A few commenters have complained that they misread my post title, below, as concerned with Prediction Markets in Republican Spain, which would have been a far more inventive topic. We apologize for the inconvenience but have nothing to add to prior work in this field.

But I have added a new category, ‘the water pitcher is still broken’, for future usage. (I expect that discussions of the Republican party, in the months to come, may fall naturally under this heading.)

I’m reading an interesting book, Eye For An Eye, by William Ian Miller [amazon]. (I don’t know anything about him. I just grabbed this off the shelf.) It’s a discussion of lex talionis style justice systems – a somewhat unsystematic ‘antitheory’ of justice, the author styles it. Lots of quoting from Old Norse stuff and Babylonian stuff and ancient what-not. Very colorful. Here’s a bit that’s interesting, in a subsection on “Paying Gods in Bodies and Blood”. Maybe Kieran will have something to say.
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Two weeks ago, May 1-3, McGill and the Centre de Recherche en Ethique de L’Universite de Montreal (sorry about my pronunciation) co-sponsored a conference on “Liberal Neutrality: A Re-Evaluation.” Papers are here, and my notes are below. Take this for what it is – impressions and imperfect summaries from an audience member. (I was there for the first two days, but not the third.)
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BBC news reports that a bust of Julius Caesar has been found in the Rhone. It’s a rare (unique?) contemporary representation, and none too flattering. Who knew there was a Roman ‘realist’ style?

It’s driving me crazy because he reminds me of someone. On first glance, he looks like a Ferengi. It’s certainly a far less noble countenance than your average Julius Caesar. But on second and subsequent glances, he becomes very endearing, and not just in a Short Man Syndrome kind of way. (Dear God, he doesn’t look like Nicolas Sarkozy, does he?) You can really see that this needy little jerk had the smarts to survive Sulla and the gumption to cross the Rubicon. Well worth a look.

Way back in January I speculated about how Republicans would spin McCain as their candidate, given the violent opposition to him as ‘unconservative’, a maverick liberal. I proposed a few possibilities, of which the first has been more or less borne out: McCain as unconservative is down the memory hole. I think we all pretty much expected that, although it will be interesting to see whether, as McCain is forced to try to swing towards the middle in the general, any of that is dredged back up again. Will he be undermined by his own base? (I doubt it.)

But one thing I’ve noticed, in the months since, is that – in an electoral environment in which Republican stock could hardly be lower, and Democratic stock is looking good – there is a great deal of clutching at the brass ring of ‘conservatism’ on the right. No real urgency to claim the mantle of ‘liberalism’ on the left. Republicans are sure they want to be ‘conservative’, above all, even though many admit they aren’t sure what that would even mean at present. And even though they are standing behind a candidate who was, until recently, not a conservative, in their eyes. They have a meta-desire for there to be such a thing as conservatism. [click to continue…]

It’s regularly stated that the size of the average (new) American home has doubled since 1950, and implied that this increase has continued fairly steadily over the intervening decades. This seems a bit surprising given that (on standard measures) real wages for large groups of workers have not increased since the 1970s. Some, but not all, of the story can be explained by the fact that a fixed stock like housing takes a long time to adjust and so would continue to improve in response to the big increase in both income and equality that took place from the 40s to the 70s. And of course, the top quintile of the income distribution is doing well, and they have a big influence on the market.

But that still leaves a puzzle I think. Here’s one little piece. As far as I can tell, the statistical basis for the statement comes from the National Association of Home Builders and compares the houses being built today with those built by Levitt and others in the 1950s. But not everyone lives in houses. To get the full story you’d need to take account of apartments (I haven’t looked at this).

Even more important, though, are manufactured homes (aka trailers). There are about 8 million of these up from essentially zero in the 1950s. They constitute about 8 per cent of the housing stock now (housing around 19 million people), which must imply a substantially larger proportion of homes built each year. Although they can be quite large, most are a lot smaller than the average home built on-site. Taking manufactured homes into account would substantially lower the size of the average new home. It would also fit the income data, showing rising inequality, a lot better.

Cato Unbound is “currently carrying an interesting contribution from Leif Wenar”:http://www.cato-unbound.org/2008/05/12/leif-wenar/we-all-own-stolen-goods/ on how to combat the “resource curse”. Leif proposes a two-stage strategy for attacking the problem of kleptocrats who use the state monopoly of violence to extract resource revenues whilst their population lives in poverty. The first step is to prosecute (in American, and presumably also European courts) traders in goods stolen from peoples by their rulers. The second step is to go after stolen natural resources that get incorporated into manufactured goods elsewhere (say in China) and then imported into the US. Here Wenar advocates a tariff on those goods, the proceeds of which would be paid into a fund to be held for the benefit of the people whose resources have been stolen, with the fund to be disbursed to them when their government meets minimally acceptable standards.

