Ireland’s _Sunday Business Post_ informs us that the country’s bishops have come out with a startling admission.

From “LanguageLog”:http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3070.

I got an email the other day, trying to set up an interview about Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us. Shortly afterwards there was a cancellation – they actually wanted the author of Zombie Economics: A Guide to Personal Finance, due to be released in May.

I’m well aware that there’s no copyright in book titles (Zombie Econ was originally going to be called “Dead Ideas from New Economists, and back in the 90s I wrote one which the publisher insisted on calling Great Expectations), but I can’t help wondering about the implications for sales. At least for the moment they don’t look too bad. According to Amazon, 12 per cent of people who viewed the doppelganger ultimately bought my book, while the proportion going the other way is zero (although some zombie fans go for Chris Harman’s Zombie Capitalism). But I imagine that’s the result of bad search results among people looking for mine, rather than a spillover from those looking for the doppelganger. If so, I imagine the flow will reverse when the new one is released.

Are there other interesting examples of book title recycling, or interesting ideas for new takes on classic titles?

Both recommended:

First: Kevin O’Rourke’s “more general take”:http://ineteconomics.org/sites/inet.civicactions.net/files/BWpaper_OROURKE_040811.pdf (PDF) on the trilemmas facing the eurozone.

bq. What we have seen instead is a series of ineffectual moves on financial regulation, and now a complete unwillingness to confront the European banking crisis head-­‐on. Rather than promoting pan-­‐European growth strategies, the institutions of the Union have been enthusiastically promoting pro-­‐cyclical fiscal adjustments in the periphery, even as they insist that heavily indebted governments repay private creditors of private banks in full. Not only is the policy incoherent, making sovereign default more likely on the one hand, while preaching austerity on the other; the insistence that taxpayers rather than investors pay for bank losses is also setting the stage for a potentially very damaging confrontation between core and periphery taxpayers. The political consequences of this are unknowable, but in Ireland, just three months after the troika’s intervention, the political party that had been dominant since the 1930s was annihilated at the polls, with the radical and Eurosceptic Sinn Féin now sniffing at its heels: and this in one of the most conservative, and Europhile, countries in Europe. What three or four years of the current policy mix will do is anybody’s guess.

The paper is particularly interesting in its focus on the _politics_ of Eurozone governance, which does not get nearly as much attention as it deserves. John Quiggin and I have a piece forthcoming in _Foreign Affairs_ which talks to the medium-term consequences of institutionalized austerity at the European level – O’Rourke’s piece provides a good general take on the same set of issues, as well as discussing topics (class and distributional divides) that we don’t get into. The paper is being presented at INET – there is much other interesting looking material available “here”:http://ineteconomics.org/initiatives/conferences/bretton-woods/agenda.

Second, Kate McNamara’s more “topical piece”:http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67710/kathleen-r-mcnamara/can-the-eurozone-be-saved arguing that the European Union needs to take the plunge and become more like a state.

bq. In the eyes of markets and skeptical observers, the European Union is more than an intergovernmental organization but not yet a state. When the European Union bickers and dithers, the markets have no idea what may happen. The euro is the only single currency in history that has not been tightly linked to broader state- and nation-building efforts (often following wars, during which military action required budgeting and taxation). Although the euro is an extraordinary peacetime achievement, it suffers from a lack of supporting political institutions that can make broader macroeconomic policy. The European Union needs to change that and move beyond the structure of its current economic and monetary union — which were seemingly designed for a world in which private and public actors never over-borrow and financial markets never question their ability to repay — to real political and economic cohesion, something international markets would recognize as parallel to a nation state.

As she recognizes (and O’Rourke argues too) there is little enthusiasm among European leaders (let alone publics) to make this jump. This obviously generates normative objections (some perhaps fundamental) as well as practical ones. But equally, it is not at all clear that the European Union can survive as it is, as a kind of ungainly half-way house between an international organization and a genuinely federal system.

It was always highly likely that, given a Republican win in the US House of Representatives, the 1995 shutdown of the government would be repeated, and now it seems virtually certain[1]. Until recently, I’ve assumed that the outcome would be a capitulation by Obama and the Dems. Less likely, but still possible, was repeat 1995 where the Republicans caved, and took the political blame for the shutdown, but one in which there were still substantial budget cuts borne mostly by workers and the poor (actually, I think Clinton had done most of this pre-95).

The events in Wisconsin have shifted the odds, making it much harder for the Reps to shift or share the blame for a shutdown, and therefore more likely that an eventual compromise will be on terms than can be seen as a political win for the Democrats. More importantly, though, they’ve raised the prospect of something much bigger – a genuine popular movement against cuts that could turn the whole debate around.

I have no idea whether anything of the kind is being organized. I hope so, though it would be even better if something like this began as a spontaneous outgrowth of the movement in Wisconsin and elsewhere. That would, I expect, horrify Obama and the Dems even more than it would the Reps, but the example set by the fugitive legislators in Wisconsin suggests that there may yet be some Hope in the Democratic party.

