I was very shocked reading “this account of police brutalities in Belgium”:http://www.mo.be/index.php?id=340&tx_uwnews_pi2[art_id]=29989&cHash=c7f254ce3e. I really have nothing to add, except that I am going to write, tonight, to the two members of parliament I voted for (one for the senate and one for the chamber), and will ask them (1) what we, concerned citizens, can do, and (2) what they can do to make sure this is properly being investigated. I know most Belgian politicians have other things on their mind (the political difficulties of forming a majority coalition look more insurmountable each day), but surely that cannot be an excuse for letting the police getting away with treating innocent people like this.

Regular commenter Tom Hurka expressed complete dismay a couple of years ago when I told him that I hadn’t seen any live music for 16 years or so (the last concert being Pentangle at the late lamented Palms in Davis CA). I did nothing to correct this omission at the time. But in February one of my undergraduate students invited me to go see her and her dad perform together at a local coffee shop: the kids (who know her a little as a babysitter) were riveted, so much so that the girls wouldn’t leave, and forced me to come back and pick them up an hour after we’d had to leave with the little horror (quite understandably, as you can tell from listening to her here — our horror was singing Jolene, with most of the lyrics gleaned from a single hearing, for months afterward, and her version of “Bad Romance” inspired our 13 year old to start playing Lady GaGa songs on the ukulele at her school talent shows). This experience prompted my wife to say we should go to live music sometimes which, indeed, we have started doing (our first outing, oddly enough, being to see Neil Young, supported by Bert Jansch who, therefore, constituted the bookends to our long drought of live music, and there’s no-one I’d sooner play that role).

So we went to see Suzanne Vega last night, with a couple of friends. I had completely forgotten that I once owned her first two albums (when they were actual records), and was therefore surprised to find that I knew about half the songs she sang, rather than just the three hits I had in my head. The venue was what I think they call “intimate” — in other words, she can’t have made much money from it (I reckon there were around 300 people in a 500 capacity theater, with tickets selling at $30 each, and she is touring with a sound mixer, a bassist, a guitarist and someone else). Anyway, she was great — her voice still pure, her songs good enough to please my wife and our friends, none of whom had as much prior interest as I did, and, most surprisingly, her stage persona quite at odds with the tenor of her songs. While the songs are reserved, reflective and not really cheerful for the most part, she is, herself, funny, self-deprecating but confident, and relaxed. After listening to a somewhat harrowing song the audience would burst out laughing at her stories and jokes.

She was promoting a series of retrospective albums that started coming out a few months ago. The second is released tomorrow, but, looking for it, I saw that the mp3 version of Close-Up, Vol 2, People and Places (Deluxe Edition) is for sale for only $3.99, today and tomorrow only. Worth it, if you have fond memories of her. UPDATE: I found a plausible explanation of the economics of the tour and album here.

Sad news.

A few days ago, Germany made the final payment on the reparations imposed in the Treaty of Versailles, bringing to an end the formal consequences of the Great War that began in 1914 and continued, in one form or another, throughout the 20th century.[1] Many of the new states that emerged from the war (the USSR, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia) have now disappeared, though the consequences of the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement are very much still with us. I don’t really have the basis for a post on this, but I thought this event deserved some kind of acknowledgement anyway.

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Following up my Trolley post: I didn’t realize until just now that Philippa Foot died on October 3. So let’s have a separate, more serious thread for anyone with thoughts about that.

My 9-year old daughter was rather curious about my Trolley cartoons, so we made a podcast. Her art criticism is spot-on, no question, and she makes some pretty strong moral claims. What do you think? (Don’t worry. I have her permission to post this. I interviewed my 6-year old, as well, but she declined to give consent to publish her philosophical work at this time.)

Here’s how you grade a hundred and twenty five papers. Grade five. Take a break. Grade another five. Take a longer break. Repeat.

Really I should be doing yoga or swimming, not looking at any sort of screen at all – but things are a bit slow around here, so …

I like this train. Click link for larger – it’s part of the Field Museum collection.

In other graphical science news, I just finished Atomic Robo Volume 4: Other Strangeness [amazon]. It’s fun! [click to continue…]

For those of us of a certain age, Sunday afternoons were spent watching old films on telly (where on earth were our parents, I wonder?). The best films starred Jack Hawkins or George Formby, but for me the most keenly anticipated were Norman Wisdom’s films. It was only for Wisdom that I noted the time in the Radio Times to be sure to see the whole thing. Looking back, I imagine they all had the same plot, and the same jokes, and the same pratfalls. But who cared? They were all funny, all innocent, all brilliant. Sorry to see him go. But glad that the DVD revolution means I can watch whenever I want. Guardian obit here. Clips, wonderfully arranged, here. Brian Logan’s appreciation.

Charles Ferguson has “a nice piece”:http://chronicle.com/article/Larry-Summersthe/124790/ in the _Chronicle of Higher Education_ about Larry Summers, the economics profession and their position in American public life. Definitely worth a read.

