I was talking to a friend in the trade policy world this weekend, who told me that he understands that Canada will indeed be taking a “WTO action”:http://www.cbc.ca/canada/newfoundland-labrador/story/2009/05/05/eu-seal-ban-505.html seeking remedy for the EU’s ban on the importation of seal products, imposed because of the perceived cruelty of clubbing baby seals to death so as to get their skins off intact. Apart from the innate merits of the underlying argument (which you can discuss in comments to your heart’s content), this should (unless Stephen Harper loses his job in the meantime and the new government loses interest) really, really have some interesting effects on debates over world trade and globalization. Screw the turtles – when anti-WTO protest groups are able to run full page newspaper ads with adorable baby seal cubs, they’re going to be in a truly excellent position to wage public relations war. All the more so when the Canadian counterposition (that the seals are killed humanely) turns on the legal requirement that the baby seals should have stopped blinking before the hunters start skinning them. Perhaps Stephen Harper should have applied similar attention to the current state of the Doha round – I don’t see it moving around very much at the moment, but it does still blink occasionally. I wouldn’t be surprised if this turns out to be the _coup de grace_ for trade liberalization this decade and the next (which does not, of course, mean that it would be the most important explanatory factor if trade liberalization grinds to a halt, merely one of the significant immediate causes).

This excellent piece by Jonathan Zittrain explains very nicely the potential downsides of how cloud computing is developing these days. (“Cloud” here refers to having all our data reside out there on others’ machines instead of on our own devices.)

A few quotes, but as we like to say, read the whole thing.

The crucial legacy of the personal computer is that anyone can write code for it and give or sell that code to you — and the vendors of the PC and its operating system have no more to say about it than your phone company does about which answering machine you decide to buy. Microsoft might want you to run Word and Internet Explorer, but those had better be good products or you’ll switch with a few mouse clicks to OpenOffice or Firefox.

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The iPhone’s outside apps act much more as if they’re in the cloud than on your phone: Apple can decide who gets to write code for your phone and which of those offerings will be allowed to run. The company has used this power in ways that Bill Gates never dreamed of when he was the king of Windows: Apple is reported to have censored e-book apps that contain controversial content, eliminated games with political overtones, and blocked uses for the phone that compete with the company’s products.

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When we vest our activities and identities in one place in the cloud, it takes a lot of dissatisfaction for us to move. And many software developers who once would have been writing whatever they wanted for PCs are simply developing less adventurous, less subversive, less game-changing code under the watchful eyes of Facebook and Apple.

On a related note, this post seems like an appropriate occasion to link to this great cartoon, which the artist created over 10 months ago.

England “win the second test”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/england/8159247.stm (the first time they’ve beaten the Australians at Lords since 1934), thanks to some awesome bowling from Flintoff, and some very dodgy umpiring. Open thread below.

The “New York Times Magazine”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19Vance-t.html has a long, appreciative article on Jack Vance, which seems to me to be more or less exactly right on his virtues (his wonderful prose, most especially his characters’ ornate conversational style, which confects a froth of cupidity, _amour-propre_ and sundry other ignoble motives into spun-sugar extravagances of rococo diction), while touching on some, at least of his flaws (poor ability to plot; I would also note his difficulties in creating complex characters, especially female ones). The NYT piece has a nice illustration of the former from _Eyes of the Overworld_, describing a conversation between Cugel, whose efforts to become a vendor of purportedly magical artifacts have proved unavailing, and the far more successful proprietor of the neighboring booth, who possesses many small items of great value.

bq. “ ‘I can resolve your perplexity,’ said Fianosther. ‘Your booth occupies the site of the old gibbet, and has absorbed unlucky essences. But I thought to notice you examining the manner in which the timbers of my booth are joined. You will obtain a better view from within, but first I must shorten the chain of the captive erb which roams the premises during the night.’

bq. ‘No need,’ said Cugel. ‘My interest was cursory.’ ”

Vance’s description of the foppish Ivanello, whose facial expressions run “the somewhat limited gamut between amused indifference and easy condescension,” is shorter, but has some of the same flavor.

One topic that the piece’s author doesn’t touch on is Vance’s sociological imagination, which I’ve always admired. He has a particular interest in status relations – the society of his late novel, _Night Lamp_, where everyone strives to become members of clubs of ever-increasing exclusivity, culminating in the Clam Muffins who are at the top of the social pyramid, is described in especially droll terms. But the village in _Cugel’s Saga_, where the men sit all day on pillars to soak up the purportedly healing fluxes of the upper atmosphere, while paying assiduous attention to which of them has the highest pillar, is a very nice discussion of the relative nature of status games (Cugel discerns that they don’t pay any attention to the absolute height of their pillars and uses this to bilk them). One of the novels in the _Planet of Adventure_ series (sadly, I don’t think it is the gloriously named ‘Servants of the Wankh’) has a set-piece that anticipates Mancur Olson on the distinction between stationary and roving bandits. I’ve wanted for years to write a short piece on the sociology of Jack Vance (and now that I have tenure can perhaps do the occasional thing for pure fun). Anyone have suggestions for other sociologically rich parts of the Vance corpus?

The latest “episode”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/henryporter/2009/jul/16/photography-police-view-delete-images of police harassment of street photographers is recounted by Henry Porter in the Guardian. There just seems to be an endless loop around this stuff: police officers stop/arrest/intimidate photographer, fuss in the press, lobbying of politicians, earnest denials and issuings of revised guidance by senior police, continued botherings despite guidance. Do, repeat.

