Michael Froomkin writes letters.

Just sent this to the Washington Post’s Ombudsman:

Today’s lead editorial on the Al-Kidd v. Ashcroft case blindly repeats a piece of government propaganda that has been decisively falsified in the court proceedings of that very case.

“High Court Should Overturn Kidd v. Ashcroft” begins like this:

ABDULLAH AL-KIDD was arrested at Dulles International Airport in 2003 after purchasing a one-way, first-class ticket to Saudi Arabia.

In fact, testimony and subpoenaed airline records establish that Al-Kidd had a round-trip coach ticket. The government’s false statement — originally made to the court to justify arresting him — misled the court and it is this very pattern of government misrepresentations that played a significant role in the judicial turn against immunity which the Post (in my opinion wrongly) critiques. The Post’s error is no mere detail but serves as means of obfuscating — avoiding — the central facts that undermine the argument the Post wishes to make.

I guess if you use fake facts it’s easier to write editorials in favor of unlimited and un-accountable state power to detain US citizens (AP: “Over the next 16 days he would be strip-searched repeatedly, left naked in a jail cell and shower for more than 90 minutes in view of other men and women, routinely transported in handcuffs and leg irons, and kept with people who had been convicted of violent crimes. On a long trip between jails, a federal marshal refused to unlock al-Kidd’s chains so he could use the bathroom.”).

No mere factual correction can fix this problem since that would fail to make clear that the factual change undercuts the entire logic of the editorial, but I have never yet seen a correction which makes such an admission, and don’t have much hope here.

The question for you, though, is this: how could the Post allow someone to write an editorial on such an important matter who isn’t even aware of one of the better-known facts of the case? And who doesn’t then check the facts. … the accurate facts were and are no secret: it almost takes work to avoid them.

I can’t say that this is particularly surprising. The editorial board of the _Washington Post_ is a disgrace. It’s the major reason I stopped my subscription some years ago, despite liking some people who write for the newspaper. When the senior editors of the newspaper repeatedly tell lies to their readers, some “obviously self-serving”:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/08/24/synergies/, others, like this, in pursuit of a sinister and insane national security agenda, it tends to corrode one’s trust in the institution.

The shutdown of the US government has been deferred for two weeks, as a result of a Republican proposal which gives them $4 billion of facesaving but uncontroversial cuts (some already proposed by Obama, the rest unspent money set aside for possible earmarks, which they have already decided not to include in the Budget). This is a pretty big backdown, given the kind of rhetoric being thrown around after last year’s recapture of the House, suggesting positive eagerness for a shutdown. Among the factors contributing to the backdown, I think the vigorous resistance being mounted in Wisconsin, and the significant public sympathy it is attracting, would have to be the most important. Secondary, but also important is Obama’s bounceback in the polls. The bounce has been modest but surprising given the continued weakness of the economy. If the shutdown is blamed on the Reps[1], and the economy is recovering by 2012, their chances of victory don’t look so good.

That said, on past form, the odds have to favor an ultimate capitulation by the Dems. Given their relative strength, and the extreme demands of the Rep leadership (let alone the Tea Party), a pre-emptive capitulation sufficient to avert a shutdown looks unlikely. At the other end of the probability distribution, the chance that, in the context of an extended shutdown, the Reps might buckle as they did in 1995 looks more promising than before.

fn1. As Frank Rich points out, there is a compelling logic to blaming the Republicans for a shutdown, namely that the Republicans would clearly like to shut down the (non-military bits of the) Federal government, whereas the Dems would not.

fn1. And, as Frank Rich observes, it

The ECJ has ruled that it is illegal discrimination for the insurance industry to treat men and women differently.

This is currently mainly being covered as an excuse to do larf-o-larf items about “weren’t people funny about women drivers in the 1970s! But actually women are safer drivers! Imagine!”. In actual fact the car insurance thing is not that big of a deal since the no-claims bonus swamps any gender effect within a couple of years; all it really means is that nobody will insure teenagers at all, which I count as not necessarily an unmitigated cost. The real issue is pensions.

