I am responsible for the Ayn Rand/charity beat at Crooked Timber and here’s another story on the subject. This really doesn’t look like it’s going to end up well. A large charitable foundation attached to a bank has given the University of North Carolina Charlotte, among others a donation in return for making “Atlas Shrugged” compulsory reading. Most tragic rationalisation:

BB&T donated $500,000 last year to Johnson C. Smith University to help endow a professorship on capitalism and free markets, with lessons including “Atlas Shrugged.” It’s the fourth endowed chair at the historically black college in Charlotte.

“I don’t believe I have to advocate that people accept Ayn Rand’s philosophy,” said Patricia Roberson-Saunders, who holds the chair. Roberson-Saunders, who will present Rand with other texts, said students will benefit from reading about a world view held by “people with whom they will have to work and for whom they will have to work.”

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Doug Feith, the “stupidest fucking guy on the face of the planet”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Feith, has a new book out, and the “back cover blurbs”:http://marcambinder.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/04/advance_praise_for_war_and_dec.php are … interesting. Says Jean Edward Smith

“The fact that the policy to which he contributed was flawed from the outset in no way diminishes the historical importance of this firsthand account.”

Robert Gallucci, who hired Feith as a professor of practice at my alma mater, Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, against “vehement faculty opposition”:http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/25/news/teach.php, is scarcely more enthusiastic.

“Douglas Feith has written what will be a controversial book. It will certainly anger many readers because it takes a different position that most other accounts on the wisdom of going to war in Iraq, on what mistakes were made, and on what made them. But Feith’s is a serious work, well-documented, that presents the best defense to date of the defining policy of the Bush presidency. It is a readable account that deserves to be read and its argument debated.”

Nor is Henry Kissinger precisely fulsome in his praises (and if you’ve lost Henry Kissinger …)

“The fullest and most thoughtful statement of the Pentagon thinking prior to and in the first stages of the Iraq war. Even those, as I, who take issue with some of its conclusions will gain a better perspective from reading this book.”

And these were the blurbs they chose to promote the book …

More generally, consider this an open thread on dubious blurbs and promotional snippets taken from book reviews. My favourite example of the latter being the Irish Times‘ review of Iain Banks’ _The Wasp Factory._ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=Iain%20Banks%20the%20Wasp%20Factory, “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FWasp-Factory-Novel-Iain-Banks%2Fdp%2F0684853159%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1207883741%26sr%3D8-1&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 )

It is a sick, sick world when the confidence and investment of an astute firm of publishers is justified by a work of unparallelled depravity. There is no denying the bizarre fertility of the author’s imagination: his brilliant dialogue, his cruel humour, his repellent inventiveness. The majority of the literate public, however, will be relieved that only reviewers are obliged to look at any of it.

How could you possibly, possibly refuse to buy a book with a blurb like that?

Clive Crook is probably my favourite sort-of-conservative big media commentator. But his “new piece”:http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803u/no-american-exceptionalism on ‘the End of the American Exception’ seems to me to be seriously out of whack.

That the United States stands apart is something Americans and Europeans have agreed on for a long time … Modern America has limited government, weak unions, high-powered incentives, capitalism red in tooth and claw. Post-war Europe has tax-and-spend, transport strikes, six-week vacations, and the welfare state. …Caricatures are well and good, but this one is just too much. In economic matters, America is far more like Europe, and Europe more like America, than either cares to admit. … health care … is America’s biggest social-policy exception …And it is marked for abolition. … . Consider regulation of business and finance. Few seem to question that the weight of regulation is less in the United States. In one area, anyway, this is true: Worker protections are weaker in America than in Western Europe … But think about product-safety regulation, or environmental regulation. … On regulation of corporate governance, Democrats are still calling for stricter rules … since Sarbanes Oxley, American financial and corporate regulation has been probably the most stringent and complex in the world.

