“Indeed.”:http://splinteredsunrise.wordpress.com/2007/10/16/bono-to-blight-dublin-skyline-with-giant-phallic-symbol/

Your chance to make predictions and explain who you’ll be rooting for and why. I’m hoping for an England win, but predict SA to win 32-12, with Wilkinson scoring all England’s points. Since I’m English, it isn’t hard to explain my sympathies, and the fact that “Bristol”:http://www.bristolrugby.co.uk/index.php hooker “Mark Regan”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Regan should playing for England and is an old boy of St Brendan’s 6th Form College (where my youngest went) more than completes the picture. I’m more intrigued about who the various Celts, Gaels, Aussies and Kiwis who write for or read CT will be backing. Normally, I’d expect an “anyone but England” policy, but, given “the dubious politics of SA rugby”:http://southafrica.foreignpolicyblogs.com/2007/05/26/rugby-race-and-nationalism-with-a-twist/ and England’s underdog status, there may be some surprises.

I’m absurdly pleased to see that Polish translation of my book Justice is now available (in Poland, that is). Of all the languages I would want my work to be translated into, Polish tops the list (Welsh is a close second). Half the kids in the school where I took my “O”-level got an extra “O”-level in Polish for free (because it was their home language) and that’s always made it seem exciting and important.

But I can’t speak or read a word of it. So there are two requests. Is this an excerpt? It looks like one to me, but I have no way of being sure. And, from the picture, it looks as if Zygmunt Bauman has provided an endorsement on the cover. That seems extremely unlikely; can anyone enlighten me?

“Tyler Cowen”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/10/leonid-hurwic-1.html on the Nobel prize going to the mechanism design crowd.

In other words, no incentive scheme, no matter how clever, can get people to tell the truth. Grove, Clarke, Tideman, and Tullock lurk in the hallways. Note that a second price auction (let everyone bid and the winner pays the price of the next highest bid) fails in terms of Paretian optimality. The government takes the second price bid from the winner, but what should it do with the money? Either the government wastes resources by destroying wealth, or it redistributes that wealth in some way but then the resulting redistribution in turn feeds back into bids and we can no longer derive truth-telling as optimal (but is this really a practical problem?; my fear is that the entire incentive-compatibility literature has never gotten at the real reason why we don’t run the entire economy as a second-price auction.)

One of my favourite papers of all time, Gary Miller and Thomas Hammond’s “Why Politics is More Fundamental Than Economics: Incentive Compatible Mechanisms are Not Credible,” “makes exactly this argument”:http://jtp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/6/1/5 (link to abstract: full paper is behind paywall for non-academics, unfortunately) using clear language and simple mathematics. It also makes clear (a) that the problem doesn’t vanish if the surplus goes to a private actor rather than government, hence suggesting that many private sector schemes to elicit information etc are similarly problematic, (b) that one plausible historical solution has been to elicit the creation of bureaucratic norms of professionalism that encourage administrators not to behave as selfish rational actors and (c ) that the surplus problem is, properly considered, where politics enters into the argument, and a way of getting at the real reasons why we don’t run the economy using these mechanisms.

Also notable is another paper that “Tyler links to”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/10/was-the-indian-.html on whether the Indian caste system was efficient or not. As Tyler notes politely, and Chris Hayes “more pungently”:http://www.chrishayes.org/blog/2007/oct/14/mainstream-economics/, this is a weirdly functionalist paper in the way that many economic analyses of institutions are weirdly functionalist. The professional deformity of the institutional economist is to seek explanations of institutional origins and change grounded in efficiency. In fairness, I should acknowledge that the professional deformation of the political scientist (and of many economic sociologists) is to seek explanations of institutions grounded in power and distributional questions, but it seems to me that this professional deformity gets things right _a lot more often_ (institutions that are genuinely grounded in the desire to promote collective efficiency are relatively rare, and the Indian caste system is rather obviously not one of these rare exceptions).

