heart is all-pervasive. Art and everyday life are full of emotions expressed through talk about the heart, be it given or joined, singing or broken, closed or kind. The Ancient Greek view that the liver is the seat of the soul can seem plausible on a good Friday night, and Descartes’ case that it’s our head that matters may be felt with some force the following morning. For sheer range of metaphor, though, the heart has no serious competitors. But what about the thing itself? The cheerful curve of a Valentine’s heart does not convey what a real heart looks like. A heart ache is not a heart attack. We all know that the heart is a pump that moves blood around the body, but very few of us could give an accurate account of how it happens. The dynamic interplay of all those chambers, arteries and valves is difficult to picture, hard to explain, and took a very long time to discover.
Yet, at the same time, we are more familiar than ever with the risks of cardiac arrest and the danger of heart disease. Coronary bypasses are routine and a heart transplant these days is a standard (if difficult) option rather than an exotic experiment. So there are two ways of talking about the heart: as a metaphor for ourselves and our innermost feelings, and as a key bit of internal plumbing, in need of maintenance and regular upkeep. Advances in medicine over the past century or so, and especially in the last thirty years, have made it difficult to keep the two separate. The real heart intrudes more and more on its imagined counterpart.
“BoingBoing”:http://www.boingboing.net/2004/08/19/happy_birthday_dd.html reports that “Dungeons and Dragons”:http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/welcome is “30 years old”:http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/538/538848p1.html. And it’s _still_ a virgin.
“Paul Krugman”:http://www.pkarchive.org/ and “Fernando Cardoso”:http://www.harrywalker.com/speakers_template.cfm?Spea_ID=624 were the final plenary speakers yesterday evening at the “American Sociological Association Meetings”:http://www.asanet.org/convention/2004/ in San Francisco. The topic under discussion was “The Future of Neoliberalism,” and both of them did a pretty good job. The panel was introduced and moderated by “Juliet Schor”:http://www2.bc.edu/~schorj/, who spoke for twenty-odd minutes at the beginning and seemed just a tiny bit reluctant to give up the mike. That was understandable, I suppose, as the ballroom was jammed — standing room only and spillover into the hallways outside, and it’s hard to resist a crowd that big. I hadn’t seen Krugman speak before. He was refreshingly nerdy. His detractors work incessantly to make the “shrill” label stick, but in person he comes off more like Woody Allen’s accountant brother.
Krugman made a passing reference to Enron and wondered whether Homeland Security was responsible for the intermittent problems with the lights and sound, but otherwise stuck to the topic at hand, arguing that “neoliberalism” could and should be decomposed into policies that ought to be evaluated independently. So whereas free-trade and export-led growth has clearly gotten _much_ better results than tariffs and import-substitution, the benefits of unrestricted capital mobility or gung-ho privatization aren’t as well established. He emphasized the complexity of the problems at issue and the dangers of hubris in development policy. He came across, in other words, like a theoretically-driven social scientist determined to learn from the data and looking for the answer to the question “How can we make as many people as possible better-off?”
All of which made some of the questions from the audience (passed up on cards and read out by Schor) more than a little irritating. The worst one, stupid as well as rude, asked whether economics was “too mired in the muck of right-wing thought” to do any good in the world. (I should say that no-one clapped at that one, and a lot of people were clearly embarrassed: in many respects this was the friendliest of all possible audiences.) Krugman politely stood his ground. Whoever submitted the question is probably well-used to (correctly) arguing that the horrors of Stalin don’t invalidate the fundamental insights of Marxists. How hard can it be to apply the same basic point to the WTO and the neoclassical toolkit?[1] Questions like that are the bobblehead left-wing analogue to the pez-dispenser right-wing trope that if only you understood “Econ 101” or “the basic laws of the market” you’d agree with every wingnut idea put to you. I have all kinds of criticisms and qualms about economics as a body of knowledge and a professional enterprise, and naturally I’d like to be right about all of them all the time. But, sadly, easy certainty is continually frustrated by the fact that many of the economists I know are much smarter than me and have the irritating ability to make good arguments for their point of view. And so even though I will of course prevail in the end I can’t just dismiss them out of hand. I expect the same consideration in return, the odd snotty economist (or, more often, their camp-followers in political science and law) notwithstanding.
