Tim Lambert and I have a piece in the online edition of Prospect, defending Rachel Carson against the tobacco/DDT lobby. It was cut down for publication from a much longer article, which I’ve appended over the fold. The article shows how the legend that Carson caused the banning of DDT, just as it was about to wipe out malaria, was invented and popularised by tobacco lobbyists, most notably Steven Milloy, who wanted to mount a flank attack on tobacco’s archenemy, the World Health Organization.
When I was 5, we moved from liberal Dun Laoghaire, Co. Dublin to rural Cashel, Co. Tipperary, and from a free and easy Montessori School to the local convent/Christian Brothers. I’d been reading on my own for a couple of years already (mostly because I was jealous that Henry already could) and I’m not sure I’d really ever heard of the alphabet. The first week in Senior Infants at my new school, we started memorising and chanting our ABCs. I was horrified. I vividly remember counting up the remaining years till I would be finished with school, and it was 14, almost three times longer than my life to date. I’m not sure if I cried then, but now when I think of my little 5 year old self and the bleak and largely tortuous future set out before me, I almost could. [click to continue…]
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I’ve posted “before”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/02/05/delivering-people-to-the-labour-market/ about the gradgrindesque policy priorities of Britain’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (the main public funding body for the humanities in the UK). My colleague, the philosopher of science James Ladyman, who has been waging something of a campaign on the subject, “has written a piece”:http://stormbreaking.blogspot.com/2008/05/ahrcs-funding-decisions.html for a blog dedicated to resisting the “marketization and instrumentalization of higher education”.
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The BBC has a feature on my friend, the philosopher Havi Carel, and the way in which philosophy has helped her come to terms with the diagnosis of an incurable disease. Havi has a book _Illness_ (US, UK) forthcoming in September, in which she draws on her own experience and tries to give a philosophical account of the meaning and significance of illness.
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People have rightly suggested that I post about events before they happen, instead of after, so those interested and able can attend. This is one of those weeks when those curious about the social aspects of IT have some wonderful options.
On Wednesday will be the start of the Berkman@10 celebrations at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. Yes, Berkman has been around for a decade and they’ve really made their mark on the field (or several fields is more precise). Folks from all over will be coming together in Cambridge, Massachusetts to celebrate a decade of exciting and important work with a look at some of the most pressing questions and challenges ahead (see the schedule for details). The event will culminate in the Berkman 10th Anniversary Gala Dinner and Awards Presentation.
Unfortunately, I’ll miss a part of the Berkman celebrations, but with good reason. On Thursday evening, I will be moderating an exciting event here at Northwestern. We’re fortunate to host Cass Sunstein and Siva Vaidhyanathan for a symposium on “Social Networks and the Good Society”.* It’s free and open to the public so feel free to come by.
But wait, there is more! This Wednesday and Thursday, Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy will be hosting a workshop on The Future of News, also open to the public.
I may be missing others, but these three events are enough to get your head spinning. I’m excited to be taking part in two of them. I recall seeing one more conflict for the week, but I can’t find info. If you know of other related events, feel free to add.
[*] At which point can people be assumed to be sufficiently well-known that they do not require a link upon mention? I’d think this may be such an instance, but I decided to include pointers to more info just in case.
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By Kathy G.
I’ve been remiss in replying to this post by Megan McArdle, but today I’ve finally gotten around to it. This will be a really long post, so don’t say I didn’t warn ya.
McArdle basically argues two things: that 1) the minimum wage has a disemployment effect, and 2) that monopsony is not a persuasive model for the labor market (or at least for the low-wage retail sector). First I’ll deal with the evidence on the minimum wage. McArdle mentions the famous 1994 Alan Krueger and David Card study which looked at the impact of a 1992 increase in the minimum wage on employment in fast food establishments in New Jersey. Krueger and Card found that in that case, contrary to what standard theory predicts, the increase in the minimum wage did not decrease employment.
Very reasonable criticisms of that study have been made. McArdle summarizes:
The original study was a phone study; when another study asked for actual payroll records, they found the same result the standard model would predict: fast food employment dropped in New Jersey. Additionally, as Kevin Murphy has pointed out, the survey started long after employers knew that a minimum wage hike was coming–he compares it to assessing a midnight curfew by comparing the number of teenagers on the street at 11:59 to the number on the street at 12:30.
In response, Krueger and Card did another study that looked at the impact of that same minimum wage increase on employment in fast food establishments in New Jersey. To counter the previous criticisms from economists like Kevin Murphy who said that their data was problematic and that they’d got the timing wrong, this time they used a more reliable data source (employer data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics) and looked at the data over a longer time period. And guess what? This new analysis confirmed their original findings: the increase in the minimum wage did not lead to a decrease in employment.