…The unions are weaker here, it is said. To be sure, they have fewer members as a proportion of the workforce than in Britain, or (even more so) continental Europe. … proposed card-check legislation is expressly intended to slow and reverse the decline in union membership. This is a goal which few European governments would any longer think to embrace. In Britain it would be regarded as crazy … American unions remind me of the old-fashioned British kind. They seem anachronistically angry and assertive. … See what America’s unions have done to the auto industry. The Writers’ Guild just shut Hollywood down for several months. …I cannot think of a British union that any longer has that kind of muscle, or would think of exerting it if it did. In much of the rest of Europe, unions have become a quietly co-operative part of management more than militant champions of workers’ rights.

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The OSI has a “new fellowship program”:http://www.soros.org/initiatives/fellowship that may be of interest to some CT readers.

The Open Society Fellowship supports outstanding individuals from around the world. The fellowship enables innovative professionals—including journalists, activists, academics, and practitioners—to work on projects that inspire meaningful public debate, shape public policy, and generate intellectual ferment within the Open Society Institute.

The fellowship focuses on four themes: National Security and the Open Society; Citizenship, Membership and Marginalization; Strategies and Tools for Advocacy and Citizen Engagement; and Understanding Authoritarianism. OSI also supports a limited number of fellows whose work focuses on other topics within the scope of its mission.

Also, I’ve been meaning for a week to link to the inimitable “Kathy G.”:http://thegspot.typepad.com/blog/. Those of us who’ve known her in other contexts have benefited greatly from her mixture of shit-stirring feminism, sociological chops and interest in political economy; it’s great to see her join the blogosphere. “Here”:http://thegspot.typepad.com/blog/2008/04/note-to-megan-m.html and “here”:http://thegspot.typepad.com/blog/2008/04/monopsony-in-mo.html she explains to Megan McArdle what monopsony actually involves. And “here”:http://thegspot.typepad.com/blog/2008/04/can-someone-ple.html she asks with some justification if anyone can tell her why _Salon_ is publishing the “twisted, misogynist, bizarrely self-obsessed ravings of a freak like Camille Paglia?”

Obviously, I’m not Crooked Timber’s resident expert on the sociology of online communities, so here’s hoping that Kieran or Eszter will be along in a moment to reassure me, but, as a keen Flickr user, I’m perturbed by their decision to start allowing video. Flickr (owned by the troubled Yahoo, of course) probably has two (overlapping) kinds of user: the person who wants a repository for their snaps to show to friends and family and the person who is into photography on at least a hobbyist level who wants to interact with similar others. It also has thriving groups of various kinds based on shared interests or locality: for example my local group has 1000+ nominal members, dozens of active members, and a fairly thriving offline complement of activities (monthly meets where much beer is consumed, photowalks etc.).

All of this is threatened by the addition of video. As the photographic element is diluted and the YouTubers arrive, some photographers will find it less congenial and will choose to go elsewhere; as they go, the pool will become more dilute, leading others to take the same decision. In other words, I predict the kind of cascade effect the Mark Granovetter and others have written about. Of course, I could be wrong, and maybe the Flickr community is more robust and adaptable than I’m allowing for. SmugMug and Pbase don’t (yet) have local groups of photographers who hang out together, critique one another’s pictures and so on. But this seems a rash decision for Yahoo to make. Does it have to do so with the Microsoft bid? Maybe.

I just upgraded to MS-Office 2008 for mac. God help me. I did it without reading the reviews. Now I discover custom macros are history. I don’t really care so much, except I worry that EndNote won’t play nice now. (Won’t that be lovely?) And I used to have a custom macro for converting ascii/plaintext – i.e. stripping out all the hard returns. So I could cut&paste email or a Gutenberg book, select one menu item, and get the lines to wrap instead of being all sullen and jagged out there on the right. It’s such a common problem. Now how am I going to solve it?

What’s a simple fix for converting ascii/plaintext to MS-Word?

