Josh Cherniss, Harvard grad student and an old friend of Crooked Timber, tells me of an interesting sounding initiative at Harvard for a grad student conference in political theory.

Details below the fold.
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We’ve just had an issue with some spam showing up on the site. Not the run-of-the-mill comment-based sort. It was hidden in a block of html enclosed in a tag. Weirdly, and this is the disturbing bit, it appeared as a block of HTML appended to our index.php file, which really shouldn’t happen at all. The result was that WordPress would render CT pages and then this bit of spam text would be right at the bottom of the html, outside the body tags, etc, as the index.php file closed out.

The permissions on the index.php file are right and our WP installation is up to date. There doesn’t seem to be anything else amiss, and apart from it appearing in a very strange place it seems like automated rather than handcrafted spam. (Another odd thing was that some of the spam links pointed to some personal pages hosted by washington.edu, but I didn’t follow the links.) Unfortunately I don’t know how long the spam has been there. What happened to us is approximately the same as what happened to this guy on the WP support forum, but there wasn’t any helpful followup from that thread. Has anyone encountered this issue before?

We had a scare last year; our eldest was warned that she might need very expensive orthodondistry in order to be able to be a fully-paid up participant in the ideology of perfect teeth. We had a narrow escape — or, at least, a stay of execution, as she is only to be monitored for the next year or so. But at some point the fight will loom; do we spend a fortune on something that we’ll be told is medically valuable by someone whose living is made by contributing to wasteful positional competition. If only everyone had imperfect looking teeth, no-one would care.

But dentists really do matter.
As Anne Alstott reminds us, a large swathe of American children never see an orthodontist, because they never get to see the dentist who might refer them, and with tragic results:

Earlier this year, Deamonte Driver, a 12-year-old boy living in Maryland, died after he got a tooth infection that led to a brain infection. Deamonte had never had routine dental care.The problem wasn’t that he was among America’s 47 million uninsured. He was covered by Medicaid, the federal health-insurance program for the poor, which includes dental care for kids. But Medicaid reimbursement rates for dentists in Maryland—as in many states—are set at such low rates that few dentists accept Medicaid patients.

Driver’s tragedy is only the most extreme consequence of poor access to dentists. Ask any teacher in an elementary school with lots of low income kids, and she’ll tell you stories of kids in prolonged and sometimes intense pain during the schoolday; public money being thrown away on teaching kids who can’t concentrate because they don’t get proper dental care. Anyway,
read the whole thing.

to _Methodenstreit: The Extended Blogospheric Remix_. First, as a few commenters here and there have noted, Herb Gintis’s review of a Post-Autistic Economics reader has disappeared from Amazon. I’ve been in contact with Gintis, who not only didn’t take it down himself, but is rather annoyed at its disappearance. I’ve taken the liberty of reproducing it below the fold for the sake of posterity. Second, I see that an “Econ prof” claims in correspondence with “Ezra Klein”:http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/05/more_on_heterod.html that “Aklerlof, Stiglitz, etc. all got published very easily.” For Akerlof at least, this “isn’t true”:http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/articles/akerlof/.

I received my first rejection letter from _The American Economic Review_. The editor explained that the Review did not publish papers on subjects of such triviality. In a case, perhaps, of life reproducing art, no referee reports were included. … again rejected on the grounds that the _The Review_ [i.e. _The Review of Economic Studies_ – hf] did not publish papers on topics of such triviality. … The next rejection was more interesting. I sent “Lemons” to the _Journal of Political Economy,_ which sent me two referee reports, carefully argued as to why I was incorrect. After all, eggs of different grades were sorted and sold (I do not believe that this is just my memory confusing it with my original perception of the egg-grader model), as were other agricultural commodities. If this paper was correct, then no goods could be traded (an exaggeration of the claims of the paper). Besides — and this was the killer — if this paper was correct, economics would be different. I may have despaired, but I did not give up. I sent the paper off to the _Quarterly Journal of Economics,_ where it was accepted. I had had such a hard time getting this article published, that I was quite surprised, on a trip to England in the fall of 1973, to discover that, not only had it been read, but even with considerable enthusiasm.

