Recent discussion on twitter, facebook and blogs involving, inter alia Matt Yglesias (yes, again!), “Erik Loomis”:http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2011/08/jimmy-carter-founding-father-of-the-beer-revolution (who kicked it all off), Scott Lemieux, John Band, Dsquared, me, and others, tells me that people get much more excited about who has the best beer than about the role of the brewing industry in late capitalism and the fate of organized laboour. It also tells me that the claim that country X has the best beer is ambiguous. Some people think that the United States now brews the best beer, but even they are forced to concede that should you wish to actually drink the stuff, you are better placed (for example) in England where a ten-minute stroll from your front door (in any major or minor city) will likely get you to a pub with a decent selection. However, the partisans of nouveau American beer chauvinism have asserted that whilst England may score highly on that dimension, the typical US supermarket has a world-beating selection of brews. I’m not so sure. But first some commentary on our three questions (accompanied by some photographs). (This post is, incidentally, fortified by the excellent Jennings “Sneck Lifter” from Cumbria, a dark bitter at 5.1% abv.)
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Continuing the all-Yglesias all-the-time quality for which Crooked Timber is lately renowned, Matt’s post here could be stronger. He’s pointing out that a Grover Norquist tweet is nonsense (not an unusual circumstance, I surmise, but there is a point to be made.) “If Keynesian economics worked — shoplifting would create jobs.”

Matt points out that Norquist is committing what he calls ‘the broken windows fallacy fallacy’, which requires some explanation of the money supply in 19th Century France. There is an easier way. W.W. II ended the Depression. So Hitler is like shoplifting, only more so. [click to continue…]

Here’s an interesting (or at least provocative) new piece of psychological research (link may need academic subscription) with findings concerning the moral framework generally favoured by economists:

bq. In this paper, we question the close identification of utilitarian responses with optimal moral judgment by demonstrating that the endorsement of utilitarian solutions to a set of commonly-used moral dilemmas correlates with a set of psychological traits that can be characterized as emotionally callous and manipulative—traits that most would perceive as not only psychologically unhealthy, but also morally undesirable.

“The mismeasure of morals: Antisocial personality traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas”, by Daniel M. Bartels and David A. Pizarro, Cognition 121 (2011) 154–161.

The seemingly imminent downfall of Muammar Gaddafi may not represent “the end of history”, but, for the moment at least, it’s pretty close to being the end of tyranny, in the historical sense of absolute rule by an individual who has seized power, rather than acquiring it by inheritance or election. Bonapartism (if you exclude its more specialised use to refer to supporters of the Bonaparte family claim to rule France) , is probably the closest modern equivalent. Forty-odd years ago, this kind of government was the rule rather than the exception in most regions of the world (notably including South America and the Communist bloc), and was represented even in Western Europe by Franco and Salazar.

Now, there’s Mugabe clinging to a share of power in Zimbabwe, along a bunch of less prominent, but still nasty, African dictators in the classic post-colonial mode (in the original post, I underestimated the number of these who are still around, but they are clearly a dying breed). Add in a handful of shaky-looking strongmen in the periphery of the former Soviet Union, and that’s about it for tyrants in the classical sense.

Normally classed as tyrants but not meeting the classical definition, Kim jr, Assad jr and Castro minor (and some others mentioned in comments), the first two of whom are certainly tyrannical in the ordinary modern sense, but all of whom inherited their positions, as of course, did the remaining absolute monarchs. The historical evidence, starting with Cromwell jr, and running through Baby Doc Duvalier and others is that regimes like this hardly ever make it to the third generation. They combine the low average ability inherent in hereditary systems with a lack of either royal or revolutionary, let alone democratic, legitimacy.

More interesting cases are those of Museveni in Uganda and Kagame in Rwanda, illustrations of the point that tyrants in the classic sense need not be bad, at least relative to the alternative they displaced. But these seem to be isolated examples, owing much of their appeal to the horrors that preceded them and the fear that those horrors might return.

More surprising to me are the number of cases where classic tyrants, having established one-party states, have been succeeded by self-selecting oligarchies – China is the most striking example, but Singapore also fits. Looking at the evidence of the past, I would have predicted that such oligarchies would either collapse in short order or see the emergence of a new tyrant, but there is no sign of that for the moment.

I don’t have a good theory to explain the rise of so many tyrants in the modern period, beginning with Bonaparte (or maybe Cromwell), or the sharp decline of this form of government from around the mid-1960s. But it seems that it’s a development worth noting.

fn1. Putin is often presented as being a near-dictator. But he doesn’t need to repress his opponents – it’s pretty clear he would easily win elections in Russia with or without doing so. Conversely, there’s no real evidence to suggest that he could or would hold on for long if public opinion turned sharply against him.