UPDATE: OK, on reflection it’s pretty clear how to make a 4-step fix using find&replace. Having bothered to figure this out, I’ll just put the simple solution under the fold. [click to continue…]

It seems to be children’s TV and organ procurement week here at CT; before I get started into something new I should probably note that Russell Arben Fox has “said everything I wanted to say”:http://inmedias.blogspot.com/2008/04/henry-farrell-and-keiran-healy-are.html in my earlier postbut has put it far more thoughtfully and eloquently. As the father of a two year old with an interest in the topic (albeit one whose TV diet is restricted to 2 hours on weekends, much to his disgruntlement), I’ve become much more intimately acquainted with the offerings of US children’s TV than I ever imagined possible or desirable. I’m especially interested in how US TV deals with the product of foreign cultures. Sometimes, it improves on them, as in the three dimensional _Noddy_ show. Not that it’s much good or anything, but the original books weren’t much cop either, and the frank racism of the original has been replaced by a soothingly multicultural Toytown in which PC Plod, oddly enough, is the only character to maintain a real English accent (I suspect serious dubbing of the UK original).

As an Irishman, I’m naturally more interested in _Jakers: The Adventures of Piggleywinks_ which is probably the most influential depiction of my native culture that millions of American children will ever be exposed to. And it’s surprisingly well done in my opinion – not classic Sesame Street good, but still not at all bad – you feel that the creators have taken some care in putting it together. Bits of the background, such as the national school ring reasonably true to my own upbringing, and even if it’s a concatenation of cliches, they’re well researched cliches. Most of the characters even have real Irish brogues (unlike “other shows with bigger budgets”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/10/19/bad-accents/), although the grandfatherly narrator seems to have mysteriously picked up a pronounced Dublin working class accent somewhere in his peregrinations between Raloo Farm and Amerikay.

Still, there’s one glaring omission from its depiction of rural Irish life in the 1940s – there’s no mention (at least in the episodes I’ve seen) of the Roman Catholic church, or any other church for that matter. Apart from their occasional utterance of the eponymous expression of surprise, you’d think that the villagers were as godless a crowd of humanists as ever warmed the cockles of PZ Myers’ heart. I can understand why the program producers made this choice – it would be hard to tackle the role of the church in 1940’s Ireland without falling into the one set of cliches or the other, and the bits after the main show seem designed to highlight the universalities of the immigrant experience rather than the particularities of one small country. But it still feels odd to me every time I watch the program; having grown up in a small market town with less than 2,000 inhabitants myself, I can testify that the Catholic church was not only important but omnipresent. It organized and disciplined the community in good ways and in bad. When I was around nine years old or so, we were told by the headmaster of the local Christian Brother’s school (the unloved Brother Ryan – I sometimes wonder what’s happened to the vicious old bastard since) that the local cinema was to be boycotted because it had dared to show _The Life of Brian._ One boy who broke the boycott, and was caught, got several strokes of the stick in front of the class for his pains; none of us found this at all remarkable at the time. Of course, the country (and the town, on the couple of occasions I have been back through it) have changed dramatically in the interim, and not entirely for the better; while I wouldn’t want to go back to the Ireland of the 1970s, let alone the 1950s, I find the consumerism and materialism of the new Ireland pretty unpleasant in its own way too.

I only saw this item flashing briefly across the TV screen, but I’m sure it will be of interest to CT readers. The new Australian government, which is withdrawing combat troops (though not some troops guarding our embassy) from Iraq, has announced that Iraqis who have worked with Australian forces in Iraq will be offered resettlement in Australia. The estimated number of Iraqis to receive visas, including family members, is 600. Australia had only about 500 troops on average, so that gives an idea of the scale of commitment that might be expected from the UK and US if they met their obligations in a comparable fashion.

The decision to accept the interpreters ahead of other refugees has been criticised, but I think this is justified. The essential point should be to treat this intake as additional to, rather than part of, our general obligation to accept refugees.

Updating on the same point, this Times story indicates that the first three workers to be accepted under the much more restrictive British program have finally arrived in the UK, and that the program has so far delivered visas to a total of 12 Iraqis and their families. The total estimated intake is 2000.

Via Sally Satel, here’s a bit from a Freakonomics discussion. Stephen Dubner asked a bunch of people, “How much progress have psychology and psychiatry really made in the last century?” One of the respondents, Dan Ariely (a Professor of Management at MIT) cites some work about organ donation (emphasis added):

One of my favorite graphs in all of social science is the following plot from an inspiring paper by Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein. This graph shows the percentage of people, across different European countries, who are willing to donate their organs after they pass away. When people see this plot and try to speculate about the cause for the differences between the countries that donate a lot (in blue) and the countries that donate little (in orange) they usually come up with “big” reasons such as religion, culture, etc. But you will notice that pairs of similar countries have very different levels of organ donations.

