Edmund Wilson’s printed note, a response to a student group asking him to do a reading, breathes of another world. He added in a handwritten scrawl that he doesn’t do “live readings either when I’m offered a very large fee.” And the printed card itself lists a bevy of activities that he declines. Unlike participants here and now – myself and the others – he doesn’t “contribute to or take part in symposiums or ‘panels’ of any kind,” “give interviews” or speeches. He is an ornery writer, devoted to his craft.
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In his brief but delightful introduction to <i>What Are Intellectuals Good For?</i>, Scott McLemee offers a précis of the Scialabbian moral/political universe: “Reconciling the skeptical pragmatism of Richard Rorty and the geopolitical worldview of Noam Chomsky is not a simple project.  Rarely do you find them treated as two sides of one ideological coin.  But that seems like a reasonably accurate description of Scialabba’s sense of the possible.  If he were to write a manifesto, it would probably call for more economic equality, the dismantling of the American military industrial complex, and the end of metaphysics.”  This does indeed sound reasonably accurate, and it serves as a reminder that McLemee is one of the few contemporary writers and reviewers who belongs in Scialabba’s league.  For regardless of whether one agrees with Scialabba’s judgments on matters moral and political (and, often enough, I don’t, even though I’d endorse that hypothetical manifesto in a heartbeat), one has to be impressed with Scialabba’s uncanny ability to <i>inhabit</i> the books and writers he reviews.  Scialabba’s work in <i>What Are Intellectuals Good For?</i> is remarkable for its range, yes, and his prose is notable for its precision and clarity.  But what’s most impressive, I think, is the scrupulousness fairness that Scialabba brings to the task of reviewing.  Almost every essay in this collection allows the reader some degree of imaginative sympathy with the books and writers under review, even when Scialabba himself turns out to be largely unsympathetic to the material he’s writing about.  That’s because Scialabba, like McLemee, always offers a reasonably accurate précis of the material he’s writing about before he gets around to taking issue with it.  It’s easy enough to do, of course, when you’re writing about someone who sees the world as you do; but George Scialabba does it as a matter of course.  I wish I could say the same of all reviewers; and though it’s a standard to which I hold my own review essays, I know very well that I’ve sometimes honored it in the breach.

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My friend Jo Wolff has “a column over at the Guardian’s Comment is Free”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/03/students-university-dumbing-down section taking issue with Phil Willis MP, who chairs the Parliamentary Select Committee on Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills which just issued its report on “Students and Universities” (downloadable “here”:http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm/cmdius.htm ). Jo is upset with Willis and his committee for two reasons: first, because they suggest that the marked increase in the proportions of First Class and 2.1 degrees is the result of grade inflation; second, because they were sceptical about whether a degree of the same class from different institutions are necessarily of equal value.

Jo’s response to the first “dumbing down” point is to cite the benign influence of the government quango the Quality Assurance Agency on teaching standards in Universities. I can’t actually work out if Jo’s QAA argument is sincere or an attempt at heavy irony. In any case, I wonder if he’s actually read what the report says about the QAA. It argues — surely correctly — that the QAA has been more focused on processes than on what happens in the classroom and that it has been quite easy for universities to tick the quality-assurance boxes whist actual teaching quality goes unexamined. That’s one part of the report that is surely right. At the time of “subject review” I think only about 1/19th of a department’s score was a result of classroom observation and the rest was attributable to a lengthy paper-trail which we all laboured for months to assemble. But whatever, Jo knows as well as I do that the incentive structure that government has put in place for higher education in the UK has not favoured quality of teaching but rather research. Teaching has been seriously underfunded and there has been little to no payoff in terms of career advancement open to good teachers. In the circumstances it really is hard to believe that the across-the-board improvement in student grades is the result of better teaching. (No doubt any increase in performance in the UCL philosophy department is attributable to better teaching, but Jo needs an argument for the sector as a whole!)