Anyway, if you get a chance to see Krugman at a book-signing or whatever — especially of the topic is international macroeconomics — take it. He’s good value.
fn1. Comments to the effect that I am implying that the WTO is as bad as Stalin here will be ignored.
I don’t know when “conferencing” became a verb, but I guess I’m doing it all the same. I’m at the “ASA Meetings”:http://www.asanet.org/convention/2004/ in San Francisco, where the keynote speakers include well-known sociologist Paul Krugman. I’m off to the Economic Sociology Section reception soon, but I am nevertheless tempted by the Section on Alcohol Drugs and Tobacco reception. Meanwhile, the “storm damage in Florida”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/national/15STOR.final.html?hp reminds me of the answer to “the stupidest question in the world”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000538.html.
Quick, in high school were you ever told not to date your old girlfriend’s current boyfriend’s old girlfriend? Or your old boyfriend’s current girlfriend’s old boyfriend? Probably not. But I bet you never did, either. This month’s “American Journal of Sociology”:http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJS/journal/contents/v110n1.html has a very nice “paper”:http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/AJS/journal/issues/v110n1/070259/070259.html (subscription only, alas) by “Peter Bearman”:http://www.columbia.edu/cu/sipa/RESEARCH/bios/psb17.html, “Jim Moody”:http://www.sociology.ohio-state.edu/jwm/ and “Katherine Stovel”:http://www.soc.washington.edu/people/faculty/faculty_detail.asp?UID=stovel about the structure of the romantic and sexual network in a population of over 800 adolescents at “Jefferson High” in a midsized town in the midwestern United States. They got a pretty well-bounded population (a high school included in the “AddHealth”:http://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/addhealth/ study) and mapped out all the connections between the students. Read on for the lurid details.
Two good things from Mark Schmitt (but you wouldn’t expect anything less, right?). There’s an “American Prospect Piece”:http://www.prospect.org/web/view-web.ww?id=8303 by him about the long-term effects of the congressional reforms of the 1950s and ’60s, and a “post about jobs with no sick leave”:http://markschmitt.typepad.com/decembrist/2004/08/paid_sick_leave.html:
According to the brilliant analysts at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, sixty-six million workers, or 54% of the workforce, does not get a single paid sick day after a full year on the job.
That statistic, I think, is one of the best indicators of the two classes of the labor market, and how the divide is not so much about wages and income as about benefits and security. And those of us on the relatively secure side of the divide cannot really understand how different life is in a world where you don’t have any paid sick leave. I might think I understand what it is to earn low wages — $10,500/year, in my first job — but I’ve never had a job that didn’t offer sick days. Can’t even imagine it.
Jacob Hacker has a sort of “preview of his next book”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040816&s=hacker081604 in The New Republic, and I think he is most clearly saying the big thing that needs to be said about the economy: That the principal problem, the big thing that has changed, is not the number of jobs, the rate of growth, or income inequality. It’s the shift in risk from the government and corporations onto individuals. … [B]ut while some of us have been able to exchange the security of the past for greater economic opportunity, a majority of workers are absorbing more risk without accompanying reward.
We’ve “mentioned”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002059.html this phenomenon “before”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001213.html at CT, as has Daniel in some older posts about “pension schemes”:http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2002_12_15_d-squareddigest_archive.html#86124096.
