Just broke the Water Pitcher

“Andrew Gelman”:http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2009/02/i-received-a-fr.html is puzzled.

I received a free copy in the mail of an introductory statistics textbook. I showed the book to Yu-Sung and he said: Wow, it’s pretty fancy. I bet it costs $150. I didn’t believe him, but we checked on Amazon and lo! it really does retail for that much. What the . . . ? I asked around and, indeed, it’s commonplace for students to pay well over $100 for introductory textbooks.
Well. I’m planning to write an introductory textbook of my own and I’d like to charge $10 for it. Maybe this isn’t possible, but I think $40 should be doable. And why would anybody require their students to pay $150 for a statistics book when something better is available at less than 1/3 the price?

… It just mystifies me that, in all these different fields, it’s considered acceptable to charge $150 for a textbook. I’d think that all you need is one cartel-breaker in each field and all the prices would come tumbling down. But apparently not. I just don’t understand.

Well, perhaps “crack economist Greg Mankiw”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/03/04/principles-and-practices-of-economics/ might be able to solve this particular mystery. Or, perhaps, not so much. But more simply, I think that the obvious public choice answer is that the costs of this particular arrangement are borne by the students, who constitute a captive market, rather than by the professors, who actually choose the textbook that is required. All that you need are some very moderate side-payments to persuade self-interested professors to adopt particular textbooks (perhaps even just lowering their search costs by sending them free copies). So the cartel-breaker would have to provide sufficient inducement to the professors, which seems rather unlikely given that they would not be making monopoly profits, and hence would be outbid by those who _are_ in a position to capture them.

Of course, if the professor is teaching their own textbook to large undergraduate intro classes and making large amounts of money from each semi-compelled purchase, then no sidepayments at all are needed (not all professors being as conscientious as Andrew Gelman). There’s clearly an opening for some enterprising grad student to write a paper (perhaps for the _Journal of Economic Perspectives_ or some such) on the characteristics of this very interesting market …

We aren’t up to Part II of Cohen’s Rescuing Justice and Equality, but I’m going to jump the gun. There’s this bit about something from Amartya Sen – ‘his celebrated Prude/Lewd example’ – which I had never heard tell of. I’ll quote Cohen’s narration of the case:

There exists a pornographic book that might be read by one or other, or neither (but not both), of Prude and Lewd.

Let’s pause to admire that sentence. I think that is a great first sentence for a novel, or at least a Donald Barthelme story. (But I’m getting ahead of the story.) [click to continue…]

The Washington Monthly has a piece up now, “Toy Story”, by Matthew Blake, that looks to me quite wrong-headed. Subtitled “Does the reform of a small agency herald the return of competent government oversight?”, it’s about the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and, more specifically, the Consumer Product Safety Act (CPSI). The Act passed in the wake of that Barbie lead paint scandal you faintly remember, with strong bi-partisan support in both the House and Senate. Blake suggests that perhaps the Act can be a positive model for more robust consumer safety legislation and enforcement generally.

The new law offers a realistic approach to oversight, mandating third-party lab testing for all children’s products—a reasonable alternative to keeping tabs on the vast network of foreign supply chains or simply handing responsibility over to the companies themselves. Under the act’s provisions, CPSC regulators don’t need to travel around the world, just to several universities where they can ensure that testing laboratories are looking for lead in children’s toys, not getting briefcases of cash from Mattel or Wal-Mart. And if this approach to testing toys works, federal regulators will have a strong argument to expand it to other consumer goods.

The problem is that what is convenient for regulators may be prohibitively inconvenient for businesses, particularly small ones. Are all small producers – i.e. those who can’t afford to pay for a university lab to certify that this batch of 100 hand-knitted monkeys doesn’t have any lead in it – supposed to go straight out of business? Start here: the handmade toy alliance. “If this law had been applied to the food industry, every farmers market in the country would be forced to close while Kraft and Dole prospered.” And, as it turns out, the law doesn’t cover just toys. [click to continue…]

The Little Professor points us to the forthcoming Pride and Prejudice and Zombies:

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies — Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen’s beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she’s soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen’s classic novel to new legions of fans.

She then suggests some additional titles. I can’t believe she left out War and Peace and Zombies, however. Now 50% longer! And you’d have these great contrasts between the command styles of the Prussian and French and Russian and zombie generals. (Writes itself.)

But Marvel comics is ahead of the literary curve, as always, with Marvel Zombies. They specifically explore one possibility that Miriam sees as needing careful treatment: what if a vampire became a zombie? A vambie! (In related news: witchaloks!)

