My old friend John Palattella is taking over as poetry editor at The Nation. The news brings to mind an image of him surrounded (menaced, even) by large sacks full of envelopes containing manuscripts that are very earnest indeed. The announcement from the editors notes that, as critic, John has shown “sensitivity to form, historical erudition, and a refusal of the provincial dogmas that so often balkanize the small world of poetry.” Quite right, and it will be interesting to see how he translates personal sensibility into editorial policy.

The fact that I am mentioning this has nothing at all to do with the considerable progress this past year on Nikolai!, my epic about Bukharin, composed entirely in limericks.

Aha, via “Andrew Gelman”:http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2006/12/the_averaged_am.html I see that a book I’ve been waiting for has just been published. Sarah Igo’s The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public is a study of the history of quantitative social research in America, documenting how Americans came to think of themselves as the subjects of social science, and how the categories of survey research got embedded in our culture. From the publisher:

bq. Igo argues that modern surveys, from the Middletown studies to the Gallup Poll and the Kinsey Reports, projected new visions of the nation: authoritative accounts of majorities and minorities, the mainstream and the marginal. They also infiltrated the lives of those who opened their doors to pollsters, or measured their habits and beliefs against statistics culled from strangers. Survey data underwrote categories as abstract as “the average American” and as intimate as the sexual self. With a bold and sophisticated analysis, Igo demonstrates the power of scientific surveys to shape Americans’ sense of themselves as individuals, members of communities, and citizens of a nation. Tracing how ordinary people argued about and adapted to a public awash in aggregate data, she reveals how survey techniques and findings became the vocabulary of mass society–and essential to understanding who we, as modern Americans, think we are.

I knew Sarah in grad school and heard her present parts of the project once or twice. It seemed to me then that she was going to write an absolutely first-class book. Apparently it’s just won the Social Science History Association’s President’s book award, so it looks like I was right.

This is the first year that we’ve contributed to the local NPR affiliate. I listen to NPR a fair bit, and so does my wife, but, unlike her, I’d happily do without it myself. It enhances my life, but not in a way that I value enough that I would pay if they turned it into a subscription-only service (she made the contribution, then, obviously).

I probably spend a similar amount of time listening to BBC7. On my new website I mention that it could have been dreamed up just for me – the best of BBC radio’s irresponsibly depleted archives, and an old school friend of mine is their best presenter; a joy. I’d be embarrassed to admit how much I’d be willing to pay if they made it subscription-only.

So, what if some super-national governmental agency decided to charge me to pay for the enjoyment I get from NPR and BBC7? Would I have a reasonable complaint against it? Just to put one issue aside – I wouldn’t complain, in either case. But I think I would have a complaint in one case and not in the other. I’d have a complaint in the case of NPR because my relationship to NPR is like that of the shoemaker to the elves. They do something nice for me, which I enjoy, but I didn’t ask for it, and if I’d been offered the choice between paying for it or not getting it at all, I’d have chosen the latter. But BBC7 is quite different; not only do I plan around it, but if I’d had the choice between paying for it and not getting it I’d have chosen the former (at an embarrassingly high price).

So, I don’t think I’ve any complaint if they charge me for BBC7 but I do if they charge me for NPR. To say this is different from saying that the people who, in fact, pay for BBC7 and NPR, have a complaint against me if I don’t contribute. Suppose (counterfactually, but to keep the focus where I want it to be) that both are paid for entirely voluntarily by people who are producing them just for themselves and I only get the benefit from them because they don’t know how to exclude non-contributors. If the contributors are securing what they want at a price they are voluntarily paying, it might be a bit oafish of me to consume it without contributing when I could, but it is hard for me to see that I am doing something unjust to them. So my intuition is that even though there is no injustice when I do not contribute to the production costs of BBC7, there is no injustice, either, when I am forced to contribute as much as or less than I would have voluntarily contributed in order to secure access if that were the only way of doing it.

Am I right about this? I’m sure that David Schmidtz says something about it in The Limits of Government, and even surer that Tyler Cowen does in his wonderful In Praise of Commercial Culture, but some bugger walked off with my copies of both! And I’m impatient to hear your thoughts.

I’ll write a follow-up post explaining what this post is really about in a week or so.

In November, voters in Ohio passed Issue 5, which more or less prohibits smoking in public places. There are exceptions, but not many; they are spelled out without much wiggle room. A friend who teaches in a small city there tells me it’s a relief to be able to go out for dinner now in a restaurant that doesn’t smell like old ashtrays. But he also had to write a letter to a local newspaper complaining about the editorializing in their coverage of Issue 5. The headline for a news article read something like “Freedom Abolished in Ohio.”

Well, it turns out that was just the tip of one great big iceberg of crazy. In a letter to the Toledo Blade appearing on Sunday, one John T. Kleeberger, of Metamora, identifies “the ominous parallels” (to use what I believe may be the term of art for such exercises).
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Having lived to a greater age than nearly all of his thousands of victims, and having succeeded in evading justice, the butcher Pinochet is “dead at last”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6167237.stm .