Women live longer than men. That’s one of the few actuarially reliable things you can say about life expectancy[1]. And so it requires more resources to provide a given level of life expectancy for women than it does for men. (NB: it is easy to get confused about this – remember that “risk” in context always means “financial risk to the insurer” rather than “health outcome or mortality risk to the insured”, and that living for a long time is bad news for the person who’s agreed to pay you an annuity).

Because it costs more to give women a retirement income, you can basically choose two options from the following three:

1) Equal retirement incomes for women and men
2) Equal commitment of society’s resources to providing retirement savings for women and men
3) A functioning pension annuity industry

There are a load of interesting questions about the nature of equality which might be considered relevant to the choice between 1) and 2) (although they might be considered a lot more practically relevant in a society where there was a greater degree of equality in lifetime earnings). I’m just interested to see that for the first time, a major society has decided that 3) is potentially the one to give up on. Edit: Just realised I probably ought to give my own favoured solution – I think it’s fairly obvious that 2) is the one to give up on and we just have to accept that the biological facts of the matter are that society needs to arrange things so that a given woman has a larger pool of retirement savings allocated to each other than an otherwise qualitatively identical man[2]. It’s rather like the number of social and economic consequences that we accept as flowing from the biological fact that women give birth and men don’t. Historically, capitalist economies have implicitly given up on 1), by allowing retirement incomes to be determined by savings out of lifetime labour income.

[1] by the way, don’t hold out too much hope for genetic testing as a silver bullet solution that will give us all individualised life expectancies and annuity rates. And even if it does, those rates will still be better for men as a group than women as a group, so the discrimination problem will still be there).

[2] the concept of “a woman and man who are identical in all properties except gender” perhaps not being terribly firmly anchored in reality, but as an actuarial construct I can probably save it.

Update (March 2nd): The ASA has just posted their audit statements for the past two years. Looks like someone from HQ was reading Prof. Disgruntled.

My pet Theory of Professional Academic Associations is that the discipline’s organizational life inverts its core intellectual commitments. Thus, Political Science is the discipline of government and especially of democracy. Yet, the last time I checked, all of the high-level positions in APSA are decided by committee deals rather than free and fair elections by the membership. Or, Economics is the discipline of decentralized coordination through the efficient operation of the market. Yet its job “market” is in fact an administered queue, with departments explicitly ranking their candidates, departments effectively ranking themselves, and a direct matching process operating between the two as top-ranking candidates slot into open positions in top-ranked schools. (This mechanism also includes an effective method of rent-extraction from Deans in the form of a salary ratchet.) And, to get to the present case, Sociology is the discipline that analyzes the many forms of collective social action, on the one hand, and is the social science most oriented towards the exposure of the workings of power, on the other. So naturally it follows that the ASA is not very good at organizing anything, and that its financial arrangements are as secretive as legally possible.

So, via Brayden King at OrgTheory come the efforts of The Disgruntled Sociologist to ferret out some of these details by way of the ASA’s tax statements and discusses them in a series of detailed posts. Some of the more striking findings include the following:

• The ASA spent $10M on a “condo.” (Its office building, a couple of blocks from the White House.)
• From 2003 to 2008, total revenue has been flat, but revenue from dues has increased substantially — almost 17%.
• The staff of the ASA grew 26% in five years. Wages and salary increased roughly the same amount.
• Total expenses for the the ASA ($7.6M) are greater than any of their peer organizations: American Political Science Association ($6.2M), American Economic Association ($7.1M), American Anthropological Association ($4.7M), and American Historical Association ($3.5M).
• Total compensation of headquarters staff for the ASA is substantially higher than for the other organizations (with the exception of the AEA, which lists more than twice the number of employees).
• The ASA has substantially higher interest expenses than the other organizations.
• In 2008 the ASA spent its cash reserves of $1.8M – “from approximately $3M at the beginning of the year to $1.2M at the end,” presumably to make up for that year’s 28% loss in investments.
• The ASA has $8M in bond liabilities (mostly stemming from the purchase of the DC offices).
• The big change in liabilities comes in the ominous category, “Other liabilities.” This increases twentyfold, from $101,000 to $2,000,000. The ASA describes these liabilities on the tax form as an “interest rate swap obligation.”

