There’s been a “serious”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2009/01/the_best_jobs_and_the_worst.html “debate”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2009/01/ivory_tower_sexytime.html at the “other place where I blog”:https://www.crookedtimber.org over whether academia in general, and political science in particular is a sexy profession. I’m glad to say that we actually have Real Social Scientific Data¹ that we can bring to bear on this topic. In 2006, James Felton, Peter T. Koper, John Mitchell and Michael Stinson “conducted research”:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=918283 that sought to establish, _inter alia_ how perceived hotness of professors affected their RateMyProfessors evaluations for teaching quality. As part of this exercise, Felton et al. ranked (Table 2 in their paper) the relative hotness quotients of 36 different academic disciplines. My estimable colleague John Sides prepared a nice graph of the Felton et al. data (see below).

Three important research findings leap out from this picture.

First – that academic disciplines are, without exception, more ‘not’ than ‘hot.’ When adjusted positive and negative hotness scores are totted up against each other, no discipline does better than – 0.062 (Languages). Thus, the main hypothesis of “Careerbuilder et al. 2009”:http://msn.careerbuilder.com/Article/MSN-1737-Job-Info-and-Trends-10-Sexy-Careers-You-Never-Thought-Of/?sc_extcmp=JS_1737_hotmail1&SiteId=cbmsnhm41737&ArticleID=1737&GT1=23000&cbRecursionCnt=1&cbsid=3af4ed160fc34141a4e6546d5cc61da3-284680908-R9-4 is decisively refuted.

Second, the above proviso aside, political scientists are pretty damn hot in comparative terms. We rank as number 5, trailing only languages, law, religion and criminal justice. From eyeballing the data, it looks as though there is a minor discontinuity right after political science, where the hotness lurches down a notch, and another, more significant one between psychology (at number 10) and finance (at number 11).

Third, economists are, without any jot, tittle, scintilla or iota of doubt or ambiguity, the notties rather than the hotties of the social sciences (coming 30th out of 36). Tough luck, John. Sociologists are sixth (heh), philosophers come in at number 9 (which is a perfectly respectable score, I suppose), and English professors are middlin’, at number 12 in the ranking.

(An earlier version of this post appeared at “The Monkey Cage”:http://www.themonkeycage.org)

¹ Real Social Scientific Data is a term of art here, meaning ‘statistics that are sufficiently entertaining and gratifying² that I really don’t want to look at them too hard.’ This understanding of data is very commonly applied in the public sphere of learned debate although it is, perhaps surprisingly, rarely spelled out in explicit terms. I note in passing that some commenter at the Monkey Cage wants to control for differences in sex ratios between professors and students and similar irrelevant persnickets. All I want to say to this pedant (whom I suspect to be a jealous chemistry professor or denizen of a similarly low-ranked discipline) is _political science is number 5! Suck on it._

² In a collective rather than individual sense (I don’t imagine that I’m pulling my discipline’s score up).

Disclaimer: oddly, given my interests, I’ve never read much G.A. Cohen before picking up Rescuing Justice and Equality for this little event. (I understand his friends call him ‘Gerry’, but I won’t presume, on such slight acquaintance.) This matters only because my reading of the book is still preliminary and a bit scattershot. I’m not sure I get it. Also, I typed this post out like a maniac, just for the exercise of it. Also, I’m writing this post without access to my Rawls books, which I forgot to bring home, so I can’t quote. Well, I’m sorry about that. So stuff I say that is just plain wrong should be corrected in comments, without anger if you please. And we’ll just do our best, shall we? Also, I’m about to go on vacation for a few days, but I promised to participate. Also, I’m about to embark on an internet-free weekend getaway. Hence will not be very helpful in comments myself. Best I can do.) [click to continue…]

As promised, this is the first in a series of weekly postings on G.A. Cohen’s new _Rescuing Justice and Equality_. I say “new”, but much of the book isn’t all that new at all and consists of the republication of older material with which the political philosophy community is already familiar. I should also mention that there’s a conference on the book in Oxford on Friday and Saturday, which I’ll be attending, so my contribution in future weeks will, no doubt, be enriched by that. But for now it has not been.

