A little bit I plan to include in the chapter on the Great Moderation, linking on to a critique of post-70s macroeconomics. As always, comments and criticism gratefully (and, mostly, I hope, gracefully) accepted

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But you knew about that already. More to the point: I’ve finally got some NON-free Plato for you! Plato you can pay for! And receive some Plato in exchange! My book is finally honest to gosh in stock at Amazon! After almost two months of not being in stock, despite occasionally shipping, this strikes me as a commercial step up. I trust my friends, mom, and the select, lofty rationalists who ordered and awaited initial copies with familial-Parmenidean serenity have, in due course, received and been pleased. But what about the appetitive masses, unable to regulate their desires and make them friendly to one another, etc? It will never be four weeks from now, the desires think to themselves. But soon it will be two days from now. Soon enough. I could wait two days. That is how desire for a book thinks. Well, now you hasty masses can get my book in, like, two days! So buy it already. Assuming you want it. (And Belle’s! Don’t forget it’s Belle’s book, too. She’s not so shameless about flogging it, mind you. But that doesn’t mean she’s without feeling in the matter.)

But I don’t feel like talking about philosophy tonight. I already did that for hours today. I just got a big stack of art and design and cartoon books. Let’s talk about that. Oh, and I did a bit of research. In my last post, I failed to give Faith Hubley half credit for “Moonbird”, so I went and read the little bit there is about her in Amid Amidi’s Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in 1950s Animation [amazon]. Fun fact: when she got married to John, one of their marriage vows was ‘to make one non-commercial film a year.’ Faith was apparently more determined in that regard than her husband. One of their first collaborations was “A Date With Dizzy” (YouTube – but no credit for Faith!), in which Gillespie’s band fails to come up with a plausible way to advertise ‘instant rope ladder’. It’s a weird clip, all I can say. (But I’ll say a bit more anyway in a moment.) [click to continue…]

Following the successful wingnut attack on Van Jones, the Washington Independent reports that Glenn Beck’s next target is Cass Sunstein, with the pretext being his discussion of organ donation in Nudge, his book with Thaler on how small framing effects can have big effects on outcomes (. I see this as a positive development in all sorts of ways.

Update Sunstein’s appointment was approved by the Senate on a near party line vote 57-40. Six Republicans (Bennett, Collins, Hatch, Lugar, Snowe,Voinovich) voted Yes. The No votes included Bernie Sanders who opposed Sunstein for much the same reasons I would and some Blue Dogs notably including Ben Nelson, who followed the Beck line (all of the Dems voted for cloture). Obama’s only real chance of achieving anything is to dump both the filibuster rule and the Blue Dogs. End update

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Thanks to the continued tyranny of distance as regards the transport of books, my copy of George Scialabba’s book, What are Intellectuals Good For arrived about the time the CT seminar on the topic went live. I had a variety of thoughts on reading the book, but in a lot of ways they reinforced the point made by the transportation delay: the public intellectual business, even now, is quite nationally specific. This is not to say that Scialabba is in any way parochial: on the contrary, his cosmopolitan outlook is a striking contrast with the insularism that characterises many metropolitan intellectuals, not to mention their eponymically provincial counterparts.

Still, reading his discussion of the New York intellectual scene is rather reminiscent of looking at a map of the NYC subway system. It’s fascinating, I’ve visited some of the stops and heard a lot about others, and there are some big achievements to admire, but as regards getting around Brisbane, it doesn’t have a lot of immediate use to me.

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YouTube provides:

John [and Faith!] Hubley’s 1959, Academy Award-Winning “Moonbird”. I don’t know much about it, except that they obviously constructed an ingenious and charming piece of animation on top of an audio recording of their two young sons, talking and singing.

Here’s a surprisingly progressive, “Brotherhood of Man” (part 1, part 2) educational cartoon from 1946, directed by Robert Cannon. (Scripted by Ring Lardner [jr.!], apparently.)

And another Hubley. “Soothing, instant money” – a classic Bank of America ad. Ironically, I take it this was done just a few years after Hubley was blacklisted for refusing to testify to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. So he had been forced to leave UPA and take work making commercials.

Hubley and Cannon, if you don’t know, are probably best known for their work together at UPA on such classics as “Gerald McBoingBoing” and “Mr. Magoo”.