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It’s unclear whether we are bound for a Post-American World in the near future, but it seems pretty clear that we are bound for a world in which the US dollar is no longer the unique ‘reserve currency’. The combination of chronically large trade and budget deficits and willingness of the US monetary authorities to tolerate sustained inflation means that decisions by national central banks to hold US dollar reserves are now driven by a desire to preserve the existing order rather than by calculations of risk and return. In the long run this can’t be sustained.
If the US dollar can no longer satisfy the requirements of a reserve currency, what are the alternatives? I can see two possibilities.
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By Kathy G.
It’s ironic that this James Surowiecki piece about Toyota’s success came out this week, given the fact that the the latest financial report from Toyota (via Megan McArdle) shows a substantial decline in profits. The decline is being blamed on “a stronger yen and soaring raw-materials costs.” Truck sales in the U.S. have also been down.
Whatever problems Toyota is currently having, Surowiecki points out that Toyota has “long been the auto industry’s most profitable and innovative firm” and that this year it may become the sales leader, as well. What have been the secrets to Toyota’s success? Surowiecki points to innovation, and in particular, Toyota’s vision of “innovation as an incremental process, in which the goal is not to make huge, sudden leaps but, rather, to make things better on a daily basis.”
Crucial this philosophy is
the idea that innovation is the province of an elect few; instead, it’s taken to be an everyday task for which everyone is responsible. According to Matthew E. May, the author of a book about the company called “The Elegant Solution,” Toyota implements a million new ideas a year, and most of them come from ordinary workers.
Though other companies have tried to duplicate Toyota’s techniques, they have had limited success, due in large part to the fact that “most companies are still organized in a very top-down manner.”
Though none of Toyota’s North American plants are unionized, their factories in Japan are, as are many of their factories elsewhere in the world. And Japan is where Toyota developed its innovative managerial techniques. The right-wing argument about unions is that “work rules” and lack of flexibility will inevitably stifle innovation and lower productivity. In fact, Ann Coulter’s arm candy loves to make this point, over and over. But Toyota’s success would appear to contradict this theory. And in fact, there is much evidence that contradicts the old conservative myths about the subject.
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I’ve just noticed that the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill which got royal asset yesterday (btw, enthusiasts of necrophiliac porn, better hide it under the mattress[1]), contains provisions to make it an offence to incite hatred on grounds of sexual orientation. I am in general in favour of this, in the same qualified way in which I was in favour of the parallel provisions of the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006[2]. The reason being that the specific laws in question aren’t really particularly material restrictions on free speech (as with the 2006 Act, the current law on homophobia has an explicit clause explaining that merely critical or mocking speech is not incitement to hatred), and that the UK really doesn’t need any of the antisocial behaviour that is an inevitable consequence of incitements to hatred.
It does strike me, however, that two years ago, there was an awful lot of public protest against the RRHA06. Not the least of this came from comedians like Stephen Fry and Rowan Atkinson, who were making the point that mockery and criticism of religion were an important part of comedy and that they felt their right to free expression was under threat[3].
One doesn’t have to be an aficionado of Mr Humphries or Larry Grayson to be aware that British comedians have at least as much of a professional interest in the mockery of gays as they do in the mockery of religions, but if there was a big comedians’ protest against this one I missed it. In fact, I don’t recall the free speech lobby really raising much of a stir at all; Index on Censorship didn’t so much as mention it (Update: thanks Padraig Reidy in comments, they did mention it, once, last year), though they did take an interest in the religious hatred bill, and they are aware of the current Criminal Justice Bill.
This sort of thing is unfortunate; I’m sure nobody involved intended it this way[5], but to an outsider it would certainly look as if the 2006 kerfuffle had very little to do with freedom of speech, except in as much as it could be picked up as a handy stick to beat the Muslims with. And given that, I bet it looks that way to British Muslims too. Every time we try to have a sensible discussion of the subject of hate speech, it gets much more heated than it has any reason to be, and a lot of the reason for this, in my opinion, is that the free speech issue has got tangled up with a whole load of other questions about security and immigration, to nobody’s benefit.
[1] Also bestiality porn, and as far as I can see Plaid Cymru didn’t so much as raise an objection.
[2] In comments to that thread, my view of calls from the gay lobby for parallel protection was something along the lines of “tough luck”, because I didn’t think that violent homophobia was enough of a social problem to warrant a restriction on free speech. I now think this was a mistake, partly because when you put the point as bluntly as that it’s obviously callous, and partly because the overwhelming evidence of the experience of the 2006 Act is that the restriction on free speech is trivial.
