I’m going to be on the Peter Schiff Internet Radio show, Thursday at 6:35 PM EST, talking about Zombie Economics. It should be interesting. A while ago, I had quite an interesting chat with Russ Roberts, whose views are, I think, fairly similar to Schiff’s, so i’m hoping for some creative interaction on the Keynesian and Austrian approaches to thinking about financial crises and depressions. I planned a full scale post on this, but haven’t had time yet.

I have a legal question about the Wikileaks case, prompted by this this Guardian piece, by John Naughton, linked in Henry’s comments. I must confess: I wasn’t surprised or particularly scandalized when Amazon kicked Wikileaks off its cloud, because I figured Amazon was probably technically in the right. Wikileaks had probably violated whatever terms of service were in place. I thought this sounded like the sort of thing any private company was likely to do, whether or not Joe Lieberman actually brought pressure to bear. If you have a problem customer who has violated your terms of service, you terminate service. (Just to be clear: I think ongoing attempts to shut down Wikileaks in patently legally dodgy ways are an utter scandal. Joe Lieberman pressuring Amazon is a scandal. I’m with Glenn Greenwald. I also think existing intellectual property laws are, by and large, an atrocious mess. Still, the law is what it is, so the question of how a private company like Amazon can and should be expected to react to this sort of situation is narrower than certain other more general questions about free speech and the press and so forth.)

My thought was this: Wikileaks obviously can’t own the copyright, so Amazon should not be expected to be slower to shut them down than they would be to shut down someone hosting pirate copies of Harry Potter novels. An annoying consideration, because it’s perfectly obvious that, if there is a good reason to take Wikileaks down, it isn’t because it’s like Napster in its glory days, or whatever. But there you go. But the Guardian piece says this is wrong: [click to continue…]

Below the fold, a short list of the books I really liked in 2010. Readers are invited to submit their own favorites in comments.
[click to continue…]

Budget 2011 which is before the Irish parliament now is widely described as draconian. This is the first instalment in the four-year plan to bring the budget deficit to below 3% by 2014. The adjustment is front-loaded to take out €6bn in spending cuts and tax increases in 2011. The total retrenchment will come to €15bn, under the terms of the recent IMF-ECB rescue plan.

The scale of the effort required is massive. The reason is not because the government deficit is so high – by itself, this would be painful but manageable – but because, as part of the loan agreement, no renegotiation of bank debts is possible. The large private deficits in the financial sector have been, in effect, socialized. There is no real distinction any more between the sovereign debt and bank debt. As a result, the government deficit this year stands at 32% of GDP.

Ireland thus becomes an international showcase for a new kind of politics. What happens to a country swallowing the political poison of internal deflation, and trying to grow its way out of trouble when it can neither gain competitive advantage by devaluing, nor inflate away the distributive conflicts that must ensue? Suppose the interest rate payable on its large loan is 5.7%, growth estimates of 2% are deemed too ambitious, and the immediate consequence of the stabilization plan is to be awarded a downgrade by the international bond ratings agencies? Note that national per capita income is already 20% lower in 2010 than it was in 2007. Add in the facts that the ruling coalition is deeply unpopular, the smaller party has declared its plan to withdraw soon, and the slim government majority relies on the votes of two often fractious independent deputies. How might this grim scenario unfold?

[click to continue…]

A group of scholars at the Freie Universität in Berlin is distributing via E-mail and their website alarming information about downsizing of the EU research funding in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The EU is currently drawing up its 8th framework program, in which it decides how to allocate its money – to which fields, for what type of research, what the conditions are, etc. Apparently it is not only a matter of less money going to the humanities and social sciences (which, to the best of my knowledge, is already a small percentage of what the other sciences get; sadly I forgot the exact figure, but — from the top of my head — less than 20%). In addition, the ‘impact’ or ‘valorisation’ discourse/ideology seems to take hold here too, since according to the information which is spread by the scholars from Berlin, EU funding for the humanities and social sciences would be earmarked for more applied research, and to research that contributes to the competitiveness of the EU on global markets.