Here’s a fun, if somewhat uncertainly-sourced story about how Hubley and co-creator Millard Kaufman invented Magoo, from Wikipedia:

The Magoo character was originally conceived as a mean-spirited McCarthy-like reactionary whose mumbling would include as much outrageous misanthropic ranting as the animators could get away with. Kaufman had actually been blacklisted, and Magoo was a form of protest. Hubley was an ex-communist who had participated in the 1941 [Disney] strike. Both he and Kaufman had participated in the blacklist front and perhaps due to the risk of coming under more scrutiny with a hit character, John Hubley, who had created Magoo, handed the series completely over to creative director, Pete Burness. Under Burness, Magoo would win two Oscars for the studio with When Magoo Flew (1955) and Magoo’s Puddle Jumper (1956). Burness scrubbed Magoo of his politicized mean-ness and left only a few strange unempathic comments that made him appear senile or somewhat mad. This however was not entirely out of line with the way McCarthy came to be perceived over that same era.

“David Broder 2009”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/02/AR2009090202857_pf.html

Looming beyond the publicized cases of these relatively low-level operatives is the fundamental accountability question: What about those who approved of their actions? If accountability is the standard, then it should apply to the policymakers and not just to the underlings. Ultimately, do we want to see Cheney, who backed these actions and still does, standing in the dock? I think it is that kind of prospect that led President Obama to state that he was opposed to invoking the criminal justice system, even as he gave Holder the authority to decide the question for himself. Obama’s argument has been that he has made the decision to change policy and bring the practices clearly within constitutional bounds — and that should be sufficient. In times like these, the understandable desire to enforce individual accountability must be weighed against the consequences. This country is facing so many huge challenges at home and abroad that the president cannot afford to be drawn into what would undoubtedly be a major, bitter partisan battle over prosecution of Bush-era officials. The cost to the country would simply be too great.

Lord Justice Denning, on the “Birmingham Six”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Six stitch up

Just consider the course of events if their [the Six’s] action were to proceed to trial … If the six men failed it would mean that much time and money and worry would have been expended by many people to no good purpose. If they won, it would mean that the police were guilty of perjury; that they were guilty of violence and threats; that the confessions were involuntary and improperly admitted in evidence; and that the convictions were erroneous. That would mean that the Home Secretary would have either to recommend that they be pardoned or to remit the case to the Court of Appeal. That was such an appalling vista that every sensible person would say, ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further.’ They should be struck out either on the ground that the men are estopped from challenging the decision of Mr. Justice Bridge, or alternatively that it is an abuse of the process of the court. Whichever it is, the actions should be stopped.

Funnily enough, not only did the British political and justice system manage to keep stumbling on after the Birmingham Six were released, but most reasonable observers would agree that it was the better for finally admitting that it had locked up six men for sixteen years on trumped-up evidence. Similarly, one might imagine that the US justice system would be the better for examining the _prima facie_ evidence that the Vice President of this country engaged in illegal acts, rather than pretending that it didn’t because of the risk of partisan upheaval. But not if one were David Broder.

From Jim Livesey comes an interesting-looking book on the origins of civil society. If I were Tyler Cowen I would say it was self-recommending, but in fact Jim recommended it to me directly. (Although we’ve never met, Jim represents the vanguard of the Blackrock Road school of history, philosophy, social science, science, and public policy — an admittedly hazy entity constituted mostly by him and his brothers.) The concept of “civil society” was in the ascendancy after 1989 and was everywhere in the social sciences and political talk by the late 1990s. Livesey’s book argues that the idea has roots in the defeated provincial elites of Scotland and Ireland, as a way for them “to enjoy liberty without directly participating in the empire’s governance”. I could probably have done with reading this two weeks ago, before I kicked off my social theory seminar with a quick and cheery survey of the situation of social theory prior to the nineteenth century, the sort of thing that gives real historians heart failure.

Reading the current US debate on health care from the outside is pretty dispiriting. It is an example of what happens to rational debate in circumstances of inequality where vested interests and partisan pundits can distort discussion by throwing loads of noise, fear and disinformation into the conversation. Still, that’s no reason not to try to have a conversation about which principles ought to obtain, and I think for that it is hard to beat Ronald Dworkin’s paper “Justice in the Distribution of Heath Care”, _McGill Law Journal_, 38 (1993), pp. 883-98 (though I’m looking at the reprint in Clayton and Williams eds _The Ideal of Equality_ ).

