by Henry Farrell on October 3, 2007
Via “Tyler Cowen”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/, this “IHE article”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/03/heterodox covers the right orthodoxy vs. left heterodoxy debate in economics again, and seems to end up implying that it’s mostly happening in the heads of heterodox economists. For my money, that’s far too strong a conclusion – there is “genuine evidence”:http://www.atypon-link.com/AEAP/doi/pdf/10.1257/0895330053147976?cookieSet=1 that economics training pushes grad students further to the right, weeds out radical ideas etc. It may indeed be true that heterodox types exaggerate the degree of uniformity among the orthodox, but that is a somewhat different argument. Be that as it may, I found the article’s extensive discussion of Daniel Klein’s “counter-insurgency” against leftwing economists to be pretty interesting. According to the article, Klein starts from the position that economics should be a classical liberal creed, and that “the burden of proof should be on those who wish to intervene in markets.” Fair enough if that’s yer ideological druthers. But then he argues that:
there is also a bias, perhaps unconscious, in the media: “Basically they’re social-democratic periodicals, and probably journalists, writing those articles talking almost exclusively … to people on the left.”
This is a … striking claim – there’s plenty of survey evidence (Jonathan Chait discusses this in his recent book) that journalists tend to have somewhat right-of-center views on economic issues. I doubt that Klein (whose bread-and-butter appears to be survey evidence on professionals’ attitudes) is unaware of this; the only conclusion that I can come to is that Klein believes that the vast majority of people in the US, including many people who would be considered to be on the right and indeed consider themselves to be so, are in fact social democrats. If only, says me.
Clarification: Daniel Klein says in comments below that he was specifically referring to the journalists who wrote the pieces for The Nation, In These Times, the NYT and the Atlantic. This is, to me, a considerably more defensible claim with respect to The Nation and ITT (I’m skeptical about the NYT being social democratic on economic issues and the Atlantic is a resolutely centrist publication) , and suggests that I simply didn’t understand what seemed to me to be a pretty odd statement.
by Henry Farrell on September 27, 2007
“Interesting and creepy…”:http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0907/Perils_of_access.html
Early this summer, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign for president learned that the men’s magazine GQ was working on a story the campaign was sure to hate: an account of infighting in Hillaryland. So Clinton’s aides pulled a page from the book of Hollywood publicists and offered GQ a stark choice: Kill the piece, or lose access to planned celebrity coverboy Bill Clinton. Despite internal protests, GQ editor Jim Nelson met the Clinton campaign’s demands, which had been delivered by Bill Clinton’s spokesman, Jay Carson, several sources familiar with the conversations said. GQ writer George Saunders traveled with Clinton to Africa in July, and Clinton is slated to appear on the cover of GQ’s December issue, in which it traditionally names a “Man of the Year,” according magazine industry sources.
The journalist who wrote this up describes it as a story about access, but it also speaks to the strange mix of features you get in magazines like GQ – fashion and triviality leavened with the odd ‘serious’ story to burnish the magazine’s image. “Vanity Fair” – the magazine about celebrities who wish they were intellectuals, and intellectuals who wish they were celebrities – is the classic practitioner of this weird mix-and-match. It’s unsurprising that when GQ‘s editors have to choose, they would decide to keep the coverboy stuff that sells copies – but I hope they end up publicly embarrassed over this (and the Clinton campaign too; it doesn’t say nice things about their _modus operandi_).
by Kieran Healy on September 5, 2007
Superhero blogging is the province of other members of this collective. But here — via Dan Myers, outgoing chair of the Notre Dame sociology department — is Rory McVeigh, incoming chair of said department, welcoming new grad students to the program. Dan explains the hat in coldly rational terms. But I prefer to think we’re witnessing the birth of a new Supervillain: Doc Socc, whose origin story begins with the mild-mannered but brilliant young Rory being continually passed over when it was time to choose teams in grade school, and who subsequently used his genius to develop the FootieTron (pictured), a prosthetic attachment that enhanced his football skills a millionfold. Once he tried it on, however, an accidental burst of gamma radiation made the device meld with his brain and now Doc Socc is on a quest to make THE WORLD play soccer FOREVER in teams of HIS choosing. Muaahahahahahaha. Special powers: tactical planning, team organization, long throw, kills enemies from a distance with deadly-accurate soccerbomb passes, close up by hacking expertly at their ankles. Noted ability: when captured, convincingly feigns mortal injury (writhes on ground clutching leg or head) to generate diversion and/or sympathy. Then escapes.
by Henry Farrell on August 29, 2007
Or perhaps rather, _Clash of the Titans_; only Ray Harryhausen could properly depict a “stand-off”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/28/debate of such magnitude – intellectual (and I use the term in its _very_ broadest sense) fisticuffs between Dinesh D’Souza and Alan Wolfe.