An interest rate swap obligation? As in, a derivative? Looks like investment advice gone badly wrong to me. [Update: It turns out the swap obligation is a hedge against the cost of servicing the debt on the Condo, rather than a separate investment.] Now, perhaps there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this, and there is nothing odd about these points at all. (I note in passing from the comparative data that the ASA reported 100 unpaid volunteers the last year it filed. Meanwhile, the AEA reports zero volunteers.) The thing is, though, that this is the first that members have heard of any of this. The most recent audited financial statement available is for 2007, and as far has I can tell you cannot actually navigate to it from anywhere on the website. Instead you have to search for it directly. Meanwhile the official organs of communication to members (newsletters and so on) have been completely silent about these financial downturns. The level of transparency is astonishingly low in comparison to its peer associations.

Hey look! I co-edited a book! It’s pretty good, if I do say so myself. Cosma Shalizi’s contribution is the best. Overall, I think the volume is nice for the way the various pieces talk to each other well, while also addressing their subject, Franco Moretti’s book. Plus: free online, Creative Commons, that good stuff!

To celebrate, I’m going to be posting follow-up stuff about Moretti-type stuff in the days to come. Also, I’ll try to pull together some thoughts about academic publishing and open publishing. This book is a (rather slow-ripening) fruit of the Valve book events of yore. Been meaning to get back to that sort of thing, but life keeps getting in the way in other shapes and forms. (Plus I have some sort of cold at the moment. Terribly sore throat.)

In his contribution to the volume, Cosma discusses, briefly, Stanley Lieberson’s A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change [amazon], which I’m only now getting around to reading. So here’s a question for you. A passage from Fernand Braudel that Lieberson quotes:

One cannot really talk of fashion becoming all-powerful before about 1700. At that time the word gained a new lease of life and spread everywhere with its new meaning: keeping up with the times. From then on fashion in the modern sense began to influence everything: the pace of change had never been as swift in earlier times.

In fact, the further back in time one goes, even in Europe, one is more likely to find the still waters of ancient situations like those we have described in India, China and Islam. The general rule was changelessness. Until towards the beginning of the twelfth century costumes in Europe remained entirely as they had been in Roman times: long tunics falling straight to the feet for women and to the knees for men. For century upon century, costume had remained unchanged. Any innovation, such as the lengthening of men’s clothes in the twelfth century was strongly criticized …

The really big change came in about 1350 with the sudden shortening of men’s costume, which was viewed as scandalous by the old, the prudent and the defenders of tradition …

In a way, one could say that fashion began here. For after this, ways of dressing became subject to change in Europe.

Do you think this is true?

My immediate reaction is to hypothesize that the basic dynamics of fashion have to go back a lot further. Once you get certain sorts of social divisions and status competition – which you surely will in any wealthy urban environment – you are almost inevitably going to get some sort of one-upsmanship churn, along some axis, deserving the name ‘fashion’. I immediately start half-recollecting bits from Aristophanes and Plato that suggest ancient Athenians were sensitive to changes in dress fashions. But I don’t really know. What do you think? (Better yet: what do you know?) When did fashion begin?

“Laura at 11D”:http://www.apt11d.com/2011/02/a-pub-chat.html

bq. There was a stage set for Remnick and Gladwell. … When they came out, Remnick immediately brought up the Gladwell’s social media article from a few weeks ago, where Gladwell wrote that social media only created weak ties and wasn’t sufficient to push a people to form a social movement. He took a lot of heat in the past few weeks, since social media may have played some role in the uprisings in Egypt. Gladwell was pretty hostile to his critics. He scoffed that his critic was some blogger from Huffington Post. Why should we listen to some pajama-wearing blogger, he asked? Some pajama-wearing blogger who lives in Brooklyn, he added for extra laughs.

bq. Well, I’m not sure why we should listen to a journalist who doesn’t like to travel north of 14h Street. Look, it was a very entertaining evening. Those guys were funny and witty and shared lots of amusing stories. But they didn’t know anything about revolutions or social media or Egypt. That’s okay. Journalists don’t have know be experts in their field. But they have to acknowledge that they aren’t experts and they really have an obligation to talk to people who spend their lives studying those subjects. … Why should anyone care what Malcolm Gladwell thinks about Egypt and Facebook, when there are people who have travelled to the Mid East, are fluent in Arabic, and spend most of their waking hours learning about this subject.