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Leiter “has linked already”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2008/05/geuss-on-rort-1.html , but I guess that not everyone who reads CT also reads Leiter, and it would be a great pity if anyone were to miss “Raymond Geuss’s reminiscences of Richard Rorty”:http://www.bu.edu/arion/Geuss.htm .

Australia is well known as a sophisticated modern nation, prominent in scientific and cultural endeavors of all kinds, and not characterized by marsupials in the main street, top paddock or other incongruous locations. That’s why I hasten to forestall the rumors that Western Australian Opposition leader Troy Buswell may have done something inappropriate with a quokka. Sad to say, all the other rumors are true.

While most attention has been focused on the never-ending story of the Democratic presidential primaries, the Republicans have just lost a seemingly safe seat in a Mississippi special election, following two earlier losses including that of former House Speaker Dennis Hastert. As this CNN story says, this raises the prospect of a wipeout in November. The result is consistent with steadily declining Republican affiliation and massive rejection of Bush (who’s reached all-time lows in several polls recently). McCain is still managing to avoid much of the stench associated with his party, but it seems to me this will be a lot harder for him in the context of a general election, where I imagine he will be expected to campaign on behalf of vulnerable Republicans.

I don’t know, though, whether there’s a common pattern of upsets in special elections. Incumbent governments often do badly in such elections in Australia, since it provides the opportunity for a largely consequence-free protest vote, but this logic doesn’t seem to apply in the US context. I’d be interested in any thoughts from readers

Via Tina at Scatterplot, you must buy Wicked Anomie’s terrific Blind Reviewer Voodoo Doll. Designed for those moments when you need more than just a brisk letter to the journal editor explaining that your reviewer is unclear on a few points.

This 9-inch doll (without hair) is lovingly crafted within the anomie studio and arrives finished and ready to be put to good use. This doll comes unstuffed, so that you can enjoy the cathartic act of shredding your own offending documents and stuffing them inside the doll. Finishing instructions and extra yarn included.

Proceeds go to fund designer’s trip to Annual Conference. Crooked Timber is not responsible for any stabbing pains you may experience in light of purchases encouraged by this post.

While at a conference in Germany over the weekend, I was initially quite chuffed by the greeting on my hotel-room TV:

But I quickly learned I am quite unable to compete on this front:

Somewhat more substantively, the conference, on norms and values, was attended by a bunch of interesting philosophers and political science types of a generally soft rat-choice disposition. As it happens, this week Aaron Swartz is writing about Jon Elster’s recent book, Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. Aaron likes the book a lot. I haven’t read it, but now I’m curious to do so. Elster’s early work laid out an ambitious agenda for social science and its critical edge did a lot to kill off some styles of social explanation that were prevalent at the time. But then the prospects for achieving the more positive side of the research program seemed to recede in the face of efforts to achieve it, to the point where Elster became highly critical of work that might well have been inspired by Ulysses and the Sirens or Sour Grapes. The most recent book seems to be a comprehensive expression of late-Elsterian pessimism about the possibility of a general science of social explanation.

No-one will be surprised to know that I admire Richard Rothstein, especially given how often I seem to parrot his arguments myself. Some readers may be more surprised that I also admire Frederick Hess (of the AEI no less); in fact one of my minor betes noir is the frequency with which NPR, when it wants a right winger to comment on an education policy issue, goes to Heritage or Cato, rather than to the AEI who have someone on staff who is a genuine expert, and smart with it. (If you want to understand why I like him, read Common Sense School Reform, which is typical of his work: lots of well-informed analysis and imaginative critique, peppered with just enough free-market ideology to signal that he’s firmly on the right but not enough to obscure the quality thinking). Both are somewhat skeptical of mainstream school improvement rhetoric, with Rothstein emphasizing out-of-school interventions, and Hess emphasizing the need for reforming school governance and organisational structures. If I had any power at all I’d force all public school officials ranked assistant principal or above, as well as all Education PhD students, to read Rothstein’s Class and Schools and Hess’s Common Sense School Reform. So I’ve always been curious what a Rothstein-Hess debate would be like and, to my delight, now I know: smart, sensible, and bereft of “invented artificial points of disagreement” (as Rothstein puts it). Cato Unbound commissioned Rothstein to write a 25th anniversary comment on A Nation At Risk, and recruited Hess as a critic. The other critics are not so interesting (partly because in order to criticize Rothstein they have to misinterpret him, which his critics frequently do, both from the right and the left). To help you out, the correct order of reading is Rothstein, Hess, Rothstein, Hess, Rothstein, Hess. Cato Unbound is often worth reading, and none more than this one.

I was pretty much determined to let the question of Ralph Miliband and Pol Pot lie. Blog spats are generally pretty unpleasant and tend to degenerate into a mush of claim, counterclaim and obfuscation. But “along comes Brad DeLong”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/05/in-which-we-add.html , of whom I’ve generally had a good opinion in the past. Unfortunately Brad lets his rage and disgust overcome his critical faculties whenever certain key figures come into view (Paul Sweezy, Gunther Grass and Noam Chomsky, to name but three).

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