Hello from a motel in “Little Rock, Arkansas”:http://www.littlerock.com/, which turns out to have free ethernet. (The motel, not the city.) Today’s route ran from near “Salem, SC”:http://www.sciway.net/city/salem.html, up “I-85”:http://www.ncroads.com/interst/ih085.htm to “Spartanburg, SC”:http://www.cityofspartanburg.org/ where I picked up “I-26”:http://www.ncdot.org/projects/I26Connector/ to “Asheville, NC”:http://www.asheville.com/, where you hit “I-40”:http://www.interstate-guide.com/i-040.html. The drive across the “Smokies”:http://www.nps.gov/grsm/ was beautiful, though there were some brutally heavy rainstorms. Then I drove across the whole of Tennessee, lengthways. The first city was “Knoxville”:http://www.knoxville.org/. I swear the smug looking guy in the fancy sportscar who cut me off around there “looked familiar”:http://www.instapundit.com. The longer it went on, the flatter and less interesting Tennessee became, and the more I was forced to resort to strategies like singing in the car in order to keep myself awake. Well, to be honest maybe I didn’t need that much provocation. Here’s “forty seconds’ worth of video”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/trip/day1.mov from a day’s worth of driving. Tomorrow: On to “Amarillo”:http://www.amarillonet.com/! I wonder if we have any readers in Amarillo.
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Kieran Healy
Some threads of the “ongoing”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002232.html “discussion”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002230.html about the Efficient Markets Hypothesis have begun to address the contrast between markets and planning, with the state as the prospective planner. As is often the case in such discussions, the implicit contrast is between a Hayekian information-processing ideal and, say, North Korea. To break down this assumption a bit, it’s worth drawing a link to a related debate in the economics and sociology of organizations about the existence of the firm. A long time ago, “Ronald Coase”:http://www.nobel.se/economics/laureates/1991/coase-autobio.html asked why, if markets are so great, are there so many firms? Below the fold is an “old post of mine”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/000064.html where I examine “Brink Lindsey’s”:http://www.brinklindsey.com/ efforts to defend the virtues of free markets in the light of Coase’s ideas. It might be of interest as a sidelight to the EMH debate.
After a year of leave in Australia (well, _someone_ has to act as a counterweight to all those Aussie backpackers), I just arrived back in the U.S. Three observations:
* It should not surprise you that making a c.1 year-old boy watch the in-flight TV system for six hours of a Sydney-to-Los Angeles flight would lead to emotional problems (viz, crying, screaming, kicking) for the following six hours. It seemed to surprise the parents of the c.1 year-old boy sitting next to us, however.
* A clear-eyed assessment of Los Angeles International Airport (e.g., by Martians) would conclude that it is a machine designed to produce unhappy, stressed-out people by means of multiple queues, unnecessary bottlenecks, pointless dumping of international transfer passengers out onto the sidewalk, and other more sophisticated methods.
* What the hell is “Hooters”:http://www.hooters.com/ doing with an “airline”:http://www.hootersair.com/? When I saw the jet trundle by on the runway I thought I was hallucinating.
After spending the next few days recovering from jetlag, I’m going to drive from South Carolina to Arizona, probably along I-40. (I have to do this, for various reasons.) Any advice? Apart from “Book a flight instead”, I mean.
My fellow sociologist, former office-mate and CT Comrade-in-Arms “Eszter Hargittai”:http://www.eszter.com has won the “National Communications Association’s”:http://www.natcom.org/default.htm G. R. Miller Outstanding Dissertation Award for _How Wide a Web? Inequalities in Accessing Information Online_.