Update: see further “Jim Johnson”:http://politicstheoryphotography.blogspot.com/2007/10/2007-nobel-prize-economics-mechanism.html for a more detailed account of how mechanism design “unintentionally …establishes the fundamental importance of _politics_”. On distribution v. efficiency, see also this very interesting “new _AJS_ article”:http://www.indiana.edu/~tbsoc/AJS%20article.pdf (via “OrgTheory”:http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2007/10/14/interests-and-the-creation-of-new-institutions/ ) which seeks to assess the merits of distributional and efficiency theories in explaining the origins of transnational private regulation. Finally, those looking for some (mathematically pretty hairy) intro materials on mechanism design theory should go to “Michael Greinecker”:http://yetanothersheep.blogspot.com/2007/10/readings-on-mechanism-design.html.

A couple of unrelated links that might have formed the basis of proper posts, had I but time. First, over at Leiter’s site, there’s a discussion of some highly critical remarks that Raymond Geuss has made about John Rawls and his work. Second, at Reason there’s an interview with Ayan Hirsi Ali in which she makes crystal clear the nature of her views and erases forever any thought that the perception of her as a “clash of civilizations” extremist might be the result of misreporting or looseness of expression (via Blood and Treasure).

Further evidence that blogging has eclipsed the Traditional Publishing Model.

Exhibit A. How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, by Pierre Bayard (2007). “A witty and useful piece of literary sociology” (LRB), “funny, smart, and so true” (Clare Messud), “evidently much in need” (NYT), “The runaway French bestseller … that readers everywhere will be talking about—and despite themselves, reading—this holiday season.”

Exhibit B. Books I Did Not Read This Year, by Kieran Healy (2003). “A blog post” (Me).

I’d never noticed. Larry Solum has a long passage explaining why they are. Worth reading in full. Me, I’m never scruffy any more, because I always wear a tie to work (because of something James Tooley once said, and Geoff Whitty donating the first tie). And, as everyone knows, its impossible to be scruffy wearing a tie.

It’s Saturday noon and my toddler is taking a nap; I am not in the mood for doing academic work and by now too heavily pregnant to do any serious amount of housework. So here are two musing about books.

The first is a real book, with a wonderful 1970s smell. I finally could get hold of a copy of Amartya Sen’s Collective Choice and Social Welfare. I made photocopies of that book when I studied welfare economics in the mid-1990s, and subsequent attempts to buy the book always failed. It hasn’t been reprinted for yeeeeeeears, and the only second hand version that I once found was a few hundred dollars – too much for my budget. But purely by accident, I had another look earlier this week on the Amazon second hand market, and found one, for 50 dollars. A first edition, with the errata-page included. It arrived from California today – less than 5 days after I ordered it. It’s a first edition, previously owned by someone called David Owen Butcher. Thank you David, you made my day.

The other book is Facebook. It seems that the virus finally caught me. Last week a friend showed me the ‘inside’ of facebook, and tried to lure my into joining. I saw the phantom of the timesink in the close distance, so resisted the temptation. Yet “Chris’s post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/10/11/reforming-inheritance-tax/ suddenly made me think that perhaps facebook can also be useful, and hey, the economist in me woke up, and earlier this week I joined. I even joined the Crooked Timber group (not sure what that implies, though). So, did those of you who joined Facebook in July after “Henry set up the group”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/07/11/trying-not-to-lose-face/, ever went back to work on your social facebookrelations there?

To Al Gore and the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change for the award of the Nobel Peace Prize. This is the second time the Nobel prizes have honored work on climate change, the first being the award of the 1995 Chemistry Prize to Crutzen, Molina and Sherwood for their discovery of the chemical reactions that led CFCs to deplete the ozone layer.

That award came at an opportune time. Although the world had agreed under the Montreal protocol to phase out CFCs, US Republicans working through the aptly-named DeLay-Doolittle committee were working to undermine it, attacking the science and so on, with the support of a number ofleading delusionists (Sallie Baliunas, Pat Michaels, Fred Singer and others). The Nobel award took the wind out of their sails and most of the “skeptical scientists” involved went very quiet on the issue thereafter. That didn’t stop them using the same tactics and arguments regarding CO2 and global warming.

I hope the 2007 Peace Prize award will have a similar impact. While it’s not a science prize, it would certainly not have been awarded if there was any serious doubt about (rather than politically motivated opposition to) the science of climate change. And it rightly honors Gore’s role in solidifying public opinion on the issue.

