With the Six Nations starting this weekend, it is time for one of those prediction threads again. Here’s my take. There are only three possible winners: France, England and Ireland. Of these, England overperformed in the World Cup, and the Irish were shocking, but expect some regression to the usual level. France have the most skilful team, England are rebuilding, and a great Irish team is on its last legs. England have some key weaknesses: Regan has been dreadful at hooker for Bristol, and, once again, there’s no obvious scrum half. Since France have home advantage over both England and Ireland, and England have the same over Ireland, that should be enough to make the difference. So who to come last? I’m betting on Scotland to get the wooden spoon.

Harry’s mention “below”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/01/25/look-and-learn/ of finding a comic strip from his youth on the internets made me think about the cultural ephemera that the Internet does and doesn’t preserve. Lots of stuff out there that people have scanned or Youtubed that I was delighted to find again decades after first seeing it. Lots of stuff, however, that isn’t available at all. Two of my favourite things that seem to have slipped down the memory hole (if I’m wrong, of course I would love to be told so, and more to the point, given the URLs).

(1) The famous ‘mothers of prevention’ confrontation between Jello Biafra and Tipper Gore when the latter was on her rampage against naughty rock lyrics and bad thoughts in teenagers. I remember this as having been a gloriously entertaining demolition job by Biafra (but the best part of two decades afterwards, my memory may be faulty or my standards of judgment may have shifted).

(2) Kevin McAleer’s sketches about the old days. These were broadcast on the comedy show ‘Nighthawks,’ which used to be on late at night on RTE, Ireland’s national TV station in the early 1990s. I suspect that you’d have to be Irish to really have gotten the humour – but the soft accent, the gentle, pixillated stare with which he’d not-quite-fix the camera, and the rapid degeneration of anecdotes purveying rural nostalgia into the most demented surrealism were pretty wonderful.

Neither seem to be available (although there are indications that the Biafra-Gore match was once to be found). Further suggestions of pieces of popular culture that ought to be, but aren’t preserved on the nets are welcome in comments, of course.

Some of these images are excellent. The level of geek quotient required to understand/appreciate them varies.

[Thanks to Ethan.]

UPDATE: The images have been deleted from Flickr. Thanks to Jacob for this link with an explanation. The pictures are available here (for now – Mon pm).

“The Monkey Cage”:http://www.themonkeycage.org writes about an experiment on people’s perceptions of photos of a young woman wearing a headscarf and without one. I don’t see any information on how careful the surveyors were to ensure randomness, whether they carried out statistical tests of significance etc etc (this appears to have been put together by a general social research firm, rather than academics). Still, if the results don’t have major problems, then they make for interesting reading. Not all the inferences that people make about the veiled, as opposed to the unveiled woman, seem unreasonable. Unsurprisingly, more people consider the woman to be more conservative when they see the headscarf photo (this seems to me to be not an unreasonable inference; people who display overt symbols of religiosity often are more conservative). But there are some other judgements that are a little bit less pleasant.

Subjects displayed considerably more aversion to the covered woman. Specifically, they were less likely to want to live near her. While 89% said that they would like the uncovered woman as their next-door neighbor or in their neighborhood, only 62% said that about the covered woman. One-fifth (19%) actually said they wanted her to live “outside of the US.”

More “here”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2008/01/headscarves.html.

!http://www.themonkeycage.org/headcovering-thumb.PNG!

My dad rather cleverly put a condition on me getting a regular delivery of Thunder (home of Adam Eterno, the man who couldn’t die, and quickly gobbled up into Lion and Thunder, and, eventually, Valiant): it was that I also get regular delivery of the distinctly old-fashioned Look and Learn. A clever move: I loved it. You still can’t see much of Thunder on the web, but Look and Learn has it’s own wonderful website now. Incorporating the magnificent Arthur Mee‘s Children’s Newspaper. Hours of fun to be had by all boys and girls (as long as they have firmly entered middle age). (First three months of Adam Eterno, here, by the way).