BTW, sorry for posting so much lately. As you can probably tell, I have a lot of really urgent work to leave until the last possible minute.

Update The outcome was a last minute compromise that looks like a win for the Dems, relative to prior expectations. The cuts not much more than they had pre-emptively offered, and the various riders (Planned Parenthood etc) stripped away.

fn1. One problem with being in Australia is that I can’t always keep track of time. It’s already Thursday evening here, and I’ve been thinking of tomorrow as shutdown day, but actually it doesn’t start until midnight Friday DC time, which is still a day and a half away.

The news from Yemen is grimly familiar – more protestors shot by President Saleh’s security forces and plainclothes thugs. But now the US government has shifted position, letting it be known in various ways that it’s time for Saleh to go. Their hope now is that a replacement will allow the operations against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to continue as before. A few thoughts about this.

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Glenn Greenwald looks at the dilemma faced by the Democratic base, and by much of the left globally. He doesn’t offer any answers, and I don’t have many either. The Republicans are getting scarier and crazier, so much so that any repeat of a Nader-style strategy is unthinkable. On the other hand, the fact that the base has nowhere to go, and can’t even justify abstention means that Obama and the rest of the Democratic leadership can and do kick them (or, thinking more globally, us) with impunity.

In some sense, it was ever thus, and the problem is not specific to the left – the Republican base spent years complaining about RINOs in much the same terms. Given a spectrum of opinion, the outcome is likely to be close to the median (calculated with respect to the weight given to particular people’s opinions which commonly won’t be uniform). Those far from the median face a choice which inevitably presents itself, to some extent, as one between lesser and greater evils.

The frustration felt on the left at present is (at least at my case) associated with a feeling that we should be doing a lot better. The case for market liberalism is in ruins after the Global Financial Crisis and it’s obvious that the reconstruction of the system has changed nothing, leaving the bankers unscathed and putting all the burden onto ordinary people. Left positions on lots of specific issues have much more public support than is evident from their political representation. The right screwed up massively over Iraq, is delusional on climate change and so on. And Obama won office easily running hard against Bush’s abuses on civil liberties and for a decent health care plan.

Similar points could be made about the situation in Australia, where the Labor government has essentially adopted the positions of its conservative predecessor (confusingly called the Liberal Party) while the Liberals have moved into the crazier reaches of the right. Over the fold, my own reaction to a recent speech by our Prime Minister Julia Gillard, which illustrates this very well (non-Oz readers may need to Google specific names, but a lot of the themes should be familiar).

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I’ve got no time for a proper review, so this post is just a mention of Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer [UK Link]. The academic in me was initially put-off by the self-helpy presentation of the book. Because of this, I imagined that it would be (a) irritating and (b) unscholarly. It is only unscholarly in the good sense that it does not come across as a work of dry academic research. And Bakewell isn’t irritating at all: her writing is fluid, witty and unpretentious. The book provides a compelling psychological portrait of Montaigne, contains plenty of interesting background on the wars of religion, and nudges the reader towards the Montaignian attitude of sceptical curiosity about self, others and the world. I enjoyed it tremendously (got through the 300+ pages in a few days) and am now rooting through the real thing, the Essays. Highly recommended.

Mark Blyth has a “somewhat different approach”:http://triplecrisis.com/the-problem-of-intellectual-capture/ to the Greenspan op-ed of last week, which looks to be emerging as the fruit fly genome/Enron email corpus/Zachary’s karate club of theories about post-crisis bogus rationalization.

bq. Rather than deal with the crisis as it happened, or even address what it cost, Greenspan dealt with the crisis on a purely rhetorical level. I mean rhetorical in the sense that Albert Hirschman identified twenty years ago in his fabulous book The Rhetoric of Reaction. (Really, if you haven’t read it, read it now – it’s like a Dan Brown crypex for crisis-newspeak). Hirschman pointed out that conservative arguments come in three distinct theses. First is the “Perversity thesis” where any well meaning reform produces its opposite outcome: ‘welfare makes you poor’ – that sort of thing. The second is the “Jeopardy thesis” where reforms put at risk more than they can ever deliver–­ the fear of extending the suffrage is typical. Third is the “Futility thesis” where reforms are simply pointless – fill in any and all opposition to global warming. Greenspan begins with a few vignettes concerning Ford’s inability to get a credit rating on an ABS and how the banks will suffer if their ATM card fees are regulated, but he soon hits his stride. I gave him a “Hirschman Scorecard” of four perversities, three jeopardies, and two futilities in one column …These ranged from bemoaning how “consequences cannot be readily anticipated” (Jeopardy), to noting how prop-trading rules will force operations abroad (Futility), and hand waving about complexity regarding “undesirable repercussions that might happen” (Perversity).

The rest is also well worth reading, but quite depressing.