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Following up on a couple of recent posts, I thought it might be useful for me to explain why I don’t think of myself as a ‘heterodox’ economist or even find the concept particularly useful. Although I’m clearly to the left of most people in the economics profession (including a fair number who would call themselves heterodox) I’m happy to identify myself with the mainstream research program in economics.

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Jeff Randall in an article tellingly entitled “It’s not racist to worry about immigration”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;jsessionid=GC4DUTALG01A3QFIQMGSFF4AVCBQWIV0?xml=/opinion/2007/06/01/do0101.xml&posted=true&_requestid=6551 in the Telegraph:

bq. Never mind arguments over race, diversity and multi-culturalism, England (where most immigrants want to settle) is horribly crowded. With 50 million people, it is the fourth-most densely populated country in the world, excluding city states such as Hong Kong and Dubai.

The trouble with this sort of claim is obvious. If England (density: 388.7 /km²) counts as a country then all kinds of other non-sovereign-state units ought to be included in the sample — New Jersey (438/km²) perhaps, or Puerto Rico (434 /km²), or the Palestinian Territories (615 /km²). But if sovereign states (apart from city states) _are_ the relevant unit, then the UK (243 /km²) comes in behind “rather a lot of places”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density .

Rich Byrne writes on Al Gore’s new book critiquing newsertainment and Gore’s own history facilitating the current state of affairs:

Gore’s book rehearses the well-known factors in the decline of TV news: runaway conglomeration, slashed news budgets and sharp profit incentives for news divisions to drown out the serious with titillation and slapstick.

But how precisely did it get this way? It’s been a long slow slide, to be sure, but the Telecommunications Act of 1996 – in which Gore was a key player as Bill Clinton’s vice president – has accelerated the very problems Gore bemoans in _The Assault on Reason_.

… it’s an inconvenient truth for Gore that this overhaul of US media law narrowed consumer news choices and curbed the public accountability of broadcasters. In a review of the legislation’s fallout in 2005, the advocacy group Common Cause noted that the law created “more media concentration, less diversity and higher prices”. …

… The new law increased the license period granted to broadcasters from five years to eight years and it significantly raised the bar required to successfully challenge license renewals. This double whammy effectively blunted one of the only tools available to ordinary citizens to hold media accountable.

The effects are already there to see. Recent studies have shown that local broadcast coverage of politics has been largely obliterated, with many broadcast news stations virtually ignoring regional congressional elections. … So it’s no surprise that Gore prefers to ping the soft target of celebrity. Nor is it surprising that his critics in the media prefer to keep the discussion on Gore v Britney.

Not long ago I was going to post about the challenge of keeping relevant people posted of one’s travels. That is, the challenge of knowing who among one’s friends may be in the same location at the same time. It’s one thing to remember who lives at a particular destination, it’s another to try to guess who may be travelling there at the same time you are.

Fortunately, just as I was about to post on this, I came across Dopplr, which is a site that addresses this precise issue. Once you sign up, you can let the system know about upcoming trips. You also link up with other people to share your itineraries and the system tells you when you’ll overlap. It’s in closed beta, but if you can think of a friend who has an account, you can ask him/her for an invitation.

Obviously, the value of such a service increases by the number of relevant contacts that join and keep their accounts up-to-date. I wonder if they will be adding the option of distinguishing among contacts. You may want certain people to know about a trip, but not others. And of course, if you prefer that people not know about a certain trip at all, you can exclude it from your list altogether.

I’m excited about this service, but the usual challenge remains: getting enough of my non-geeky friends to join and update their travel info.

“Henry’s post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/05/30/hip-orthodoxy/ reminds me of a time in my recent past that the struggles of heterodox economics were taking up a good deal of my energy. In 2001, I was one of the three Cambridge University PhD students who wrote a little piece called “Opening up economics”:http://www.paecon.net/PAEtexts/Cambridge27.htm, which was originally signed by 27 economic, business economics and development economics PhD students to call for an ‘opening up’ of the economics discipline. In fact, originally we were four writing the proposal, but one dropped out since she became too worried that writing this piece might jeopardize her chances of getting her degree. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that many of us were scared, and some fellow PhD students didn’t want to sign because they worried about how their supervisors would react. So far for the notion of a free market of ideas.
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In the near future, CT will be hosting another book event. I thought it would be helpful to alert our readers ahead of time so people can read the book and thereby participate in the discussions more actively and in a more informed manner.

