Since England was on fire (perhaps still is, in a certain sense) and the financial markets are in trouble, we may be forgetting that a human disaster is taking place in Eastern Africa, where millions of people are suffering from famines. A photo series in the New York Times makes visual how horrendous the situation is. These pictures are from Somalia, which is for a range of reasons probably the worst situation of all countries in the Horn of Africa where people are suffering from hunger, but that’s little consolation. I recall famines in Ethiopia and neighboring countries ever since my childhood, and it is depressing to see them returning again and again, leaving one to feel rather powerless about what, if anything, one can contribute to providing a sustainable solution to this.

Famines are horrible, and are made worse by war, lawlessness, bad or nonexisting governance, and population growth (there is some accessible background material at the BBC Africa sites). These aspects make it harder to think of solutions to prevent this from happening yet again in the future, but that is not the worry of people currently starving. They need food, water and medical care, and they need it now. But once these horrible pictures get off our screens again, and the people who are now starving are either buried or are trying to rebuild their lives, we should not forget returning to searching for a sustainable solution to global poverty reduction/elimination. Let’s invest more in that discussion here on CT (to be continued).

We had the first set of recall elections for the Wisconsin State Senate yesterday. 6 Republicans, all elected in 2008 (during the Obama general election) were up; the Dems needed to take 3 in order to flip the Senate. In the end, they got two (districts 18 and 32), which is roughly what they expected. There had been talk of them hoping for District 14, but that didn’t seem realistic to me. It is a natural swing district, but the Dem candidate was uninspiring, turned out to have numerous moving violations and had, rather unfortunately, been caught on tape saying that paying child support to his exwife was a low priority; and Luther Olsen, the incumbent, has a strong personal following among independents which, given his competence and affable personality, was going to be hard to shake. His gamble (that he would be more likely to hold on to office if he caved into the Governor than he was to ever hold a committee seat again if he resisted) paid off. The appalling Alberta Darling held on to her seat despite a (to me) surprisingly strong Democratic showing, and I suppose it is still just possible that the results will turn out to be dodgy, reliant as her majority was on the reporting of Waukesha County, whose clerk is not renowned for her carefulness. But it’s unlikely. And there are some reasons not to be cheerful: the defeat of Randy Hopper, whose private life has been moderately scandalous, and who does not seem to have been living in his district, should have been much easier than it was.

Two Democrats face recalls next Tuesday (the 16th). The recall effort against the Dem senators was basically an attempt to divert energy and resources from the Republican recalls, but, perhaps predictably, the Rep candidate for the 12th district, a teapartier, has attracted a lot of out of state money (the estimate for yesterday’s elections is that $30 million was spent on the 6 races). If you want to pledge your own in or out of state support for Jim Holperin, the more vulnerable of the two Dem incumbents, click here.

Where does this leave things? Well, if things go well next week, the Reps will have a 17 to 16 majority in the Senate, vulnerable on a day to day basis to Dale Schultz, the one Republican who voted against the collective bargaining law, and who has been enjoying being seen as an independent. Some are declaring victory: as John Nichols points out, these were gerrymandered Republican seats, which have been Republican for a long time, and, as I indicated, privately I heard from a number of Democrats that they would be amazed to get 3, and please to get 2. And there is a case for saying that the momentum has been surprisingly strong, given that the protests ended in March.

Still, I am not personally thrilled, despite having not had high expectations. The left is clearly still galvanised, but the right has maintained its strength well. Walker has pissed off a lot of constituencies, but there isn’t enough momentum at the moment to make it clear that a recall will work, let alone that an as yet unknown Democrat can beat him. A recall of the Governor would require the collection of 550k signatures in 60 days, and because of the rules around recall, that signature collecting process cannot begin till November. If Darling, or even more so Olsen, had been defeated, it would have been a lot easier to convince an electable Democrat (i.e. Russ Feingold [1]) to declare prior to a recall which, in turn, would have made a recall more likely to succeed. All in all: things are not good, but they are not as bad as they might have been.

If anyone can find me a good link for contributing to the No (thanks Steve) campaign on the Ohio Collective Bargaining Limit Repeal, I’ll post it later. Update: contribution page here.

[1] Several other Democrats are regularly mentioned as potential candidates, but I am not aware of any who are dying to run, and no good candidate (that is, any candidate I would be interested in seeing become Governor) already has the kind of name recognition that would make it easy to define themselves in the campaign as anything other than the antiWalker candidate.

I’ll leave those who are better qualified than I to argue about the econometrics, but the timing of this paper’s release is extraordinary.

bq. Expenditure cuts carry a significant risk of increasing the frequency of riots, anti-government demonstrations, general strikes, political assassinations, and attempts at revolutionary overthrow of the established order. While these are low- probability events in normal years, they become much more common as austerity measures are implemented. … We demonstrate that the general pattern of association between unrest and budget cuts holds in Europe for the period 1919-2009. It can be found in almost all sub-periods, and for all types of unrest. Strikingly, where we can trace the cause of each incident (during the period 1980-95), we can show that only austerity-inspired demonstrations respond to budget cuts in the time- series. Also, when we use recently-developed data that allows clean identification of policy-driven changes in the budget balance, our results hold.

