For those who wanted a more print-friendly version of the open data seminar that we’ve been running, here’s a “PDF”:https://crookedtimber.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/open_data-latex1.pdf (bog-standard memoir class document I’m afraid – I don’t have John H.’s design skills). It’s available under a Creative Commons non-commercial license – those who want to do their own remixes may want the underlying LaTeX file, which is available “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/open_data-latex.txt. Below, links to the various posts, in order of publication:

“Tom Slee”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/06/25/seeing-like-a-geek/ draws connections between James Scott and the awkward relationship between open data and actual empowerment.

“Victoria Stodden”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/06/26/reasoning-with-open-data/ suggests that people interested in the political aspects of open data should learn from the efforts of computational scientists to preserve the step-by-step process through which final results were produced.

“Steven Berlin Johnson”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/06/27/searching-for-john-snows/ argues that open data platforms can attract, empower and even create people interested in solving complex problems.

“Matthew Yglesias”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/06/28/open-data-journalism/ makes the case that open data is crucial to journalism, and that there is often a case for government to produce it.

“Clay Shirky”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/07/02/cooperation-and-corruption/ argues that there are two different strands of open data advocacy, one devoted to improving services, the other to actually tackling corruption, and that the former works rather better than the latter.

“Aaron Swartz”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/07/03/a-database-of-folly/ finds that open data and transparency don’t address _either_ structural problems of corruption, or help make life more efficient.

“Henry Farrell”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/07/04/trish-reiner-and-the-politics-of-open-data/ argues that open data will not change politics, but would have advantages under a different political configuration than the one we have.

“Beth Noveck”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/07/05/open-data-the-democratic-imperative/ sees open data as a foundation for complex democracy and a wellspring of innovation in government.

“Tom Lee”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/07/06/open-data-better-politics-winning-politics-but-still-politics/ worries that open data advocates tend towards a blithe over-optimism, but maintains that it still has democratic benefits.

A somewhat different take on matters Hayekian – Martin Höpner and Armin Schäfer’s “article on Hayek and the EU”:http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8638234&fulltextType=RA&fileId=S002081831200015X has just come out in _International Organization._ It’s been in gestation for a while (an earlier working paper version can be found “here”:http://www.mpifg.de/pu/mpifg_dp/dp10-8.pdf), but the argument is pretty straightforward – if you look at it right, the European Union looks rather more Hayekian than Polanyian-social-democratic.

bq. Instead of re-embedding markets, the EU is beginning to resemble Hayek’s blueprint of “interstate federalism,” where individual (economic and social) rights are located at the central level while the capacity for taxation and interpersonal redistribution remains entirely decentralized. What appears to be the nucleus of supranational social policy might turn out to be a recipe for less social protection and redistribution at the national level. … by granting non-nationals access to social transfers while being unable to oblige them to contribute financially puts pressure on the generosity given to all entitled persons. As economic liberals have aptly observed, divorcing rights from obligations limits the capacity for redistribution. … political initiatives to re-embed markets have become extremely difficult as EU members have grown ever more economically diverse. At the same time, integration through law (as opposed to political integration) continues apace and limits national governments’ ability to correct markets.

This article stems from a broader left-skepticism about the EU associated with people like Fritz Scharpf and Wolfgang Streeck (uncoincidentally the former director and director of the Max-Planck Institut where Höpner and Schäfer are based). Its argument is open to challenge but is also, at the least, highly plausible. Nonetheless, it’s the kind of argument that gets very little attention in the US, where, broadly speaking, leftists are in favor of the EU, and rightists (especially Hayekians and libertarians) against it. Much of this surely has to do with the tribalism that John Q. was talking about last week – a lot of US intellectual politics is based on affect. But it also suggests that the EU is a different kind of experiment than most Americans believe. If the EU manages to weather the tempest that still threatens to swamp it, and comes out the other end with a currency union, a banking union, and some kind of bond system, it will still look, as Höpner and Schäfer suggest, very Hayekian. Will it be politically sustainable over the longer term? I suspect not – increasing misery at the national level as a result of increased exposure to international exposure, combined with a withering of social protections will create the kind of political upheavals that Polanyi described (whether with happy, or unhappy consequences). Polanyi’s ideas suggest that Hayekian federal constitutionalism is almost necessarily self-undermining. But of course, Polanyi could be wrong …

(probably the last post I’ll be doing on these issues for a while)

“Tyler Cowen has a further response”:http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/07/how-to-improve-firms-treatment-of-workers.html. His argument – I think I am presenting it correctly – is that regulation may not improve the lot of workers facing specific depredations, because firms will find other ways to screw them, leading to “indeterminate” outcomes, which might or might not be to workers’ long term benefit. His preferred alternative is an improved welfare state, which will enhance workers’ bargaining position vis-a-vis firms.
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Via John Siracusa, a really nice exercise in crowdsourcing and data visualization on Bostonography.