For example, take the following pairs of countries: Denmark and Sweden; the Netherlands and Belgium; Austria and Germany; and (depending on your individual perspective) France and the U.K. These are countries that we usually think of as rather similar in terms of culture, religion, etc., yet their levels of organ donations are very different.

So, what could explain these differences? It turns out that it is the design of the form at the D.M.V. In countries where the form is set as “opt-in” (check this box if you want to participate in the organ donation program) people do not check the box and as a consequence they do not become a part of the program. In countries where the form is set as “opt-out” (check this box if you don’t want to participate in the organ donation program) people also do not check the box and are automatically enrolled in the program. In both cases large proportions of people simply adopt the default option.

You might think that people do this because they don’t care — that the decision about donating their organs is so trivial that they can’t be bothered to lift up the pencil and check the box. But in fact the opposite is true. … The organ donation issue is just one example of the influence of rather “small” changes in the environment (opt-in vs. opt-out) on our decisions.

Johnson and Goldstein’s work on the role of default options in decision-making is good, but the figure above (especially with its y-axis labeled “Effective Consent Percentage”) is misleading as presented by Ariely. First he says, correctly, that the data show “the percentage of people, across different European countries, who are willing to donate their organs after they pass away.” But then he says, wrongly, that “similar countries have very different levels of organ donations.” The graph shows the number of people who say they are willing in principle to be donors, and the large difference that the default option to this question makes. The casual reader might think — as Ariely himself seems to — that the actual rate of organ procurement in those presumed-consent countries is vastly higher than that in informed-consent countries. But this is not the case at all. The figure shows is how many people sign up given the defaults (opt-in vs opt-out), and _not_ the rate of actual organ donors procured.

Here is a figure showing the organ procurement rate for various presumed- and informed-consent countries from the early 1990s to 2002 or so. Each green circle is the procurement rate for a particular country-year. (I want to focus on average differences between countries so I don’t show the time series itself. Click here for a figure showing the time trends.)

You can see that there are differences in the procurement rate between presumed- and informed-consent countries, and the highest-performing presumed-consent countries on average (Spain, Austria) score higher than the highest-performing informed consent countries. But the differences are not that big, and they are probably due mostly other features of the procurement system in the presumed consent countries. There is certainly not the huge disparity you might believe exists from a quick look at the post on the Freakonomics blog . (Incidentally, all of the countries shown here had their legal regime set as presumed- or informed-consent before the period covered by the data, so the often large within-country variability can’t be explained by the opt-in or opt-out defaults. Italy’s procurement rate, for instance, grew rapidly in the 1990s with no change in the law.)

In fact, as I’ve discussed recently in this post and argue in this paper, it is not at all clear that consent laws per se have any strong effect on the procurement rate (as distinct from their effect on people’s attitudes). Even if most people support organ donation, there are still large logistical hurdles to be overcome at the point of procurement. It is investment in the procurement infrastructure that really makes the difference to rates of organ donation, even if default options to opt-in or opt-out have large effects on people’s professed willingness to participate in the system.

_Update_: John Graves at the IQSS Blog makes the same error. As always, it is striking how easy it is for a mistake like this to propagate.

Like Henry, I bought the Old School Sesame Street collection for, uh, my kids. Yeah, totally for them. There’s all kinds of good stuff in there, including the God of the Classroom, Roosevelt Franklin. The improvised interactions with children who don’t always do what they are supposed to are also great. For instance, here is a great moment where Paul Simon sings an short version of “Me and Julio Down by the School Yard.” Slightly sour as always, Simon takes the song quite fast, as if he wants to just get it over with. He is immediately upstaged by the improvisations of the little girl sitting next to him. After he cuts her off, so he can start singing, she waits for her opening and then upstages him again. But by then even he is enjoying himself.