The book is “Higher Ground: New Hope for the Working Poor and Their Children” by Greg J. Duncan, Aletha C. Huston, and Thomas S. Weisner.

During the 1990s, growing demands to end chronic welfare dependency culminated in the 1996 federal “welfare-to-work” reforms. But regardless of welfare reform, the United States has always been home to a large population of working poor— people who remain poor even when they work and do not receive welfare. In a concentrated effort to address the problems of the working poor, a coalition of community activists and business leaders in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, launched New Hope, an experimental program that boosted employment among the city’s poor while reducing poverty and improving children’s lives. [The authors] provide a compelling look at how New Hope can serve as a model for national anti-poverty policies. [source]

You can either buy the book directly from its publisher, the Russell Sage Foundation, or get it at Amazon. Chapter 1 [pdf] is available online for free.

In addition to Timberite contributions, we’ll have comments by Nancy Folbre and Kimberly Morgan plus a response by Greg Duncan.

Soon there will be a Web site just for this – if there isn’t one already -, but until then, let’s see what we can collect here.

Yesterday, Google announced a new feature of its Maps service: Street View for select urban areas in the U.S. plus Google’s backyard. We’ve seen this before on services like A9 (which discontinued the feature), and Microsoft’s Live Maps, but this seems more user-friendly.

Boing Boing has a thread with links to some interesting finds. Oh, the temptation to go hunting for more! Spot any embarrassing situations or funny captures? There is potential here for hours of amusement!

I’m off to Trader Joe’s.

Chris Hayes’ “article”:http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20070611&s=hayes on heterodox economics has gotten a lot of attention; for my money, the two best takes on it are “Ezra Klein’s”:http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/05/forgetting_the_.html and “Matt Yglesias’s”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/. As Matt says:

What heterodox economists are really challenging isn’t neoclassical economics but the political behavior of neoclassical economists. The recent Alan Blinder fracas is a case in point. He didn’t call any of the standard neoliberal case for free trade into question, and, indeed, didn’t argue against free trade at all. He just said something that he thought would be helpful in spurring the creation of the sort of social democratic society with an open market that he favors, while many economists saw his statements as giving aide and comfort to people who have a political agenda (blocking new trade agreements) that they don’t like.

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I believe my last post here — almost a month ago — was all about <a href=”https://crookedtimber.org/2007/05/03/time-check/”>not having enough time in the day</a>. Well, today my summer finally begins. I returned the last of my twelve graduate seminar essays, and I dropped off the First Child. I left him the car in which we drove 800 miles in one day, and flew back to central Pennsylvania the next day. Now that’s efficiency! We decided to forego <a href=”http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/reporting_for_duty/”>the traditional father-son knife fight</a> upon parting, because I had myself a one-way airline ticket that I’d purchased only eight days before, and we figured I would attract quite enough attention in the airport without having to explain away sundry fresh flesh wounds.

Nick turned 21 last month, and will begin his senior year of college in the fall. I don’t know whether that makes me the CT contributor with the oldest child, but I figure I’ve got a shot at that dubious distinction. And so, for my return-from-little-hiatus post, I’m going to dilate a bit about parents and professors.

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The piles of documents released as a result of litigation against Phillip Morris and Exxon are gifts that keep on giving for those of us interested in the process by which the Republican parallel universe has been constructed. Previous research has shown that the core proponents of global warming delusionism including Stephen Milloy, Fred Singer and Fred Seitz got their start as shills for PM, denying the risks of passive smoking. A string of rightwing thinktanks including Cato, the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute helped to promote these hacks and the lies they were paid to peddle.

Now it’s turned out that one of the hardiest of parallel universe beliefs, the claim that Rachel Carson and the US ban on DDT were responsible for millions of deaths in the third world, arises from the same source.

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