New from MIT Press comes “_Causation and Counterfactuals_”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262532565/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/, an anthology edited by “John Collins”:http://collins.philo.columbia.edu/, “Ned Hall”:http://web.mit.edu/philos/www/hall.html and “L.A. Paul”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lapaul. At the “Pacific APA”:http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/divisions/pacific/ meetings, the latter was recently identified, much to her disgust, as “Kieran Healy from Crooked Timber’s wife.” _Causation and Counterfactuals_ presents the best recent work on the “counterfactual analysis of causation”:http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-counterfactual/, which helps us understand the metaphysical underpinnings of sentences like “If you don’t buy it you’ll be sorry,” “If I hadn’t blogged so much my own book would be finished by now,” and “If everyone on CT posted a shameless plug simultaneously, who’d be responsible?” The book is also perhaps the only place to read the full, gripping saga of “Billy and Suzy”:http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=billy+suzy+counterfactual&btnG=Search, a tale of “passion”:http://www.mit.edu/~yablo/advert.html, “overdetermination”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/homepages/ney/overdetermination_and_mental_causation.pdf, “war”:http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:DtIwbmQeUTcJ:web.syr.edu/~edhiddle/Hiddleston%2520Causal%2520Powers%2520web.pdf+billy+suzy+war+causation&hl=en, “double prevention”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lapaul/papers/causation-preemption.pdf and “appalling violence”:http://philosophy.wisc.edu/eells/papers/ptprevmay01webver.PDF.
Guest-blogging over at Volokh, Cathy Seipp tells us “why we should learn French rather than Spanish:”:http://volokh.com/posts/1090100809.shtml
Last year, when she took French at Pasadena Community College, we got the same reaction: “Why French? Why not Spanish? Isn’t that more useful around here?” Well, no. What’s useful in Los Angeles, just like everywhere else in the country, is English. I suppose if I were a contractor rounding up day laborers every morning, and wanted my daughter to learn the family business, Spanish would be invaluable. … I do speak enough Spanish to communicate with the cleaning lady … This is sort of useful, but not vital.
Since 1066, educated English speakers have studied French. Even if we don’t speak it … it gives us a deeper understanding of our own language, and prevents embarrassing gaffes like “I just love that Why-vees Saint Laurent!” Which some trophy wife actually said to me at a fashion show once.
An example of the kind of embarrassing gaffe that the study of French seems powerless to prevent is left as an exercise to the reader.
I’ve written about the intersection of “incarceration”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/000087.html, “race”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/000096.html and “the labor market”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000386.html several times in the past. In the United States, the remarkable expansion of the prison system over the past thirty years, despite generally falling crime rates, has had far-reaching effects on large segments of the population, but especially amongst unskilled black men. A striking way to characterize the depth of this change is to make a comparison to rates of participation in some other institution — say, for instance, that more black men have been to jail than are in college. But, as a lobby group found out last year, these comparisions are quite tricky to make properly, because the populations are different (all black men vs college-age black men, for instance).
But one of the many good reasons we have sociologists and demographers is to work out those numbers properly. A “new paper”:http://www.asanet.org/pubs/ASRv69n2p.pdf [pdf] by Becky Pettit and Bruce Western[1] does a terrific job of estimating how the effects of mass incarceration are distributed across the population. They estimate the risk of imprisonment for black and white men of different levels of education.[2] The paper is worth reading in its entirety, both to see how the findings might be understood and to understand how one goes about estimating these numbers in the first place — it’s not at all trivial to calculate them. Two core findings — bearing in mind these are the best available estimates — are remarkable:
* Among black men born between 1965 and 1969, 30.2 percent of those who didn’t attend college had gone to prison by 1999. A startling *58.9 percent of black high school dropouts born from 1965 through 1969 had served time* in state or federal prison by their early 30s.
* “Imprisonment now rivals or overshadows the frequency of military service and college graduation for recent cohorts of African American men. *For black men in their mid-thirties at the end of the 1990s, prison records were nearly twice as common as bachelor’s degrees.*” In the same cohort, “imprisonment was more than twice as common as military service.”