Of course, for those inside the Republican bubble of delusion, it will have the opposite impact (since they are opposed to both peace and science, it could hardly do otherwise). But it will certainly have an impact on the imminent election campaign in Australia, leaving those who have been scathing about Gore and the IPCC with (yet more) egg on their faces. Of course, that group includes PM John Howard who refused to meet Gore last year, though he has modified his position since then. Since he seems to be in the mood for changing his tune , he would be well advised to take this opportunity to ratify Kyoto.

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About a month before their wedding my friends told me they have a region-free DVD player, so I lent them Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? I hope they understood that it was not an attempt to get the wedding cancelled, but rather an expression of confidence that they were doing the right thing. It is hard for me to believe that my parents allowed me to see Whatever Happened when it was first on TV, but they did, and it provided a vision of adult life and, eventually, marriage, that only dissipated when I finally decided to marry myself. The writing and acting are both pitch-perfect in the first series, which narrates the lead up to Bob and Thelma’s wedding. Bob is torn between Thelma, his upwardly gazing (but not necessarily upwardly-mobile) fiancee, and Terry, his laddish, feckless and determinedly working-class (apart from the working bit) childhood friend.

Two things that struck me watching it again, recently, were confirmed by the one member of the couple who watched it religiously (and didn’t, I should add, call off the wedding, which was absolutely lovely!)

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The secret of GWB’s success — for a while there, anyway — was that he was so comfortable playing the role that Phil Nugent nails as, “Sure, he’s a different kind of cop and he doesn’t play by the book–but he gets results!”

So what’s up with the lame duck’s recent lameness?

By now, it’s clear that “We don’t torture” is going to be George Bush’s equivalent to “I am not a crook” or “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”–an embarrassingly transparent, obviously untrue statement that the speaker never would have even made in the first place if he hadn’t been obligated to deny something that everybody had already figured out was the case. In the earlier examples, you could at least understand the emotions behind the decision to go on TV and indignantly challenge these unfounded accusations that the sun is hot. In Nixon’s case, it must have been deeply nerve-racking for a such a rigid, uptight old Quaker, one who had built his administration on promises of restoring “law and order” to a nation that had lost its moral compass, to start seeing cartoons of himself and his top aides in prison stripes in the paper every damn day. The very idea undermined everything that he wanted to believe about himself and everything his supporters wanted to believe about him. As for Clinton, for a free-wheeling, charismatic dude who had a well-documented taste for the ladies and a serious JFK complex, it must have been…well, anyway, I’m sure he didn’t want to sleep on the couch. But George Bush is supposed to be our self-styled Mr. Grim Reality, President Bauer. Why the hell is he denying that we do what he must know his most hardcore supporters worship him for having the balls to do? Why doesn’t he respond to questions about whether we torture by barking “Damn straight,” and then pulling a former Gitmo resident’s spleen out of his jacket pocket to gnaw?

Excellent question. Check out the rest of Nugent’s post for the answer. H/t Jerome Weeks.

You know middle age has arrived when you think to yourself “I’m going to write a letter to my MP!“. It’s a tacit admission that your days of throwing petrol bombs are probably behind you and that you have been ground down and co-opted into the System, Man.

On the other hand, kids grow up much faster these days, so maybe it’s not as unfashionable as it used to be. Maybe if we all try, we can make writing a letter to your MP become the next cool craze among the hip, trendy, pipe-smoking, tweed-wearing crowd. Let’s all try it this evening – come back from work, stride through the door, hang your bowler hat on the stand and loudly announce to your long-suffering spouse or partner “Dammit, Muriel! I’m going to write a letter to my MP!”. Writing a letter to your MP is the new black.

What should we all write a letter to our MPs about? I know! How about the Iraqi employees campaign talking points?