Matt Yglesias[1] says

Many on the right and center indicate that in order to restore the economy, President Obama needs to do more to cater to the whims of rich businessmen. Many on the left feel that this is exactly wrong and that in order to restore the economy, President Obama needs to do more to stick it to the rich and dispossess them. History suggests that both are wrong.

He goes on to give plenty of evidence for the wrongness of the first proposition, and none at all for the second.
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The question came up in comments to the sf and fantasy top 100 thread: take such debates seriously? Or not so much? Admittedly, it’s kind of like comics fans arguing about which heroes/titles deserve a reboot. (via Comics Alliance)

UPDATE: to judge from comments, some readers may have missed the point of the comics forum post, or failed to click over. The lengthy thread consists entirely of comics fans arguing self-righteously, enthusiastically, angrily, but above all, knowledgeably, about non-existent comics. They really keep the ball going.

“Alls I know is that if they manage to bring back Captain Hayseed and the Ramblin’ Rangers, I’m gonna Freak. Out. Molterstein’s run on that in the 50’s shaped my childhood. Too bad they can’t bring back Tony Modigliani for art, but I heard after that fourth lightning strike, his art really went downhill.”

“If you look at the shifted continents promotion where it says “worlds will change” you can see Hayseed’s symbol of the Haymaker where Asia should be. I bet it gets tied into the Century of Peril series though and Jason Tooth is writing it.”

Next week in my Philosophy of Literature module I’ll be talking about pareidolia and theories of how and and why it works. How and why pretty much any closed loop with three dots in it is a face, because it ‘looks like’ one. The occasion for burdening my students with this is discussion of overly-linguistifying (in my view) theories of how literature ‘works’ and, more grandly, linguistifying theories of what Aristotle called mimesis, a.k.a. that whole ‘poetics’ ball of wax. I posted some of my thoughts about pictures and pictoriality before: it’s important to realize that even though a smiley face is an utterly conventional icon, it doesn’t follow that it works by convention.

Anyway, I thought it was a nice coincidence that Andrew Sullivan linked to this today, for his Faces of the Day thing.

Also, I just stumbled on a real sparklepop/powerfolk earworm of a tune by Vetiver, “Wonder Why”, which turns out to have a a pareidolia-based video. Great track. Get it free from Amazon.

The maps and the video are good examples for me because they preemptively emphasize something that is often raised as an objection to efforts to ‘naturalize’ the pictorial function: namely, it’s a learned process. By the end of the map series, and the video, you are more sensitized to faces and figures in maps, mailboxes and trashcans than you were at the start. To that extent your responses are ‘conventional’, in the sense of learned (when you could perfectly well have been learning something else, so the result is somewhat ‘arbitrary’). Fine, fine. But the point still stands. From the fact that a result is path-dependent, it may follow that it is conventional (in a perfectly good sense of that word). But, again, it does not follow from the fact that something is conventional in that sense that it ‘works by’ convention in some other senses that tend to be carelessly bundled in. The mechanism by which we recognize things as faces is cognitively distinct from the mechanism by which we recognize that ‘faces’ denotes faces. My target here is Nelson Goodmanian thinking, which tries to explain pictorial resemblance and representation on the model of linguistic denotation. He doesn’t say it works exactly the same, all the way up and down; that would be pretty obviously crazy. But he pushes the line that, in order to theorize how pictures work, you have to build on a kind of denotational foundation. I think the opposite: theories of linguistic denotation need to rest on a foundational theory of pictoriality. But enough about me. Enjoy the video and the song. Great song, I think.

“Matt Yglesias”:http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/08/19/299780/beer-and-neoliberalism-redux/ suggests after a Twitter debate that I and Tom Philpott are conceding a lot to neo-liberalism because we’re OK with microbrews. I’m not so sure.

Matt’s “original claim”:http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/08/18/299166/beer-and-neoliberalism/ was that craft brewers were somehow analogous to charter schools, giving us delicious individualist brews, rather than unionized mass-produced piss.

bq. So here’s the thing. You may not like Miller or Bud Light, but Miller and Anheuser-Busch both run unionized breweries. And as Loomis notes, one consequence of the cartelization of the American beer brewing industry was to generate monopoly profits for the large breweries. This was good not just for “Miller executives” but for all the stakeholders in the enterprise. When a unionized firm is in a non-competitive marketplace, the union is in a strong position to force the firm to share some of the monopoly rents with the workforce. When the market becomes more competitive, not only does the unionized firm lose market share but the union in general loses leverage. The craft breweries are basically the charter schools (or foreign-built trains) of the beer world.