[click to continue…]

As James Surowiecki points out here, my views on what’s entailed in bank nationalisation differ significantly from those of Paul Krugman. [1] Krugman, like quite a few other advocates of nationalisation, has in mind models like the Resolution Trust Corporation and the Swedish nationalizations of the 1990s, where the government took insolvent institutions into temporary public ownership, liquidated the bad assets and returned them to the private sector. These solutions worked well because the global financial system as a whole was solvent and liquid, even though some sectors (US S&Ls, Swedish banks) were not.

What’s needed in the present case is not only to fix the problems of individual banks, problems on a much bigger scale than have been seen before (even in the leadup to the Great Depression, the financial sector played a smaller role in the economy than in the recent bubble), but to reconstruct a failed global financial system. It’s kind of like rewiring an electrical system in near-meltdown, while keeping the power on (this is possible, but tricky and dangerous). The job is likely to be much slower than the rescues mentioned above, and the institutions that emerge from it will be very different from those that went in.

But, contra Surowiecki this time, this only strengthens the argument for nationalisation. Financial restructuring is going to be a huge challenge, involving both a radical redesign of national regulations and the construction of an almost completely new global financial architecture. To attempt this task while leaving the banks under the control of discredited managers nominally responsible to shareholders whose equity has, in the absence of massive transfers from taxpayers, been wiped out by bad debts, seems like doing live electrical work while wearing a blindfold and standing in a pool of water.

fn1. Krugman is well-known for being right when lots of others have been wrong, so take this into account in assessing the arguments.

Chief Justice Roberts misplaces an adverb; Obama realizes this, pauses to give him the opportunity to correct the error; Roberts realizes what he has said, corrects himself; Obama nods to acknowledge the correction, smiles, and repeats what Roberts originally said rather than drag things out further.

The text in the Constitution is, “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Did your kids watch the inauguration at school today? My eldest did (middle school). I’m pretty sure the same school did not have them watch either of the previous two inaugurations. I’m fine with that, not because I am an enthusiast for the new President, but because the inauguration of a black President has a rather different meaning. By “fine with that” I mean something like, it seems ok to me in a non-ideal context; I’d much sooner that they spent their time studying. But, my daughter relayed to me the comments of one of my fellow soccer moms, “If they watched Brett Favre retire, they’d better let them watch Barak Obama become President”. Brett Favre’s “retirement” was, apparently, shown in every single classroom in the school except my daughter’s (her teacher suddenly rocketed in my estimation).

Mike Kazin in an email (published with his permission):

Perhaps you gotta be steeped in left history to get excited by this or be Joe Klein– But the only time I broke down in tears watching the big concert today was when Pete Seeger, all 89 years of him, started singing the two “radical” verses of This Land Is Your Land that almost always get cut when the song is sung in public, or in countless elementary schools across the nation (pasted below). I bet Pete was thinking, “This is the way Woody wrote it and so I’m going to make sure the whole country hears it.” How long before some right-wing blogger mentions that this song was written by a member of the
Communist Party — whose best buddy and fellow comrade made it to the Lincoln Memorial to bring it all back home?

When you add this to all the encomia to King and to Rosa Parks and to Lincoln the Emancipator– well, the left’s definition of patriotism is now dominant– only six years after anti-war posters reading, “Peace is Patriotic” sounded absurdly marginal. Change I can believe in…

“As I was walkin’ – I saw a sign there
And that sign said – no tress passin’
But on the other side …. it didn’t say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!

Chorus

In the squares of the city – In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office – I see my people
And some are grumblin’ and some are wonderin’
If this land’s still made for you and me.”

All reasonable^TM commentators now agree that nationalisation of big banks like Citigroup, Bank of America and Royal Bank of Scotland must take place soon, explicitly or otherwise. As I said at just before the second (failed) Citigroup bailout) banks like Citi are not only too big to fail, they’re too big to rescue with any of the half-measures that have been tried so far.

It’s obvious that “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well It were done quickly” and cleanly, without any dodges designed to hide the reality of nationalisation. The longer these zombie institutions are allowed to run on public money, but under the existing discredited managers, legally answerable to the private shareholders, the bigger the costs the public will ultimately face.

Nationalisation would resolve a lot of the difficult questions around ideas such as the creation of a “bad bank” to hold all the toxic assets accumulated during the boom. That’s critical as long as policy is aimed at turning the troubled banks around while keeping them private, but it’s unimportant once all the debts and assets have been taken on to the public balance sheet. Once the big banks are nationalized, the government can take its time salvaging whatever assets are still worthwhile and preparing for the reconstruction of a private banking system under a completely new system of regulation, a task that is likely to take several years.