It’s the last week of term at my University, and I happen to have a heavy teaching load this term, which means I have no time to properly check this out. So consider this as the mere spreading of information and the opening up of space to discuss these issues in greater depth by those of you who know more about this, and/or have currently more time at their disposal to investigate this. I’ll invite some EU research directors to join the debate.

My wife has asked for wireless speakers for Christmas, for using an ipod or ipad with. I’ve looked through some of these options at amazon and, frankly, I’m clueless. I want speakers that are easy to set up, not too fancy or expensive, but reliable. Something like my Sanyo Internet Radio (much admired by my teenage daughter’s friends) that even I managed to set up in 5 minutes flat. I assume that our least tech-savvy reader is more tech-savvy than I, so I thought you might be able to give advice.

Tis the season for posting more original Dickens Christmas story illustrations to Flickr. I just put up a set for “The Haunted Man”, which is, in addition to being a nicely gothic sort of affair – such as suits the season – another nice illustration of Henry’s point that sf has its roots in the ‘condition of England’ novel. “The Haunted Man” is about a mad scientist who finds a way to erase from his own memory all the sorrows and wrongs he has suffered. And: the effect is contagious. Those he touches have their memories erased as well. Of course it turns out to be a terrible idea. “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and all. (But a lot more sentimental.) The only one who is immune to the effect is a boy – a feral child. Furthermore, this feral child is, as it were, a morlock rising. A harbinger of a feral race to follow. But there’s a happy ending!

Tell it that way and it sounds like some sort of sf scenario. The mad science-y atmosphere is indeed well conjured: [click to continue…]

Well, prompted by the various criticisms of my practice described in this post on 75 Tips for Getting a Better Education I asked my current crop of freshman students what they think. Some answers below the fold (these do not make things easier). Entirely coincidentally I read this amazing paper about reducing the gender achievement gap in science courses, and it made me wonder whether the this issue (addressing professors) has more significance than I have thought.
[click to continue…]

As the father of two moderately manga-mad little girls, I have some X-Mas recommendations. First, Manga Studio is a drawing/comics application that kids can really use and enjoy. At the moment, Amazon is selling the Debut version at the low, low price of $9.99. That won’t last. [UPDATE: nor did it.] If you want to know more, here’s an interesting, 90 minute tutorial from Dave “Watchmen” Gibbons. A good introduction. If you just want to watch him make something neat, go here. Word to the wise: you can’t use this sort of application without some sort of graphics tablet.

Might as well recommend a couple books while I’m at it. A lot of how-to-draw-manga books are not really age appropriate for a 6-year old and a 9-year old. But two by Christopher Hart have been a big hit in our house: Manga for the Beginner: Everything You Need to Start Drawing Right Away!; and Manga for the Beginner, Chibis: Everything You Need to Start Drawing the Super-Cute Characters of Japanese Comics [amazon]. Christopher Hart has published a ton of how-to-draw books. A lot of them aren’t good, in my opinion. But these two hit the spot.

A question for you: I read quite a bit of manga; my daughters, not so much. They draw the stuff day and night but don’t read it. American stuff like Amulet and Bone and Tiny Titans is what they like (influenced by manga, but not manga). The Japanese stuff, with few exceptions, is hard for them. This is even the case when the titles are ridiculously ‘easy’, like Happy Happy Clover (bunnies having fairly quiet adventures, in case you couldn’t guess.) They find the panel layouts baffling and hard to follow. This isn’t just the right-left problem. I tend to agree that it all seems oddly cluttered, given the intended audience. I wonder whether Japanese tots are hyper-literate when it comes to tracing a not-so-obvious line through a series of panels. What do your little girls like to read these days?

… let’s look ahead beyond 2012. Based solely on the likely rate of unemployment, the odds are against Obama being re-elected. As Jeff Madrick points out, the odds against a presidential re-election are long whenever the unemployment rate is above 7 per cent, and that’s a virtual certainty. There are other economic variables that reliably affect voting behavior, such as income growth, but they are just as negative. And it’s hard to see anything positive in the current political dynamic.