“Arthur Goldhammer”:http://artgoldhammer.blogspot.com/2011/02/waterloo-of-lintellectuel-francais.html

bq. It must have been more than 30 years ago now that Michel Foucault wrote an article entitled “La mort de l’intellectuel.” Apparently Le Monde didn’t get the message, because it invited four “intellectuals” to comment on the “Arab revolts.” The choice of participants in this forum tells you something about what the word “intellectuel” means today. We hear from Alain Touraine, Alain Badiou, Elisabeth Roudinesco, and André Glucksmann. None is a specialist on the region in turmoil, on the history of revolutions, on Islam, on Arab culture, on the political economy of the rebellious states, on social movements in the Arab world, on previous rebellions against military dictatorships, on relations between the military and civil society, or any of a hundred other topics that might confer authority to speak about one or another aspect of the unfolding wave of rebellion.

bq. in France, to be a specialist is almost a disqualification to speak as an “intellectual.” An intellectual is one who has risen above his or her specialty, if any, to acquire a quasi-priestly authority to pronounce on _n’importe quoi_ — and as often as not, to say _n’importe quoi_ about it. But I wonder if this sort of rootless speculation has any purchase on the French audience today. Perhaps a piece like this in _Le Monde_ is simply a throwback to the day when large numbers of people hungered to know what Sartre or Camus thought about the events of the day.

When I read these posts (nearly back to back – I’ve been away from the internets for a few days), the similarities were striking. The current crop of French intellectuals is rather like Malcolm Gladwell. And (such comparisons being commutative) Malcolm Gladwell is rather like the current crop of French intellectuals. I wonder which would take greater umbrage at the comparison.

An interesting piece in the Chronicle by Jerome Lucido is pretty damning of the college admissions system (especially among private very selective colleges, but not just among them). Last month I was at the conference he refers to at the end of the article (in fact I was a keynote speaker, and only at the last minute did I manage to suppress my inclination to channel James Stockdale, given that I basically know nothing about college admissions). I suppose the participants — about 175 people, almost all admissions or financial aid officials from a diverse array of selective schools, including the admissions deans of several Ivies and flagship states — were largely self-selecting, but still I was surprised how much consensus there appeared to be about what the problems are with the admissions system and how they are generated. Here is Lucido’s basic analysis:

College and university leaders—trustees, presidents, chief academic officers—have the unenviable responsibility of ensuring their institutions’ continued financial viability while pursuing increasingly ambitious academic missions. In this pursuit, their strong turn to the competitive marketplace is understandable. But it is also clear that more is happening here. There is an insatiable appetite for prestige and status that accompanies the drive for revenues. What we see now is that marketplace competition has escalated to the point at which it threatens to become the mission rather than to serve the mission. And for what gain?

An institution can achieve short-term market advantage through aggressive marketing, but in due time competitors will match and then surpass that edge. The escalating competition raises institutional costs, invariably resulting in higher tuition and a greater need to admit students whose families can pay full price.

While some institutions can handle the added expense, there are broader costs that no college can handle alone. As numerous scholars have documented, zealous pursuit of institutional interest has come at the expense of social goals and the public trust. Moreover, there is a loss of educational values, a loss that we cannot afford. One effect of our pursuit of rankings and prestige has been to change how students view college. No longer seen as the crucial capstone of an educational journey, a degree is now regarded as a ticket to economic advantage. Students and institutions alike, it seems, are branding themselves in pursuit of positioning.

