UPDATE: See Phil Ford’s response, on “Hot Pants,” at Dial “M”

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While taking in the news that James Brown has died, I’ve been in transit — far away from my CDs, and unable to celebrate his life in fitting manner. It sounds like a joke in really bad taste, but in fact what I most want to hear is the album called Dead on the Heavy Funk 1974-’76. I used to have it on tape but am not sure if it’s still in print. There’s another compilation with a similar title released as part of what sounds like a worthy archival edition covering Brown’s entire career.
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French Church Street, Cork. To avoid excessive nostalgia, below the fold is an equivalent photo from my current location, Tucson. Merry Christmas, everyone.
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If, like me, you find that Christmas Pudding is already heavy enough without the brandy butter or clotted cream, you might want to try this much lighter sauce which cuts the richness with a nice tangy citrus flavour (taken from Katie Stewart and sharing its name, I suddenly notice, with my son).

4oz butter
4oz caster (baker’s) sugar
Juice of one orange
1 tsp cornflour
Rind and juice of one lemon

Slowly bring the butter and sugar to a boil. Mix the orange juice and cornflour together, then add to the butter and sugar with the lemon juice and rind. Keep mixing to ensure a smooth sauce. Serve warm.

I said it was less heavy than brandy butter. Don’t worry, its not healthy or anything. You can use more juice or less butter and sugar if you like. Adding brandy is nice too, though redundant if you serve the pud properly.

Have a happy Christmas, those of you to whom its relevant. The rest of you — well, have a great December 25th anyway. I’m off for a few days to enjoy myself with my family.

When, some years ago, I read Adam Hochschild’s “King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terrorism and Heroism in Colonial Africa“:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Leopold’s_Ghost, I was shocked not only by the historical analysis of Belgian Colonialism in the Congo, but even more about the fact that I had never learnt these things at school or university. While, partly thanks to the internet, nowadays many more Belgians know about the attrocities that King Leopold committed in the Congo, there is still a lot of denial about Belgium’s colonial role in Africa.

According to Adam Hochschild, there are “striking parallels between King Leopold in Congo and George W. Bush in Iraq”:http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-hochschild22dec22,0,2727390.story?coll=la-opinion-center. I expect that people will differ in their opinion whether this is an exaggeration or not, but at least I hope that the American kids (now and in the future) will get a more self-critical account of the US’s role in Iraq than what I learnt about Belgian’s role in the Congo.
(hat tip to “Political Theory Daily Review”:http://www.politicaltheory.info/)

Via “Dan Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/003069.html, Greg Mankiw “accuses Deval Patrick”:http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/12/deval-patrick-is-no-pigovian.html of not understanding basic economics.

The money quote from Patrick:

“If we’re trying to cultivate here in Massachusetts an energy-smart economy, then the notion of relying for additional revenues on something we’re trying to break our dependence on doesn’t seem to me to be a formula for long-term success.”

Mankiw’s response:

Okay, let me get this straight: It is important that we reduce our consumption of oil. Therefore, we should not tax it.

Hmmm….Governor Patrick was Harvard class of 1978, and it’s a good bet that he took ec 10. I wonder what they taught about the slope of demand curves back then.

There usually isn’t much need to remind well known right-of-center economists of the importance of incentives, but it looks to me as though Mankiw is misreading an on-the-face-of-it-quite-reasonable claim here. Patrick is suggesting, as far as I can see, that if we want to move away from a petroleum based economy, it may be a bad idea _ex ante_ to make gas into an important source of tax revenues for the government. If the Massachusetts state government comes to rely on a gas tax as a significant source of income, then it will have an incentive over the longer term not to want to lower tax revenues, say, by introducing non-tax regulations that make hybrid vehicles more attractive and gas-guzzlers less so. It will have created a long term constituency that favors the status quo, and that is likely to resist vigorously attempts to move away from it that would threaten funds going to this or that favoured project.

This kind of feedback loop, in which policy shifts create and provide resources for new constituencies which then push for the maintenance of that policy, has been explored at length by Paul Pierson and others (see “here”:http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:LbUegaZYGqEJ:www.yale.edu/coic/pierson.doc+%22paul+pierson%22+%22effect+becomes+cause%22&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=9 for a nice and reasonably brief overview). Now it could be that this effect is swamped by the substitution effects and so on described in basic micro textbooks. But it also could be that it isn’t swamped – and I can’t think of any very good way empirically to test for which effect is likely to prevail under which circumstances. Mankiw and Patrick are on different sides of an argument about the appropriate instruments for changing incentives. But this in no sense means that Patrick is an economic illiterate.

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.)