While we wait for the dust to settle following the 2010 election, I thought I’d repost this piece from the aftermath of 2005, suggesting that Labour should introduce electoral reform. My predictive record is a mixed one, but this piece looks pretty good, I think.
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And, apparently, Labour enters talks with the Lib Dems. Telling that his resignation takes effect only on the election of a new leader, and not immediately. Presumably, no caretaker was forthcoming. So much for Alan Johnson having no ambition.

My wife announced that she wants a GPS system for her birthday (its ok, she studiously avoids reading CT). Well, which GPS system should I get for her? Are there any differences? Looking around I am bewildered. (Ideally I’d like to avoid having one with a posh female English accent, both because it irritates me and because it induces my wife to mock mercilessly).

I’m rushing to prepare to go into a lockup to write reports on Australia’s government budget, brought down tomorrow, so this post is a bit scatty, but it might raise some points for discussion regarding the European debt crisis.

* First, a general observation. In a typical bailout, the biggest beneficiaries are not debtors, but creditors. So creditors ought to be “bailed-in” and made to bear some part of the cost

* The Greek case is misleading, in implying that government profligacy is the primary cause of the crisis. In most cases, the problem is the same as in earlier rounds of the crisis, most obviously in Iceland – bad loans by private banks which their national governments feel impelled to rescue, but can’t afford to

* The idea that the euro precludes devaluation as a way out is a relatively minor part of the story. Given that debts are denominated in euros, devaluation to improve the trade balance would be only marginally effective. The real effect of the eurozone so far, has been to raise the stakes regarding default.

* Resolving the crisis requires a couple of measures at the European level
– monetary expansion by the ECB
– co-ordinated action to strengthen government revenue, both by an acceleration of the attack on tax evasion and by discouragement of tax competition within the eurozone

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About eight weeks ago I left my MacBook on the DC Metro. Not a wonderful experience, as you can imagine – especially as repeated calls to the Metro’s Lost & Found, advertisements on Craigslist with reward promised and other such measures failed to produce any results. But then, last week, I got a call from Ross Sirbaugh at “Computer Warehouse”:http://www.compwarehouse.webs.com/ in Falls Church. Someone had brought in the computer and asked them to reinstall the operating system. Ross smelled a rat, took a look at the machine, figured out my name and other details, then tracked me down and called me. And then, to put the icing on the cake, refused to accept any reward whatsoever for his pretty considerable efforts. So I figure the least I can do is to give a WWW shout-out to Ross and his colleagues at Computer Warehouse, for their willingness to go that extra mile and then a couple of miles again (please – don’t anyone tell the “Heritage Foundation”:http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/05/heritage-foundation-breaks-major-abuse-of-power-story.php though). I think it is a pretty safe surmise that if this is the level of due diligence that they exercise when they don’t have _any economic incentive whatsoever_ to do it, the level that they’ll exercise when they do have such incentive (because you’re paying ’em for something) must be super-duper awesome. So, go to Computer Warehouse for all your needs (it looked like they had some pretty good value in laptops – and clearly, their tech people are strongly recommended). Did I mention their name? “Computer Warehouse”:http://www.compwarehouse.webs.com/ – right on Leesburg Pike.

Also – in the spirit of locking the barn door after the horse has gone but to your very great surprise been returned later through the benevolence of strangers – recommendations for minimizing the pain of stolen machines.

(1) _Back Up Everything Important_ somewhere external. This is the one measure I did take – and the pain would have been far, _far_ greater had I lost my work along with the machine. I use “Sugarsync”:https://www.sugarsync.com/referral?rf=dvbii96jagjv0 which keeps the work documents on my various machines in sync with each other as well as giving me an online back up – others swear by DropBox, SpiderOak and other services.

(2) Make sure that your account is password protected. I didn’t do this – remarkably stupidly – but appear to have gotten away without loss of personal information. You shouldn’t take this risk. I won’t again.

