N.B. I say “disgrace” because it’s not a tragedy, precisely.
I am officially not allowed to look at the internet, as it is likely to give me a terrible migraine. More terrible than the one I already have. All the time. So this will have to be brief (lol srsly). I just scanned the front page to see if there was anything else, but didn’t see it, so I feel as if I have to say something about the shameful, quasi-state-sanctioned execution of Trayvon Martin.

Trayvon Martin was 17, and was staying with family in Sanford, Florida, in what is referred to by the obligatory monicker “mostly-white gated community.” He walked out to buy some candy and a can of iced tea at a local convenience store, and was tailed back by a self-appointed neighborhood watchman, who deemed him “real suspicious” and “probably on drugs or something.” This joker George Zimmerman then got out of his truck to (perhaps) scuffle with Trayvon, and then shot him in cold blood, as far as anyone can figure, while Trayvon was pleading for his life. This (the pleading) can be heard in the background of neighbors’ 911 calls. I have to say it’s a little odd none of them stepped out on the porch with a shotgun to say “I’ve called the cops already, cut it out!” The number of people committing crimes who will just run away if you say “I see you down there, knock it off” is high IME. Zimmerman claims it is his high-pitched voice we hear begging for his life between the firing of the first and the second shot, after which there is silence. Take a look at a picture of the man. I don’t even know what to say.

UPDATE: I place this above the fold so everyone will see. I was sort of taking it for granted that people were reading Ta-Nehisi Coates‘ blogging on this, which has been copious and excellent. But if you haven’t, you should.
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So it appears that Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of _Freakonomics_ is “upset at various critics”:http://www.freakonomics.com/2012/03/20/freakonomics-what-went-right-responding-to-wrong-headed-attacks/. He is deeply unhappy with Andrew Gelman and Kaiser Fung, for having written what appeared to me to be a skeptical but intellectually generous take on the Freakonomics project. He is angry at Ezra Klein, whom he describes as someone who is ‘in the business of attacking at any cost’ on the basis of a tweet that Dubner presents in a “rather misleading fashion”:http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/03/21/annals-of-dishonest-attacks-stephen-dubner-edition/. And he believes that ‘a man named Chris Blattman’ (great title for a band btw), was insufficiently abject in his apologies for a post “in which he suggested”:http://chrisblattman.com/2012/01/28/more-on-yesterdays-cheap-shot-at-freakonomics-and-wsjideasmarket/ that _Freakonomics_ did not provide sufficient credit to other bloggers. Dubner is entirely right when he suggests that apologies should not be self-serving. So I hope that my own apology – long overdue – is not misinterpreted as same. I’d hereby like to sincerely apologize for having done my little bit to make Stephen Dubner and the whole _Freakonomics_ phenomenon what they are today.

Long-time readers will be familiar with the _Crooked Timber_ seminar that we did many years ago on the original _Freakonomics_ book. I can’t say what exact role it played in helping the book becoming the mass cultural phenomenon that it did, but the publicists seem to think that it played a significant role in generating publicity. Part of this was likely novelty – no-one had done anything quite like this before, so that lots of other bloggers linked to it. The revised and updated paperback edition of the book described the seminar as having provided the most astute analysis to date of the book’s arguments.

Doing this seminar was, I’m afraid, my initiative. I could try to defend myself. I (and others) were more interested in Levitt’s original academic work than the popularization. We sort of said this _sotto voce_ in the seminar, but only _sotto voce._ Nor has _Freakonomics_ been entirely bad. It’s gotten e.g. Justin Wolfers, who is excellent value for money, out into broader public circulation.

But even if it seemed a good idea at the time, I should have known better. Yes – Levitt is an interesting and original economist, but the glib contrarianism and breezy confidence that silly econometric results would tell us something valuable about the world were baked into the cake from the beginning of the _Freakonomics_ project, and perhaps before. D-squared’s perhaps never-to-be-published CT summation of his various posts on Freakonomics makes that clear. It’s a bit like one of those high-end fashion marques that begins with haute couture, and ends up over-extending its brand by using it on everything from cheap plastic novelties to toilet paper.