Dworkin’s “central idea”:

bq. … we should aim to make collective, social decisions about the quantity and distribution of health care so as to match, as closely as possible, the decisions that people in the community would make for themselves, one by one, in the appropriate circumstances, if they were looking from youth down the course of their lives and trying to decide what risks were worth running in return for not running other kinds of risks. (C&W, 209)

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Megan McArdle replies to my post:

So I’m not sure that this conversation is likely to be productive, since at least one side of it has decided to substitute sarcasm for engagement. But let’s see if we can’t tone down the nastiness a little, and try to have a reasonable discussion.

I agree with the first sentence. And I agree with the second sentence. Moving right along. [click to continue…]

In any book on policy thinking, the easy bit (not all that easy!) is to write about what’s wrong with existing ideas, in my case the zombie ideas I’m writing about. The chapter plan for my book includes, in each chapter, a section on “What next”. As regards the Great Moderation, which was essentially an interpretative claim about the data, it’s not really clear what to include. I’m leaving the details of macroeconomic thinking and policy for another chapter and writing about how society should handle risk. Comments and criticism appreciated as always.

I’m in the process of setting up a site at wikidot.com where the whole draft will be presented in wiki format. But I’ve been travelling and haven’t managed to get it going yet.
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The stupidest decision I made as an undergraduate was not to go to Jerry Cohen’s lectures on Marxism. The London colleges, despite being almost completely separate, pooled resources to give Philosophy lecture courses for 2nd and 3rd years. The lectures were held in tiny lecture rooms at Birkbeck – I seem to remember usually being there on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. The relevant term, Jerry’s lectures were on the same morning as the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind courses; I knew that I only had the concentration for 2, and, despite being, I presumed, some sort of Marxist (unaffiliated), I had no interest in political philosophy (not least because I believed some quite unsubtle version of Marx’s theory of history). (I’ll also admit that I responded somewhat to peer-pressure; my mate Adrian was not going to the Marxism lectures, and it was fun to have coffee with him instead). Like, as I later found out, Jerry, I had not come to study philosophy in order to learn about political ideas – I’d been politically active since I was 15 and had been exposed to all the political ideas that implied while I was in secondary school (taught History by a member of the CPB (M-L); indirectly recruited to the peace movement by a former CPGBer; worked with someone in the NCP, various SWPers; engaged in conspiratorial faction fights within the peace movement against various Trotskyists including CB’s flatmate of that time… you get the idea). I went to university to study something that I knew I couldn’t learn any other way – analytical philosophy. So it was easy to pass up Jerry’s lectures, even though everyone said they were brilliant, and even though I was interested in Marxism.

Later Jerry influenced me enormously. I bought Karl Marx’s Theory of History A Defence
as a celebration of getting my degree and read it first on a trip after graduating; I studied it about half-way through graduate school (along with these papers by Levine and Wright, and Levine and Sober), and more than anything else was responsible for my shift away from philosophy of language to political philosophy; because, like most readers of KMTH, I became convinced that the version of Marx’s theory of history that had seemed to me to make political philosophy irrelevant was false. I then read what is still my favourite Jerry paper, “The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom”, and subsequently saw him lecture at UCLA; from then on I guess I read nearly everything he published, as soon as I could get my hands on it.

So now, what I presume is his final book, Why Not Socialism? (UK) (I hope there’ll be other publications – presumably someone, probably one of our readers, is taking responsibility for seeing some of the work that Jerry left unpublished into print) is in my hands. Princeton have deliberately created it to be like On Bullshit – very short, beautifully made, small enough to fit in a smallish pocket. People have been calling it the “camping trip” book; he uses the conceit of a camping trip to demonstrate that organizing social life around the two principles that, for him, define socialism – a very stringent version of equality of opportunity, and a very demanding principle of community – is very appealing to most people in some circumstances. He goes on to demonstrate that the appeal of these principles is not superficial, or restricted to unusual circumstances such as a camping trip, but are appealing at a society-wide level too:

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We had a new addition to the family at the weekend, which is going to make it quite difficult for me to post anything more in the near future.