Interestingly, racial disparity as such has not grown in sentencing: the rates and risks of imprisonment are 6 to 8 times higher for young black men compared to young whites in both the ’45-’49 and ’65-’69 cohorts. But class inequality has increased. So while lifetime risk of imprisonment nearly doubled between 1979 and 1999, “nearly all of this increased risk was experienced by those with just a high school education.” Incarceration is now the typical life-event for young, poorly-educated black men.
fn1. Full disclosure: Becky’s a friend of mine and Bruce was one of my Ph.D advisers.
fn2. To forestall any misinterpretation, note that “risk” is a technical term here meaning roughly “the probability of being observed as ‘incarcerated’ during the period under study.”
Speaking of “accepting responsibility”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002176.html, I am planning to take the credit for “this trend”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/kieran.png (also “pdf”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/kieran.pdf, to print out and hang on your wall). Go to the “Social Security Administration Website”:http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/ and investigate some trends for yourself. See the decline of the Heathers, the sudden, spectactular rise of the Ellas, and the terrible Hillary crash of 1993. Then read Stanley Lieberson’s “A Matter of Taste”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0300083858/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ for the sociology.
Brayden King notes that the “Wall Street Journal”:https://print.wsj.com/print-registration/docs/6gcaf.html is concerned about ever-rising health care costs in the United States. I’ve been looking at data on national health systems for a paper I’m trying to write. It turns out that there’s a lot less theoretical work done on comparative health systems than you might think, certainly in comparison to the huge literature on welfare state regimes. Here’s a figure showing the relationship between the “Publicness” of the health system and the amount spent on health care per person per year. Data points are each country’s mean score on these measures for the years 1990 to 2001.
*Update*: I’ve relabeled the x-axis to remove a misleading reference to ratios.
Just thought I’d let everyone know that the Great Barrier Reef really deserves its name.
Brian has already “critiqued Christopher Peacocke’s argument”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002108.html#comments that a belief in our capacity to accurately represent the the external world is justifiable _a priori_ by appeal to the mechanism of natural selection. Accurate representations of the world are selected for, so (Brian summarizes) “we probably get basic things right most of the time.”
Brian’s the philosopher, so he’s better able than me to spot the big problems in the argument. (He was selected by graduate school for this.) An additional one strikes me. Elsewhere in the world of arguments from natural selection we find arguments that practices like religion or a belief in God are also fitness-enhancing for a whole bunch of reasons and thus likely to be selected for. But the people who make these arguments do so to explain why religious beliefs are useful fictions, not to show that they therefore accurately represent facts about the world. So while Peacocke’s argument seems plausible as long as we restrict ourselves to the contemplation of tables, contemplation of the varieties of religious experience seems to cause him some problems. Of course, you can say that while accurate representations of the world are selected for in the case of the perception of tables, inaccurate representations are selected in the case of perception of divine entities. But then “basic things” and “most of the time” start to do an awful lot of work in the argument, distinguishing what we get right from what we get wrong starts to look much harder, and the seemingly elegant _a priori_ bridge effected between reality and representation by means of natural selection seems shaky. That’s the problem with arguments from adaptation. They’re a bit too adaptable.
I agree with Brayden. In a year when the theme of the ASA’s annual meeting is “Public Sociologies”:http://www.asanet.org/convention/2004/themhome.html, it’s appropriate that the winner of the ASA’s dissertation award is a “Blogger”:http://brokengoalie.typepad.com/kickasswomen/2004/07/brian_g_kicks_a.html. Congratulations to “Brian Gifford”:http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~hptp/rwjf_scholars.htm#BG and also co-winner “Greta Krippner”:http://www.soc.ucla.edu/faculty.php?lid=2399&display_one=1.
The Centers for Disease Control report that “three people have died from rabies”:http://www.cdc.gov/od/oc/media/pressrel/r040701.htm contracted after receiving transplants that originated with the same donor. The donors lungs, liver and kidneys were recovered. The lung recipient died during the transplant of unrelated causes. The recipients of both kidneys and the liver died of rabies. In their “more detailed investigation”:http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm53d701a1.htm of the events, the CDC report that the donor
bq. as an Arkansas man who visited two hospitals in Texas with severe mental status changes and a low-grade fever. Neurologic imaging indicated findings consistent with a subarachnoid hemorrhage, which expanded rapidly in the 48 hours after admission, leading to cerebral herniation and death.