The big question is, what should governments do with the banks once they own them? Clearly, there’s an imperative for banks to start lending again, but there is no benefit in making yet more bad loans. And, right at the moment, credit-worthy borrowers are hard to find. The immediate concern must be to ensure that commercially sound loans aren’t being constrained by the need to bolster bank balance sheets. Then, governments need to consider whether some form of support for loans, such as interest rate subsidies or guarantees (secured against assets seen as having a long-term value that exceeds their current market value) should be part of the policy response to the recession. Such policies have plenty of risk associated with them, but the risks are mitigated a bit if the guarantor and the bank owner are ultimately the same (in this case, the public).

Obviously, this is not the kind of question economists have spent a lot of time thinking about until fairly recently. I don’t imagine many of us would have expected, a year ago, to be reading the Wall Street Journal castigating Henry Paulson and the Bush Administration for the (partial) nationalisation of the Bank of America. No doubt plenty of mistakes will be made. But there is no time for leisurely reflection here. As in 1933, the next hundred days will make a big difference, one way or another.

My 4-year old iMac is on it’s last legs. The DVD drive no longer works and, although everything else is fine and functional, it’s just plain slow. I have the money, so what’s the problem?

It’s this: everyone was hoping for a new iMac to be announced at Macworld, but no dice. It’s been a long time since a new iMac appeared and it seems certain we’ll have something exciting by June at the latest. But I don’t really want to wait. I’m morally certain I could CAUSE something new and exciting to be announced and rapidly rolled out, by the simple act of buying one of the old ones. I doubt very much it would take more than a week. This would, of course, be intensely annoying to me. But everyone else would be very happy. They could buy whatever the happy shiny new thing turns out to be. (At the very least, they could buy the old thing that I just bought for significantly less than I paid.) So: should I let the knowledge that I will be bringing joy to millions of other mac users, in the form of a hot new iMac, tip the scales in favor of buying the old one right now? Should I buy altruistically, in effect? Bonus question: if I knew that by throwing a fat man off a bridge in front of an oncoming trolley I could make Apple release a new iMac, would it be ok to do it? So long as I didn’t get caught?

What do you think the odds are that Apple will 1) drop their prices or 2) roll out a new iMac in the next couple months?

“John Crowley”:http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/ has a lovely essay on Thomas Disch in the new “Boston Review”:http://www.bostonreview.net. The essay isn’t on the WWW yet (I’ll link to it when/if it does appear), but I wanted to quote this bit about Disch’s _334_ as soon as I read it:

… why did he need the scaffoldings of futurist fiction? We might guess that if he were beginning a writing career now, with dozens of writers taking up and inventing personal worlds in irrealistic modes and nobody minding, he wouldn’t need science fiction. But I think that he was always haunted – and vivified – by the awful and the apocalyptic. In creating the world of _334_, he had the grand sweep of decline and fall, featuring numberless populations and quick-time disasters, that would allow him to admit a competing tendency to generosity and humility in dealing with individual hurt and longing. Posit a future that is cruel enough to be convincingly the future of this bad present – a hard shell for the tender snail of self – and you can bring out from it what matters most to you: the shortened version of things in the world.

When I wrote an “irritated piece”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/12/16/they-bellow-til-were-deaf/ in response to Benjamin Kunkel’s “silly essay”:http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=1308 last month, I mentioned _334_ as a counter-example to Kunkel’s claims. But Crowley’s summation of Disch (perhaps because it isn’t a polemic or counter-polemic, instead being a sympathetic analysis of a particular aesthetic) says what I was trying to say far better. There isn’t any necessary reason why a particular set of literary tropes and themes _have_ to overwhelm character in dystopian or apocalyptic novels. Instead, as _334_ exemplifies, you can use the tensions between dystopia and the everyday lives of people as a source of art. Which is what _334_ does so well, and why it is a minor masterpiece.

I was on C-Span’s _Washington Journal_ this morning, talking about my “piece”:http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=can_partisanship_save_citizenship for the _American Prospect_ on partisanship and organizing. Anyone who’s interested can watch it “here”:http://www.c-spanarchives.org/library/index.php?main_page=product_video_info&products_id=283429-4 (from about 1.01.15 for half an hour or so).