Via Kevin O’Rourke.

The last month or two, I have started getting solicitations to review articles submitted to journals I’ve never heard of before, published by a crowd called academicjournals.org (the most recent of their journals to solicit my professional and disinterested advice is the International Journal of English and Literature). The journals and articles have absolutely _nothing_ to do with my areas of research, and I get the very strong impression that I’ve been selected by some blunderbussing algorithm working from scraped email addresses of random academics. A quick Google search suggests that I’m not the “only person”:http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php?topic=61175.0 who is puzzled about all of this, and suspects that there’s something fishy. What I can’t work out though is, is what they’re trying to do by soliciting me and umpteen non-bcced academics in the same email to review their bollocks for them. Is it some sort of advertising? Means of confirming that the email address is live, if you’re stupid enough to respond and tell them that you know nothing about African literature? Something else entirely?

I presume there’s some underlying business model here – but can’t figure out quite what it is. If it’s the obvious one of getting people to submit crap research and pay to get it ‘published’ in journals that no-one has ever heard of, I can’t see why they would be soliciting people to review aforementioned crap research. Suggested plausible motivations are welcome below …

So, the city’s on fire, looters roam the high streets, maybe it’s kicking off in Birmingham and Leeds, too. Consider this an open thread to blame Twitter and praise the Big Society.

Here’s a short inverview/profile thing I did recently for the “Good Question” series that the Kenan Institute for Ethics has been doing. There was a high-concept photo-shoot and everything, so if you’ve ever wanted to see me hanging around in a junkyard warehouse surrounded by various spare parts (I’m sure you see the connection here), then now’s your chance.

I’ve seen this kind of article many times but is it correct? I’d say that I’ve generated several million words in papers, newspaper articles, blog posts and so on since I got my first Mac in 1984 (a bit over 100kw/yr for 25+ years, for something like 3 million), and also attracted maybe 10 million more in blog comments (over 100k of non-spam comments. Of that, I’ve lost
* a fair bit of material I produced before 1990, when hard disk space was very expensive, and stuff had to be stored in various external disk formats. Sadly that includes my first econ theory book and a book of satirical songs I turned out in the 1980s. Mostly this was a case of physically losing, or accidentally overwriting, the data rather than possessing it, but being unable to read it any more.
* The first year or so of comments on my blog in the now-obsolete Haloscan system.
* The blog has also suffered a lot of linkrot, including internal links to its older incarnations
* A lot of my older text is in formats that can now only be read by extracting a text-only format, and some old stuff (eg pre .qif financial records) is in formats that are no longer readable in any way. But again, that’s mostly a problem with pre-1990 stuff.

Compared to my slightly obsessive desire to preserve every revision of every piece I’ve ever written, those are substantial losses. But compared to my paper records, my digital stuff is almost perfectly complete, not to mention instantly accessible and searchable.

I suspect that most people who want one have gotten one already. But in case any CT readers haven’t, and would like to try it out, click here to get one of the 150 invites I have to distribute …

S&P’s decision to downgrade US Treasury bonds from AAA to AA+ has elicited various reactions, some of which I’ll doubtless repeat here. Obviously, S&P has no particular expertise (apparently it couldn’t even get the arithmetic right) and based on its historical and continuing performance, its opinions ought to carry no particular weight with anybody (they say so themselves, when under pressure over obvious cases of misrating, asserting that they are merely offering an opinion).

On the other hand, it’s also pretty obvious (and even more so after the Repubs successful use of the debt ceiling to force Obama to abandon any call for tax increases along with the cuts they both wanted) that the US has some fairly intractable problems in dealing with its (technically quite manageable, but still substantial) public debt. Finally, as I said last time I discussed this, a decision of this kind (including a decision to maintain AAA ratings) is inherently political

There are two reasons why S&P’s choice of rating matters more than, say, my own opinions on the matter
* First, a lot of investors still pay attention to ratings agencies, for whatever reason
* Much more importantly, agency ratings are embedded in global regulations concerning prudent management of investment. If a second major agency were to join S&P in downgrading, large numbers of institutions would be debarred, under existing rules, from investing in Treasury bonds

That’s clearly unsustainable, so what will happen?

[click to continue…]

This one goes with the others. (Having posted two, it would be more strange not to post a third.)

In other news, I notice that Erick Erickson has some difficulty with the is/ought distinction. He reasons that, since Republicans in fact will not raise taxes under any circumstances, it follows that one can’t fault Republicans for not raising taxes. That would be like blaming the rain for raining. Or something. A nice illustration of the advantages and disadvantages of extreme intransigence for political life, perhaps.