Rabies has about a three-week incubation period, and the three surviving recipients were re-admitted to hospital between 21 and 27 days after their transplants, where they died. Regular readers of CT know that one of my main “research interests”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~kjhealy/vita.php3 has been the social organization of exchange in human blood and organs. In particular, I’ve looked at how the logistical underpinnings of the procurement system “drive variation”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/drafts/alt-org.pdf in rates of donation, and argued that it’s a mistake to frame the debate about organ donation in terms of stylized images of givers versus sellers. In other words, whether the process is industrialized matters more than whether it is commodified. Often, it’s only in tragic cases like this that this logistical aspect is brought to light. Of course, that doesn’t mean I think highly rationalized organizational systems are a necessarily a bad thing. Just take the CDC itself, and its remarkable “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report”:http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/, which tracks what people are dying from this week in the United States. The MMWR was where the earliest signs of the size of the “HIV disaster”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/papers/ts.pdf became apparent to the epidemiologists, though alas not to the blood banks or the Reagan administration.
Via “Ralph Luker”:http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/5933.html comes a quite “astonishing story”:http://margaretsoltan.phenominet.com/archives/2004_06_01_archive.html#108800392641516571 from Margaret Soltan at “University Diaries”:http://margaretsoltan.phenominet.com/. (The link doesn’t seem to work: scroll to Wednesday June 23rd.) “In March”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001545.html I wrote about Diploma Mills like “Glenncullen University”:http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/materials/work/slides/Glencullen%20University_files/ (a non-existent college in Dublin), which offer a range of degrees upon receipt of a fee, without all that tedious standing in line, taking exams, writing theses, and so on. Last month, an ongoing investigation headed by “Senator Susan Collins”:http://collins.senate.gov/ called for “a crackdown”:http://govt-aff.senate.gov/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressReleases.Detail&Affiliation=C&PressRelease_id=718&Month=5&Year=2004 on such places.
Degrees from the Glenncullens of this world pad out the CVs of people from many walks of life. But University Diaries reports that the investigation has also found evidence of bogus credentials on the CVs of some … unexpected … people. People like “Isaiah Berlin”:http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/, for instance:
The committee’s zealous detective work has produced a list of contemporary and posthumous fake degree holders that is now making the rounds … Perhaps the most stunning revelation involves Sir Isaiah Berlin, an intellectual and moral icon whose death a few years ago prompted hundreds of tributes, festschrifts, conferences, and books. … How then can it be that Berlin graduated not from Corpus Christi Oxford, as his curriculum vitae claimed, but rather from the similar-sounding, and now defunct (by court order) diploma mill, the University of England at Oxford? And that his Ph.D. in philosophy was granted on the basis of a one-page essay he wrote describing his “life experience” as a “a real pluralist” who “likes everyone”? (Quotations are taken from UEO records confiscated by the Department of Commerce.)
“It’s an intriguing story,” says Madelaine Jovovich, a member of Collins’s staff. “Berlin was born in Riga; his father was a timber merchant. His father was very unhappy that his son wanted to become an academic, because he wanted Berlin to go into the family lumber business… It turns out that this business was not just wood but wood products, including paper, and that Berlin’s father was, among other things, the proprietor of an early and very lucrative diploma mill, which his son did eventually agree to help run, so long as it could be kept quiet. The business was so successful that the Berlins opened a branch in Romania which continues to operate today.” … Given this new information, scholars are reviewing Berlin’s somewhat enigmatic life – in particular, his various overseas trips and contacts – with greater care.
So Berlin might not just have gotten his Ph.D from a diploma mill, he might have actually been _in charge of one_? That popping noise you hear is the sound of heads exploding at Oxford, and possibly also in various political theory seminars around the United States. University Diaries quotes (but doesn’t source) the likes of Ronald Dworkin, Tom Nagel and Michael Walzer expressing their astonishment and dismay at these revelations.
