Very sorry I haven’t kept up my Descartes blogging. Been dead busy and, somehow, blogging about hylomorphism, you never feel the Sisyphusian (Sisyfuscian?) pressures of the news cycle. Will try to get back on that dead horse. But here’s something new. My 5-year old daughter is shaping up to be a Peter Cook/Dudley Moore fan. She likes Superthunderstingcar even better than the original Thunderbirds, even better than cat videos! (Also, she would like to report that she wewwy had “Bad Wowmance” wunning thwew hew head. But that’s another kettle of fish. I haven’t let her watch the video for that one, but she was singing it for a while. And the 8-year old called her ‘Baby Gaga’, but it didn’t stick, so she’s back to being Mei-Mei.)
So I’ve been watching a spot of “Not Only … But Also” YouTube videos. Very funny stuff. I had never watched it until recently. (Which gives the lie to the whole ‘dead busy’ excuse. I know.) Here’s my question to you. The “L.S. Bumblebee” sketch, which is a hoot and a half – love the shirtless gong player and his sheet music; and which concludes with a hilarious appearance by John Lennon as “Dan”; is a dead-on “Lucy In The Sky” roast. Yet “L.S.” was, apparently, released as a single in February 1967. But Sgt. Pepper itself was only released in June, 1967. It seems that “Lucy in the Sky” was perfectly pre-parodied, months in advance. I’ve Googled around a bit and found quotes from Moore, from the 1970’s (by which time “L.S.” was apparently erroneously popping up on Beatles bootlegs) suggesting that the song was supposed to parody the Beach Boys more than the Beatles, which doesn’t really seem right. (Maybe the Monkees?) Also suggesting it was a response to the whole “Lucy” craze, which doesn’t seem to fit with the dating. Anyway, what is most surprising to me is the thought that, by the start of 1967, Sgt. Pepper-style psychedelia was the stuff of parody to the point where the frame joke of the sketch is that it is fodder for a documentary for Idaho television. Could it really be that Sgt. Peppers was that old hat by the end of 1966, before it even existed? I’m confused? I always thought the Beatles were pretty cool.
When I read the _Financial Times_ review of Joris Luyendijk’s _People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East_ last year, I knew it was a book I wanted and needed to read (Australian title is _Fit to Print_). So I placed an order on amazon.uk that very morning. But it never came and I only just got my hands on a second-hand copy. Amazon (US and UK) are both listing it as out-of-print. Which is a pity, because you need to read it too. Some of it will be familiar to intelligent and well-informed people: of course we _know_ things work like that. But it is hard to keep the knowledge one has of the news process in view, when watching TV, reading the papers, listening to the radio over breakfast. Luyendijk will, at the very least, do the necessary job of keeping us sensitized. [click to continue…]
Arthur Goldhammer’s “excellent blog on French politics and society”:http://artgoldhammer.blogspot.com/2010/01/pacs-is-between-one-man-and-one-woman.html points to “this article”:http://www.insee.fr/fr/themes/document.asp?ref_id=ip1276#inter2 on the French _pact civil de solidarité_ – a kind of civil union introduced in 1999/2000, largely as an alternative to gay marriage. But the pacs has had very interesting consequences for straight couples (95% of couples with pacs are straight), as this chart shows.
The growth of the pacs’ popularity over its first decade is striking. There are now two pacs for every three marriages. Interestingly, this is because of both a significant decline in marriage, and a significant increase in the overall number of people willing to engage in some kind of state-sanctioned relationship. While you would obviously need more finely grained data to establish this properly, the obviously intuitive interpretation of this (at least to me) is that the pacs have grown _both_ by providing an option for people who would probably not have gotten married in the first place, _and_ attracted a number of people who otherwise would have gotten married, but who prefer the pacs’ lower level of formality (it is much easier to cancel a pacs relationship than to get divorced). Perhaps this provides grist for the mills of social conservatives (who could claim, stretching the data a bit, that gay-appeasing civil unions are undermining the sacred institution of marriage) – but it would oblige them to face up to the question of whether they should _prefer_ gay marriage to potentially corrosive civil unions that straight couples can take advantage of too. Liberals and leftwingers don’t face nearly the same dilemma, since they can reasonably assume that those who choose civil unions over marriage have good reason for doing so (and perhaps will get married later if they want to; obviously, you can’t tell from data like this how many partners in pacs decide to get married later on).
A sociologist friend told me a few months ago that she had finally read my book Justice, and that it was the first time that she had encountered Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist case (which she thought was pretty neat). The full text of the article is here; the wikipedia entry is here. The discussion reminded me that I keep intending to post something about thought experiments in general, and Thomson’s article in particular, partly to defend thought experiments against JQ’s scepticism. I haven’t read a great deal of the secondary literature about the violinist, but I have taught it numerous times, and discussed it extensively with colleagues and students; what follows is just my take, in the light of those discussions.