I think this first version of the claim was wrong, on any reasonable interpretation. If Matt was suggesting that good beer and good unions are somehow incompatible, all I can say is Sir, I refute you “thus!”:http://www.zimbio.com/pictures/aZ4Xq0fSCjD/InBev+Strike+Threatens+Supplies+Belgian+Beer. If he was arguing instead, as he seemed to be claiming on Twitter, that Big Microbrew threatens the bargaining power of unions in the American beer industry, then he was making a wildly implausible claim. Not only do microbrews only account for a small percentage of the market (about 7% as best as I can see) but they constitute a more or less entirely separate market from the market for Miller, Budweiser etc. There’s simply not that much substitution between the two – hence, not much in the way of market effects. Unlike e.g. steel minimills in the 1980s, microbrews pose no fundamental threat to the way the major industry is organized. He’s correct that charter schools (which I personally have no very strong inherent objections to, by the way) also only constitute a small percentage of the US education market – but beer, obviously, is not subject to the same political forces as is education. There is little likelihood that the appeal of microbrews will lead state, local or federal officials to impose or encourage mandatory hopping levels for Anheuser-Busch, or that US unions would object if they did. Unlike their “Danish compatriots”:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304703104575174242543577012.html they have no skin in the game. Microbrews have no realistic chance of transforming the main marketplace in ways that would undermine unions.

Matt seems now to be making a somewhat different claim, which doesn’t really make much sense to me.

bq. The Farrell/Philpott explanations of why this is okay in the case of domestic craft beer rely on the claim that empirically speaking the impact of the new entrant in question on the marketplace is going to be small. That may be true, but it’s in considerable tension with the impulse of Philpott (based on his original article) and Farrell (assuming “pissy” is not a compliment) to valorize the new entrants. … There seems to me to be a kind of special pleading at work here, where on the one hand a neoliberal approach to the beer market is justified on the grounds that it’s giving consumers superior options, but then it’s okay to be a neoliberal about beer because only a tiny minority of consumers will actually appreciate these new options. Neoliberalism for me but not for thee

This is a very peculiar argument. Matt has been quite good in the past at taking on libertarians and conservatives who claim that all liberals want is a bigger state. Now, he seems to be suggesting that all that people to _his_ left want are bigger regulation and bigger unions, and that when it comes to craft ales and stuff that they really care for, they’re big old hypocrites who want _deregulation all the way._ This claim rests both on a caricature of the left and a fundamental misconception about the issues at stake, which concern personal likes and dislikes, not politics. I have particular tastes in beer, but I don’t feel that other people are missing out on very much if they don’t share those tastes, and instead drink beers that I myself dislike. Not only am I prepared to share a blog with “such people”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/05/10/in-praise-of-budweiser-contains-extended-footnotes/, I’m even married to one of them. Nor, even if my tastes were like those of dsquared and my spouse, would I have any reason to oppose deregulation that did no apparent damage to the causes that I believe in. Where a policy change gives people _more choices_, and there are _no discernible negative side-effects_, I’m all in favor. I cannot on earth see why anyone would prefer to describe this stance as ‘special pleading,’ or a major concession to neo-liberalism rather than e.g. ‘common sense.’

Perhaps there _is_ some Bierstalinismus Fraktion out there, which believes that the proletariat will never be fully realized as a class-in-itself until it learns to appreciate hoppy microbrews, but which has reached an accommodation with neo-liberalism in which these joys are reserved for the revolutionary vanguard. I’m not a member of it. Nor, I suspect, is anyone else whom Matt is disagreeing with. This is a rotten test-case for arguments about neo-liberalism, precisely because neo-liberals, left-liberals and social democrats have no reason to disagree with each other. In cases where there is a clash between (a) increasing individual choice, and (b) plausibly weakening political forces that help militate against inequality, there are real arguments to be had (and, depending on the specifics of the case, one might reasonably favor the one side or the other). But I’m not seeing any such clash here, and I’m rather confused as to why Matt thinks that there is, and that people to his left are engaging in special pleading so as to ignore it.

Here’s NPR’s list. (Kevin Drum is musing about it, among others. He points out: no Pohl, Bester, Delany.)

The Silmarillion beat The Hobbit? Fer reals? (Drum is wondering about that, too.) And a D&D Forgotten Realms book is on the list. So it, too, beat The Hobbit?

No Greg Bear or David Brin? Seems we need at least one of those hard sf ‘killer B’s’. No Uplift books? No Forge of God/Anvil of Stars or Moving Mars? (I understand why Larry Niven is on the list, but couldn’t we drop a Niven/Pournelle book to make room for Bear or Brin?) No Bova neither.

No John Crowley, Little, Big? Seems a crime to omit that one.

No Fritz Leiber?

I’m trying to think what multiple Hugo and Nebula-winning authors have gotten the boot on this list.

Take it away!