With Bush making his farewell, I thought I’d make the rounds of right-wing blogs to see how they were rising to the occasion. I wondered how low the limbo bar of low standards could go. I was a bit disappointed to start at Red State, see a post entitled “Will the Left Accept That They Were Wrong Wrong About Bush?” and come up with an instant winner. What is the author going to praise Bush for, you ask? “We stand here watching Bush kindly say his goodbyes and we see George W. Bush stepping down like every American president before him (well, except the ones that died in office, of course). Even Darth Cheney is packing up for his last ride into the sunset.”

Bush didn’t stage a coup. (Well, there are a few hours left. But it does seem that he won’t.)

That’s it.

“So, will each of these half sentient, dillweeds fess up that they were wrong? Will they turn to their fellow dillweed, whack-jonse friends and say: “Ya know, I have to hand it to Bush. He was an alright guy for following the Constitution and going home to Texas like he’s supposed ta.”

Only time will tell.

Melissa Schwartzberg at Columbia and I have an essay in the new issue of “Ethics and International Affairs”:http://www.cceia.org/resources/journal/index.html on the ways in which norms structure majority-minority relations on Wikipedia and the Daily Kos. The journal has made it “freely available online here”:http://www.cceia.org/resources/journal/22_4/essays/002.html.

Building on case studies of Wikipedia and the Daily Kos, we make three basic claims. First, we argue that different kinds of rules shape relations between members of the majority and of the minority in these communities in important and consequential ways. Second, we argue that the normative implications of these consequences differ between online communities that seek to generate knowledge, and which should be tolerant of diversity in points of view, and online communities that seek to generate political action, which need less diversity in order to be politically efficacious. Third, we note that an analysis of the normative desirability of this or that degree of tolerance needs to be tempered with an awareness that the actual rules through which minority relations are structured are likely the consequence of power relations rather than normative considerations.

The other lead essay is “Michael Walzer on democracy promotion”:http://www.cceia.org/resources/journal/22_4/essays/001.html, which should keep Daniel entertained …

Hollywood is poised to make a Tintin movie, apparently, so we have two recent think pieces about comics’ greatest boy reporter in plus-fours. Matthew Parris declares that he’s obviously gay. The Economist somehow manages to take an exquisitely Economistesque line, getting digs in at the French while backhandedly praising Americans for their peculiar issues, while allowing that the Brits are probably somewhere in the middle. Here is the concluding paragraph:

Tintin has never fallen foul of the 1949 French law on children’s literature [making it illegal to portray cowardice positively]. He is not a coward, and the albums do not make that vice appear in a favourable light. But he is a pragmatist, albeit a principled one. Perhaps Anglo-Saxon audiences want something more from their fictional heroes: they want them imbued with the power to change events, and inflict total defeat on the wicked. Tintin cannot offer something so unrealistic. In that, he is a very European hero.

The Parris piece is mock-serious, otherwise I would have to ask: is he serious? But he sort of seems serious, so I’m wondering whether, on some level, he thinks Hergé really meant to imply that in the world of the fiction (oh, never mind, I’d just wander off into philosophy nonsense about true-in-the-world-of-the-fiction. Parris is obviously taking the piss.) So the question we’ve got to ask is: are Tintin and Haddock sex jokes likelier to be funnier, on average, than the corresponding Batman and Robin jokes, which we have certainly all heard by now? (Obviously it’s much funnier to make jokes about Tintin and Haddock being Batman and Robin.) But Parris makes some interesting observations. What do you think?

Let’s turn the question around: are there actually such things as old-fashioned adventure books for boys that don’t seem vaguely campy, hence homoerotic? Because all you need is: no women. (Except for mom, maybe.) A bunch of males doing things together that don’t quite make sense, but it’s all very urgent. The male characters talking funny.

I do concede that the Tintin books are far more exclusively male-populated that even the standards of healthy boys’ adventure would seem to demand.

One thing The Economist claims, in passing, which I’m not really sure about, is that Tintin is almost unknown in America. Obviously you have to judge by the standards of comics not, say, Paris Hilton. If you show the average American a picture of Tintin, will they not know who this kid is? I’ve have noticed that Tintin is oddly missing from some ‘best comics’ lists. Wizard’s list is hopelessly capes&tights, so no surprise there. But here’s another. No Tintin. [UPDATE: nope. He’s there, after all. I missed him because I searched for his name spelled correctly – Hergé – rather than minus the accent. Ahem.] I read Tintin as a child. Didn’t lots of other people?