Just before Christmas, I picked up a copy of _Roseanna_, the first volume of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo’s Martin Beck series. I’ve just finished the final volume _The Terrorists_. Having read the first, I had to read them all. Since the reprint schedule wasn’t going to get me them all quickly enough, I scoured Hay-on-Wye for volumes and then the internet. In the 1960s and 1970s Sjowall and Wahloo, husband and wife, collaborated on the sequence of ten detective stories set (mainly) in Sweden. Though we at CT sometimes Scandinavia as some kind of benign alternative to North American capitalism, the far-leftish Sjowall and Wahloo had a much more negative take. The Swedish welfare state that appears in the novels is a grotesque fraud perpetrated on the working class and they use the device of detective fiction to show a reality of desperation, poverty, isolation, alienation, exploitation, and criminality. But the novels are hardly exercises in _agitprop_ . If they were, they’d be a pretty poor read. Instead, their brutally cynical vision of Swedish society simply tinges the whole and emerges through the facts and the occasional acid comment.
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“In-N-Out is opening a franchise in Tucson soon”:http://www.in-n-out.com/location_details.asp?id=207, not too far from where I live. This may well pose problems for my, uh, ruthless nutrition and fitness regime. I’m not a connoisseur of American fast food, but In-N-Out is pretty damn tasty. “Sonic”:http://www.sonicdrivein.com/index.jsp is apparently also worth a bypass. I mean detour. Two locations recently opened in Tucson, but I’ve never eaten there. I think the last really good fast food chain I ate at was a while ago in Auckland, where I got to try the frighteningly large burgers and dangerously tasty kumara fries at “Burgerfuel”:http://www.burgerfuel.com/flash.html, on Ponsonby Road.

As noted elsewhere this week, the eminent American essayist George Scialabba has recently taken his work online with GeorgeScialabba.net.

But that’s just the beginning. He’s on a roll. [click to continue…]

Via “3QD”:http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/, a nice “profile”:http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2006/mayjun/features/knuth.html of the great “Don Knuth”:http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/ who — amongst many other things — gave the world “TeX”:http://www.ctan.org/, which, together with its “various”:http://www.latex-project.org/ descendants, helps make technical writing beautiful and encourages amateur typophiles to “waste their time”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/04/27/fetishizing-the-text/ formatting their “work”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/drafts/moral-order.pdf.

Not content with their Nobel Prize, Economists also emulate Mathematics with their Fields Medal analog, the “John Bates Clark Medal”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bates_Clark_Medal. This year, for the first time, the winner is a woman: Harvard’s “Susan Athey”:http://kuznets.fas.harvard.edu/~athey/. Congratulations to her. (Hat tip: “Brad DeLong”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/04/susan_athey_win.html.)

Eugene Volokh and a correspondent discuss Max Weber’s views on the state and legitimate violence, and between them make a common error:

I was corresponding with a friend of mine — a very smart fellow, and a lawyer and a journalist — about concealed carry for university professors. He disagreed with my view, and as best I can tell in general was skeptical about laws allowing concealed carry in public. His argument, though, struck me as particularly noteworthy, especially since I’ve heard it in gun control debates before: “Forgive me, but I’m old-fashioned. I like the idea of the state having a monopoly on the use of force.”

I want to claim that this echo of Weber (who said “Today … we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory”) is utterly inapt in gun control debates, at least such debates in a Western country.

He goes on to give a string of alleged counterexamples: “Every jurisdiction in America has always recognized individuals’ right to use not just force but deadly force in defending life … Use of deadly force for self-defense has always been allowed in public places as well as in private places … many non-state organizations even maintain private armed staff — armed security guards …” The examples actually make Weber’s point. Weber said that a distinguishing feature of the modern state is that it “claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory … the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the ‘right’ to use violence.”