Both the blog and the second book were pretty dreadful. John has written about the contrarianism of the book, while as Andrew Gelman has hinted, he could have been a lot nastier had he wanted to be, pointing e.g. to the blog’s highlighting of results suggesting that ESP works, that the economy wasn’t actually all that bad in October 2008 etc. Nearly every time that I’ve seen _Freakonomics_ mentioned in the last several years, I’ve felt guilty and embarrassed that I had something to do with its rise to prominence. Very likely, it would have become prominent anyway (it had a very well organized PR campaign). But perhaps, given the chanciness of social contagion etc, it would not.

In any event, there really aren’t any excuses. I’m genuinely sorry for whatever push I gave to help start the _Freakonomics_ snowball rolling down the hill. There’s not much I can do about it now, but there you go.

Here’s a nice profile in the Guardian of my colleague Dave Brady, who was in London recently talking about poverty and social policy:

Brady’s response is that we need to rebuild trust in a welfare state that everyone feels they benefit from. The problem he sees developing in Britain is similar to the situation that exists in the US, where welfare is now only for the very poorest people.

“The more [that] ‘welfare’ is a broad portfolio of social policy to help people across the life span, the more effective it is at reducing poverty,” he explains.

“If you create a small constituency of beneficiaries that doesn’t have broad-based political support, it’s harder to mobilise in support of those benefits.”

For evidence, Brady points out, look no further than the ease with which the welfare reform bill got through parliament compared with the ferocious fight the coalition government has had to get the health bill on to the statute book.

Unluckily for me, Dave will soon be heading off to Berlin to be a director at the WZB, despite the city’s near-total absence of quality baseball.

Today is World Poetry Day, and as previously announced we will celebrate it here at Crooked Timber by having an open thread where all of us can post poems, with or without translations, of our own making or borrowed from someone else. Here’s mine, which dates back to my student days, but I am pretty sure I didn’t write it myself – I think it read it somewhere in the form of street poetry or in a students’ magazine. The original is in Dutch, the English translation mine. Enjoy!

Ze schreef een klein gedichtje
het had niet veel om handen
maar het was als een klein lichtje
dat in het donker brandde.
*****
She wrote a little poem
it didn’t mean much at all
yet it was like a tiny light
glowing in the dark.

This morning brings news of new plans by Britain’s Tory/LibDem coalition, this time to privatize parts of the road network. Presented (again) merely as a way of getting things working more efficiently, this is both part of a pattern and – the philosophical point here – a further reduction in the liberty of individuals. The pattern is a gradual shift of resources that used to be common in to the private or quasi-private sector. Not long ago, higher education was free: now it is not. Fairly large amounts of formerly public space in cities are now in the hands of private developers who employ security guards to enforce their rules on what can be done on their land. Government plans to privatize publicly-owned forest and woodland have been defeated, but for how long? The “reforms” of Britain’s National Health Service allow for new charges to be brought in for treatments and services deemed “non-essential” (although NHS trusts are already denying treatment for some conditions that used to be treated for free). Generally, there’s a shift from formerly taxpayer-funded services towards privatized ones that users have to pay for.

No doubt our “libertarian” friends approve of this shift, but those who don’t have an ideologically distorted view of liberty should be alarmed. First, the extension of chargeable private space means that the range of actions permitted to individuals who lack money is reduced. Lack of money reduces your purely negative freedom,[1] as anyone who tries to perform actions encroaching on the state-enforced private property of others will quickly discover. Second — and this point should hold even for those silly enough to reject the view that private property restricts the freedom of those who have less of it — the increase in privatized public space means that we are increasingly subject to the arbitrary will of private owners concerning what we can and can’t do. Rights of assembly? Rights of protest? Rights to do things as innocuous as take a photograph? All of those things are now restricted or prohibited on formerly public land across the United Kingdom or subject to the permission of the new private owner. The interest of those who endorse a republican conception of freedom is thereby engaged, as is those of liberal persuasion who think a list of basic liberties should be protected: less public space, less capacity to exercise those basic liberties. The proposed privatization of the roads is just an extension of this.