(3) Set up a “firmware password”:http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1352 if you have a recently made Mac. Makes it much harder to wipe the OS.

(4) Consider buying anti-theftware like “Undercover”:http://www.orbicule.com/undercover/. Depending on your tolerance for risk, this may be too expensive for the benefits provided (me: my risk tolerance has decreased substantially since this happened to me).

Other suggestions or recommendations welcome in comments.

This piece by Paul Campos makes the point, not for the first time, that Elena Kagan’s public record is so thin as to make it impossible to guess how she might decide as a Supreme Court judge. While this question is important, another strikes me.

How does someone whose vita contains “three scholarly articles, two shorter essays, two brief book reviews, and two other minor pieces”, and who had apparently never appeared in a courtroom before last year, get to be Dean of Harvard Law School and then US Solicitor-General[1]? Even confining myself to law journals and popular pieces on legal topics, I could match that track record. I once even exercised a quasi-judicial function in my career as a regulator, which is more than Kagan has done.

In view of Kagan’s apparently inevitable promotion, can I put myself forward as her replacement? I guess the Harvard gig is already taken, but I’m sure I’d be a great Solicitor-General. All my friends say I”m “brilliant”, and have “many remarkable qualities”. Some will even go as far as “scrupulously fair-minded” .

fn1. For comparison, here’s the publication list for Kathleen Sullivan, reputedly the runner-up for the S-G job.

Just about every article in this morning’s _Financial Times_ seems to include a paragraph or two about how governments need to “deliver” debt reduction, to satisfy the markets, investor expectations etc. They then typically note that said investors are anxious about whether democratic politicians can “deliver” the austerity measures that the markets “require”. So here’s the question: how long before the _Economist_, the Murdoch press and similar give up on democracy on the grounds of its incapacity to “deliver” firm government? We’ve been here before, of course, in the 1970s, when the _Economist_ and the _Times_ backed the Pinochet coup in Chile. Of the PIIGS, only Ireland has escaped dictatorship in living memory and some of the southern European countries still contain contain authoritarian rumps (with special strength in the armed forces and law enforcement). My guess is that we’ll be reading op-eds pretty soon that raise the spectre of “ungovernability” and espouse “temporary” authoritarian solutions. Maybe such columns are already being written? Feel free to provide examples in comments.

The discussions here and elsewhere on agnotology/epistemic closure have established the existence of a set of mechanisms on the right[1] for propagating ignorance and protecting it against factual refutation. These mechanisms have some obvious benefits, particularly in mobilising resistance against policy innovations, and tribal solidarity against outsiders of all kinds. This is evident, for example, in the attacks on Obama’s health reforms, in the support that can be mobilised for anti-immigrant policies and in the promotion of anti-science views on climate change. Politically, it’s impressive that a party that made such a complete mess of every aspect of policy under Bush can be favored to make big gains at the next elections. At least in the short term, ignorance is strength.

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Yesterday, one of the biggest events in the history of the Internet took place; non-Latin top-level domains went live in the DNS root zone. In plain English, you can now type the whole of a domain name in Arabic script. Not just the left of the dot (as in dot org) but the right of it, too. The three new top-level domains are السعودية. (“Al-Saudiah”), امارات. ( “Emarat”) and مصر. (“Misr”). They are country code names in Arabic for Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Egypt.

How did this happen? Years of collaboration and cooperation between countless technical, policy and linguistic experts around the world, endless patience and a fair amount of justified and motivating impatience for people to be able to use their own scripts and thus languages to access the Internet.

As Tina Dam, who leads ICANN work on internationalising domain names puts it, credit goes to the “registries and governments that have worked actively locally; the IDNA protocol authors; the policy makers; application developers” such as browsers who had to figure out how to make the url field read from right to left, and many, many more.