Now, D’Souza says Boston College is withholding videotape of a debate on the book he conducted there with the scholar Alan Wolfe — because it shows that the college’s “intellectual emperor has no clothes.” …But the producers of the video maintain that it was an embarrassment for both debaters. “It was uncivil, they talked over each other, they … cast aspersions on each other’s character, they made jokes at each other’s expense, it was a snipe job, it was a street fight, it was a brawl. And frankly it doesn’t meet Boston College’s intellectual standards,” said Ben Birnbaum, the executive producer of Front Row. While it was clear that the taping was intended for an online audience, the written agreement with the debaters left the decision on what to do with the video in the college’s hands.
Boston College’s media people should be warmly congratulated for protecting us from this abomination. On the one hand, not much can be said about Dinesh D’Souza that hasn’t “been said already”:http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Dinesh_D’Souza. On the other, it seems to me that Alan Wolfe doesn’t come in for anywhere near as much flak as he deserves. Not that he’s a D’Souza, or anything like him, but he _is_ Gertrude Stein’s Oakland in human form, a sort of Lowest Common Denominator of liberal wuffle. Wolfe is the source of relentless waves of book reviews, opinion articles, magazine squibs and monographs; in short, of ideas journalism of all kinds except the kind that actually has ideas. I have a friend whose cure for writer’s block is to pick up the latest Wolfe emanation in the _New York Times Book Review_ or wherever it might be, and use it as a class of a purgative. As he reads it, he gets increasingly furious that this sort of guff can _get published_ by apparently serious journals; this anger serves to clean out the system. It may be that sometime, somewhere, Alan Wolfe has said something that is both interesting and true; if so, I have yet to see it (readers who believe that they have spotted insightful Wolfe articles in the wild should of course feel free to link to them in comments).
by Henry Farrell on August 20, 2007
Two requests for help:
(1) Academic blogs wiki. I’ve grown tired of dealing with google spammers, and have upgraded to Mediawiki 1.68 which should allow me to use “ConfirmEdit”:http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit, a basic captcha tool. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work – when I try to implement it I get the following error message
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_BOOLEAN_AND, expecting ‘(‘ in /home/farrell/public_html/wiki/extensions/ConfirmEdit/ConfirmEdit.php on line 363
It looks from the extension’s “talk page”:http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_talk:ConfirmEdit as though I am not the only person experiencing this problem (someone suggests a modification to the php file which doesn’t seem to work for me). Anyone have any idea of what the problem is? (fwiw my server uses php 4.4.6 – hence my inability to upgrade to a more recent version of MediaWiki). For the moment I have implemented a temporary kludge to deter spambots by protecting the relevant directory with a password easily visible to Real Humans, but this isn’t a happy or elegant long term solution. UPDATE – problem solved – a directory screw-up on my part.
(2) when messing around with my server a few months ago, I deleted the rtf and PDF files for the Yochai Benkler seminar that we ran here a while back, and can’t find any copies on my hard drive or on the Wayback Machine. Anyone who downloaded a copy and is willing to send me it will have my eternal gratitude …
by Harry on August 17, 2007
Our wedding was, in so far as any can be, a happy accident, and nearly as low-key as possible (we had four guests, I made dinner, and the secretary in the UC Davis Philosophy department who was a minister of that church that the Revd. Jim was with in Taxi, signed the papers with us. She subsequently presided over an even more minimalist wedding, inspired by ours, over lunch on a workday in the outstanding student cafeteria they used to, and for all I know still, have there). So, no family, and not much in the way of gifts.
So you might think I’m not one to offer advice on what to ask for for a wedding present. But, as ever, I have strong opinions, after 15 years of marriage, about what is actually worth having, and feel obliged to pass them on to my excellent friends who are about to tie the knot, and have relatives who will not only attend the wedding but are keen to give them gifts. Here are my 4 top picks:
[click to continue…]
by Kieran Healy on August 8, 2007
All this harshing on Michael Ignatieff for his ponderous, air-filled essay on Iraq reminded me of a characterization of him I’d read a few years ago. I couldn’t remember the source, only the phrase. But Google remembers:
bq. The staff of BBC2’s late Late Show used to have a little joke about one of its presenters, Michael Ignatieff. Everyone knows what an idiot savant is: someone who appears to be an idiot but in fact is a wise man. Well, Ignatieff was a savant idiot.