[3] Ben Elton, the noted author, former comedian and disappointment[4], apparently still believes that jokes about Islam are too near the knuckle for the politically correct world of modern British comedy. He has perhaps not noticed that they more or less form Shazia Mirza or Omid Djalili‘s entire act. I suspect that what he means is that you’re not seeing white comedians making fun of Islamic minorities, in which case I rather think he owes an apology to Jim Davidson and the late Bernard Manning for more or less everything he said in the 80s.
[4] For example, as Alexei Sayle noted when Elton collaborated with Andrew Lloyd Webber on a musical: “It’s really quite tough, you know, when you see someone whose work you’ve been familiar with for years, you don’t agree with them on politics but you recognise that they’ve got a genuine talent – and then they go and write a musical with Ben Elton”.
[5] Not true, obviously; one of the Freedom of Speech marches that year very nearly had to be called off because of the amount of involvement from the BNP and similar groups. I’m referring to Rowan Atkinson and Stephen Fry here – I am sure their concern over free speech was sincere at the time.
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By Kathy G.
The decision on the part of Washington University, the highly respected research university located in St. Louis, Missouri, to award an honorary degree to the odious Phyllis Schlafly is deeply distressing to me. One reason why is that this story has gotten nowhere near the attention it deserves, either from the mainstream media or from the left blogosphere (although there are a few blogs that, against the grain, have been on the case).
I think part of the problem is that, these days, many people have no idea who Phyllis Schlafly was and is. And, compounding that, a lot of folks don’t understand what awarding an honorary degree means. I will try to correct what I see as those lacunae, or misunderstandings, in this post (which I’ll warn you right here, is exceedingly long).
Let me start by posing a question: how would you feel if a great university decided to bestow its highest award — an honorary doctoral degree — on Ann Coulter? Or on Karl Rove? Well, the reprehensible Schlafly is very much their equivalent, as I’ll explain later.
Washington University has defended its outrageous decision to honor Schlafly with these disgusting weasel words:
Alumna Phyllis Schlafly’s articulation of her perspectives has been a significant part of American life during the last half of the 20th century and now the 21st century, serving as a lightning rod for vigorous debate on difficult issues where differences of opinion are profound and passionate. Not only should a university serve as a place where such discussions take place, but it may also choose to recognize those who provide leadership and articulation — both pro and con — on vital issues.
Well, yes, there can be doubt that Phyllis Schlafly has been a “significant part of American life,” that she has been a “lightning rod,” that she has shown “leadership.” As Alan Wolfe pointed out in a 2005 review of a biography about Schlafly that appeared in The New Republic (but which, unfortunately, is unavailable online, because the TNR archives are still screwed up, as they have been for about a year now):
If political influence consists in transforming this huge and cantankerous country in one’s preferred direction, Schlafly has to be regarded as one of the two or three most important Americans of the last half of the twentieth century. . . Had she never been born, the Constitution would now include an Equal Rights Amendment.
I am in complete agreement with Wolfe here — Phyllis Schlafly is indeed probably “one of the two or three most important Americans of the last half of the twentieth century.” That is a bitter and painful truth, but a truth nonetheless. Wolfe again:
Critchlow [author of the Schlafly biography Wolfe is reviewing] is right to insist on Schlafly’s influence–but influence is a neutral category. It may be a force for good or a force for ill, depending upon the ideas that animate it. Let it be said of Phyllis Schlafly that every idea she had was scatter-brained, dangerous, and hateful. The more influential she became, the worse off America became.
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The merchant banker Oliver Kamm has a “vicious little post”:http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2008/05/miliband-pre-et.html today attacking the memory of the late Ralph Miliband for a paper he published in 1980. Miliband, the father of the current British foreign secretary, was, of course, a Marxist theoretician and a member of the British new left for much of his life. As a member of that left, he authored many papers for journals like the _New Left Review_ and _Socialist Register_. And again, as a member of that new left, he had an ambivalent relationship to the Soviet bloc. On the one hand he lamented the lack of democracy in those countries; on the other he thought they had achieved various social gains. Well he was (largely) wrong about the latter, but 1980 is a long time ago, and, back then he wasn’t alone in that false belief. In fact, he shared it with people for whom Kamm now declares his admiration and support and who then wrote for those same journals. The difference is, of course, that they are alive and he is dead. Miliband cannot reconsider.
