I’m sure you’re all tearing your hair out with frustration or worry, so I apologise for not posting much. For the past week I have been on a very tiny island on the south end of the “Rangiroa”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rangiroa atoll, in French Polynesia. No internet access there. Also no electricity.

In other news, it turns out that if you write a book called “Last Best Gifts”:http://www.lastbestgifts.com then the website for it gets a _big_ surge in hits from Google searches in the weeks before Christmas, but not because people are suddenly interested in the topic.

The idea that winning wars is a matter of willpower (what Matt Yglesias calls the Green Lantern theory of geopolitics) has been getting more and more attention as the situation in Iraq deteriorates.

At one level, the triumph of will theory is immune to meaningful empirical refutation. Whenever a nation loses a war, it can be argued that, with more willpower it would have prevailed. The one exception is where the nation is utterly destroyed, in which case, there will be no one interested in observing the failure of will.

There is, however, a specifically American version, which can be given some kind of empirical support. Until Vietnam, the United States had, at least according to the official accounts, never lost a war. The willpower theory holds that this loss was due to domestic weakness rather than defeat on the battlefield, and that subsequent failures of US forces in Lebanon, Somalia and elsewhere represent “Vietnam syndrome”.

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Last in this season’s gift guide series are some ideas for charitable giving. If you celebrate any of the season’s gift-giving holidays, it’s getting to that point where it is too late to order anything for delivery and soon you won’t have time to run out and buy something either. What’s left? You could make a charitable donation on behalf of the people on your list.

I am sure there are the usual suspects on everyone’s list, either charities that are the first to gain mention during any crisis, ones automatically associated with the holidays, or ones you donate to annually and so it is likely that you reach for your checkbook this time of year with specific organizations in mind. For example, we here at CT have a history of supporting causes such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation since their mission is so closely aligned with what we do.

But in addition to the usual suspects, how about considering some lesser known charities? Is bigger always better in this realm?

Recently, I stumbled upon an interesting site called the Darfur Wall.

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Our Scott has unleashed impressive versificational forces (here and here). In comments, Adam Roberts suggests we try to get The Crooked Timber Littel Booke of Political, Philosophical and Scientifik Limerics out by X-Mas. I am duty-bound to report that I have already written A Philosophical Abecedarium, if somehow you managed to miss it back in 2002. I invite new contributions. (I’ve got two ‘k’s, so I might as well have dupes for the others.)

And let me take this opportunity to continue my occasional series of comics recommendations. In this thread, everyone piped up with faves, but no one mentioned Powers, by Bendis and Oeming. It’s more or less a cop procedural, with the protagonists as ordinary human officers responsible for investigating ‘Powers’-related crimes. You can imagine how that might get amusing. The hard-boiled dialogue is just great. And, in fact, you can read the entire first story arc – Who Killed Retro Girl? – here. (The navigation is a bit confusing. Most of the apparent links are just for jokey decoration. Click on the little ‘click here’ button in the Retro Girl box at the top. That takes you here. Then click the small, ochre ‘full daily page archive’ button on the left. Then pull down the little pull-down thingy to start at the beginning, rather than with today’s offering – which is p. 110. Whew! Now you just keep clicking ‘next’ through all 110 pages. You probably would have figured that out yourself.) Some of the pages are more full-featured, with links to pages of the original script, sketches and such. For fanboys.

The first year of the series – a whopping 450 pages worth – is available very cheaply: Powers, vol. 1 [amazon]. Good deal.

