World Politics

Brad de Long points to a piece on the equity premium by Marty Weitzman and says,

Marty Weitzman is smarter than I am …This is brilliant. I should have seen this. I should have seen this sixteen years ago. I *almost* saw this sixteen years ago.

Weitzman’s idea[1] is the replace the sample distributions of returns on equity and debt with reasonable Bayesian subjective distributions. These have much fatter tails, allowing for a higher risk premium, lower risk free rate and higher volatility, in the context of a socially optimal market outcome. Here are some of the reasons why this is important

My immediate reaction is the same as Brad’s. Something like this has occurred to me too, but I’ve never thought hard enough or cleverly enough about it how to work it out properly. This is a very impressive achievement, and Marty Weitzman is very, very smart (which we already knew).

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According to this AP report in the NY Times, Moqtada al-Sadr has been wounded by US shelling in Najaf. Sadr is an irresponsible demagogue, his political agenda is reactionary and authoritarian and his militia has been guilty of many acts of thuggery and violence. And we should all wish for his complete and speedy recovery from his wounds.

Update There is a ceasefire and negotiations have started for a truce. This is welcome news, and I hope the talks are successful. However, it only points up the fact that the bloody campaign to destroy Sadr was both morally indefensible (as well as being politically stupid). I restate the point I made when the fighting was at its peak.

Almost certainly, the current fighting will end in the same sort of messy compromise that prevailed before the first campaign started. Nothing will have been gained by either side. But 2000 or so people will still be dead. Sadr bears his share of the guilt for this crime. The US government is even more guilty.

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The Allawi government’s decision to ban Al-Jazeera has received a lot of attention. Rather less has been paid to a subsequent announcement of a wide range of rules to be applied by the new Higher Media Commission. Prominent among them is a prohibition of “unwarranted criticism” of Allawi himself. This was reported in Australia’s Financial Review and also in the Financial Times (both subscription only) and also in a number of Arab and antiwar papers, but not in any of the general mainstream press.

For those inclined to a “slippery slope” view of censorship, this is certainly a case study.

Here’s a protest letter from the Committee to Protect Journalists.

It’s been argued at length whether the Iraq war as a whole was morally justified. Given that many thousands of people died in the process of removing Saddam’s regime, I don’t think so. On the other hand, if you suppose that Saddam would otherwise have stayed in power for decades, and make some optimistic assumptions about future prospects, it’s possible to come to the opposite conclusion. But what possible moral justification can there be for the two bloody campaigns against Moqtada al-Sadr?

If the figures reported by the US military are true, nearly 2000 of Sadr’s supporters have been killed by US forces (1500 in the first campaign launched by Bremer just before his departure and another 300 in the last couple of days). This is comparable with plausible estimates of the number of people killed by Saddam’s police state annually in its final years.

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Heavy rain in Bristol today, so I spent the afternoon watching Volker Schlondorff’s “The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073858/ (based on the Heinrich Boll novel). For those who don’t know, the film is about what happens to a young woman after she spends the night with a man who turns out to be a terrorist suspect. She is alternately bullied by the police and villified by the gutter press. What is different today, of course, is the way that the blogosphere serves as an Insta-echo-chamber for tabloid coverage of such stories. One imagines the “Heh”s and “Readthewholethings” that would accompany posts linking to a contemporary Die Zeitung’s online coverage of events. (If you’ve not seen the film, don’t be put off by the sole IMDB commenter, who has also posted politically-motived negative reviews of Rabbit-Proof Fence and Bloody Sunday.)

IRRITATED UPDATE: Why is a classic of the New German Cinema available on DVD in Region 1 but not in Region 2 (including the UK and Germany)?

I caught about five minutes of some retrospective on Reagan last night. One of the talking heads — a US protagonist whom I didn’t recognize — said something like the following:

bq. Of course, we now know that the Soviet Union was incredibly weak, falling apart in fact, and that it probably wouldn’t have survived even without the pressure we were putting on. But you have to remember that, _at the time_ , all the intelligence reports (and the media) stressed how _strong_ the Soviets were. On the basis of the intelligence we were getting, we’d never have guessed the reality.

Deja vu?

Eve Garrard, who figured prominently in our comments last week on my posts discussing Amnesty International (“here”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001924.html and “here”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001935.html ) has written “an impassioned criticism”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/06/the_biggest_att.html of AI over at Normblog. You should read what she says, although I happen to disagree with her claim — which I regard as obviously misguided — that the universal applicability of a principle entails that all who violate it are equally blameworthy for so doing (penultimate paragraph). The most serious criticism to be made of Garrard’s post, though, is that it seriously misrepresents what Amnesty said.