Yes, I know that’s not really what an idiot savant is, but you get the point.
by Kieran Healy on July 23, 2007
Top: View of the University of Arizona and the Santa Catalina mountains, summer day. (My office is on the top floor of the building in the lower right foreground.) Bottom: View of the University of Arizona and the Santa Catalina mountains, summer monsoon. It’s just finishing up now.
by Kieran Healy on July 22, 2007
Simpsonize yourself by uploading a headshot, providing a few variables, and (allegedly) having it automatically converted. You can tweak the image afterwards. JamesJoyner thinks it’s lame. Here I am — I’ll leave the veridicality of the representation for others to judge. The site is a bit finicky, perhaps because it’s overloaded with users. If you get it to work, post a link to yourself in the comments.
by Kieran Healy on July 19, 2007
Here is a likely poorly-specified question for biologists, prompted by wanting to buy Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us and then reading a story about genetically modified mice. Weisman’s book asks how the world would change and what of us would survive if humans were all wiped out overnight or just disappeared by something (a virus, the Rapture). The premise is unlikely (something that kills people — all people — but leaves the rest of the world standing) but intriguing.
So I wondered, what if, long, long after our disappearance, some other species arose on earth at least as intelligent as us and eventually started doing evolutionary and molecular biology. Let’s say they have a working theory of evolution much like our own. Now say for the sake of argument that a bunch of transgenic organisms produced by humans have survived and prospered in the interim. So our future biologists find things like a bacteria that produces insulin, or a plant that secretes insecticide, or rice that is high in beta carotene, or more exotic stuff as needed.[1]
I’m wondering, would such organisms even present themselves as empirical anomalies? (That is, how much would you have to know about genomes and evolution for them to seem odd?) And if they did seem odd, how would they be explained? That is, would the evidence of their intelligent design by a previous, now-extinct species be clear? You can see that I’m just irony-mongering here. Would some Arthropod-staffed functional-equivalent of the Discovery Institute point its claw at some of these organisms, saying they were anomalies that could only be explained by the intervention of a divine intelligence? Would Charles Crustacean find a story that could account for their evolution by natural selection? I’m particularly interested in whether the artificial provenance of transgenic organisms would be clear on internal evidence alone. I don’t know anything about this stuff, so probably the answer is “Yes” for reasons obvious to experts. But if it weren’t …
From the sound of Weisman’s book, though, internal evidence wouldn’t be all that was available. Our putative Arthropod successors would likely be able to conjecuture as follows: “The lost civilization who did this is probably the same one responsible for leaving those giant goddamn piles of steel-belted rubber rings and miscellaneous plastic items piled around the place.” To which someone would no doubt reply, “Come off it, no organism that spent its time making rubber tubes and piling them up in giant mountains would have ever been smart enough to figure out genetic engineering.”
[1] It occurs to me that rice requires a lot of cultivation to prosper, but there aren’t any humans to take care of it. Hence, “insert example as needed.”
by Kieran Healy on July 17, 2007
As “Atrios points out”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2007_07_15_archive.html#162127958575664769 the Pope is indeed a Primate as well as a primate. This reminds me of watching RTE news years ago reporting on the death of “Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiach”:http://www.answers.com/topic/tom-s-cardinal-fiaich, Primate of Ireland. The newscaster asked some talking head whether he preferred to remember the Cardinal as a man or a primate. I know which PZ Myers would pick.
by Kieran Healy on July 13, 2007
Via Unfogged, “a key piece of empirical evidence”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19740787/ in the gun control debate. Faced with an intruder attempting to rob them at gunpoint, the homeowners responded successfully with wine and cheese. Merely brandishing the Camembert and bottle of Chateau Malescot St-Exupéry was not sufficient, though: they were discharged, but without injury to either party, or indeed the party itself.
by Kieran Healy on July 12, 2007
Just look what it’s doing to otherwise sober economists:
What have you done, Henry?
by Kieran Healy on July 9, 2007
I had to stop at the local Wild Oats this morning to pick up my monthly supply of liberal condescension. Some of the fruit was labeled “Organic.” The non-organic stuff was labeled “Conventional.” I found this a little odd, because when I see “Conventional” used as a label, I expect its opposite to be “Nuclear.”
by Kieran Healy on July 4, 2007
Via “Engadget”:http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/04/steorns-orbo-free-energy-machine-demonstrated-tomorrow/ comes news that “Steorn”:http://www.steorn.com/ are back with an allegedly working demonstration of their magnetic “free energy” (i.e., perpetual motion) machine, the “Orbo”:http://www.steorn.com/orbo/. You may remember them from “last year”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/08/22/free-lunch-and-irish-breakfast/. As before, the reading on the kookometer is over in the red, as the device is being pitched directly to the media, the demo is taking place as a show at an “art museum”:http://www.kinetica-museum.org/new_site/, and some convoluted jury system “challenge” is in place to validate it. The smart money, I believe, is of the view that Steorn — if they’re not just charlatans — have honestly reinvented some version of the magnetic motor, a mainstay of perpetual motion cranks.
