In my post on EU-US convergence, I found that the US was similar to the leading eurozone countries in both productivity (output per hour worked) and employment-population ratio, so that the difference in income per person is mostly explained (in some cases more than explained) by differences in hours worked per employment person. I didn’t take the distribution of income into account, since the data sources I was using there did not provide anything useful. But commenter Detlef found a blog post by Maximilian Hagemes at the World Bank site which links to a useful paper by Piketty and Alvaredo on cross-country comparisons of income concentration. For most eurozone countries, they show that the top 1 per cent of households gets about 8 per cent of total income (the presentation is graphical, but in any case, there is no point in going for spurious precision with numbers like this). For the US, the most recent data gives an 18 per cent share. So, the share of national income going to the remaining 99 per cent is about 10 per cent smaller in the US than in the eurozone.

There are a couple of ways of looking at this.

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This “essay”:http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100824/ART/708239962/1200/REVIEW on Eric Rauchway’s _Banana Republican_ by Ben East is rather dim-witted. Not because it displays no evidence whatsoever of actually having read the book under discussion (instead being a review essay based on a couple of sentences in someone other’s review), although it does not. Nor because it makes a sweeping judgment that “critics” (the plural is a stretch, since the only critic mentioned is Joe Queenan of the New York Times) have dismissed the book as not well written (as it happens, Queenan’s “issue”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/08/books/review/Queenan-t.html is that the writing is _too_ good to plausibly reflect the thought processes of Tom Buchanan). Nor yet because elevates a purely personal crochet into a universal aesthetic principle, although it does that too. It’s because it completely misses the point.

bq. Without believable characters, novels are nothing. So it isn’t particularly surprising that sometimes, authors take the somewhat safer option. They “borrow” characters from other writers’ works – the more famous, the better – and place them in their own books. … So why do authors continue to use well-known characters? Is it a self-imposed challenge to carry on somebody else’s iconic work, or just an easy way to make a quick buck? … Banana Republican, gives Tom Buchanan – the racist, snobbish, despicable excuse for a human being in F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby – a second chance. … The New York Times called it a gimmick: “It’s as if Rauchway wrote a generic farce about a long-forgotten revolution and then decided the book might get more attention if he recast the narrator as a refugee from The Great Gatsby,” wrote Joe Queenan. … Perhaps, I suggest, the difficulty is that readers often feel authors are writing with somebody else’s characters because they know they have a ready-made audience. That, well, they’re being just a little lazy and unimaginative. … “

There’s a very obvious reason why Rauchway has “borrowed” the character of Tom Buchanan. He’s riffing on a famous “borrowing” that sought to do for nineteenth century British imperialism what Rauchway wants to do for the early twentieth century version – the exploits of “Sir Harry Paget Flashman, VC”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Paget_Flashman. Flashman was, of course, the bully who gets sent down from Rugby in Thomas Hughes’ _Tom Brown’s Schooldays._ McDonald Fraser appropriates this character from a novel that is in every way inferior to his own books, problematic though they are in some ways, and transforms him from a thick-headed boor into an intelligent, charming, selfish and completely cowardly representative of the British upper classes. Queenan notes the broad resemblance between _Banana Republican_ and the Flashman novels, but seems completely ignorant of the fact that Flashman is himself a borrowing from another novel, suggesting that he needs to pay a little more attention to the stuff that he’s reading. That East elevates this misreading into a fundamental principle of aesthetics (that those who use other’s characters in their own novels are lazy, unimaginative, and timorous and that their novels, with a tiny list of exceptions are failures), suggests that his problem is rather more fundamental. Indeed, if one wanted to apply adjectives to a critic who doesn’t seem to have actually _read_ the book he’s trying to take down (East makes _no_ independent judgments of the book in the course of the review-essay), lazy, unimaginative and timorous might be excellent ones to start out with. Matt Yglesias wrote somewhere that _the National_ pays remarkably well for book reviews. If I were them, I’d be asking for their money back.

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Education Next is celebrating its tenth birthday with a poll to uncover which are the most important education books of the decade. The short list of 40 titles is curious (and what is curiouser, given EN’s political leanings, is that Linda Darling-Hammond’s and Diane Ravitch’s books are currently way ahead of the pack). Several, but I’ll only single out Karen Chenoweth’s It’s Being Done, and Jay Mathews’ Work Hard, Be Nice, really have no business on any such list at all. Others (like David Cohen and Susan Moffitt’s outstanding book The Ordeal of Equality: Did Federal Regulation Fix the Schools?) belong but are not being voted for, presumably because they are too new to have actually been read by the readership, whereas others still (like Goldin and Katz’s equally brilliant The Race between Education and Technology) are faring badly because they do not have a colon in the title. (So, go vote for them, now, they’re both great).