J.K. Galbraith remarked that conservatism was engaged in a long search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. But that quest may sometimes become boring, or perhaps too difficult. Not to worry, because occasions to be straightforwardly vicious are more easily found, if you have the taste for it. Its spiteful tone aside, in substance Connick v. Thompson seems to be a Lord Denning Moment for the U.S. Supreme Court. The conservative majority preferred to affirm an obvious wrong rather than face the appalling vista of a brutal and corrupt justice system. To be fair to the system, it’s worse than that. Once the initial wrongdoing came to trial a jury, the district court, and the 5th circuit (twice) all decided the other way. It’s only when we get to Thomas, Scalia, Roberts, Alito, and Kennedy that the system chose to further institutionalize prosecutorial immunity. Stitch-ups should be seamless: if someone could pull at a stray thread, the whole thing might unravel, after all.

For those interested, here is our Chancellor’s statement on the Cronon affair:

Members of the campus community,

Two weeks ago UW-Madison received an open records request from Stephan Thompson, deputy executive director of the state’s Republican Party, for email records of Professor Bill Cronon.

Professor Cronon is the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography and Environmental Studies at UW-Madison. He is one of the university’s most celebrated and respected scholars, teachers, mentors and citizens. I am proud to call him a colleague.

The implications of this case go beyond Bill Cronon. When Mr. Thompson made his request, he was exercising his right under Wisconsin’s public records law both to make such a request and to make it without stating his motive. Neither the request nor the absence of a stated motive seemed particularly unusual. We frequently receive public records requests with apparently political motives, from both the left and the right, and every position in between. I announced that the university would comply with the law and, as we do in all cases, apply the kind of balancing test that the law allows, taking such things as the rights to privacy and free expression into account. We have done that analysis and will release the records later today that we believe are in compliance with state law.

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Washington, DC – The National Governors Association has announced a voluntary product safety recall of sixteen governors, due to a structural design problem that could pose an immediate safety risk to consumers.

“We didn’t know, when we made these governors available to the public, how truly dangerous they were,” said an NGA representative who requested anonymity because he feared swift and remorseless retaliation from one of the defective governors.  “In most cases, they seemed like fully functioning human beings.  But now it appears that many of them avoided routine safety checks or managed to buy off safety regulators.”

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As a result of the events in the Arab world[1], I’ve been thinking some more about “international realism”, which I take to have the following central premises[2]

1. States have durable, long-term interests and their actions in international affairs are driven by the rational pursuit of those interests

2. The use or threat of military power is the pre-eminent way (or at least one of the primary ways) in which states pursue their interests

It struck me in thinking about recent events that this is essentially a theory for a world of autocracies. (Apologies to those for whom this is old news, but this is a blog, after all). In such a world, international realism reduces to the claim that individuals are driven by rational self-interest. While there are problems with this claim (it’s empirically problematic if self-interest is defined tightly, and tautological if it’s defined by “revealed preference”), it seems like a sensible starting point, at least for the kind of individuals who become successful autocrats.

Moreover, the idea that war is a central part of rational policy makes sense for autocrats. Although war is a negative sum game, it seems reasonable, under a wide range of circumstances to assume that the losses are borne primarily by the autocrat’s subjects, while the gains flow to the autocrats. Even a war that ends with the status quo ante can be beneficial to the rulers on both sides by providing a Malthusian check on a population that might otherwise prove restive, providing an excuse for increased taxation and so on. That implies the failure of the standard negative-sum game argument against war, namely, that both sides would be better off calculating the outcome of war, and agreeing to accept it without a fight.

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I wish I had time to write more about this, but a few links will have to do. On Sunday the Observer ran a story that the AHRC, the main state-funding body for arts and humanities research in the UK, had caved into pressure from the British government to include “the Big Society” (the Cameron Tories name for their attempt to hijack mutualism while cutting public services) as one of the things they’d support research into. Subsequently, the AHRC issued a vigorous denial, “refuting” [sic] the allegations. Well it looks like the Observer story was wrong, that a journalist misunderstood his informant (the actual government pressure was on the British Academy – see here) and that the AHRC had not bowed to ministers. So why, then, does the AHRC promote “the Big Society” on its website? It turns out that, rather the like the British journalist of the poem, they don’t need to be bribed or twisted but are happy to guess what their political paymasters want and publicize a party-political agenda on their own initiative. British academics are upset. See Iain Pears here and here, and my colleague James Ladyman at the New Statesman. And there’s a petition: do sign it.

Alan Greenspan is back as free market evangelist, and it’s rather wonderful.

Today’s competitive markets, whether we seek to recognise it or not, are driven by an international version of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that is unredeemably opaque. With notably rare exceptions (2008, for example), the global “invisible hand” has created relatively stable exchange rates, interest rates, prices, and wage rates.

It’s best not to interpret this as an empirical claim, but a carefully-thought-out bid for Internet immortality. It has the sublime combination of supreme self-confidence and utter cluelessness of previously successful memes such as “I am aware of all Internet traditions” and the “argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care,” but with added Greenspanny goodness. I tried to think of useful variations on the way in to work this morning – “With notably rare exceptions, Russian Roulette is a fun, safe game for all the family to play,” and “With notably rare exceptions, (the Third Punic War for example), the Carthaginian war machine was extremely successful,” but none do proper justice to the magnificence of the original. But then, that’s why we have commenters. Have at it.