• David Miliband’s Statement on ‘Iraq: Locally Recruited Civilians’ of 9th October stated that Britain will help to resettle- in the wider Middle East, or in the United Kingdom- Iraqis who can prove that they have worked for this country’s soldiers or diplomats for a continuous period of twelve months.
• Hundreds of Iraqis have been targeted for assassination for having worked for this country. Some have worked for a period of twelve months exclusively for the British and can prove this. Some have not but have been pinpointed for murder anyway. We have a responsibility to save these people from being murdered for the ‘crime’ of working for the British.
• There are a lot of local employees who fled their jobs before 12 months precisely because they had been targeted, or who did a 6-month tour for one British battalion and were then told to go and work for the Americans, or who did 12 months or more with interruptions, or who the Army didn’t give proper documentation too.
• Iraqi staff members must be given shelter not because of their provable length of service but according to whether they have been identified for murder by local death squads. This can be investigated on the spot by Army officers and referred rapidly to London: the process needs to start now.
• Mr Miliband’s statement did not mention the families of Iraqi employees. As Iraqi militias also murder the families of their ‘enemies’, we must resettle our employees’ families as well. Mark Brockway, an ex-soldier who hired many Iraqis, estimates that we are talking about a maximum of 700 Iraqis to resettle: this country admits 190,000 immigrants net every year.
• Iraqis have already been targeted for murder for having worked for this country. We will be shamed if we allow more to be killed for the same reason. Our soldiers, who are angry at this betrayal, and our diplomats, will be placed at risk if they gain a reputation for abandoning their local helpers.

I’d add that, of course, to tie the relocation package and thus the risk of death to 12 months’ continuous employment puts the employers of local staff in an utterly invidious position – how the hell do you manage your personnel and budget if you know that making someone redundant is tantamount to signing their death warrant? But anyway, come on folks, it’s so far out that it’s far in again! Write a letter to your MP! Seriously, write a letter to your MP. I am trying to jolly things along but it is a really important campaign. Write a letter to your MP.

Stalin is supposed* to have said “A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic”. Like much said by that father of lies, it is a half-truth. A million deaths is a statistic, but it’s also a million individual tragedies.

The death of David Pearce, the first Australian soldier to die in Afghanistan is a tragedy for him and his family. So were the deaths of Marany Awanees and Jeniva Jalal, shot by security guards from Unity Resources Group, an Australian-run security company in Baghdad last week. And so have been all of the deaths in Iraq (as many as a million since 2003) and Afghanistan in the wars and violence that have afflicted both countries for decades.

As someone who supported the war in Afghanistan, as a necessary act of self-defence and as an intervention that seemed likely to have positive effects, I have to accept some share of the responsibility for the deaths it has caused, including that of David Pearce. I can make the point in mitigation that, if the Afghanistan war had not been so shamefully mismanaged, most obviously the diversion of most of the required resources to the Iraq venture, it might well have reached a successful conclusion by now. But even after that mismanagement, I still, reluctantly, support the view that it is better to try and salvage the situation in Afghanistan by committing more resources, rather than pulling out and leaving the Afghans to sort it out themselves. I draw that conclusion because I think there would be even more bloodshed after a withdrawal, and that there’s a reasonable prospect that a democratic government and a largely free society can survive in Afghanistan with our help. And, even after all the mismanagement, I think most Afghans are better off now (or at least no worse off) than they would have been with a continuation of Taliban rule and civil war.
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I’ve just noticed (thanks to Facebook) that my friend Martin O’Neill had “a splendid article on inheritance tax in last week’s New Statesman”:http://www.newstatesman.com/200710080002 . This is currently a hot topic in British politics, as Labour have reacted concessively to a populist Tory attack on the tax. You should read the whole thing, as Martin gives a very cogent explanation of why we should learn to love inheritance/estate taxes and of what’s wrong with the arguments against them. Martin concludes with a Rawlsian suggestion for progressive reform:

bq. To return from abstract arguments to concrete policies, what should Labour do about IHT, in reaction to the Tory proposals? The answer comes from an unexpected direction. The American philosopher John Rawls, in his final book Justice as Fairness, suggests that a just society should have a system of IHT that taxed beneficiaries rather than estates. In that way, inheritance could be taxed much more like income, and hence inheritance tax could be made progressive, through orienting it towards receivers rather than donors. Large estates need not attract any taxation, as long as they were dispersed among a number of relatively disadvantaged recipients. At the same time, even small estates could be taxed heavily if they were all left to others who were themselves already wealthy. Under this system of IHT, there could be no objection that the state was stopping middle-income families from “setting something aside” for their children. But, at the same time, this form of IHT would prevent wealth-transfers which greatly widened existing inequalities.