On the information we have at present, any Republican candidate other than Palin will have very good odds of winning. But there is also a fair chance that Palin will get the Republican nomination, despite her high negative ratings outside the Republican base. That would give Obama his best chance, but still no guarantee.

[click to continue…]

The ever-ludicrous home of the British “decent left”, _Harry’s Place_ , carries the motto on its banner “Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.” No surprise then that they’ve devoted much of their recent coverage to increasingly hysterical guilt-by-association denunciations of Wikileaks. One of their marginally saner bloggers, “Gene”, has now posted “a long comparison”:http://hurryupharry.org/2010/12/10/historical-echoes/ between Chinese Nobel-prizewinner Liu Xiaobo and his German predecessor Carl von Ossietzky. Von Ossietzky was convicted of high treason and espionage in 1931 for publishing details of German rearmament in contravention of the Versailles treaty, a verdict that was upheld in 1992 by Germany’s Federal Court of Justice. The 1992 ruling, “according to Wikipedia”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Ossietzky , reads:

bq. According to the case law of the Supreme Court of the German Reich, the illegality of covertly conducted actions did not cancel out the principle of secrecy. According to the opinion of the Supreme Court of the German Reich, every citizen owes his Fatherland a duty of allegiance regarding information, and endeavours towards the enforcement of existing laws may be implemented only through the utilization of responsible domestic state organs, and never by appealing to foreign governments.

Carl von Ossietzky, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange ….?

So, the vote to triple university tuition fees in the UK was won by the government, albeit with a reduced majority (21), thousands of young people demonstrated outside Parliament, and the Prince of Wales’s car got bricked as people chanted “off with their heads!” What now? People seem to be anticipating three things: more disorder on the streets as the coalition pushes though its cuts programme; the destruction of the Liberal Democrats; and a massive slump in popularity for the Coalition. Good news for the left then? I’m not so sure.
[click to continue…]

Thanks, Cosma, for posting the Haldane and Russell pieces. Let me now offer an elegant proof of Henry’s thesis – “The ancestry of modern SF lies as much in the 19th century ‘condition of England’ novel as it does in more obvious ancestors like Frankenstein” – with reference to the G.K. Chesterton novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which Haldane mocks for its bad prophecy. (Haldane himself confidently predicts that, in the future, people will sensibly acknowledge the tonic, healthful effects of tobacco. Glass houses, stones.) Anyway, the neat thing about Napoleon is that it is imagines, from the point of view of 1904, what the world will look like, 80 years hence. Will 1984 be some sort of utopia, or some sort of dystopia, one asks?

Then the wise men grew like wild things, and swayed hither and thither, crying, “What can it be? What can it be? What will London be like a century hence? Is there anything we have not thought of? Houses upside down—more hygienic, perhaps? Men walking on hands—make feet flexible, don’t you know? Moon … motor-cars … no heads….” And so they swayed and wondered until they died and were buried nicely.

Then the people went and did what they liked. Let me no longer conceal the painful truth. The people had cheated the prophets of the twentieth century. When the curtain goes up on this story, eighty years after the present date, London is almost exactly like what it is now.

We arrive at the limit case of sf. We tend to assume science fiction is about portraying technological change – or potential technological differences from how things are now. But, logically, one of the possibilities is that things could be pretty much the same. Of course, this is rather silly because it turns every work of fiction into science fiction (because every work of fiction either imagines things to be different from how they are, scientifically, or more or less the same.) Which induces us to pluck the string of motive. What makes something sf is either its foregrounding of technological difference/change or its impulse to indulge the sociological imagination, more generally. Getting back to Chesterton, his world of 1984 is more changed than “almost exactly like what it is now” would suggest:

Very few words are needed to explain why London, a hundred years hence, will be very like it is now, or rather, since I must slip into a prophetic past, why London, when my story opens, was very like it was in those enviable days when I was still alive.