(The Liberal Democrats as part of the Tory-led coalition bear a particularly heavy responsibility for failing to prevent these changes for which the UK government has no democratic mandate. With luck they will be destroyed at the next election, as they deserve to be. Let no-one forget, though, how far the last Labour government took us down this path and legitimized these changes through measures like student fees and the Private Finance Initiative.)

fn1. For an argument to this effect and a demolition of the idea that lack of money confers lack of ability rather than unfreedom, see G.A. Cohen, “Freedom and Money”:http://howardism.org/appendix/Cohen.pdf (PDF)

I’m teaching a chapter from Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress [amazon]. This passage gives some sense of the argument:

Why should our capacity to reason require anything more than disinterestedness within one’s own group? Since the interests of my group will often be better served by ignoring the interests of members of other groups, the need for a public justification of conduct should require no more than this. Indeed, shouldn’t we rather expect the need for public justification to prohibit justifications which give the interests of my group no more weight than the interests of other groups? This suggestion overlooks the autonomy of reasoning – the feature I have pictured as an escalator. If we do not understand what an escalator is, we might get on it intending to go a few meters, only to find that once we are on, it is difficult to avoid going all the way to the end. Similarly, once reasoning has got started it is hard to tell where it will stop. The idea of a disinterested defense of one’s conduct emerges because of the social nature of human beings and the requirements of group living, but in the thought of reasoning beings, it takes on a logic of its own which leads to its extension beyond the bounds of the group.

I think it’s fair to say that Stanley Fish is shaky on the concept of an escalator, in Peter Singer’s sense. [click to continue…]

In celebration of the day that’s in it, something from my past, and the past of a fair number of people from my generation. We were nearly the last to come of age when Irish culture was dominated by a combination of the Catholic Church and a particularly lugubrious nationalism. One of the early harbingers of its collapse was a television show, _Nighthawks_, which was broadcast on Ireland’s second station at 11pm a few nights a week, when the pious and well behaved had already gone to bed. The best bits of it were the occasional appearances by stand-up comic, Kevin McAleer, who stretched the conventions of Irish rural life, out and out and out, until they had become completely surreal and demented, all while staring at you with an expression of utter gormlessness, shot through with occasional bouts of craftiness. I mentioned this once before on Crooked Timber, and got an email out of the blue from McAleer, telling me that the tapes of _Nighthawks_ had long ago been erased, in the systematized auto-da-fe that was Irish television’s contribution to our cultural heritage (see also “Kieran”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/04/26/childhood-horrors/ ). But in the interim, someone (McAleer himself??) seems to have found some bits and pieces, and put them together with footage of his live show on Youtube, which should give people the flavour of the thing. Here are two. I’d be interested to know how readers react to them – I think they’re inspired myself but you may have to have the right cultural context to really get them. I’d be interested to know how they travel.

I’m a Molly Crabapple fan – one who gratefully received a preview of her not-yet released Art of Molly Crabapple Volume 1: Week in Hell [amazon – it’s quite inexpensive! order today!] – so let me give a boost to her new Kickstarter project: Shell Game – An Art Show About The Financial Meltdown. She writes a bit more about the project here.

A lot of people probably won’t like this because they won’t be impressed by the whole Octopi Wall Street-as-Burlesque aesthetic. But who cares! Don’t give money! Anyway, it’s already fully funded. You don’t like it? Sit n’ spin on your sense of aesthetic superiority! [click to continue…]

Here at ICANN Costa Rica, a debate has erupted about the casual sexism women experience at technology conferences. The Czech hosts of our next meeting ran a booth asking people what they’re most looking forward to in Prague; seeing the sights, drinking beer, or ‘girls’. A complaint was made and the offending “light-hearted promotion” was withdrawn. So far, so humdrum.