It’s the legitimacy point that’s key. The state claims the right to regulate who can and cannot do things like own weapons, shoot people, run some kind of armed organization or what have you, and under what circumstances and with what restrictions. Which is precisely what Volokh’s examples show: jurisdictions _allow_, laws _recognize_, and so on. It is this legitimacy claim that is behind the state’s labeling certain groups as terrorists, for example. Volokh goes on to say that his “point is simply that this Weber quote is of no relevance to the question of private gun possession for self-defense.” Weber won’t resolve any detailed policy questions in that department, though his definition does make it clear that in a modern state the private ownership of weapons is something the state will certainly claim the right to regulate.

_Update_: To clarify, as I wrote this in a bit of a rush: (1) Volokh’s counterexamples rebut effectively the idea that the state has a monopoly on the commision of violent acts (especially armed violence). (2) This is not what Weber meant by “monopoly on legitimate force.” (3) It seems to be what his correspondent thought Weber meant, however, and so (4) Between them they end up propagating a common error about Weber, though it’s not Volokh’s intent to discuss Weber’s ideas specifically. I’ve changed the title of the post to forestall misinterpretation.

Among the top-ranking videos at YouTube this morning, nearly half (nine out of twenty) consist of Cho Seung-Hui’s monologues as broadcast by NBC.

Good for Siva Vaidhyanathan for criticizing this decision at the MSNBC website. (See also his piece there on the “ill-conceived lessons” being drawn from the massacre.) [click to continue…]

From the Economist, some advice on “English As She Is Wrote”:http://www.economist.com/research/styleGuide/index.cfm?page=673903. As is usual with such lists, there’s much to agree with and a few nits to pick. A current peeve of mine — which doesn’t make the list — is the use of “incredibly” to mean “very.” There is also probably a name for the law requiring that there be several errors of style or grammar in this paragraph, but I don’t know what it is.

Today I received an e-mail from an undergraduate student (whom I don’t know) who asked if he could pose a few questions on Amartya Sen’s work: [click to continue…]

Really rather shameful. Riyadh Lafta, one of the co-authors of the Johns Hopkins/Lancet studies on excess deaths in Iraq, has been refused a transit visa for his flight to Vancouver to make a presentation on alarming increases in child cancer. He was apparently meant to be passing on some documentation to some other medical researchers who are going to write a paper with him on the subject; the presentation was happening in Vancouver because Dr. Lafta had already been refused a visa to visit the USA.

What on earth can be in this data? Presumably the UK and US authorities have reasoned that Dr Lafta is an ex Ba’ath Party member (as he would have had to have been to hold a position in the Iraqi Health Ministry), and thus the data he is carrying is not really about child cancer at all. Perhaps he is involved in some sort of “Boys from Brazil” type plot to clone an army of super-soldiers from Saddam Hussein’s DNA, and for this reason the UK cannot be exposed to this deadly information for even four hours in the Heathrow transit lounge.

The alternative – that Dr Lafta is being intentionally prevented from travelling in order to hush up his research on post-war deaths (research which even the Foreign Office have now more or less given up on trying to pretend isn’t broadly accurate), or to hush up the news about paediatric cancer for political convenience – is too horrible to contemplate. I’d note that there isn’t an election on in the USA at present, so the denialist crowd can shove that little slur up their backsides this time too.

(thanks to Tim Lambert as always)

In semi-related news, and with apologies to the person who gave me the tip for taking so long to post it, it appears that Professor Michael Spagat, the author of the “main street bias” critique, has a bit of previous form when it comes to making poorly substantiated and highly inflammatory statements about other people’s research. His involvement with the general issue came about because he’d been using some of the IBC data in support of a power law hypothesis[1] about the scaling of violent deaths. This carried on from previous work he’d done on Colombia, where he had also defended his own somewhat tendentious interpretation on the data by slagging off Human Rights Watch. I sense something of a pattern here; I noted in a previous post that although the “main street bias” critique appeared in the Lancet colloquium on the Burnham et al paper, Prof. Spagat himself did not, and I thought at the time it might be because of this habit.

[1] And one of Prof Spagat’s co-authors on the main street bias paper, and a few others in the power law of violence series was Neil Johnson of Oxford University, who was also a co-author of that paper about the Eurovision Song Contest that we had a go at a while ago, and so the circle of minor irritation is complete.