The reason can be stated in one sentence. The people had absolutely lost faith in revolutions. All revolutions are doctrinal—such as the French one, or the one that introduced Christianity. For it stands to common sense that you cannot upset all existing things, customs, and compromises, unless you believe in something outside them, something positive and divine. Now, England, during this century, lost all belief in this. It believed in a thing called Evolution. And it said, “All theoretic changes have ended in blood and ennui. If we change, we must change slowly and safely, as the animals do. Nature’s revolutions are the only successful ones. There has been no conservative reaction in favour of tails.”

And some things did change. Things that were not much thought of dropped out of sight. Things that had not often happened did not happen at all. Thus, for instance, the actual physical force ruling the country, the soldiers and police, grew smaller and smaller, and at last vanished almost to a point. The people combined could have swept the few policemen away in ten minutes: they did not, because they did not believe it would do them the least good. They had lost faith in revolutions.

Democracy was dead; for no one minded the governing class governing. England was now practically a despotism, but not an hereditary one. Some one in the official class was made King. No one cared how: no one cared who. He was merely an universal secretary.

In this manner it happened that everything in London was very quiet. That vague and somewhat depressed reliance upon things happening as they have always happened, which is with all Londoners a mood, had become an assumed condition. There was really no reason for any man doing anything but the thing he had done the day before.

Then: everything erupts in glorious medievalism!

Now, let’s run through it again. Logically, it should be allowable for any imaginative treatment of the future of science, or the possibilities of science (up to and including fairly flagrant impossibilities) to count as sf. But that means, potentially: things stay the same. But that’s a silly sort of sf. So we expand our definition to include works of sociological imagination, as it were. But now it’s a bit tail-wags-the-dog. The fact that Chesterton’s novel, framed as it is, is plainly sf, goes to show that sf is a subset of a broader set of works of sociologically imaginative fiction. In much sf, the machinery functions not as a fictional end but a means of getting the sociological ball rolling. Instead of deus ex machina, to end the thing, you have populus ex machina, to get it started. On the other hand, there are problems with doing it this way. But that’s why we have comment boxes.

“Paul McAuley on sf and society today”:http://unlikelyworlds.blogspot.com/2010/12/something-just-happened.html

bq. … something similar should have happened to science fiction, shouldn’t it? After all, catastrophes and sudden shifts in perception are part of its stock in trade. But instead of confronting Reality A, the genre has, in the first decade of the 21st century, too often turned to its own comforting version of Reality B: retreating into pleasant little pulpish daydreams in which starships still effortlessly span a galaxy where a guy can turn a profit, or where technology is as controllable as clockwork and the actions of individuals can still make a mark on history. …

bq. I prefer the point of view of William Gibson, who has pointed out that the only way to tackle the place we’re in now is to use the science-fiction toolkit – the tropes, images and metaphor developed from the crude flint hammers of pulp by decades of cooperative effort and argument. If other writers are using the science-fiction toolkit to evolve new kinds of stories in the present’s different air, that’s exactly what we should be doing, too. Forget the past. Especially the pasts of all those great glorious science-fiction futures, lost when it all changed. Look again at the future. Embrace change. Let go. If only. If only.

And “Cosma Shalizi riffs on Ernest Gellner”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/702.html

bq. It was pretty plain by, oh, 1848 at the latest that the kind of scientific knowledge we have now, and the technological power that goes with it, radically alters, and even more radically expands, the kind of societies are possible, lets us live our lives in ways profoundly different from our ancestors. (For instance, we can have affluence and liberty.) How then should we live? becomes a question of real concern, because we have, in fact, the power to change ourselves, and are steadily accruing more of it.

bq. This, I think, is the question at the heart of science fiction at its best. (This meshes with Jo Walton’s apt observation that one of the key aesthetic experiences of reading SF is having a new world unfold in one’s mind.) Now it is clear that the vast majority of it is rehashing familiar themes and properties, and transparently projecting the social situation of its authors. I like reading that anyway, even when I can see how it would be generated algorithmically (or even by a finite-state machine). … But sometimes, SF can break beyond that, to approach the question What should we make of our ourselves? with the imagination, and vertigo, it deserves.

Discuss – but try not to get bogged down in the finer nuances of the etymology of ‘reticent’ please …