As my old IANA colleague, Kim Davies, says; the hard work and collaboration required to get this far is just the beginning. The people behind these new domains now need to work with their own communities to populate them. Browsers like Firefox don’t seem to have caught on yet, though they’ve had plenty of warning. And many more script and language groups are lining up behind to get their own characters into the root. Word is the Russians want Cyrillic in next (Medvedev got his game face on when he heard the Bulgarians might get there first.). [click to continue…]

Comment away!

I’ve been remiss in posting about the Greek crisis, thanks to other obligations (one paper, semi-half-arsed, just written for a workshop tomorrow; another paper, at best one quarter arsed, for a deadline next week), but here are a few points for discussion.

(1) On the “argument”:http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2010/02/not_federal_union_yet argument that “got me drawn into this”:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/02/13/et-dona-ferentes/ in the first place, I think that Charlemagne’s criticism of Krugman was demonstrably wrong. As I summarized matters back then:
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The New York Times had a Room for Debate roundtable on presumed consent and organ donation the other day. I wrote a short piece for it. There’s already been some follow-up from Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution. This morning I came across Nurse & Lawyer, who have a dialog on the topic. During their conversation, they say the following about my contribution:

Nurse: One of the panelists, Kieran Healy from Duke, makes what amounts to a ridiculous argument that this law will rekindle fears that surgeons are standing over sick people with hack saws, waiting to harvest their organs, and that they might just take them even if you’re not truly gone. Um. . . won’t those people just sign the opt-out if they are truly so concerned? As Arthur Caplan from Penn (woot woot) points out, most people do want to be donors. Healy also makes no suggestions. Maybe he’s against organ donation all together?

Lawyer: And what’s the source of the idea that doctors have more interest in one patient than in another? What interest does the doctor personally have in harvesting organs, unless the patient is his own kid? I agree. Opt out if that’s your nightmare.

I am not against organ donation. Feel free to read any of what I’ve written on this topic. And my argument is not ridiculous.

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I’ve renewed my never-ending summer of Trollope, this time with the Eustace Diamonds, the second – though it feels like the fifth – Trollope where “Frank must marry money”. Never one to shy away from a lengthy aside to the reader, Trollope gives a rundown of the attitudes, circa 1873, of “a fine old Tory of the ancient school, who thought that things were going from bad to worse, but was able to live happily in spite of his anticipations”, a trick the Tea Partiers might usefully learn:

“It was bad to interfere with Charles, bad to endure Cromwell, bad to punish James, bad to put up with William. The House of Hanover was bad. All interference with prerogative has been bad. The Reform Bill was very bad. Encroachment on the estates of the bishops was bad. Emancipation of Roman Catholics was the worst of all. Abolition of corn-laws, church-rates, and oaths and tests were all bad. [click to continue…]

In my last post, I promised a separate discussion on the tu quoque response; that is, the claim that confirmation bias, closed-mindedness and deliberate promotion of ignorance are universal phenomena, just as bad on the left as on the right.

More over the fold on this, but here are some links that have come up since I posted

Slacktivist gives some striking info on the “P&G in league with the devil” rumors. Key points.
*The rumors were apparently started by distributors for Amway, but went viral (compare AGW delusions and Exxon).
* (Many of) those propagating the rumors, even excluding those with a monetary axe to grind, were not innocent dupes, but were well aware that they were peddling lies.

David Frum reduces Jonah Goldberg to a stammering wreck on the question “Is Obama really a Marxist/Socialist”.

A second example of a rightwing critique of agnotology. Note: In the original version of this post, I incorrectly linked to an example of agnotology instead of a refutation, then corrected it (as I thought) but failed. I think it’s right this time. Even inadvertent error can be hard to correct! -JQ

Scott McLemee reviews the book of the concept.

A striking example of the asymmetry of agnotology. The right has made big play of alleged weaknesses in the “hockey stick” paper of Mann et al. But the critique they primarily rely on, by Wegman et al, is a pile of plagiarised nonsense.

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