First of all, it should be obvious that the violinist case does not establish the permissibility of abortion even in the case of rape. In fact, I would say that the focus on the permissibility of abortion (which Thomson encourages, not least by her title) is a bit misleading. Every semester a very small number of my students say that they do not think it is permissible to unplug oneself from the violinist. Not a single sentence in the article speaks to them: they can get off before even getting on (interestingly, every now and then a student (usually they turn out to be some sort of lefty) who thinks there is a right to abortion thinks it is impermissible to unplug oneself, because one has extensive and stringent duties to aid stranger in need). So what does the example establish?
Scott Brown’s election this past Tuesday offers the Democratic Party a new hope. A new hope for a politics of modesty in place of the politics of arrogance; a new hope for a politics of cooperation in place of the politics of demonization. Democrats might not realize it now, but they have before them a historic opportunity to seize the day and regain the trust of the American people for at least a generation. By turning their backs once and for all on the scorched-earth approach of the party’s liberal wing, Democrats can consolidate their legitimate gains while cutting loose their least reliable partners. They have the ability; all they need is the will.
The problem — if there is one — is that time is tight, and the party will need to move on several fronts at once. What follows is not an exhaustive list, but rather a series of first steps Democrats will need to take if they are to remain a meaningful majority party.
Both biosociological and psychological models, as well as animal research, suggest that testosterone has a key role in social interactions1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Evidence from animal studies in rodents shows that testosterone causes aggressive behaviour towards conspecifics7. Folk wisdom generalizes and adapts these findings to humans, suggesting that testosterone induces antisocial, egoistic, or even aggressive human behaviours. However, many researchers have questioned this folk hypothesis1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, arguing that testosterone is primarily involved in status-related behaviours in challenging social interactions, but causal evidence that discriminates between these views is sparse. Here we show that the sublingual administration of a single dose of testosterone in women causes a substantial increase in fair bargaining behaviour, thereby reducing bargaining conflicts and increasing the efficiency of social interactions. However, subjects who believed that they received testosterone—regardless of whether they actually received it or not—behaved much more unfairly than those who believed that they were treated with placebo. Thus, the folk hypothesis seems to generate a strong negative association between subjects’ beliefs and the fairness of their offers, even though testosterone administration actually causes a substantial increase in the frequency of fair bargaining offers in our experiment.
If I’d had time last week to write about Irish politics, I’d have blogged about Bertie Ahern’s success in getting the taxation authorities not to make him pay any taxes on his forthcoming autobiography. Creative works enjoy an exemption under Irish tax law. Both “Alex Massie”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/alexmassie/5698076/the-latest-great-irish-storyteller.thtml (who reveals that the former Taoiseach’s full name is Patrick Bartholomew Ahern – news to me) and “Fintan O’Toole”:http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2010/0112/1224262119416.html are quite upset about all of this. I’d have expected O’Toole to be more forgiving; after all, in his recent book (forthcoming soonish “in the US”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fs%3Fie%3DUTF8%26x%3D0%26ref_%3Dnb%255Fss%26y%3D0%26field-keywords%3Dfintan%2520o%2527toole%2520%2526%252334%253Bship%2520of%2520fools%26url%3Dsearch-alias%253Daps&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=390957 unless you have a Kindle, in which case it’s available already) on feckless politicians, property developers and the travails of the Irish economy, O’Toole describes Bertie as:
“a character in a long-running soap opera. Such characters are meant to be people like us, except that an absurd number of dramatic things happen to them. Their marriages break down, they have complicated, drawn-out love affairs, their children marry pop-stars and have twins, or become famous novelists overnight.
Surely, the autobiography of a fictional character is fictional itself by definition, and hence as creative as creative can be?
More to the point: O’Toole’s book, _Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger_ is highly recommended. It is written in haste and _saeva indignatio_ and hence not as polished as his work usually is, but is very strong in both analysis and indictment. Since Daniel has already “promised a review”:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/01/07/i-scream-you-scream-we-all-scream-for-icesave/#comment-301281 (and what could possibly go wrong with such a promise?), I won’t write one here, instead making two short points. [click to continue…]
A bit of mindless surfing had me looking at the execrable Instapundit for the first time in ages … but there was actually something interesting there: a link to Sally Mann, talking about memory, uncertainty and the collodion process. Those 19th-century photographers who managed to produce near-flawless images using the process were really something.
This “NYT article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/world/europe/18iht-women.html on Germany is a useful book-end to the discussion on diversity of European models etc.
NEUÖTTING, GERMANY — Manuela Maier was branded a bad mother. A Rabenmutter, or raven mother, after the black bird that pushes chicks out of the nest. She was ostracized by other mothers, berated by neighbors and family, and screamed at in a local store.
She felt ostracized after signing up her 9-year-old for lunch and afternoon classess — and then returning to work. “I was told: ‘Why do you have children if you can’t take care of them?’” she said. Her crime? Signing up her 9-year-old son when the local primary school first offered lunch and afternoon classes last autumn — and returning to work. … Ten years into the 21st century, most schools in Germany still end at lunchtime, a tradition that dates back nearly 250 years. … Ten years into the 21st century, most schools in Germany still end at lunchtime, a tradition that dates back nearly 250 years. … For several mothers, their great-grandmothers’ maxim, “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” — children, kitchen, church — holds true, even if, as Mr. Haugeneder says, “increasingly it is a way of life people can’t afford.”