I’m buried in grading at the moment (like, I suspect, many of our readers), and not up to writing any longwinded posts. But I did come across something that I thought might make for an interesting discussion for the academic types who want to take a few minutes out. A vanity search on Google Scholar revealed that a piece (PDF) that I co-wrote with Jack Knight a few years back had been cited in an “article”:http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/tesg/2006/00000097/00000004/art00009 by Pieter Tierhost for the _Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie_ on “The Scaling of the Dutch Vegetables-Under-Glass-Cluster: Sweet Peppers, Tomatoes and Cucumbers.” Now it isn’t quite as odd as it might sound that Tierhost would cite an article by a political scientist and political theorist; there’s an actual connection there (and Tierhost’s article looks like an interesting and valuable take on industrial clusters for those who follow these debates). But I certainly never thought that anything I wrote would be of interest to scholars debating the cooperation strategies of Dutch vegetable-growers. Which leads to a point for discussion by those of our readers as gets cited occasionally – what’s the most surprising venue/field/article that you’ve been cited in?

I’m still working my way through the report of the MLA task force on evaluating scholarship for tenure. It’s a hundred pages long, but takes a while to process. One thing does jump out as worrisome and discouraging, though: the status of translation.
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A casual reference to limerick-writing here last week had the effect of unleashing hitherto unexpected powers of versification among some of Crooked Timber’s readership. Seriously, I had no idea.
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The FT has two “great”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/4cd813b2-8dff-11db-ae0e-0000779e2340.html “articles”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/b77c5102-8ec1-11db-a7b2-0000779e2340.html (behind the paywall unfortunately) on how a deliberately fostered culture of corner-cutting at BP led to disaster. Some highlights below the cut. [click to continue…]

Juan Cole:

I see a lot of pundits and politicians saying that Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq have been fighting for a millennium. We need better history than that. The Shiite tribes of the south probably only converted to Shiism in the past 200 years. And, Sunni-Shiite riots per se were rare in 20th century Iraq. Sunnis and Shiites cooperated in the 1920 rebellion against the British. If you read the newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s, you don’t see anything about Sunni-Shiite riots. There were peasant/landlord struggles or communists versus Baathists. The kind of sectarian fighting we’re seeing now in Iraq is new in its scale and ferocity, and it was the Americans who unleashed it.

I have a vague recollection that, in the run-up to war, more or less this point was adduced as evidence democratization could work: no deep history of sectarian in-fighting (not like the Balkans, or anything.) I don’t have a thing to add, ignorant as I am, but I think Cole’s choice of verbs – unleashed – points in the direction of a question. It seems to imply the opposite of what Cole pretty clearly means to suggest: namely, that the beast itself is substantially new. So what should we say? The most obvious thing? Saddam bred the beast, but kept it on a leash; we unleashed it? But I’m not going to bother to pretend I know what I’m talking about here.

Cole links approvingly to this post that offers a slightly different assessment – namely, the beast was born, leashless, after Saddam fell: “close social and political identification with one’s religious group has come about largely as a result of the political environment after the fall of Saddam Hussein – the situation of the Shi’ites in Iraq before that was largely the result of the clan-based nature of political power in the country rather than religious discrimination.” I have to say: this could be cited as evidence that ‘it could have worked, but the Bush crew gratuitously screwed up the reconstruction’ – a line that has taken quite a beating the last 12 months or so. (I’m not proposing we revive such counter-factual apologetics. I’m just asking.)

Glenn Fleishman tags me with one of these silly little things. Alright, then. Five things most people don’t know about me.

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Following the publication of this piece in the NY Times, I’ve had a string of email exchanges with Hal Varian, cc:ing Brad DeLong in the role of interested onlooker. I was surprised by the NY Times article since it included both a correct statement of the way in which Stern treats discounting and income redistribution (roughly speaking a 1 per cent change in income has the same value whenever it is incurred and whoever receives it) with a lot of statements that were either misleading or downright wrong, implying that the near-zero rate of pure time preference in the Stern Review implied a near-zero discount rate for cash flows.

Since Varian is one of the brightest and most technically careful people in the economics profession, I was unsurprised by the correct statement, but very surprised to see errors I’d already refuted when put forward by Arnold Kling, Bjorn Lomborg, Megan McArdle and others. Email revealed that the main problems arose from editorial attempts to ‘simplify’ things for readers, but we still have a lot of disagreements about the justifiability or otherwise of inherent discounting.