I’ve mentioned this book before, but now that it’s been published so I thought it worth mentioning again. “Egalitarian Capitalism”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0871544512/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ is a new book by my new colleague “Lane Kenworthy”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lkenwor/, who’s just joined us at “Arizona”:http://fp.arizona.edu/soc/. It’s a comparative analysis of trends in income inequality and household pre- and post-tax transfers in sixteen wealthy capitalist democracies. Lane’s approach is to ask whether the data support the idea that there are tradeoffs between a low degree of inequality, on the one hand, and strong growth, high employment and growing incomes on the other. The short answer is “not really.” The longer answer has interesting discussions of which approaches work and which seem not to. It’s a good book: the argument, the writing, and the data analysis are accessible and easy to follow. As has often been said around here, policy and public debate in the United States hardly ever looks around to see how other countries organize the relationship between economy and society. Maybe the current climate provides an opportunity to change that: To see how equality is compatible with various measures of economic success, read the book. (To get a sense of how these countries compare to Neoconservative ideals, just continue to follow the news about Iraq.) You can “read the first chapter”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lkenwor/egalitariancapitalism.pdf to get a better sense of what the project is; “look at the cover”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lkenwor/egalitariancapitalism-cover.pdf; or just “buy it”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0871544512/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/.
The Irish athlete “Cathal Lombard”:http://www.flynnsports.com/athletes-detail.htm?id=155 has “tested positive”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/athletics/3544612.stm for “EPO”:http://www.drugs.com/cons/EPO.html, the now commonly-abused drug that radically boosts red blood cell production. Lombard’s path seems to have been a standard one. Nothing special for most of his career, his 5,000 and 10,000 meter times started improving radically when he changed coaches a couple of years ago. In “interviews”:http://www.irishrunner.com/cathal03.html he put it all down to training smarter and overhauling his approach to running.
Assuming the tests are confirmed, Lombard’s story shows just how phenomenally effective performance-enhancing drugs are these days. Lombard is basically a decent club runner: certainly faster than most of us, but he never won anything in competition and he certainly couldn’t touch the likes of, say, Mark Carroll, the leading Irish men’s middle distance runner of his generation. Just “compare”:http://www.flynnsports.com/athletes-detail.htm?id=24 and “contrast”:http://www.flynnsports.com/athletes-detail.htm?id=155 their respective accomplishments over the years. And yet at the age of 26, Lombard started knocking down his 5 and 10k PBs in 20 or 30 second chunks over a period of months, to the point where “earlier this year”:http://www.irishrunner.com/04stan.html he smashed Mark’s National 10k record by 13 seconds. Now imagine what happens if you give EPO to someone who is really, really talented to begin with.
This sort of thing makes it hard to get really enthusiastic about the upcoming Olympics, because it’s clear that for everyone who’s caught there are a bunch more who evade detection. But which ones? It’s hard to catch even textbook cases using known substances, let alone truly elite competitors who use stuff that testing agencies don’t even know exists. Some sports, like professional cycling, are so obviously soaked in chemicals that everyone has simply agreed to look the other way. On the track and field circuit, there are a lot of fairly clear-cut opinions about who’s clean and who isn’t, and a lot of justified resentment from honest athletes who see their own natural talent and hard work count for nothing courtesy of someone else’s course of injections. They face a harsh choice when they see the likes of Lombard accelerating away from them on the back straight towards Olympic glory, corporate sponsorship and popular adulation.
I’m nearly at the end of my few weeks of dashing around various countries by various means. Here’s an incident I witnessed this afternoon on a flight from Salt Lake City to Tucson, on a small commuter jet. I was sitting in the first row. The flight attendant was standing next to me, by the door. A tall, casually-dressed woman got on and presented a little yellow piece of paper to the flight attendant. He looked at it.
Flight Attendant: This isn’t a boarding pass.
Woman: Yes, I–
FA (Polite but confused): I’m sorry. Are you sure —
W: I’m armed.
FA: What?
W: I’m armed.
FA (looks at yellow paper again): OK. I haven’t seen this before.
W: Thanks.
Then she went and sat down. Later the Flight Attendant went and showed the piece of paper to the pilots, and they had a chat about it.