I’ve been enjoying Duckworth Lewis Method (UK) with the kids for months now. To be honest I had never even heard of Pugwash before, and The Divine Comedy was just a name on a bunch of posters, not a band/person I knew anything about, so it took me a while to get hold of the album. But it is fabulous, full of catchy tunes, melancholic reflection on the game, and sometimes wry humour. For a while my youngest knew the whole of “Meeting Mr Miandad” by heart. My favourite is “Mason on the Boundary”, which somehow makes me think of the last time I was at the Parks (with Swift and my dad), when I caught glimpse of an elderly man in an MCC tie, whose name tag revealed him to be the godfather of a childhood friend, someone whose exploits around the commonwealth were the stuff of legend in said friend’s family. Almost certainly most of it working for her majesty, if you know what I mean. I didn’t say “hi”. There’s even an indirect tribute to CLR James (in “The Age of Revolution”). That the two best books about cricket are by North American marxists is just about ok; that the best songs are by two Irishmen is odd.

Anyway, my eldest daughter, the only one who has watched a lot of cricket, and who was for a while a fan of a certain leg spinner, laughed out loud when she got to the end of “Jiggery Pokery” for the first time. A whole song about a single ball? Gatting must be mortified. And now, with the approval of Mr Duckworth and Mr Lewis, a 14 year old girl called Claire has made an animated video for it.

And here, though you have to wait a bit (30 seconds in), is the ball in question:

I took a fair bit of flak from Yglesias and DeLong last week for welcoming Ed Miliband’s break with New Labour on inequality. But I think I was right in my view that New Labour (or, at least elements of it) had abandoned, in their normative commitments, a concern with distribution. In support of that view, I was interested to read this piece in today’s Observer by Tim Allan, written from a Blairite perspective and worrying about what Ed Miliband has had to say about pay at the top:

bq. … to my mind the most critical and damaging line in your speech was when you said that it is wrong, conference, that a banker [or presumably anybody else] can earn more in a day than a care worker can earn in a year. It is hard to exaggerate the political importance of this position as a break from New Labour. New Labour’s key insight was to recognise that helping the poorest in society could be done without setting limits on people’s aspirations. So it is a line with huge political and practical implications. If it ever moved from conference rhetoric to actual policies, it would raise some difficult practical questions: will a maximum wage really be set at 250 times the wage of a care worker? Why not 25 times, or 2.5 times and what is the rational basis for such distinctions? Would the maximum wage apply also to entrepreneurs earning money from successful companies they have created? Would they have to stop trying to build their business and create new jobs when they reach the threshold? You need quickly to counteract the dangerous perception that you are against success, against wealth creation, and want to dictate economic outcomes for the wealthiest rather than provide economic opportunities for all.

There’s an excellent reply to this from Sunder Katwala over at Next Left.

UPDATE: The original version of this post contained some speculation about the motives of DeLong and Yglesias, and Robert Waldmann commented critically on this. Since I think it is better to take any hint of personal invective out of this, I’ve edited the post to remove this speculation.

Utter genius. But watch it now – I suspect that when “This constitutes a fair use of Disney’s Donald Duck” meets a takedown notice from the Mickey copyright mafia, the takedown notice is going to win.

“Matt Yglesias”:http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/09/new-labour-and-inequality/ and “Brad DeLong”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/09/in-which-matthew-yglesias-observes-that-innumeracy-is-an-awful-thing.html have argued that this graph, from “Lane Kenworthy”:http://lanekenworthy.net/2009/06/01/did-blair-and-brown-fail-on-inequality/, shows that we shouldn’t be too critical of Labour’s performance with respect to inequality over their 12 years of government in Britain.

Both Matt and Brad are pushing back against “Chris’s post below”:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/09/30/its-about-the-distribution-stupid/, which argued that Labour had done very little about equality. (Although in his remark on my comment on his post, Brad now seems to suggest that his post was a pre-emptive strike against what Chris would go on to write in comments.) There’s a natural rejoinder on behalf of Chris, which has been well made in both Matt and Brad’s comments threads. Namely, if the graph really showed that things had gotten better, equality-wise, the Gini coefficient for the UK would have fallen. But in fact it rose, somewhat significantly, over Labour’s term. Indeed, the “IFS Report”:http://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/4524 that the graph is based on shows quite clearly that it rose markedly towards the end of Labour’s term.

So I got to thinking about how good a measure “Gini coefficients”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient are of equality. I think the upshot of what I’ll say below is that Chris’s point is right – if things were really going well, you’d expect Gini coefficients to fall. But it’s messy, particularly because Gini’s are much more sensitive to changes at the top than the bottom.

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I’m paying close attention to Amazon rankings just now[1], and it’s striking that both the #1 and #2 spots in “Economics-Theory” are held by FA Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. Whatever your view of Hayek’s work in general, this is truly bizarre, and indicative of the kind of disconnection from reality going on on the political right. On the natural interpretation, shared by everyone in mainstream economics from Samuelson to Stigler, this book, which argued that the policies advocated by the British Labour Party in 1944 would lead to a totalitarian dictatorship, was a piece of misprediction comparable to Glassman and Hassett’s Dow 36000. So what is going on in the minds of the buyers? Are they crazy? Do they actually think that Hayek was proven right after all? Is there a defensible interpretation of Hayek that makes sense?

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