note: I originally wrote this for the Dani Rodrik seminar. As it grew, though, it became apparent that it didn’t really have much to do with “One Economics, Many Recipes” and that it was thus a bit unfair to ask Dani to comment on it. On the other hand, I liked it too much to kill it altogether – dd

“One Economics, Many Recipes” makes a lot of useful and constructive suggestions about how to attack the central problems of economic development. However I don’t think it gives enough emphasis (fundamentally because I don’t think it’s possible to give enough emphasis) to international debt as a constraint on development. Nearly all of the success stories in the book relate to countries which started their periods of development without a large debt burden, and the presence or absence of large net external debt is certainly one characteristic which matches up well to the motivating stylised fact in the book – the distinction between those countries like Argentina which followed all the standard policy recommendations but didn’t develop and those like China which ignored them and did. In this essay, I’ll try and flesh out a few provocative views on the financial aspects of development policy, which in my view are just as important real-world constraints as the institutional real-economy factors that are the main subject matter of the book.

Actually, just as I don’t think it’s sensible to carry out international comparisons of crime rates without taking demographics and urbanisation into account, I don’t think that any kind of comparative analysis of developing economies can be carried out at all without conditioning on the debt burden. It’s that important. When you have a situation in which a country’s capital account is dominated by contractual flows payable in foreign exchange, that is far and away the most important fact about that country’s economy. This is because as long as the debt service constraint is binding (and I discuss what happens when it isn’t, below), then unless the country is receiving massive net transfers from abroad, the entire economic development program is going to end up being twisted toward a capital account constraint which almost certainly has nothing to do with a sensible locally-based development plan of the kind that Dani advocates.
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I’m really, truly, not going to talk about Jonah Goldberg. Instead, I’m going to talk about Cass Sunstein and his idea, reprised in Republic 2.0 that the Internet poses a threat to democracy by virtue of it’s capacity to allow us to

avoid information we don’t like. Conservatives are increasingly seeking only conservative views, liberals are seeking only liberal views, and never the twain shall meet.

Sunstein argues that the echo chamber effect tends to reinforce existing views and produce a poisonous partisan divide.

It seems to me that exactly the opposite is true. The partisan divide in the US is being reinforced because people are more exposed to the other side than before.

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I know, I know. But I’m going to talk about it anyway. Here he is, today:

I tried to explain, for those whose feelings were so hurt they didn’t even crack the spine, that the title Liberal Fascism comes from a speech delivered by H. G. Wells, one of the most important and influential progressive and socialist intellectuals of the 20th century. He wanted to re-brand liberalism as “liberal fascism” and even “enlightened Nazism.” He believed these terms best described his own political views — views that deeply informed American progressivism and New Deal liberalism.

I happen to know a thing or two about this, through research on Wells’ work on his cinematic (Wells scripted, Korda produced, Menzies directed) good-bad boondoggle, the 1936 SF film, Things To Come [wikipedia].
I’ve posted about the film before on CT here. I wrote a really fun post about it at the Valve: how H.G. Wells prevented steampunk. [click to continue…]

Ari at Edge of the West asks,

bq. … who’s the most important … [American] historical figure about whom most people know nothing?

(I have edited the question slightly, because Ari is a historian and so writes 250-word blog posts that have five footnotes.) I don’t have many suggestions, because I am one of the “most people” in this case and ipso facto know nothing about potential contenders. But in the comments someone suggests Philo T. Farnsworth. This reminds me of a conversation I once had with an American historian and a Russian computer scientist. It went something like this:

American: … but that’s TV, I suppose. Philo Farnsworth didn’t know what he was getting us all into.
Irishman: Who?
Russian: Who?
American: Philo Farnsworth. He invented the television.
Irishman: No he didn’t. John Logie Baird invented the television!
Russian: Who are these people? Television was invented by Alexander Televishnevsky!