Jo’s response to the second point — cross-institution comparability of standards — is to say “so what?”. He may be right. But what infuriated the Select Committee was that they asked the question of university leaders and failed to get a clear answer. Rather they were faced with obfuscation and evasion. Perhaps if Jo had been interviewed he would have given the committee a clear, reasoned and satisfactory answer as to why it doesn’t really matter: the Vice Chancellors of Oxford and Oxford Brookes universities weren’t willing or able to do so.

From the _Shorter Oxford_ (old edition),

bq. _Corsned_ – in Old English law, the morsel of trial, a piece of bread consecrated by exorcism ( _panis conjuratus_ ) which an accused person was required to swallow as a trial of his guilt or innocence.

Consider this an open thread for the nomination of other words similarly obscure in usage and unusual in meaning that you’ve come across.

Lemme horn in on Quiggin territory here. I just flew home to Singapore from New York and read about a third of Justin Fox’s The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street [amazon] on the flight. (You can view my takeoff here.) Verdict: it’s good! Chapter 1 contains a lively portrait of Irving Fisher. He was, I have learned, a boldly quantitative economic pioneer who pronounced in print just before the crash of ’29 “stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” He lost his personal fortune in the Great Depression. (So he’s a nice emblem for Fox’s book – quants come to practical grief when reality neglects to live up to ideal model standards.)

For his doctoral thesis [completed in 1893] he devised the most sophisticated mathematical treatment yet of economic equilibrium, and he also designed and built a contraption of interconnected water-filled cisterns that he described as “the physical analogue of the ideal economic market.” Many decades later, economist Paul Samuelson judged this work to be “the greatest doctoral dissertation in economics ever writter.” It launched Fisher into a leading role among the world’s still-sparse ranks of mathematical economists. (10)

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In my discussion of the efficient markets hypothesis, I’ve asserted at various times that if (strong or semi-strong) EMH holds, then the market price of an asset “the best possible estimate of the value of the asset” or, more simply, the “right” price. Quite a few commenters asked me to spell out what this means, and there was some useful discussion. This really is the central issue in evaluating the EMH, so I want both to get it right and to express myself as clearly as possible for non-specialist readers. There’s a draft over the fold. I await your brickbats and (hopefully) bouquets.

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Another section from the forthcoming book. Casting suggestions for the blockbuster movie will be gratefully accepted, along with more prosaic correction of errors, omissions, and of course, compliments. I’m trying to get a nice HTML version, but will see how it goes

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The Internets are buzzing with the latest survey showing, among other things, Republicans are split on the Birther issue with only 47 per cent accepting the claim that Obama was born in the US. That’s almost exactly equal to the 48 per cent who agree that global warming exists – it’s evident from the public debate that the overlap between Birthers and opponents of AGW is very high ).

But I wouldn’t want to give the impression that over 50 per cent of Republicans are conspiracy theorists who believe in a secret plot to impose a Kenyan-socialist dictatorship as part of the UN/IPCC system of world government. On the contrary, the proportion is only about 25 per cent (more in the South). As on the global warming issue, the balance of opinion within the Republican Party holds to the sensible “sceptical” position: the science isn’t settled, the birth records are unclear, sightings of black helicopters need further investigation and so on. That’s good to know.

Jennifer Rubin at “Commentary”:http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/rubin/74851 leans on the mad research skillz of “Michael Rubin at “National Review”:http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/rubin/74851 to slur Presidential Medal honoree Mary Robinson for being an anti-Semite. Or something.

As Michael Rubin pointed out in this 2002 column, in her capacity as president of Ireland, she also happily provided millions of dollars of support to the PLO, which were used in terror attacks:

bq. During the last four years of Robinson’s tenure, the European Union donated large sums of money to the Palestinian Authority. Ireland even held the presidency of the European Union for the second half of 1996. During this time, Arafat siphoned large amounts of European aid money away to pay for terror. Robinson can plead ignorance, but documents seized during the recent Israeli incursion into the West Bank revealed that the Palestinian Authority spent approximately $9 million of European Union aid money each month on the salaries of those organizing terror attacks against civilians. While European officials like Robinson looked the other way, the Palestinian Authority regularly converted millions of dollars of aid money into shekels at rates about 20 percent below normal, allowing the Palestinian chairman to divert millions of dollars worth of aid into his personal slush fund.