And as an added bonus, Here is Stevie Wonder playing “Superstition” live on Sesame Street. Beats the shit out of Barney, I’m telling you.

The “FT”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7cffc450-02ab-11dd-9388-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1 has a story on the political sensitivities involved in transplanting Sesame Street to divided societies such as Northern Ireland.

Today, BBC2 Northern Ireland will air its first local version of Sesame Street … the show has been renamed Sesame Tree because, well, it’s easier to have children hanging around a tree than decide if the street is in a Catholic or Protestant neighbourhood. … The scenes are, indeed, charming: one tells the story of a five-year-old boy learning to play the drum with his older brother at an Orange march, traditionally seen as a Protestant event. Another focuses on a young boy who must wait until he is old enough to join a hurling team, a game associated with nationalist Catholics. But the question remains … Can taking Northern Irish children on a TV tour of the lives of their peers really help to reverse decades of entrenched sentiment? … Or is this the latest version of a sentimentally idealistic American icon spreading its mission of social morality around the world while creating new licensing opportunities at every conflict?
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“Dan Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/003780.html and “Steve Clemons”:http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2008/04/hillarys_call_t/ argue it out over whether or not the US should boycott the Beijing Olympics (Steve says no, Dan says that it would be no harm if the West uses the threat of non-attendance to squeeze some concessions from the Chinese). For me, the interesting question is why the Olympics are so politically important, and how their importance seems to be changing. International relations scholars don’t have much to say about the politics of the modern Olympics (there’s a book by Christopher Hill, but that’s about it), but it’s surely an important international institution; as we can see from recent events, states pay a _lot_ of attention to it. This was true of the original Olympic festival in Greece too; Martin Wight identifies the festival as one of the key institutions binding together the Greek city-state system (although the original Olympics had a military truce attached to it, so it was obviously more important in the ways that IR scholars usually measure importance).

The current debacle though seems to mark an important change in the politics of the Olympics. As best I understand it (I am open to corrections if wrong), in the past, Olympics politics have involved inter-state rivalry, and have been driven by decisions on the part of traditional political elites. The US boycott of the Soviet games in protest against the invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 resulted from a decision by Jimmy Carter, and the tit-for-tat boycott by the Soviets and their allies of the LA games in 1984 resulted from a top level decision too. The dynamic driving the Beijing Olympics seems to me to be rather different; what we are seeing is that the politics of boycott is being driven by mass-publics, and most recently by protestors, rather than by political leaders. In the absence of the public unrest that has culminated in the recent protests in Paris, I doubt very much that Western political leaders would be muttering about not showing at the opening ceremonies – the geopolitical stakes of market access etc are likely more important to them than the fate of Tibetans. But given the widespread public reaction in the West, even leaders like Gordon Brown, who obviously want _very much_ to attend, are having to insulate themselves from public pressures by taking other actions liable to annoy China (such as meeting with the Dalai Lama). In short, I think we are seeing how public opinion and organized cross-national opposition can create significant constraints on the ability of leaders to respond to what they see as the geostrategic necessity of keeping China happy. This is, as best as I am aware, a new phase in the development of the Olympics.

So that way, you can do something about this:

The European Commision has opened the door for mobile phones on planes, introducing measures to harmonize the technical and licensing requirements for mobiles services in the sky. This means that 90 percent of European air passengers can remain contactable during flights, according to the Commission. … As a result of the introduction of the measures by the Commission, local regulators will be able to hand out licenses to make services a reality. One regulatory decision for all of Europe was required for this new service to come into being, according to Viviane Reding, the European Union Telecommunications Commissioner. “In-flight mobile phone services can be a very interesting new service especially for those business travelers who need to be ready to communicate wherever they are,” she said in a statement.

As Kevin Drum remarked recently in connection with the possibility of acquiring the power to remain invisible, the question is not so much whether you would like to be able to do this, but whether you’d be happy if everyone else could do it, too. Looking forward, I wonder whether, in a decade or so, people who are irritated by endless yakking on a long flight will be a robust majority, or whether their disgust will seem more in line with Leon Kass and his intense disapproval of people who eat ice-cream in public.