Daniel Foley arrived at 5.15 am on Saturday 29 August. He weighs just over 3 kg and is about 51 cm. Despite his size, the birth was quick and completely natural. Daniel slept through the first night from 9.30 pm – 5 am and then gurgled a bit to tell us he wanted to be fed. He is huge, healthy, has blue eyes and seems very peaceful. He is already breaking many Brazilian and Irish hearts.

Thanks for having me here. Crooked Timber encapsulates the best traditions of blogging and debate. I have discovered to my cost that there are some truly dire political websites out there and there is something profoundly depressing about watching those who want to cram all of the world’s complexities into a single, simplistic ideological viewpoint. I hope my son will grow up to understand the values of liberal diversity, listening to other viewpoints, critical inquiry, human compassion and honesty. I hope that his world will also be more peaceful than the one that we have lived through in recent years.

A Daniel come to judgment! yea, a Daniel!
O wise young judge, how I do honour thee!

The “Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/29/AR2009082902388.html?hpid=topnews cites worries among intelligence officials:

A. B. “Buzzy” Krongard, the third-ranking CIA official at the time of the use of harsh interrogation practices, said that although vigorous oversight is crucial, the public airing of once-classified internal assessments and the prospect of further investigation are damaging the agency. “Morale at the agency is down to minus 50,” he said.

… Krongard, one of the few active or retired CIA officers with direct knowledge of the program willing to voice publicly what many officers are saying privately, said agency personnel now may back away from controversial programs that could place them in personal legal jeopardy should their work be exposed. “The old saying goes, ‘Big operation, big risk; small operation, small risk; no operation, no risk.’ ”

“If you’re not in the intelligence business to be forward-leaning, you might as well not be in it,” Krongard said.

‘Forward-leaning’ in this context being a rather transparent euphemism for being ‘willing to break the laws forbidding torture of captives.’

There is of course a case that relatively low ranking CIA officers should not be prosecuted for torture while the high officials that ordered them to torture, or provided flimsy legal justifications for torture (or perhaps indeed encouraged them to go beyond the guidances provided) get off scot free. But I think that the pragmatic case that these officers should be prosecuted is a stronger one; on two grounds.

First, and most obviously, bringing these cases to trial may lead to the uncovering of new evidence. The most obvious defense open to these officers is that they were indeed only following legally mandated instructions – and it seems at least plausible to me (as a non-lawyer) that a judge will be more likely to allow discovery on potentially exculpatory evidence for these officers than for other potential plaintiffs, such as those who were in fact the victims of this torture. This is of course screwed up – but it is (as best as I can tell) part of the legal culture of this country. This evidence might perhaps (not very likely, given politics – but then I would not have predicted Holder’s decision a month ago) lead to the prosecution of high level officials who were more directly involved in creating the policies in question and possibly encouraging their underlings to go beyond even these policies.

Second, the more cautious that low-ranking CIA officers are about breaking the laws criminalizing torture in future, the better. I _want_ them to be worried that they will be hung out and left to dry by their political masters if they break the law. This will give them a strong rationale to say no, the next time that they are asked to, and at least partially reshape the incentive structure in benign ways. There is something rather obviously fucked up about a political culture in which high ranking officials can make the opposite claim – that we want intelligence officers to be able to break the law by torturing people, and that not giving them this license ‘lowers morale.’ But you would not know that from reading the _Washington Post._

Three weeks ago Megan McArdle was annoyed. Have you ever noticed how health care reform proponents act as though there’s deep wisdom in reminding us that there is going to be rationing one way or another? “This is one of the things that most puzzles me about the health care debate: statements that would strike almost anyone as stupid in the context of any other good suddenly become dazzling insights when they’re applied to hip replacements and otitis media.” I – and others – pointed out that there were problems with McArdle’s use of the word ‘ration’. Without missing a beat, McArdle has moved on to being impressed by the deep wisdom of the thought that (envelope please): there is going to be rationing one way or another. She muses about the ironic circumstance that no one wants to utter the r-word and – long story short – ends by suggesting that reformers are particularly remiss in this regard. They want the fact that there is going to be rationing, one way or another, to be invisible. Have you ever noticed this about health care reform proponents?

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