Looking at the debate over UK protests over the tripling of tuition fees, it seems to me that this is an occasion where realistic utopianism (I’m paraphrasing Erik Olin Wright here) is needed, and is currently in short supply. The present ways in which modern societies determine the life choices available to 20 year olds are unsatisfactory and inequitable, and the British system is (or seems from a distance) to be more inequitable than many, perhaps most. So, defending that system against change, even change that will make things worse, is difficult and problematic. Rather than ask what incremental reforms might make things better, it seems like a good idea to ask how we might design a set of institutions from scratch, and then think about the implications for existing systems.

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I always figured that great scene, and great line, from “The Hep Cat” was some sort of early 1940’s pop culture reference. Now I know.

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.
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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?

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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.
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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.

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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.
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