UPDATE: Come to think of it, this old literary mash-up post – continued here – is even funnier than zombies. In all modesty.

There’s been a “serious”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2009/01/the_best_jobs_and_the_worst.html “debate”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2009/01/ivory_tower_sexytime.html at the “other place where I blog”:https://www.crookedtimber.org over whether academia in general, and political science in particular is a sexy profession. I’m glad to say that we actually have Real Social Scientific Data¹ that we can bring to bear on this topic. In 2006, James Felton, Peter T. Koper, John Mitchell and Michael Stinson “conducted research”:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=918283 that sought to establish, _inter alia_ how perceived hotness of professors affected their RateMyProfessors evaluations for teaching quality. As part of this exercise, Felton et al. ranked (Table 2 in their paper) the relative hotness quotients of 36 different academic disciplines. My estimable colleague John Sides prepared a nice graph of the Felton et al. data (see below).

Three important research findings leap out from this picture.

First – that academic disciplines are, without exception, more ‘not’ than ‘hot.’ When adjusted positive and negative hotness scores are totted up against each other, no discipline does better than – 0.062 (Languages). Thus, the main hypothesis of “Careerbuilder et al. 2009”:http://msn.careerbuilder.com/Article/MSN-1737-Job-Info-and-Trends-10-Sexy-Careers-You-Never-Thought-Of/?sc_extcmp=JS_1737_hotmail1&SiteId=cbmsnhm41737&ArticleID=1737&GT1=23000&cbRecursionCnt=1&cbsid=3af4ed160fc34141a4e6546d5cc61da3-284680908-R9-4 is decisively refuted.

Second, the above proviso aside, political scientists are pretty damn hot in comparative terms. We rank as number 5, trailing only languages, law, religion and criminal justice. From eyeballing the data, it looks as though there is a minor discontinuity right after political science, where the hotness lurches down a notch, and another, more significant one between psychology (at number 10) and finance (at number 11).

Third, economists are, without any jot, tittle, scintilla or iota of doubt or ambiguity, the notties rather than the hotties of the social sciences (coming 30th out of 36). Tough luck, John. Sociologists are sixth (heh), philosophers come in at number 9 (which is a perfectly respectable score, I suppose), and English professors are middlin’, at number 12 in the ranking.

(An earlier version of this post appeared at “The Monkey Cage”:http://www.themonkeycage.org)

¹ Real Social Scientific Data is a term of art here, meaning ‘statistics that are sufficiently entertaining and gratifying² that I really don’t want to look at them too hard.’ This understanding of data is very commonly applied in the public sphere of learned debate although it is, perhaps surprisingly, rarely spelled out in explicit terms. I note in passing that some commenter at the Monkey Cage wants to control for differences in sex ratios between professors and students and similar irrelevant persnickets. All I want to say to this pedant (whom I suspect to be a jealous chemistry professor or denizen of a similarly low-ranked discipline) is _political science is number 5! Suck on it._

² In a collective rather than individual sense (I don’t imagine that I’m pulling my discipline’s score up).

My 4-year old iMac is on it’s last legs. The DVD drive no longer works and, although everything else is fine and functional, it’s just plain slow. I have the money, so what’s the problem?

It’s this: everyone was hoping for a new iMac to be announced at Macworld, but no dice. It’s been a long time since a new iMac appeared and it seems certain we’ll have something exciting by June at the latest. But I don’t really want to wait. I’m morally certain I could CAUSE something new and exciting to be announced and rapidly rolled out, by the simple act of buying one of the old ones. I doubt very much it would take more than a week. This would, of course, be intensely annoying to me. But everyone else would be very happy. They could buy whatever the happy shiny new thing turns out to be. (At the very least, they could buy the old thing that I just bought for significantly less than I paid.) So: should I let the knowledge that I will be bringing joy to millions of other mac users, in the form of a hot new iMac, tip the scales in favor of buying the old one right now? Should I buy altruistically, in effect? Bonus question: if I knew that by throwing a fat man off a bridge in front of an oncoming trolley I could make Apple release a new iMac, would it be ok to do it? So long as I didn’t get caught?

What do you think the odds are that Apple will 1) drop their prices or 2) roll out a new iMac in the next couple months?

With Bush making his farewell, I thought I’d make the rounds of right-wing blogs to see how they were rising to the occasion. I wondered how low the limbo bar of low standards could go. I was a bit disappointed to start at Red State, see a post entitled “Will the Left Accept That They Were Wrong Wrong About Bush?” and come up with an instant winner. What is the author going to praise Bush for, you ask? “We stand here watching Bush kindly say his goodbyes and we see George W. Bush stepping down like every American president before him (well, except the ones that died in office, of course). Even Darth Cheney is packing up for his last ride into the sunset.”