Kamm’s post attacks Miliband’s paper “Military Intervention and Socialist Internationalism” (“Socialist Register, 1980”:http://socialistregister.com/node/22 ) on the grounds that he doesn’t think the crimes of Pol Pot were sufficient to justify the Vietnamese invasion. Reading the paper today, it has an odd and stilted feel: Miliband is wrestling with a set of issues and problems that seem deeply alien today. I think Miliband was wrong about that case, and badly so. But I presume (and hope) that he didn’t appreciate how horrific the Pol Pot regime had been, or didn’t believe all the reports. What the casual reader wouldn’t glean from reading Kamm’s nasty little post, though, is that the substance of Miliband’s article was an attack on the idea that the socialist ideal should be advanced by “socialist” states invading other countries. In other words, it was principally _an attack on the idea_ that socialists should support the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. Miliband argues, correctly, that all that resulted from such interventions was alienation from the socialist cause, and the installation of weak puppet regimes without popular legitimacy. You’d never gather that from reading Kamm’s blog, though. He presents Miliband’s attack on Soviet tankism as an apologia for massacre. That wasn’t how it would have been read at the time. In fact, it isn’t how a fair-minded person would read it now.
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Kevin Drum points to this piece by Michael Gerson, denying the existence of a Republican War on Science. As Drum points out, Gerson doesn’t even mention the major battlegrounds like global warming denialism, creationism and intelligent design, and the Gingrich-era shutdown of the Office of Technology Assessment, focusing on a much narrower set of issues including stem cell research and abortion.
Moreover far from refuting the claim of a war between Republicanism and science, Gerson spends most of the article fighting on the Republican side. Most obviously the obligatory, and in this case, lengthy discussion of eugenics, tied in Jonah Goldberg fashion to contemporary liberalism.
There’s an even more fundamental problem here. Gerson is so focused on the political/cultural/ethical war he is fighting that he doesn’t even consider the question of whether there are any scientific facts that might be relevant to the question.
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Dina has kindly posted a draft of a chapter that I wrote that is forthcoming in a volume on Philosophy in Schools. I wrote most of it a long time ago, when I was working at the Institute of Education, and involved in developing the Citizenship Education program there. Conversations with teachers, teacher educators, and researchers confirmed that a lot of teachers who would be leaned on to teach Citizenship Education lack the necessary confidence and resources to teach about controversial moral issues in a non-dogmatic way. This is not a criticism — it is what I heard from them, directly. It seemed to me that the experience of college-level philosophy teachers especially of service courses (such as my Contemporary Moral Issues course) might be useful for teachers to reflect on. What especially struck me at the time was that teachers did not have a lot of written material to read, either to prompt discussion in class or to help them prepare for managing such discussion. So the chapter linked to basically outlines the way that I tend to introduce my CMI course, and outlines a way of thinking about the values at stake in various debates, but then, at the end, gives very short (1500 words or so) accounts of some of the moral debates around two issues in bioethics — abortion, and designing children. I’ve copied the “designing children” section below the fold, but encourage teachers to read the whole thing.
A comment Dina made to me in an email — that she was preparing to use a thought experiment from my book Justice
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By Kathy G.
The results of this new study on pain assessment by Princeton’s Alan Krueger and SUNY Stony Brook’s Arthur Stone are for the most part not particularly surprising. As it turns out, economic inequality impacts practically every dimension of human existence; even physical pain is unequally shared. For example, the Krueger/Stone study found that respondents with low socio-economic status experienced “significantly higher pain occurrences and severity.” For instance:
The average pain rating is twice as high for those in households with annual incomes below $30,000 as for those in households with incomes above $100,000.
And
Participants with less than a high school degree reported twice the average pain rating as did college graduates.
Occupational status seems to play an important role, given that
the average pain rating for blue collar workers is 1.00 during work and 0.84 during nonwork, and for white collar workers it is 0.61 during both work and non-work episodes.
And in an interview, Krueger said, “Those with higher incomes welcome pain almost by choice, usually through exercise,” he says. “At lower incomes, pain comes as the result of work.” [click to continue…]
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By Kathy G.
Well, what can I say? Henry has provided me with such a truly awesome intro that I can’t possibly hope to live up to it. But it does give me an additional incentive to do my best, which is what I’ll attempt to do.
Yesterday, following up on something Spencer Ackerman had posted, Matthew Yglesias wrote the following:
It’s really bizarre how, in the context of war, totally normal attributes of human behavior become transformed into into mysterious cultural quirks of the elusive Arab. I recall having read in the past that because Arabs are horrified of shame, it’s not a good idea to humiliate an innocent man by breaking down his door at night and handcuffing him in front of his wife and children before hauling him off to jail. Now it seems that Arabs are also so invested in honor that they don’t like it when mercenaries kill their relatives.
I completely agree, and this gives me an excuse to bust out an argument that has long been marinating in the recesses of the ol’ cranium. It’s this: that America, the Mideast, and the world would have been better off if “the single most popular and widely read book on the Arabs in the US military,” Raphael Patai’s racist tract The Arab Mind, had been taken off Pentagon reading lists, and been replaced with Edward Said’s Orientalism* instead. [click to continue…]
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