The striking thing is that several key books, some of which must be contenders, are missing. Regular readers will be able to guess the three absentees which top my list, and which would have competed only with The Ordeal of Equality for my permitted three votes if they’d been there. But to ensure there’s no mystery, here they are:

1. Richard Rothstein, Class And Schools: Using Social, Economic, And Educational Reform To Close The Black-white Achievement Gap must have outsold all but two or three of the books on the list, and has more google scholar citations than any of the ten books on the short list that I looked up (it’s discussed here (which should explain why It’s Being Done doesn’t belong on the list) and here)

2. Again Richard Rothstein, this time with Tamara Wilder and Rebecca Jacobson, Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right (discussed here)

Ravitch’s likely winning entry draws on very heavily on both of the above books, so, really, they must be important if hers is.

3. CT favourite, Annette Lareau, Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (discussed here and lauded here).

Perhaps it was the curse of a positive Brighouse mention on CT that sunk them (but then why is The Global Achievement Gap on the list?). Feel free to recommend other absentees from the list in comments.

“Scott Rosenberg”:http://www.wordyard.com/2010/08/30/in-defense-of-links-part-one-nick-carr-hypertext-and-delinkification/ has a good go at Nick Carr’s claims about what the Internets is Still Doing to our Brains. BRRRAINNNZZZ ! ! !

bq. Carr’s “delinkification” critique is part of a larger argument contained in his book The Shallows. I read the book this summer and plan to write about it more. But for now let’s zero in on Carr’s case against links, on pages 126-129 of his book as well as in his “delinkification” “post”:http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/05/experiments_in.php. … The nub of Carr’s argument is that every link in a text imposes “a little cognitive load” that makes reading less efficient. Each link forces us to ask, “Should I click?” As a result, Carr wrote in the “delinkification” post, “People who read hypertext comprehend and learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed form.” … [The] original conception of hypertext fathered two lines of descent. One adopted hypertext as a practical tool for organizing and cross-associating information; the other embraced it as an experimental art form, which might transform the essentially linear nature of our reading into a branching game, puzzle or poem, in which the reader collaborates with the author. … The pragmatic linkers have thrived in the Web era; the literary linkers have so far largely failed to reach anyone outside the academy. The Web has given us a hypertext world in which links providing useful pointers outnumber links with artistic intent a million to one. If we are going to study the impact of hypertext on our brains and our culture, surely we should look at the reality of the Web, not the dream of the hypertext artists and theorists.

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At a meeting of teacher’s union chapter leaders I attended recently to talk about Race to the Top, I was struck by two things: one was how open they were in private about the fact that current ways of evaluating teachers are appallingly bad; the other was how hungry they were for a clearer understanding of how evaluation of teachers using test scores (one of the things States were strongly encouraged to include in their Race applications) would work. I gave my modest attempt to explain how it would work and why it was a bad idea. Now, fortunately, they can discard my critique, and get the real thing. Authors including Richard Rothstein, Helen Ladd, Diane Ravitch, and several eminent psychometricians (including Richard Shavelson, Ed Haertel and Lorrie Shepard) have made an unanswerable (but, as the authors certainly know, eminently ignorable) case against using test scores, even value added modeling methods, to evaluate teachers (here). Here’s the executive summary:

Every classroom should have a well-educated, professional teacher, and school systems should recruit, prepare, and retain teachers who are qualified to do the job. Yet in practice, American public schools generally do a poor job of systematically developing and evaluating teachers. Many policy makers have recently come to believe that this failure can be remedied by calculating the improvement in students’ scores on standardized tests in mathematics and reading, and then relying heavily on these calculations to evaluate, reward, and remove the teachers of these tested students.

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In the spirit of more engagement with the left rather than a mere continuation of lobbing potshots at libertarians, let me point out a disjunction between these two “recent”:http://leninology.blogspot.com/2010/07/imperialism-of-market-reason.html “posts”:http://leninology.blogspot.com/2010/08/on-class-structure-and-income.html at Lenin’s Tomb

The first, riffing on David Harvey, and what sounds to be a terrible book by Ben Fine and Dimitris Milonakis, is your standard-issue dismissal of economic notions of rationality as a kind of imperialism.