My daughter having reached high school, and being surrounded by adoring juniors and seniors (don’t ask) I encounter a lot of kids who seem caught up in this world — applying to college seems to dominate an entire year of the life of upper middle class kids here, and, at least from my vantage point, does seem to discourage academic risk-taking, focuses attention unhealthily on grades over learning, and encourages them to partake in the proliferation of meaningless “awards” (my daughter was nominated for a “leadership award” from the American Legion while still in middle school, and was criticized by a friend for spurning the nomination on the grounds that the award would help her college applications (my daughter, as you might guess from previous references, says “I don’t want to go to some fancy east coast school. I want to go to a state college. In the Midwest”). I’ll take up the other part of Lucido’s article, concerning the metrics by which we should judge colleges another time (after I’ve read Richard Shavelson’s book explaining the CLA). The only advice I have if you are going through, or about to go through, this nightmare, is to peruse the Education Conservancy’s site for sane advice, or to read Lloyd Thacker’s collection College Unranked, which contains plenty of sensible advice mainly from admissions deans, to your kids when you tuck them up in bed at night.

Megan McArdle quotes James Joyner on player compensation, in sports, and draws a moral concerning unions. Let me summarize Joyner’s argument, which is pretty generic and familiar in broad outline: major league baseball, the NBA, and the NFL have different systems of caps and regulations limiting pay and restricting free agency. Plausibly, the system that is best for fans, overall, the NFL system, is worst for some players. (Joyner actually says ‘horribly unfair to the players’. We shall consider this sweeping thesis about social justice.) The NFL is not a free-market-style competition between autonomous business units but a profit-sharing cartel organized to ensure rough competitive equality between teams. Winning teams cannot just convert victory into extra profit and plow that back in, investing in team quality to entrench their winning position, which would be less exciting for fans. See also: major league baseball. The NBA is intermediate: you have salary caps, but players have more free agency. As a result, cities that are nice places to live in if you are really rich have an advantage. They have an informal way round the cap, in effect. Which is, again, good for (some) players, but not for fans overall.

McArdle doesn’t provide a link to the Joyner piece, but here it is. The title: “athletes are ruining sports!” The conclusion: “The bottom line is that players are human beings, who ought to have the right to take their talents to South Beach — or wherever they’re wanted. Just like fans can do.” This is, as Joyner is clearly aware, a bit of a paradox: athletes are making the game worse and they ought to have the right to do so. The ‘cure’ – namely, restrictions on pay and mobility – is ‘worse than the disease’, because it is manifestly grossly unjust.

McArdle seems inclined to draw the opposite conclusion: since the game is better if players are restricted in their bargaining power, and since the point is a good game, the proper, market-minded conclusion to draw is that employee bargaining power should, in principle, be restricted to ensure it does not conflict with productivity-minded management decisions. [click to continue…]

Here.

My assembly representative (whom I didn’t support — he is not known to be particularly leftwing, and the Reps don’t bother running in this seat, so I supported the Green) writes the following instructions to his friends:

Continue to show up here at the capitol and shake the foundations of this building with your opposition.

Contact friends and relatives around the state and urge them to contact their Republican representatives. If you
know anyone in Appleton or Neenah (Senator Ellis), the LaCrosse area (Senator Kapanke), the Hudson area
(Senator Harsdorf), the Ripon area (Senator Olsen), Waupun or Beaver Dam (Senate Majority Leader Fitzgerald),
Platteville or Dodgeville (Senator Schultz), Sheboygan or Manitowoc (Senator Leibham), the Green Bay area
(Senator Cowles), Fond du Lac or Oshkosh (Senator Hopper), communication from the constituents of these
Senators would be especially helpful.

Protests continue at the state capitol building, as well as major rallies, until the people of our state are heard by
this Governor.

So, the Rep Senators thought to be particularly vulnerable to caving are named, and, wherever you are, if you know people who live in those districts prevail upon them to write or call, maintaining a polite friendly demeanor if possible.

Phelps asks me “How often has a Democratic representative asked constituents to shake the foundations of the Capitol building?” Not a lot in the past few decades, I’d guess.

Oh, and my representative will have to do some really awful stuff in the coming year or so if he wants me to support an opponent again at the next election.

The downfall of the Gaddafi dictatorship now seems certain, despite brutal and bloody attempts at repression. The failure of these attempts kills off what was briefly the conventional wisdom, that dictatorships in the region can hold on if they “don’t blink“. At this point, Gaddafi and his remaining supporters will be lucky if they can make it to The Hague for their trials, rather than sharing the fate of the Ceaucescus.