What really astonishes me about this is that the alleged terrorism link is based on what seems to be a law-enforcement myth about the bad guys scoping out their targets using DSLRs and that the police are actually missing a major intelligence opportunity. Anyone who mixed with enthusiastic photographers knows that there is a bunch of people in every town and city who wander around looking at things, noticing the unusual, exploring side-streets and back alleys, and so forth. Even when we haven’t got cameras on us we’re looking, noticing, framing, making a mental note. You’d think that a smart police officer somewhere might have cottoned on to this and had the idea that cultivating good relations with such people, not acting so as to piss them off, might actually be a good idea. But no. The police mentality is to see such people as suspicious and possibly criminal and to intimidate them off the streets. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

A moment of silence for <a href=”http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2009/07/barefaced-goaway-bird.html”>Hilzoy</a>, who’s retiring from blogging this week.

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So is Tony Blair officially in the running to become President of the Council of member states of the European Union (a new job, that might or might not be quite powerful, depending on who gets it, that will come into being if the Lisbon Treaty passes)? The Financial Times “says yes”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d5313c12-7145-11de-877c-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=70662e7c-3027-11da-ba9f-00000e2511c8.html [click to continue…]

Discussion on the first post in this series went really well, so I’m carrying on. Here’s the proposed introduction.¹ Again, comments, both favorable and critical are very welcome and the best will be rewarded with a copy of Dead Ideas from New Economists (I’m back with the original title at present).

Updated As Chris Bertram points out, my second (or higher-order) hand attribution of the “Thesis, antithesis, synthesis” triad to Hegel was incorrect. As with Mundell’s impossible trinity, these terms weren’t used by Hegel (apparently they were borrowed from Fichte by Hegel’s popularisers). I’ve changed the text a bit and added a bit more about Marx and idealism/materialism, still trying to keep it at a level that will be good for a broad audience and avoid the risk of bringing in yet more errors. There’s lots more in the thread I will take into account in later parts of the book, coming soon. Thanks everyone, and keep the comments coming,

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A DC-based friend wrote today to say that he had finally abandoned the Washington Post, a paper he used to really like. The final straw was this piece allegedly written by Sarah Palin, a substance-free rant claiming that a cap-and-trade scheme for CO2 emissions would be economically ruinous. But much more damaging is the observation that, if this piece had come out (with the obvious stylistic variations) under the byline of George Will, Robert Samuelson, David Broder or any of the other rightwing/Villager hacks on the Post op-ed page, it would have slipped by without any real notice. The sooner this insult to the memory of Katherine Graham and Ben Bradlee¹ goes out of business, the better.

¹ Yes, I know Ben Bradlee is still alive, and even still associated with the paper. But his memory will be forever associated with the Post in its glory days, and not with the travesty produced by Fred Hiatt and Katharine Weymouth.

Annie Hall on the Hill.

This is the first in what I hope will be an extensive series of extracts from my forthcoming bestseller Dead Ideas from Live Economists ¹. I’m inviting comments and suggestions from readers, with free copies of the book for the ten best. To avoid cluttering the home page, the substance will be over the fold, with only a short intro like this for each post.

Update The discussion has been very helpful, though a lot has more to do with what will come later. In this section, I’ve changed the para about Keynes speculative career a little.
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That’s “a headline”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8147890.stm at the BBC. So it would seem that they do rather less damage to the UK economy tham the various banking groups that needed rescuing ….

Phew! England (and Wales) “just about got away with it”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/england/8146497.stm despite Pietersen’s stupidity and arrogance. The really big difference from 2005 (so far) is the change in feel caused by Warne’s retirement. Four years ago, Warne was a feral presence, spooking the England batsmen with his cunning and aggression. Of course, Ponting was captain back then too, but this series has seen him come to the fore: planning, homework, probing the England weaknesses. Collingwood was terrific today, but, generally England were brainless. Still, no harm done yet and four tests to play to win back the Ashes.

I haven’t blogged much in the last months — I had too much on my plate and blogging is an easy thing to drop if there’s much more work than can be squeezed into 24 hours a day. A few times something came on my path that I felt I had to blog about, and now, in this academic-off-season with more time (or rather: fewer urgent deadlines) the challenge will be to remember all those things that I felt were worthwhile throwing into the Blogosphere.

Here’s one. A few weeks back I joined “the Friends of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy”:https://leibniz.stanford.edu/friends/ (SEP). For philosophers, but also for other academics or thinkers/writers/readers who sometimes want to check out a philosophical theory, term, subfield or canonical thinker, this is a true gift. I use it in my teaching and have so far only had positive remarks from students. The SEP contains high quality refereed entries, generally well-written and enlightening, and always freely available to anybody on Earth with access to the internet. Anybody supporting the Open Access movement, or anybody seriously concerned about educational equality of opportunity on a global level, should therefore support the SEP if they can (the membership fees are $5 for students and $10 or 25 for professionals – much less than the fees of most academic associations). So now there is an easy way to support the SEP, and you’ll get something in return for your membership – nicely formatted PDFs of the entries. I hope many thousands worldwide will join, and that the people working hard at creating and maintaining the SEP will take it as a big ‘thank you’ for their work.