I’m teaching my Ph.D. level course on institutions and politics this fall. The idea behind the course is to provide Ph.D. students with (a) an understanding of core debates in institutional theory in political science (distinguishing between rational choice, historical institutionalist and ideational accounts), (b) some sense that these accounts go across the subfields of political science, and (c ) an intuition that there are Other Social Sciences with debates about institutions, and that they often have fun and important things to say. Below the fold is my draft reading list: suggested amendments, additions, revisions etc are gratefully received (and if anyone finds the syllabus useful, they should feel free to take it and adapt it for their own requirements &c&c). I also have a class without assigned readings yet – which I hope to fill in with some fun new topic.

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Here’s a contrarian take from a studio exec:

“A tentpole film is one where you can seed the desire to see the film to everyone in every distribution channel. It’s the only kind of film you can spend $100 million marketing,” he said.

Hendrickson’s talk was mainly focused on solving problems in digital production on tentpoles, but he began with an “Econ 101” presentation on the movie business.

“People say ‘It’s all about the story,'” Hendrickson said. “When you’re making tentpole films, bullshit.” Hendrickson showed a chart of the top 12 all-time domestic grossers, and noted every one is a spectacle film. Of his own studio’s “Alice in Wonderland,” which is on the list, he said: “The story isn’t very good, but visual spectacle brought people in droves. And Johnny Depp didn’t hurt.”

Visual spectacle, he said, drives attendance in a film’s first few weekends. And unlike years past when a movie like “The Lion King” might stay in theaters as long as a year, almost all movies are out of theaters quickly now. “Once you’re out of theaters your maximum profit potential is over,” he said.

I went to see “Cowboys and Aliens” last weekend, so I’m feeling fairly tentpoled myself, and I don’t really like it. Terrible story (as all the critics said. I know, I know. I don’t know why I wanted to see it.) [click to continue…]

Sometime in Spring, two years ago, my brother Henry received a hand-written letter from a woman in Ireland he’d neither met nor heard of. It was a letter of introduction. The person being introduced was Edward, “a decent, entertaining fellow. We have known him all our lives.”

A month or two later, I phoned to say I’d be arriving that evening from L.A. for a couple of weeks in the DC office. Henry pressed the letter into my hands as I arrived on the doorstep. He was rushing to the airport and thought I might have more time to take an interest.

The letter came via a circuitous route from a tenuous connection; Meg, Edward’s godfather’s wife who was also my mother’s friend Mary’s book club companion. It was prompted by a misunderstanding between a son who was monosyllabic about his social life and a mother who thus assumed he had none. It came from the peculiarly Anglo-Irish practice of proper letter-writing, and directly from that rare person who said ‘I must write them a letter’, and actually did. [click to continue…]

The National Interest has just run a piece I’ve written on the S&P downgrade. I had understood this was a conservative publication, but I tend to got lost in the varieties of US conservatism (and, for that matter, liberalism). Anyway, they seemed happy to run this as well as an earlier piece on Europe. A quick look at the website didn’t suggest I was in bad company – most of the foreign policy stuff was anti-war, and the other economic pieces were eclectic.

Is there an up-to-date guide for overseas visitors to the US scene? It’s nice to be called up from the Australian farm team, but I don’t want to end up in some glossy publication that turns out to be funded by LaRouche.

In March, I wrote about ICANN’s current leadership, and how it is costing the organization its key people and international reputation. I publicly addressed ICANN’s Board of Directors with my concerns during its San Francisco meeting, and was astonished by the level of support for my view. My aim was to make very public an issue that was deeply damaging to the organization behind closed doors and help make it impossible for the Board to continue to publicly ignore.

ICANN’s Board has now decided not to renew Rod Beckstrom’s contract as CEO when the deal expires in 2012.* There had been calls for Beckstrom to resign or be fired before the end of his contract, but I’m glad the Board is ensuring that the search for a new CEO is not rushed unnecessarily. Hasten slowly, as my grandmother used to say.

As many know, the Board’s new Chair, Dr. Steve Crocker, has spent considerable time over the past year or so on regular phone calls to Rod Beckstrom, not so much in coaching mode as providing a sounding board and voice of experience. That solid working relationship is a credit to both and will help to ease the transition to new leadership.

The Board has given itself time to think hard about a new CEO and make sure the decision is the right one. Presumably they will set up a search committee. I hope that committee can include or consult members of the Internet community. Here are some points the search committee might consider.

‘Multi-stakeholder’ is not a slogan. It’s ICANN’s DNA.

Rod’s most obvious legacy is a largely new, mostly American executive team with shallow ties to the global Internet naming and numbering community. They will need to work hard with the community to show they understand that ‘multi-stakeholder’ is more than a slogan, and that transparency and accountability are not optional. [click to continue…]