Now a new conventional wisdom seems to be emerging, at least according to this article in the NY Times. The central idea is that while dictatorships (more accurately perhaps, tyrannies, in the classical sense of monarchs who have seized their thrones with no prior hereditary claim) are doomed, but that monarchies can survive with cosmetic concessions. In particular, on this analysis, the US relationship with the House of Saud can go on more or less as before.

There’s an element of truth here, but the central claim is wishful thinking

[click to continue…]

Can anybody in Indiana comment on this? (thanks roac).

With a wary eye on Wisconsin, Republican leaders in several states are toning down the tough talk against public employee unions and, in some cases, abandoning anti-union measures altogether. Indiana’s governor urged GOP lawmakers to give up on a “right to work” bill for fear the backlash could derail the rest of his agenda. In Ohio, senators plan to soften a bill that would have banned all collective bargaining by state workers. And in Michigan, the Republican governor says he’d rather negotiate with public employees than pick a fight.

Hard to know what to say about this:

“The law enforcement officers from across the state that have been working at the Capitol and have been very impressed with how peaceful everyone has been,” said WPPA Executive Director Jim Palmer. “As has been reported in the media, the protesters are cleaning up after themselves and have not caused any problems. The fact of that matter is that Wisconsin’s law enforcement community opposes Governor Walker’s effort to eliminate most union activity in this state, and we implore him to not do anything to increase the risk to officers and the public. The costs of providing security can never outweigh those associated with a conflict.” Palmer also announced that, beginning tonight, the WPPA is formally requesting its members from across the state to come to the Capitol to sleep amongst the throngs of other union supporters.
“Law enforcement officers know the difference between right and wrong, and Governor Walker’s attempt to eliminate the collective voice of Wisconsin’s devoted public employees is wrong,” continued Palmer. “That is why we have stood with our fellow employees each day and why we will be sleeping among them tonight.”

I guess my daughter, now largely absent from the home, will be safe.

The Assembly passed the Bill last night around 1am — although there is now some doubt about the legality of the process, in view of the fact that many Democrats had no opportunity to vote. (TV report here, thanks Joe). The Republicans said that 60 hours of debate was enough — though it is hard to call what happened in the Assembly “debate”, given the complete lack of interest one side had in considering any possible slight flaws in the Bill.

Four Republicans voted against the bill:
Dean Kaufert of Neenah
Lee Nerison of Westby
Richard Spanbauer of Oshkosh
Travis Tranel of Cuba City

Their mailboxes will be full of bile. If you live in one of their districts, please write, thanking them. If you don’t live in any of their districts, it is still worth writing a short, kind, note, thanking them for their courage, and telling them that you understand how hard it must have been to stand up for their principles, but that there’s no point being in politics if you can’t do that. Tranel, in particular, is young, and a freshman: he’s going to have a tough few months is my guess, and friendly words of support from around the country and maybe the world are the least he deserves.

The Dems have been bloody brilliant.

We Are Wisconsin from Finn Ryan on Vimeo.

(via Joe)
And she is Wisconsin:

The Hustisford School Board approved giving preliminary layoff notices to all 34 members of its teachers union, including the wife of state Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, superintendent Jeremy Biehl confirmed Thursday.
The board took the action in advance of Gov. Scott Walker’s release of the state budget and the statutory deadline for issuing such notices “to give themselves complete flexibility,” Biehl said. Hustisford administrators had recommended issuing the notices to five staff members.
“It’s not something I take lightly,” said Fitzgerald, whose wife, Lisa, is the district’s only guidance counselor. “It will have an effect on our life.”
Fitzgerald said his wife initially believed she was one of only three staff members to receive a preliminary layoff notice, after the board’s Wednesday action. “I thought maybe she was being targeted by them,” he said.
Even after learning that everyone had received notices and that she was not targeted, Fitzgerald said “it seems odd.”

He should talk to the Governor who is planning to send such notices to thousands of people, most of whom also have relatives.