I forget the Russian inventor’s real name. As I recall, further discussion established that for many 20th century developments the Russians had a counterpart developer who, according to the schoolbooks, had just gotten there before. And while this may seem like a standard bit of Soviet-era oddness, the phenomenon of simultaneous discovery in science well-established, together with “Stigler’s law of eponymy.”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler’s_law_of_eponymy

British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, “defending proposals for 42-day detention”:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/controversial-new-terror-laws-unveiled-773317.html :

Ms Smith said the Government could not afford to “sit on our hands” in preparing for potential future risks – but denied she was legislating for a hypothetical situation.

“We need to legislate now for that risk in the future,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“It won’t be hypothetical if and when it occurs. We are not legislating now on the basis that we are bringing it in now for something that might happen in the future; we are bringing in a position for if it becomes unhypothetical.”

Indeed, or indeed not …

I’m reading David Frum, Comeback Conservatism [amazon]. So far, so mushy. But it does, at the very least, contain the third silliest argument I’ve encountered in the last 6 hours. (The top two contenders arrived, courtesy of Jonah Goldberg, in his bloggingheads exchange with Will Wilkinson.)

Here is Frum, protesting the notion that John Edwards is a friend of the poor, or in any sense an economic egalitarian:

Voters sense this truth. It’s an observable fact that those voters who care most deeply about equality – deeply enough to organize their lives to live in egalitarian communities – overwhelmingly vote Republican.

Take a look at a map of the state of Missouri. A recent study conducted by the state identified a dozen of the state’s 114 counties as “equality centers.” These equality centers were located on the outer fringes of St. Louis, Kansas City, Columbia, and Springfield. Every single one of these highly egalitarian areas of the state voted overwhelmingly Republican.

Meanwhile, the most unequal parts of Missouri, the cities and especially the city of St. Louis, voted heavily Democratic. Where you find many different lifestyles and races; where you find singles, immigrants, and gays; where you find high-rise buildings, country estates, and really great take-out – there you find inequality. After all, what is inequality but another form of “diversity”? And what is “equality” but another word for homogeneity? Communities with lots of married families, lots of single-family homes, and low proportions of nonwhite minorities and single people – communities that Democrats and liberals would inwardly disparage as “white bread” – are communities in which people tend to earn similar amounts of money. (p. 37)

The decision of the US Federal Reserve to cut interest rates by 0.75 per cent is as clear a sign of panic on the part of the monetary authorities as we’ve seen since the 1987 stock market crash. It’s not entirely coincidental that it followed a dreadful week on Wall Street, and a couple of awful days on world stock markets while the US was closed for the long weekend.

Still, stock markets have fluctuated quite a bit in the last 20 years without producing this kind of reaction. The really alarming events have been happening in bond markets and, in retrospect, the most alarming happened just over a month ago.*

That’s when Standard and Poors cut the credit rating of ACA Financial Guaranty Corp from A (strong investment grade) to CCC (just about the worst kind of junk) in one move. This event showed the weakness of two of the most important defences against the kind of credit derivative meltdown that market bears have been worrying about for years.

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Nicholas Gruen and Tom Slee follow up — and generalize from — my post the other day about the details of proposals for presumed-consent organ donation in Britain. Here’s Nicholas:

bq. But for a long time I’ve observed the poor functionality of economics which often gets itself hung up on what’s in the textbooks, rather than trying to use the concepts, principles and techniques enunciated there as a _first jumping off point_ and a tool kit to try to solve problems keeping in mind that the solving of problems will almost always involve a high degree of (non-disciplinary) commonsense.

And here’s Tom:

bq. The common thread is that the big decisions and big ideas make less of an impact than the low-level, detailed specifics of each situation. … It’s a small step from there to saying that people at the top of large organizations (whether they be governments or countries) have surprisingly little influence and that we should not pay much attention to broad pronouncements and grand visions. It’s people dealing with everyday problems that we should pay attention to.

Jeremy picks up on this CNN talking point. It’s Race vs Gender and Black Women face a Tough Choice! As noted in the first comment in the thread, “this ‘race vs. gender’ construction, as if men have no gender and whites have no race, is driving a lot of people crazy.”