This is just a short post seeking, for the purposes of mutual clarification, to highlight where I think the real differences lie between someone like me and “left neoliberals” like Matt Yglesias. I think that something like Yglesias’s general stance would be justifiable if you believed in two things: (1) prioritarianism in the Parfit sense and (2) that real (that is, inflation adjusted) income levels reliably indicate real levels of well-being, at least roughly. For those who don’t know, prioritarianism is a kind of weighted consequentialism, such that an improvement in real well-being counts for more, morally speaking, if it goes to someone at a lower rather than a higher level of well-being. So prioritarism is a bit like a utilitarianism that takes a sophisticated and expansive view of utility and weights gains to the worse-off more highly. This view assigns no instrinsic importance to inequality as such. If the best way to improve the real well-being of the worst off is to incentize the talented (thereby increasining inequality) then that’s the right thing to do.
[click to continue…]

Look, most of us have met a celebrity, burbled something insanely stupid, and lived to regret it.

When I was a teenager, I met Mats Wilander and had the bright idea of giving him my autograph, instead of the other way around. That way he’d remember me. Cringe. Another time, in college, I met Umberto Eco and blurbled away to him about smoking for several minutes until the postgrads he was there to speak to managed to get a word in. Why, only last month, I was introduced to Alastair Darling and asked him if he’d ever been to DC.

Maybe that’s what happened to the girl from Reason.tv. In this video clip (spotted on BoingBoing a couple of days ago) Matt Damon responds to her assertion that he works hard because acting is insecure, therefore teachers would be better if their ‘incentives’ were similar. Coz it’s in their interest to, see?

Asking a man who financially never needs to work again to agree that the fear of not having a job is what motivates him/teachers is head-scratchingly silly.
[click to continue…]

Taking a break from my war with Murdochracy, my most recent column in the Australian Financial Review (over the fold) was about Peak Oil. Partly for tactical reasons, but mainly because I believe it’s basically correct in this case, I’m wearing my hardest neoclassical hat.
[click to continue…]

“Matt Yglesias”:http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/08/04/287553/the-new-labour-record-on-income-growth/ responds to Chris’s post below, by suggesting that British “lefties”‘ criticisms of New Labour’s record on inequality are discredited by a Lane Kenworthy graph, which he says he’ll take as a decisive argument in favor of what he calls “progressive neo-liberalism,” “until [he sees] a rebuttal of it.” But didn’t we have a rebuttal of Yglesias’ interpretation from “Brian Weatherson”:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/10/01/fun-with-gini-coefficients/, the last time he was pushing this line, back in October 2010? Perhaps he found this rebuttal inadequate in some way. But even if this were so, one would have thought that Lane’s own quite specific and limited explanation of what the graph suggests – that it showed that the UK poor probably did better under Labour than they would have under the Conservatives – might have given him pause (I’m quite sure that Chris, for all his dislike of New Labour, would agree with Lane’s claim here).

I also should note that he had a “go”:http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/07/30/283784/the-diversity-of-privilege/ last week at John Quiggin’s arguments about inequality, where he suggested that NYU professors had it pretty good, and that:

bq. a lot of the political dialogue I see online seems to consist of a slightly strange form of class resentment in which intellectuals, nonprofit workers, or public servants express bitterness about the high incomes of businesspeople whose lives they don’t actually envy.

I wrote a somewhat ill-tempered post in response to this, and then deleted it, because I wasn’t greatly looking forward to policing the comments section. So I’ll limit myself to saying that Yglesias’ aside certainly doesn’t do justice to the genuine and quite serious debates around inequality, which, as far as I can see, are not being driven by ‘class resentments’ but by a genuine and well-founded dismay about the current state of the US political economy. Enormous disparities of wealth help reinforce huge disparities in political power (see e.g. Bartels’ findings on how the interests of different economic segments get represented in the electoral process) in a self reinforcing cycle. That’s a problem – and it’s a _particularly big problem_ for someone who wants to concentrate on maximizing growth first, and only on sharing out the goodies afterwards. As “Cosma says”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/778.html in the best post on this broad set of topics that I’ve read to date.

bq. “When you tell us that (1) the important thing is to maximize economic growth, and never mind the distributional consequences because (2) we can always redistribute through progressive taxation and welfare payments, you are assuming a miracle in step 2.” For where is the political power to enact that taxation and redistribution, and keep it going, going to come from? A sense of _noblesse oblige_ is too much to hope for (especially given how many of our rich people have taken lots of economics courses), and, for better or worse, voluntary concessions will no longer come from fear of revolution.

To be clear – I think that Matthew Yglesias is an extremely smart and interesting writer, even when I disagree with him, as I often do. He’s a net contributor to US public debate. But when he comes up against this particular set of issues, he has an unfortunate tendency to wave difficulties in his position away by making -unsubstantiated imputations about the motives of people who bring up the problem of wealth inequality, and- (update: now withdrawn – see his comment below) referring to graphs which don’t actually say what he thinks they say. I wish he’d do better.

Update – I see that Chris has also updated his post in response.