The original (Michael) Rubin column implies that Mary Robinson should be charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for this.

I mean seriously. Don’t they have factcheckers at _Commentary_ and _National Review?_ Don’t they even have an intern who could skim the Wikipedia article on “the President of Ireland”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_Ireland ?

bq. The presidency is largely a ceremonial office, but the President does exercise certain limited powers with absolute discretion.

The Rubins (are they related?) should be advised that none of these powers touch on foreign policy, European Union policy making etc (the President isn’t even allowed to leave the country without the government’s permission). I know that neither the _National Review_ or _Commentary_ is in the business of informing its readers. But I would have thought that they needed to maintain at least a minimal degree of contact with reality for their propaganda to be effective. I seem to be wrong.

Someone wanted me to start this thread before the game started. Well I’m a bit late for that, but most of the first day was obliterated by rain. The Aussies are now 126 for 1 after 30 overs …. so unless England’s attack can get it together fast, Australia will be in control.

Even the President of the USA agrees with me about Budweiser. I suppose it was never on the cards that any of them was going to order a black-and-tan.

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Belgium has one of the highest per capita public debts in the EU, and a pension system whereby the workers pay for the pensions. So there is a serious challenge of keeping the public pension system viable and sustainable in the near future when the population will be aging.

According to the Dutch-language Belgian newspaper “De Standaard”:http://www.standaard.be/Artikel/Detail.aspx?artikelId=BE2D2NEF, Belgian politicians have decided that the best qualified candidate for the position to lead the Belgian National Office for Pensions will not be appointed. The reason? He is Dutch-speaking, and it was decided that appointing him would bring the balance of francophone versus Dutch speaking high office public servants in danger. [click to continue…]

Judging by a review I read in the New York Times, there is some danger of Christopher Caldwell’s _Reflections on the Revolution in Europe_ being taken more seriously by some Americans than earlier examples of the Europe-about-to-become-Muslim genre. Matt Carr, writing for the Institute of Race Relations, “provides some detailed rebuttal”:http://www.irr.org.uk/2009/july/ha000011.html .

I’m struck by the number of people amongst Capitol Hill’s 2009 50 most beautiful who are from big families, i.e. of 6 or more kids.

A Brussels friend once said the Irish are so numerous in the European Commission because so many of the first wave of them were from big families and were therefore natural masters of deal-making and compromise. Until the last decade or two, probably most of the Irish population were middle children of large-ish families. We do seem to have a disproportionate number of countrymen in the European and other international institutions, and some of them have done remarkably well. (Alternative theories may include mass emigration in the 1970s and 80s and a bit of path dependence since whatever other qualities the Irish abroad may have, we love to give a leg up to our compatriots. Also, there are more people from big families because, well, there are more of them.)

More Hill staffers than I would have expected come from big families. (Alternative theories: lots are from recently immigrated families, or maybe the profile writers draw more attention to the big families because they’re unusual, or maybe beautiful people are inexplicably more likely to have many siblings…) Intuitively, people who’ve grown up in a large family will have been doing power-plays, coalition-building and breaking, and all sorts of tactical shenanigans since before they could talk. Perhaps the early practice gives them an edge?

I’ve never rated the emphasis placed in popular psychology on the roles of the Eldest Child, Middle Child and Youngest Child. I’m one of the 60% of my siblings who are middle children and I never noticed a particular bent towards peace-making amongst us. But maybe there’s something to it.

In any case, check out the Wyoming cowboy on page 2. I wouldn’t mind building a coalition with him.