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I just read “a particularly egregious column from Jonah Goldberg”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-1126901,00.html in the London Times. The Times is only freely available to people within the UK, so I thought I’d surf over to the National Review Online to see if the content was also posted there. I didn’t find the Times piece, but I did happen upon “Goldberg’s take on the Instapundit-Yglesias spat”:http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/04_05_23_corner-archive.asp#032783 which concludes:

bq. Yglesias would improve his arguments if he stopped his recent habit of increasingly asserting bad motives on anyone he disagrees with.

Back to the Times, where Goldberg begins thusly a column aimed at critics of the administration’s Iraq policies in general and Anthony Zinni in particular:

bq. HERE we go again. It is time to blame the Jews. That seems to be this month’s explanation for the Iraq war. Obviously, this is hardly a new idea on either side of the Atlantic, particularly for readers of, say, The Guardian or Le Monde. But in America, the emphasis on the theory has reached almost French proportions

“[A]sserting bad motives on anyone he disagrees with” ?

My post the other day “about Amnesty International”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001924.html generated some comments, as I expected. It also led to “Jacob Levy”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_05_21.shtml#1085602703 over at the Volokh Conspiracy getting excited over the following statement by AI:

bq. AI is independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion. It does not support or oppose any government or political system, nor does it support or oppose the views of the victims whose rights it seeks to protect. It is concerned solely with the impartial protection of human rights.

Now I happen to think that’s a reasonable thing for an organization like Amnesty to say. Libertarian Cain and Socialist Abel may disagree on a lot of things. Cain believes that socialized medicine is the first step on the road to serfdom and Abel believes that the capitalist system inevitably leads to exploitation and oppression. No matter. They can work together to protest against torture, extrajudical killing and so on — which they agree are _bad_ things. An organization that insisted the everyone sign up to an analysis of underlying causes would be sectarian and ineffective. But because the smart thing for an organization like Amnesty to do is to stay out of the business of root causes, that doesn’t mean it is committed to the positive view that “Jacob now attributes”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_05_28.shtml#1085771781 to it in a further post. To whit:

bq. I emphasized the organization’s institutional stance that no system of government is preferable to any other, that human rights abuses just kind of happen rather than being matters of official policy in some cases and not in others. This requires a pose of believing in equivalence among liberal democracies, theocracies, military dictatorships, and so on.

No way is such “equivalence” entailed by the Amnesty statement of aims that Jacob quoted and it is lazy of him to suggest that it is.

(I should add that Jacob does have a point about the emphasis of some of Amnesty’s up-front press releases, but it is absurd to suggest as Frida Ghetis does in the “TNR piece”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=express&s=ghitis052804 that Jacob approvingly links to that Amnesty “has decided to stop doing its job” — since it demonstrably continues to produce the many detailed country-by-country resports that are its staple.)

Via “Lance Knobel”:http://www.davosnewbies.com/2004/05/24 I see that Jim Moore has started a blog to encourage more coverage of the unfolding tragedy in the Sudan, “The Passion of the Present”:http://passionofthepresent.org/ .

“Amnesty International’s annual report for 2004”:http://web.amnesty.org/report2004/index-eng is now out. A sobering reminder of how bad things are out there. It is also a reminder of how bad things are in world of chatterers, op-ed columnists and bloggers that we can expect (a) a great deal of moaning about how Amnesty has failed to treat country X (of which the writer approves) with due understanding, context, perspective etc; and (b) much noise about how the activites of country Y (of which the writer disapproves) are demonstrably condemned by the same report. Human rights are indivisible, and in my view, the burden of proof is on those whom Amnesty condemns to show their innocence.

From the “Economist”:http://www.economist.co.uk/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2703519 :

bq. At the next official meeting of OPEC, in Beirut on June 3rd, Saudi Arabia will be asked to demonstrate solidarity with its co-conspirators in the cartel. The bargain that holds OPEC together—each member shows restraint in production, so that all can enjoy higher prices—is at stake, they will say. But it is widely assumed that Saudi Arabia must also keep its side of a more fundamental bargain. It must be conscious of American petrol prices, especially in an election year, and, in return, the world’s only superpower will continue to offer the desert kingdom its protection.

Some issues get a lot of play in the media while others go completely ignored. The UN has a site devoted to “10 Stories the world should hear more about”. Of course, one could probably compile an endless list of stories we shouldn’t be ignoring, but it’s certainly one place to start. You can read about child soldiers in Uganda, the role of women in negotiating piece and rebuilding societies (did you know that in Rwanda women hold 49% of seats in the legislature?), and the disappearance of some peoples and languages (did you know that there are languages out there spoken by less than 100 people?). These snapshots of stories are very short and the descriptions of the issues seem a bit simplistic at times, but it’s an interesting place to start for coverage of important topics that don’t seem to get much mass media attention. Alternatively, you can always head over to The Head Heeb who manages to cover a lot of issues from certain parts of the world that seem to go ignored by many. (Thanks to Neat New Stuff for the pointer to the UN site.)