Another “bloggingheads.tv”:http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=247 with Will Wilkinson is up; among other things we talk about bad culturalist arguments and my sad yet inexorable decline into “Goldberg Derangement Syndrome”:http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/2007/04/goldberg_derangement_syndrome/. I suggest that overly determinist cultural arguments aren’t very convincing, especially when they try to explain gross differences between societies. Good cultural explanations need to identify the specific mechanisms that make for cultural stability and change. Coincidentally, I was involved in discussion today over an interesting-sounding new piece from Steve Pfaff, an University of Washington sociologist, forthcoming in Jeff Kopstein and Sven Steinmo’s new volume on divergence between the EU and US. It’s notorious that far fewer Europeans report going to church than Americans – this is often presented, especially in the pop-lit, as evidence of profound and lasting cultural divergence between the two. There’s good sociological reason to suggest that it is nothing of the sort – a key causal factor is the degree of marketplace competition.

In many European countries, churches are established and have official state support, so that they don’t have enormous need to tout for churchgoers. They’re monopolists, and as Albert Hirschman suggests, monopolists tend to be lazy. In the US, in contrast, the legal institution of church-state separation means that churches have to tout actively for business, often through means that appear crassly commercial to Europeans (megachurches and the like). Because they’ll disappear if they don’t attract adherents, they have good incentive to succeed rather better than their European counterparts in putting bums on seats. Apparently, there is a striking negative correlation between church establishment and church attendance across West European countries. Now this presumably isn’t the only causal factor – but it is an important one – and one which suggests that an apparently gross cultural divergence between the US and Europe is to a large extent rooted in the quite particular institutions governing church-state relations (you could perhaps claim that these institutions are themselves manifestations of broad cultural differences, but this would be to miss out on the quite specific historical reasons why they came into being).

At BookTruck.org (a group blog for librarians), Mimi notes that with the nightmare at Virginia Tech, mass-media coverage has been almost entirely conditioned by the new-media “surround”:
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Imagine my excitement when I turned on TF1 last night to see my two crushes amongst France’s Great Men engaged in intellectual naked mud wrestling together. Patrick Poivre d’Arvor was interviewing Nicolas Sarkozy, and was as benignly indifferent to Sarko’s expressive eyes and small man ego as if he were talking to his puppet on Les Guignols. Sarkozy punctuated his remarks by referring directly to PPDA as “Patrick Poivre d’Arvor”. It was odd, and I’m sure there’s some history behind it. Does anyone know the story?

Through the campaign, Sarkozy has been even more invigorated, more expansive, more himself. He finally wrestled an endorsement out of Chirac a couple of weeks ago, when it was obvious that Super-Menteur was hurting only his own credibility by witholding approval of his prodigal son. Sarkozy is off the leash and thriving on it. A political campaign gives expression to his infamous hyperactivity in a way the mere presidency of France never could. He’s growing into the role, but he’ll never be amiable like Chirac or grand like Mitterrand. Sarkozy is charmingly insecure. He completely spoilt his statesman act last night by pointing out how he rises above the insults of his rival candidates by refusing to address them.

This morning, in a political broadcast, Segolene Royal was looking much less exhausted than she has over the last few weeks. She articulates perfectly the nation’s desire to live out its values of fairness and justice and accommodate the rest of the world purely on France’s terms. If France’s presidency was the figurehead role initially envisaged in its predecessor republics, there would be a place for this sort of thing. Without naming names, she referred to those who are ‘bulimics of power’, implicitly contrasting her own, more measured approach. But while Royal says she’ll steer France away from the ‘neo-liberal’ policies of the last five years, in practice it would mean more of the same when it comes to the economy. Chirac has stayed a steady course purely out of lassitude, Royale would do so out of a popular, Canute-like belief that France can stand alone against ‘de-localisation’ and ECB interest rates.

The dark horse is, of course, Francois Bayrou. Try as I might, I never seem to switch on the telly when he’s talking. I’d love to see PPDA give him a good working over.

There’s a useful blog covering l’affaire Wolfowitz “here”:http://www.worldbankpresident.org/ . So far as I can see the Wall Street Journal is almost alone in spinning a pro-W line (what a surprise!).