In any case, all this has spurred me on to produce my long-promised review of Stern on discounting, at least in draft form. Read, enjoy and criticise.

I’m on “bloggingheads again”:http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=171 with Dan Drezner. Dan and I had a long discussion about Krugman and whether or not academics should get engaged in broader political debates, dipping into Krugman’s recent “piece”:http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12699486/paul_krugman_on_the_great_wealth_transfer/print on inequality as we went along. One of the things I mentioned was the bit in Krugman’s _Peddling Prosperity_ where he talks about the way in which people can cherry-pick economic statistics in order to prove what they want to prove. Krugman is talking about aggregate growth statistics, but nonetheless the point travels.

by choosing your years carefully and talking a good game, you can seem to prove whatever conclusion you like … We learn that a clever propagandist, right or left, can always find a way to present the data on economic growth that seems to support her case. And we therefore also learn to take any statistical analysis from a strongly political source with handfuls of salt. Someone once said about partisan analysis that they use economic data the way a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support rather than illumination (Peddling Prosperity pp.110-111).

Cue “Alan Reynolds”:http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/12/reynolds_rap_on.html in comments at Mark Thoma’s place, defending a rather dubious-sounding WSJ “editorial”:http://users1.wsj.com/lmda/do/checkLogin?mg=wsj-users1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB116607104815649971-search.html attacking claims that income inequality has been growing since _1980._

there is no clear evidence of a sustained and significant increase in inequality since 1988 by any other measure. I very carefully did not say there was no such evidence about 1981-87.

Indeed.

Reynolds goes on to defend his choice of periodization, but it would appear that he has a bit of a “track record”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/12/intellectual_ga.html#comment-26687832 (to extend Krugman’s metaphor) for employing lampposts not only to provide support, but to meet those other needs and imperatives that drunks are subject to while weaving their way home after a convivial evening.

(Note by the way that Krugman’s criticisms come in the midst of a longer discussion of how chancers at think tanks rather than proper economists have come to dominate debate; while academic peer review doesn’t serve as a perfect protection against this sort of cherry picking, it does make it considerably more difficult to get away with).

Reading an “article about the current snow shortage in Europe’s ski resorts”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6185345.stm , I came across the following passage:

bq. “Already banks are refusing to offer loans to resorts under 1,500 metres as they fear for their future snow cover.”

This surely presents a tremendous money-making opportunity for global warming “skeptics”. If the banks won’t lend these resorts money, then there’s a gap which the denialists could exploit and thereby make themselves rich. What could possibly go wrong?

My friend Dennis Gaffney, a freelance writer, has a story in today’s NY Times about the return of “Postcards from Buster.” (He tells me that he has another piece on the same subject forthcoming in The Nation.) The PBS children’s show, you may remember, lost its funding after the animated title character, who interacts with real children, visited a girl from Vermont to learn about maple syrup. The child casually mentioned that she has two mothers – the implication, not stated explicitly, was that they are gay – and Buster replied with the unforgettable line: “Wow – that’s a lot of moms.”

In one of her first official acts, just before being sworn in as Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings wrote to the head of PBS threatening to cut its funding because “Many parents would not want their young children exposed to the life-styles portrayed in this episode.” The “exposure”, of course, was simply portraying the existence of gay parents. The real sin was clearly the casual manner of presentation – like it was no big deal. PBS refused to distribute the episode and didn’t renew the show. Here’s a 2005 Washington Post piece about the cancellation, and here’s a Boston Globe story quoting the mom involved.

But now Buster is back with a new (albeit small) commitment from PBS and a variety of non-traditional funding sources. This season he’s visiting a family living on an Army base, and he is returning to visit some kids that he met in Louisiana during the first season who survived Katrina. Even when dealing with these tough issues, I’m sure the episodes will be presented with the same fun and matter-of-fact attitude that makes the show so enjoyable.