And if you are not disturbed that the “Pope of Liberty”:http://tlrdoc.free.fr/pages/berlin.htm might turn out to have feet of clay, then how does the actual Pope grab ya?
bq. Academics are bracing for what Senator Collins promises are further, equally staggering, revelations. “I can’t be definitive just yet,” she said to a reporter yesterday, “but I can tell you that we are scrutinizing Albert Schweitzer’s activities in Africa very carefully. The committee is also looking into allegations that one ‘Karol Wojtyla’ graduated not from the Jagiellonian University of Krakow, as his cv claims, but from the University of Jagellionia at Fort Lauderdale.”
Can all this be true? Am I just being wound up?[1] If the Pope got his degree from Fort Lauderdale, then that means “Ian Paisley”:http://www.ianpaisley.org/ (Ph.D “Bob Jones University”:http://www.bju.edu/) is better qualified than him. I really, really need to read more detailed original reporting on this story, not just quotes at a few removes. Anyone got any news items to link to?
*Update*: _Of course_ it’s a wind-up. It’s amazing what six hours of sleep will do for one’s clarity of mind. But I have to say the possibility of truthfully using the phrase “Crooked Timber Merchant” with reference to Berlin was just too tempting to pass up. If only she’d left out the bit about the Pope, I think I’d have swallowed it whole.
fn1. By the way, if some Oxbridge product leaves a comment to the effect that of course this has been common knowledge in the Senior Common Room for _years_, I’m going to be even more annoyed than I will be if it turns out to be a false report.
Eugene Volokh gravely considers the danger that a number of people designated by the government as enemy combatants — or rather, a number of Al Qaeda agents, or rather, 50,000 “alleged enemy soliders”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_06_28.shtml#1088468085 of some foreign power — might avail of “Rasul v Bush”:http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/terrorism/rasulbush021902pet.html and file an avalanche of habeas corpus writs claiming they aren’t really enemy soldiers.[1] Thus, he fears, one of the fundamental tenets of the rule of law, affirmed this week by the Supreme Court, becomes a _deadly weapon in the hands of our litigious enemies_. I see a mini-series, _Stalag Law_, set in the not-too-distant future. In a nation suffocated by _habeas_ writs inappropriately filed by malicious captured soldiers from their hotel-like detention centers, a tiny remnant of the 82nd Airborne Paralegal Division fights to clear the appalling backlog of cases …
“Brad DeLong”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/001109.html and (more appropriately) the “Medium Lobster”:http://fafblog.blogspot.com/2004_06_27_fafblog_archive.html#108855830432918424 have already given this the treatment it deserves. I just want to add that this is the same Eugene Volokh who “declared himself unwilling”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002017.html to discuss the topic of actual lawyers employed by an actual government of the United States searching for a “legal rationalization”:http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04%2F06%2F07%2F0988582 for actual “torture”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2004/06/apologia_pro_tormento_analyzing_the_first_56_pages_of_the_walker_working_group_report_aka_the_torture_memo.html that members of that administration actually authorized. Look, “like I said”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002017.html, blog about whatever you want. But here’s a hypo for you: Let’s say that you’re a respected legal scholar with “strong”:http://www1.law.ucla.edu/~volokh/#GUNCONTROL “interests”:http://www1.law.ucla.edu/~volokh/#RELIGION in the “protection”:http://www1.law.ucla.edu/~volokh/#SPEECH of individual freedoms from the dead hand of the state. And let’s say that your government is found to have tortured people. And let’s say that its lawyers produce threadbare rationalizations saying that’s no big deal. And let’s say that in response you avoid the topic because it’s disgusting and because “if I had a choice in how to invest my scarce time, I’d rather not invest it here.” And let’s say that, instead, you choose to focus on the possibility that a captured foreign army might sue its way to victory within the U.S. courts. What conclusions might your readers draw given such (admittedly far-fetched) circumstances?
fn1. “Your honor, I swear, I have no idea why all 50,000 of us are dressed in similar uniforms.”