bq. One aspect of this specious conception of “reason” is the encroachment of a set of analytical principles established by marginalist economics into other fields of social science. … Underpinning this approach is three basic analytical principles. … individualism … rational self-interest … exchange. … This imperialism of “reason” (“economic imperialism”, as Fine and Milonakis dub it), has policy consequences. ‘Public choice’ economics, for example, has acquired a prized position in the academia, in think-tanks, and among policy ‘wonks’. … rightist political animus … What I’m describing as the imperialism of market “reason” is nothing other than the ability of the ruling class to naturalise and universalise its accumulation activities, to express it as an ideology, a pseudo-sociology with pseudo-explanations for social phenomena, and to use that ideology as a justification for advancing on and enclosing all areas of public life that are not commodified, not subject to the laws of accumulation.
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It’s now nine days since the Australian election produced a “hung Parliament”. This term is used rather loosely for any outcome in which neither major party wins a majority of seats, but in this case it’s entirely appropriate. Labor and the Liberal-National coalition[1] each won 72 seats, which means they need the votes of four out of six independents/minor party reps to form government, and the six are wildly disparate.

Anything could happen: four of the six have in the past been Nationals (rural conservatives), though they have gone in very different directions since. If they let bygones be bygones we could have a very conservative government. On the other hand a couple of them now have a greenish tinge, and, with the remaining independent and the single Green party member, we could get a government more progressive than the one that went out.

Overall, this was the kind of election that both major parties deserved to lose and, in some sense, they both did. Isn’t democracy wonderful?

fn1. Here I’m counting as independent one candidate from a dissident branch of the National Party who has stated that he won’t join the coalition.

Everybody hates drug cheats. But that doesn’t seem to stop it happening, and it’s easy enough to see why.

I just finished the Bridge to Brisbane 10km fun run. I was doing really well on my training, and seemed certain to beat my personal best when I started getting knee pains – nothing really bad, but enough that I stopped before it got any worse. I got some help from the physio and did lots of stretches, but it was still a problem. So, on the day, I just took a couple of ibuprofen, and did my best to ignore it[1]. And, if I could have taken a pill that would fix my knees for me, I would have done so.

Am I, then, a budding drug cheat?

fn1. updated My friend (who beat me by 3 minutes) advises me that my time was 53:20, which is (just) a PB. My knees advise me that they will forgive me just this once. And, I should mention that, thanks to a series of miscalculations, i did the run with no assistance from caffeine, the wonder drug on which I rely for all things. So, with good knees and strong coffee, I can still hope to break 50 (in the right direction – I’ve already broken it chronologically, and of course the wrong way).
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Since I’ve been getting some (well justified) flak from commenters for paying too much attention to interlocutors in the center and right, and not enough to e.g. Marxists, I’m going to try to turn the tables, by pointing out that some of these right wing interlocutors are in fact Marxists without knowing it. “Tyler Cowen”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/08/a-very-good-point-from-dan-drezner.html takes up this bit from Drezner’s review of John’s book (also quoted in John’s post below).

bq. Quiggin thinks he’s only writing about the failure of free-market ideas, but he’s actually describing the intellectual life cycle of most ideas in political economy. All intellectual movements start with trenchant ways of understanding the world. As these ideas gain currency, they are used to explain more and more disparate phenomena, until the explanation starts to lose its predictive power. As time passes, the original ideas become obscured by ideology, caricature and ad hoc efforts to explain away emerging anomalies. Finally, enough contradictions build up to crash the paradigm, although current adherents often continue to advance the ideas in zombielike form. Quiggin demonstrates with great clarity how this happened to the Chicago school of economics. How he can think it won’t happen with whatever neo-Keynesian model emerges is truly puzzling.

hmmm … Stable mode of production. Gradual accumulation of contradictions. Crisis. Emergence of new mode. I wonder “where we might have encountered these claims before …”:http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/.

More seriously – I don’t buy Dan’s arguments here. As with most stage theories (not only Marx, but also Kuhn), the mechanisms of institutional reproduction and change in his account are sorely underspecified. ‘Contradictions accumulate’ isn’t a much more helpful empirical claim than ‘shit happens.’ To really understand what is happening, you need a proper theory of the underlying conditions for ideational retention and reproduction. _Why_ do some ideas decay into self-parody, while others do not? After all – not all ideas decay (or at least: not all ideas decay at the same rate). Some economic ideas have continued for centuries (the limited liability corporation), while others have disappeared completely, while others yet have disappeared and reappeared. We don’t know why – but if we want to make the kinds of claim that Dan is making, we _need_ to know why, or at the least, have some rough idea. Otherwise, what we have is at best a sometimes-observed empirical regularity melded to a smidgen of intuition, which is not enough (in my book at least) to dismiss a counter-claim (that one particular idea may have a longer shelf life than previous versions) out of hand. The only large scale effort to come up with a proper theory that I am aware of is the sociological literature on performativity, but this is distinctly more useful in explaining how ideas succeed than how they become ossified, and “lacks any account of the mechanisms producing variation”:http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/performativity-of-markets-and-endogeneity/.