Bush didn’t stage a coup. (Well, there are a few hours left. But it does seem that he won’t.)

That’s it.

“So, will each of these half sentient, dillweeds fess up that they were wrong? Will they turn to their fellow dillweed, whack-jonse friends and say: “Ya know, I have to hand it to Bush. He was an alright guy for following the Constitution and going home to Texas like he’s supposed ta.”

Only time will tell.

Over the past few years, a certain argument form has become fairly common: yes, I was wrong (about Iraq, financial stuff), but critics on the other side, even if they were right about the overall dynamics of how things went wrong, were substantially mistaken about the details. So – in the invincible words of Monty Python’s Black Knight – ‘let’s call it a draw’.

I predict that, for some strange reason, the folks who entered this characteristic defensive crouch will uncurl, re-affix rhetorical arms and legs, and become altogether more aggressive after Obama takes office. It will be argued that the stimulus package/health care reform/etc. will inevitably be afflicted with bad unintended consequences. But, for some strange reason, those who make this argument will not feel obliged to predict, in detail, exactly what things will go wrong. They will feel it is sufficient to sketch, in a broad way, why the dynamics of certain policy directions seem fraught with potential hazards.

I somewhat regret that I haven’t been bothering to document the argumentative trend of which I speak, so I suggest that we make a collective effort in comments: who has made the ‘yes I was wrong, but the critics didn’t get the details exactly right so it’s a tie’ argument? For future reference.

Those more inclined to monger twiddly philosophy angels-on-a-pinhead-type problems can, alternatively, tackle the following: the defensive crouch of which I speak seems to presuppose a broadly Russellian theory of the objects of thought. That is, you shift blame for unintended consequences by subscribing to a highly stringent theory of intentionality – of the objects of thought. The theory would seem to be this: you can’t really be thinking about X – e.g. any Bush-era debacle – unless you have in mind a definite description of X. So those who quite clearly heard the drumhoofs of financial apocalypse but mistakenly thought the first rider’s name was ‘The collapse of the dollar’ didn’t really hear that guy who was actually riding up. Alternatively, on a more Kripkean view of the determination of the objects of our thoughts, it seems that critics could have been warning about the very financial crisis that we actually suffered, even if they couldn’t, in advance, give an accurate definite description. So we have an ontological issue about the identity of apocalypses across possible worlds. Discuss. Preferably with Twin-Earth cases. And Larry Kudlow. If possible, you should fly the actual Larry to Twin-Earth and leave him there.

This _Washington Post_ “story”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/28/AR2008122802124.html on what happened at OSHA over the Bush years tells the usual story of flacks being hired as political appointees to gut enforcement, scientific advice being ignored, internal dissenters being punished and so on. But this bit seemed unusual, even by Bush administration standards.

In 2006, Henshaw was replaced by Edwin G. Foulke Jr., a South Carolina lawyer and former Bush fundraiser who spent years defending companies cited by OSHA for safety and health violations. Foulke quickly acquired a reputation inside the Labor Department as a man who literally fell asleep on the job: Eyewitnesses said they saw him suddenly doze off at staff meetings, during teleconferences, in one-on-one briefings, at retreats involving senior deputies, on the dais at a conference in Europe, at an award ceremony for a corporation and during an interview with a candidate for deputy regional administrator.

His top aides said they rustled papers, wore attention-getting garb, pounded the table for emphasis or gently kicked his leg, all to keep him awake. But, if these tactics failed, sometimes they just continued talking as if he were awake. “We’ll be sitting there and things will fall out of his hands; people will go on talking like nothing ever happened,” said a career official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to a reporter. In an interview, Foulke denied falling asleep at work, although he said he was often tired and sometimes listened with his eyes closed. His goal, he said, was to create the best agency he could, partly by putting in place “performance metrics” not previously used at OSHA.

I know, I know: it’s been two days since my last Haeckel post. Well, worry no longer! My X-Mas cards got a link from the University of Chicago Press! They just put out a new biography of Haeckel that is, I gather, more of a general intellectual history of the reception of evolutionary theory in the second half of the 19th Century, doubling as an attempt to burnish a somewhat tarnished reputation: The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought [amazon]. Here’s a TLS review – or rather, a longer version of one – that is, effectively, a thumbnail biography in itself.

All well and good, you agree: but surely there is more to life than German X-Mas jellyfish imagery? Yes, indeed! ASIFA has posted a wonderful series of Einar Norelius illustrations from a 1929 Bland Tomtar Och Troll (a Swedish x-mas annual of fairy and folktales). For example, here’s some sort of Aquatomten admiring a bunch of jellyfish. (Or maybe the guy’s just drowning.)