What’s interesting, and heartening, about this episode is that the complaint was made by a man, John Berryhill, and he’s taken to blog comments to make this a more broadly teachable moment:

“Guys, you might do something which, after a few drinks and alone in some exotic place with one of the women of the ICANN community, may seem to you to be a “misunderstanding” or simple social faux pas. You may find that, well, obviously it wasn’t all that bad because the next day she had the discretion not to make a big deal out of it, or otherwise call you out and embarrass you.
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One of the many, many reasons to hope the unusually silly GOP primary season stretches on and on is that eventually we get to New York (April 24). Maybe all the way to California (June 5). What if California actually matters? If Newt and Santorum are still hanging on, how are they going to pander shamelessly to California voters?

I’ve gotta think Rick Santorum’s latest line is not going to play, without adjustment, in New York or Los Angeles: “Because you don’t live in New York City. You don’t live in Los Angeles. You live like most Americans in between those two cities, and you know the values you believe in.”

What will the pivot be? And remember: one week before California’s 172 delegates go up for grabs the candidates have to be banging for all they’re worth about how awesome Texas is (152 delegates).

It’s not at all surprising that most US media have yawned at “today’s news”:http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/manning-treatment-inhuman/ that a UN rapporteur has found that the US has treated Bradley Manning in a cruel and inhuman fashion. But it does highlight a rather interesting inequity.

On the one side of the balance sheet, we have Richard B. Cheney. This gentleman, now in private life, is a self-admitted and unrepentant perpetrator of war crimes – specifically, of ordering the torture of Al Qaeda detainees. Along with other senior members of the Bush regime, he is also guilty of the outsourcing of even viler forms of torture through the extraordinary rendition of individuals to regimes notorious for torturing prisoners (including the dispatch of Maher Arar, who was entirely innocent, to the torturers of Syria). The Obama administration has shown no enthusiasm whatsoever for prosecuting Cheney, or other Bush senior officials, for their crimes. While Obama has effectively admitted that they were torturers, he has indicated, both through public statements and continued inaction, that he would prefer to let bygones be bygones.

On the other, we have Bradley Manning. He appears to be a confused individual – but his initial motivation for leaking information, if the transcripts are correct, were perfectly clear. He was appalled at what he saw as major abuses of authority by the US, including incidents that he witnessed directly in Iraq. There is no evidence that his leaking of information has caused anything worse than embarrassment for the US. Yet he is being pursued by the Obama administration with the vengefulness of Greek Furies. While Manning was being kept in solitary confinement, and treated in an inhuman fashion, Richard Cheney was enjoying the manifold pleasures of a well-compensated private life, being subjected to no more than the occasional impertinent question on a Sunday talk show, and the inconveniences of being unable to travel to jurisdictions where he might be arrested.

It would appear then that the administration is rather more prepared to let bygones be bygones in some cases than in others. High officials, who ordered that torture be carried out and dragged the US into international disrepute, are given an _ex post_ carte blanche for their crimes, while a low-ranking soldier who is at most guilty of leaking minor secrets at the lowest levels of classification, is treated inhumanely and likely, should he be convicted, to face life imprisonment.

So here’s my proposal. It’s perfectly clear that Richard B. Cheney will never be prosecuted because a prosecution would be politically inconvenient. If that’s the Obama administration’s decision (and it’s pretty clear that it _is_ the Obama administration’s decision), then the administration should own it. The president should grant Richard Cheney a pardon for his crimes. Simultaneously, as an acknowledgement that the high crimes of state officials should not go unpunished while the lesser crimes of those who opposed the Iraq war are exposed to the vengefulness of the military tribunal system, Bradley Manning should receive a complete pardon too.

I can’t imagine that Richard B. Cheney would _like_ getting a presidential pardon. Indeed, I rather imagine that he’d vigorously protest it. It would serve as the best formal acknowledgment that we’re likely to get that he is, indeed, a criminal. Obviously, it would also be an unhappy compromise for those who think that he should be exposed to the full rigors of the law. But I personally think that it would be an acceptable compromise (others may reasonably disagree), if it were applied to both sides rather than just one.