… we’re running an ongoing project soliciting opinions on Boston’s neighborhood boundaries via an interactive map. We want to keep collecting data, but we’ve already received excellent responses that we’re itching to start mapping, and when we hit 300 submissions recently it seemed like a good enough milestone to take a crack at it. (That’s actually 300 minus some junk data. If you offer the ability to draw freeform shapes, some people draw random rectangles and triangles, and some people draw… er, other long, tipped objects.) There are many questions to be asked here. Where are the areas of consensus? Where are the disputed zones? Where are the no-man’s lands, etc

Boundaries are fuzzy, but not uniformly so, the consensus center of a neighborhood need not be its geometric center, and so on. Lots of interesting stuff. It’d be great if they could collect data on the social distribution of this knowledge, too. It’s like an updated version of Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City, with shades of Rick Grannis’s classic paper The Importance of Trivial Streets. Very nice work. Check out the full discussion.

Levy Izhak Rosenbaum gets 30 months (though he may end up being deported to Israel) for brokering kidney sales in New York, something which I don’t think has happened before in the United States:

He pleaded guilty in October to three counts of organ trafficking and one of conspiracy. … Three ailing people in New Jersey paid Rosenbaum a total of $410,000 to arrange the sale of kidneys from healthy donors, and an undercover FBI agent paid him $10,000. … Rosenbaum told a federal agent that he began brokering kidney sales around 1999, recruited Israelis to sell their organs and charged Americans as much as $160,000 a kidney. He told the agent that he had arranged “quite a lot” of transplants, according to a criminal complaint. … Before the judge imposed sentence, prosecutors presented testimony from a doctor and administrator from Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia. Rosenbaum organized about a dozen kidney transplants there from 1999 to 2002 and the hospital didn’t know the surgeries involved black-market kidneys, they said. … A New York man born in Israel, Elahn Quick, told the judge that he sold his kidney for about $25,000 in 2008 in a transplant organized by Rosenbaum. Becky Cohen, the daughter of the man who bought the kidney, testified that the family paid Rosenbaum $150,000 for the organ. The transplant surgery itself was financed by Cohen’s family insurance. A locksmith, Quick, 31, said he sold his kidney because he needed the cash and thought doing so was a good deed.

The role of the transplant center in Philly is an interesting one—I wonder where they thought the kidneys were coming from. Perhaps some story about relatives?

Both the legal and illegal sides of the transplant industry are embedded in the wider world of health care provision. As Bryan O’Sullivan remarks, the third paragraph of the article, setting up the story, inadvertently does quite a good job of describing US healthcare as a whole:

“It’s a kind of trading in human misery,” Thompson said of black-market kidney sales. Rosenbaum “charged a fee” for kidneys and “used a complicated web of transactions” to finance his business. “He corrupted himself,” the judge said.

“So as you can imagine it was quite difficult for us to build a case against him”, Thompson did not add.

Back around Christmas I had a come-to-Jesus moment, ebooks-wise. I posted some iPad optimized ebooks of Dickens and Spenser, trying to make the illustrations look good. I joked that PDF was the future! Then Santa gave me an iPhone for X-Mas and I discovered that I actually like reading books on a phone, which seemed a priori impossible before that.

So, when I volunteered to make our Red Plenty PDF ebook – here it is – I also decided to try to make my first Mobi format ebook (5 megs) (that’s what you need for your Kindle); and an EPUB version (1 meg). No, I don’t know why the Kindle version is so much bigger, thanks for asking. Both versions have some humorous bugs I’ve not yet worked out, and I gotta catch a plane. So I’m just going to post them and let other people kick the tires.

WARNING: We have a reliable report that the EPUB version crashes Nooks. Very sorry about that. I really need to get back on this, and clean out the bugs. Haven’t had time.

Here’s the cover:

A response to “Matt Yglesias’s response”:http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/07/06/ten_theses_on_labor_market_regulation.html. I understand from email that his original post responding to me was intended to be read together with an “earlier post”:http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/07/04/labor_market_regulation_freedom_and_property_rights_are_red_herrings.html, where he separates out questions of freedom and economic efficiency, and argues, more or less, that the best way to increase the bargaining power of labour is by pushing full employment. This means that he does not, after all, treat market outcomes as being in some way natural. So consider those specific objections withdrawn. But I still think that there is something fundamentally wrongheaded about the way that he is analyzing these questions. And not only that – but Matt Yglesias himself (2004 vintage) would seem to agree with me.
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Corey Robin has “two”:http://coreyrobin.com/2012/07/08/hayek-von-pinochet/ “posts”:http://coreyrobin.com/2012/07/09/but-wait-theres-more-hayek-von-pinochet-part-2/ on Friedrich von Hayek’s admiration for Augusto Pinochet, quoting extensively from a new article by Andrew Farrant, Edward McPhail, and Sebastian Berger.

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Because not every post should be about libertarianism! [click to continue…]

My alma mater had a celebrity professor of political science who was principally known for two things. First, for accidentally leaving his wireless mic on during mid-lecture restroom breaks. And second, for the slogan “Politics is a good thing!” which he relentlessly promoted via mediums as diverse as lectures, TV appearances and TA’s t-shirts.

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