You see: there’s also Swedish X-Mas jellyfish imagery. So I added another card image to my flickr set, to add variety. (Not my best work, admittedly. But I only have so much 100-year old Swedish holiday card stock in my ephemera file.)

At the blog newcritics, Chuck Tryon points out something I would have missed otherwise, given the need to avoid national news magazines in the interest of anger management:

Newsweek, of all places, has a fascinating intellectual exercise in which they ask several of their film and media writers to name one popular culture text that “exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W. Bush.” Obviously, the idea of capturing the zeitgeist of eight often turbulent years with a divided electorate and a fractured media landscape is an impossibility. No single text can encompass the tragedy of September 11, the war in Iraq, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, the housing bubble and collapse, and our news media’s often vacuous response to all of these events. But the Newsweek writers offer some interesting choices, ones that collectively seem to move toward capturing some sense of Bush-era culture.

I tend to think Battlestar Galactica wins, hand’s down. (Per earlier item.) See the rest of Chuck T’s entry here.

Jacob Levy has a very interesting bloggingheads exchange with Will Wilkinson. At least it’s interesting if you want to understand what the hell just happened up in Canada, politically. That whole ‘didn’t the queen shut down parliament, or something?’ thing. If that interests you.

Next: there has been some indignation in response to Gerecht’s piece in the NY Times, defending torture and extraordinary rendition. Yglesias starts like so: “Because Reuel Marc Gerecht adheres to an appalling and cruel ethical system and the people who decide what runs on major newspaper op-ed pages have no ethics whatsoever …” [click to continue…]

This “piece”:http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=1308 by Benjamin Kunkel (whom I usually have time for), is really, _really_ annoying.

The literary novel illuminates moral problems (including sometimes those that are also political problems) at the expense of sentimental consolation, while genre fiction typically offers consolation at the expense of illumination. … The main formal consequence, then, of a withered moral imagination has to do not with subject matter (love, crime, the future) but with character. Fictional character derives from moral choices made, contemplated, postponed, or ignored—morality is the page on which the stamp of character appears—and the signal formal trait of genre fiction is nothing so much as its lack of complex characters. This deficit entangles even an acknowledged generic triumph like Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968, and the basis of the 1982 movie Blade Runner) in a certain incoherence. The ironic burden of Dick’s novel is to stick up for the warm-blooded humanity of androids (read: clones), and in this way imply the cold-bloodedness of any society that denies fully human status to some category of person. The rub, of course, is that such sci-fi humanism is quickly overcome with another irony, this one unintentional, since it is the hallmark of genre fiction to treat characters instrumentally, putting them through the paces of the plot according to their function as the embodiment of some general psychological or social category and failing or refusing to endow them with the individuality to be found among the livelier inhabitants of the traditional realist novel and, for that matter, the real world. [click to continue…]

My friend Josh Glenn has a new book, The Idler’s Glossary [amazon]. An acquaintance of mine, Mark Kingwell, wrote the introductory essay. And Seth did the illustrations. (I love Seth.) The whole svelte, 3.7 x 6 in. unit would slip snugly into someone’s X-Mas stocking, mayhap.

It’s a glossary: entries on absentmindedness and acedia through to working-class hero. (Shouldn’t there be an entry for ‘zzzzzz’? With no gloss? I think that might have been an elegant way to end the book.)

Right, the philosophy of idleness. First, I will note that Kingwell and Glenn have diametrically opposed theories of boredom. Kingwell quotes a passage from a Kingsley Amis novel: “My wife accuse me of thinking her boring. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to her that this might be because she’s boring … To her mind, her being boring is a thing I do.” Kingwell takes the husband’s side, but Glenn goes on to take the wife’s: “Go ahead and blame your dull companions, but being bored [a slang term that appeared among London’s smart set in the late 18th century, perhaps derived from the French for ‘triviality’] is your own fault. It’s the state of being too restless to concentrate, while too apathetic to bust a move.” Which, come to think of it, is a pretty stable Kinglsey Amis formula.

So who’s right: Kingwell or Glenn? In philosophical terms, if a tree is boring in the forest, and there is no one there to be bored by how dull Nature is … ? In Humean terms, is boringness a matter of (we shouldn’t say ‘gilding and staining Nature with our sentiments’) dulling and drearing Nature with our sentiments. Or was existence already dull and drear when we lay down on it?

Let us proceed to our second topic, which is of even greater significance: idleness, per se. [click to continue…]