Over the fold, the conclusion of my book, with Release Candidate title “Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us”. I plan a proper post on the whole bookblogging experience, but until then, I’ll thank everyone who’s commented, or just read this exercise with interest and make one (maybe) last request for help. Can anyone recommend a book on Thatcher’s economic reforms that would be a good suggestion for further reading? I’m currently suggesting Anderew Glyn’s Capitalism Unleashed, but I’d like to add something from a centrist or Thatcherite perspective, as long as it’s readable and not too objectionable for words.
There’s a near-complete draft of the whole book here.
The stake is $US100 and the agreed criterion is that, for Bryan to win, the average Eurostat harmonised unemployment rate for the EU-15 over the period 2009-18 inclusive should exceed that for the US by at least 1.5 percentage points
The relevant figures are at Eurostat and, with December still to come in, I estimate that the EU-15 rate will be 0.3 percentage points below that for the US for 2009, so that I beat the spread by 1.8 percentage points. [click to continue…]
I’m still working on the follow-up to my Descartes post, to which comments have been good and useful. I’ll plug the gap with a passage from the Dan Garber book I mentioned before, Descartes Embodied (good book.) I’ve never read much Francis Bacon (I don’t teach him); and in particular I haven’t read New Atlantis, which I know is his science fiction utopia (you’d think I would have gotten around to reading such a thing). Garber summarizes the organizational structure for the House of Saloman, which is apparently New Atlantis’ League of Extraordinarily Scientific Gentlemen. The job titles are pretty much turned all the way up to Awesome.
At the bottom of the organization are those who form the tables of natural history, a total of twenty-four investigators. Twelve “Merchants of Light” “sail into foreign countries under the names of other nations … [and] bring us the books and abstracts, and patterns of experiments of all other parts.” Three “Depredators” collect experiments from books three “Mystery-men” collect experiments from mechanical arts and liberal sciences, and three “Pioneers or Miners” try new experiments of their own devising. They are joined by three “Compilers,” who arrange these observations and experiments into proper tables. Twelve workers are employed at the next stage of the enterprise. Three “dowry-men or Benefactors” examine the initial tables compiled by the Compilers and draw out both technological applications and the first theoretical conclusions that can be drawn from the tables, presumably what Bacon calls the first vintage in the Novum organum. Three “Lamps” as he calls them, then draw new experiments out of the work of the Compilers and Benefactors, which experiments are them performed by three “Inoculators.” And finally, “we have three that raise the form discoveries by experiments into greater observations, axioms, and aphorisms. These we call Interpreters of Nature.”
I think someone really ought to write an SF thriller in which the science heroes of New Atlantis have to race against time to compile the proper Baconian tables that will allow them to understand and technologically defeat the invading Martians. Or something.
Perhaps Adam Roberts will consent to show up in comments and tell us whether New Atlantis is actually as fun to read as it sounds.
There’s been a fair amount of “debate”:http://www.google.com/search?q=manzi+european+economic+model&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a around “Jim Manzi’s recent piece”:http://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/keeping-americas-edge on the differences between Europe and the US. I contributed a bit myself in the Bloggingheads with Dan Drezner linked above (with discussion of Iceland, Stephen Cohen and Brad DeLong’s recent book, and other stuff too). In this wrap-up reply to his critics, Manzi maintains that some of the criticisms that have been made by e.g. Paul Krugman are flat out wrong (Paul seems to have misattributed the data series that he was using), while saying that he was not in fact setting out to prove empirically that European style welfare redistribution systems limit innovation and growth (if I understand him correctly, he still believes this to be true, but doesn’t claim that the figures he adduces show it). As he notes, he is actively advocating that the US turn to redistribution – but is also claiming that there are trade-offs involved. I should also note that I’ve met him a few times, and always found him to be a straightforward, decent and, fwiw, mildly Europhilic guy (with whom I disagree, obviously, on multitudes of things). But as per my original Bloggingheads, I am dissatisfied with one of the most basic claims of the argument – that there is a distinct “European model,” followed by all states within Europe, which can readily be distinguished from the American approach. This is a claim that you sometimes see on “both left and right”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/10/08/alesina-and-giavazzi-have-a-point/#more-6279 – but it is one that I think is very wrong indeed. [click to continue…]
One hesitates to refer to the rational kernel in any statement coming from Pat Robertson, of course. But his recent venture into explaining the earthquake in Haiti does contain a small, heavily distorted, yet recognizable fragment of historical reality.
That kernel has passed through his system without giving him any nourishment, but I’ll try to pluck it out of all the batshit craziness. [click to continue…]
I sent off the draft MS of my Zombie Economics book to the publisher last week, but there is still time for improvement. Over the fold is the second, and final part of the privatization chapter.
You can read most of the book (not always the final draft) at my wikidot site.
As always, comments and criticism much appreciated.
, and that it was the first time that she had encountered Judith Jarvis Thomson’s violinist case (which she thought was pretty neat). The full text of the article is