Shorter version: if you want to dismiss someone else’s argument on the basis of a theoretical claim about the life-cycle of ideas in political economy, it’s a good idea to have an _actual theory_ (with mechanisms and such) of the life-cycle of ideas in political economy. I’m not seeing that Dan has one here.

Update: see Dan’s “response here”:http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/08/26/the_ideational_life_cycle_in_political_economy, with a set of postulates about what may explain ideational persistence. As he notes, this is not a theory – but in fairness, political science and international relations in particular has done a terrible job in providing such theories to date (some interesting work on norm diffusion, which is not quite the same thing, aside).

I’ve spent a lot of time double-tapping[1] the zombie ideas of market liberalism. But the comments on my recent rejoinder to Dan Drezner remind me that there are some zombie ideas on the Keynesian side of the fence as well. Perhaps the most important is the claim that the breakdown of the Keynesian system of demand management was the result of an exogenous event – the oil price shock of October 1973, which arose out of the embargo imposed by OPEC during the 4th Arab-Israeli war.

There’s a tiny element of truth in this – after the oil shock, the collapse was rapid and disorderly. But the Keynesian economic order had already broken down by October 1973, and the oil shock was a consequence of that breakdown, not a cause.

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Over the last few days I’ve observed that an increasing number of our spam comments for dubious commercial opportunities in pharmacological products etc have links leading to hijacked pages at “http://www.mises.org”:http://www.mises.org. Seems quite appropriate. If you want to visit our von Misean friends by the way, be sure to check out this “front page piece”:http://mises.org/daily/4633 on how playing _Caesar III_ demonstrates the futility of Marxism and central planning. In its own way, it is quite perfect: the conclusion’s finding that:

bq. As far as it went, Caesar III was an experiment in refutation. If a graduate from the Mises University has trouble planning a make-believe Roman colony, what hope is there that anyone could plan the real thing?

says it all, really.

That’s the title of Daniel Drezner’s review Zombie Economics along with several other post-crisis books. I’m glad he likes the title, but he offers what seems to me to be a rather unfair representation of my argument. As the author, I’m not exactly unbiased, so see what you think.
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“Inside Higher Ed”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/24/post has a good article on the Washington Post‘s interesting editorial stance on colleges that make their money through hoovering up the proceeds of student loans rather than, like, actually trying to graduate students with useful degrees.

bq. On Sunday, policy makers, higher education watchers and ordinary readers opened their newspapers and Web browsers to an editorial endorsed by the Post’s staff board that took a stance that could’ve come right out of Kaplan’s playbook. After disclosing the corporate link — noting that the paper is owned by the same company that “owns Kaplan University and other for-profit schools of higher education that, according to company officials, could be harmed by the proposed regulations” — the editorial bashed the U.S. Department of Education’s proposed rules, voicing concerns about access for low-income and working students, and worrying more broadly about how the country could meet President Obama’s higher education goals without for-profit colleges. … The editorial’s disclosure and others like it in the Post’s news coverage of for-profit colleges — touted by the Post’s ombudsman in a column this weekend — don’t go far enough, Asher argued. It’s one thing to acknowledge that Kaplan is owned by the same company, “it’s another to acknowledge the financial dependencies that the Post has on Kaplan, which they don’t do.” Close to 60 percent of the company’s revenues in the most recent fiscal year came from Kaplan. .. Today’s Post features another op-ed denouncing the proposed rules on for-profit higher education. The author is the chairman and chief executive of Strayer Education Inc.

At least this time they are providing some kind of disclosure. I “used to wonder”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/06/13/broadband-provision-and-net-neutrality/ why the _Post_ regularly “trotted”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/11/AR2006061100707.html “out”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/23/AR2010052303786.html editorials against broadband regulation, basing arguments on flagrantly bullshit statistics about rural access to broadband. When I found out that the Washington Post Company is the owner of a “cable company”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_One specializing in service provision to small rural areas my wonderment evaporated. As news publishing becomes ever less profitable in its own right, we can expect ever more attention to the possible side benefits of owning a substantial share of the public debate. The _Washington Post_ has already been a “pioneer”:http://www.slate.com/id/2222093 in exploiting these synergies, and can, I suspect, be relied upon to do more as time goes on.

Bob Harris’s 40th anniversary show, here for a few more days. Extraordinary story about David Jacobs and his mum.