Belle and I are preparing to fly home to the old country. A while back some of you asked about good comics for kids. It so happens I have a couple fine choices I am preparing to dispense on the long plane flight: Owly comics, by Andy Runton. At the author’s site you can preview lots of stuff. It’s very charming and suitable for anyone over the age of 2. No words. Just pictures of worms and birds and the occasional squirrel. So, for example, over a 10 page spread, Owly rescues Wormy from drowning in a puddle and nurses him back to health. Then the two set off to find Wormy’s parents. (That from The Way Home & The Bittersweet Summer. You can preview it.) Here’s an amazon link.

Brad DeLong carries on the discussion about discounting and the Stern Review, responding to a critique by Partha Dasgupta that has already been the subject of heated discussion. As Brad says, all Dasgupta’s assumptions are reasonable, and his formal analysis is correct

But … The problem I see lies in a perfect storm of interactions:

This brings me to one of my favorite subjects: the equity premium puzzle and its implications, in this case for the Stern Review. I’ll try and explain in some detail over the page, but for those who prefer it, I’ll self-apply the DD condenser and report

Shorter JQ: It’s OK to use the real bond rate for discounting while maintaining high sensitivity to risk and inequality.

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What synchronicity: In an entry posted yesterday at Steamboats Are Ruining Everything, Caleb Crain writes about getting some offprints of his article from the latest issue of American Literary History:

I don’t think the world outside academia knows what offprints are any more, if they ever did. I say this with some confidence because when I gave one to a very worldly and well-read acquaintance, he asked, a few weeks after reading it, what it was. Had I had my essay privately printed? he asked. And that was more than a decade ago. I would like to assure everyone that not even I am so nineteenth-century as to have my essays privately printed.

Offprints are unbound printed pages of an article, which a scholarly journal provides to the article’s author so that he may share them with colleagues. The protocol is — or rather, was — that when a researcher wanted to read an article that happened to appear in a journal he didn’t subscribe to, he would send a postcard to the author, care of his institutional address, asking for an offprint. And the author, as a matter of scholarly courtesy, would mail it to him free. My father is a scientist, and when I was little and collected stamps, most of them came from the postcards sent to him and the other scientists at his institution, requesting offprints. In those days, the 1970s and 1980s, the requests by and large came from developing countries, where the research institutions had less money for their libraries. The postcards came from all over the world, in other words, from countries I’d never heard of and imagined I would never see, and it gave me a thrill to see them, emblems of the glamour and global reach of the life of the mind.

Caleb includes an image of the first such postcard he ever received after publishing an article, and offers to send an offprint of his new article if you ask for one in the traditional manner. He mentions “a slight advantage to the paper copy, actually; I couldn’t get online rights for one of the images, so that picture doesn’t appear in JSTOR, only in the printed version.”

For many of us, the hope has been that as same-sex marriage gains a foothold, it will seem less threatening and scary – more normal – to many people and opposition will temper. A data point from Canada:

Yesterday, the Canadian House of Commons voted to uphold same-sex marriage. According to the Global and Mail, “Prime Minister Stephen Harper has declared the contentious issue of same-sex marriage to be permanently closed…. The vote yesterday, which fulfilled a Conservative election promise, marked the sixth time since 2003 that the House of Commons has decided in favour of same-sex marriage.”

But what was striking to me was that opponents of same-sex marriage seemed simply to be going through the motions. According to the Washington Post: “The prime minister expended little visible effort to try to win the vote, and political commentators suggested that he simply wanted to put the issue behind him before another national election was called.”

A long article in this morning’s Inside Higher Ed covers the findings and recommendations in the MLA’s final report on tenure. Much of the same material is covered by The Chronicle of Higher Education here, I’d guess, but who knows? Short of selling blood — and quite a lot of it — I cannot afford to read anything they publish.
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Thanks, Chris. And thanks to the people who contributed to the excellent comment thread. Let me try to continue the discussion by attempting to clarify what I had in mind in the passage that Chris quotes.

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We CTers don’t agree about everything, and here’s a case in point. I was reading Jon’s excellent “Global Justice”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0745630669/junius-20 the other day and was arrested by the following sentences:

bq. When we face the question of how state borders should be drawn, it would be utopian in the pejorative sense to consider carving up territories from an imaginary state of nature. That is not a problem we will ever face. Because the current world is already divided into states, the question we must face concerns the possibility of redrawing existing borders. (p. 89)

Here Jon is echoing, and, indeed, referencing, similar sentiments by other philosopher, including Allen Buchanan whose “Theories of Secession” I was reading about the same time. Of course I agree with them both that, as a practical problem, we’re never going to face the issue of justifying state acquisition of territory _ab initio_. But the task of political philosophy isn’t just to provide practical guidance, it is also to produce critical understanding, and, anyway, there’s the question of the moral attitude individuals ought to adopt to the territorial (and other) claims of states. States claim the moral right to coerce those within their territory, to prevent others from crossing their frontiers, to deport aliens etc etc. We may have to live with the territoriality of states as a fact of life, but depending on whether we think state claims are justified (or could be justified) we’ll think differently about the morality of people who try to cross borders and people who try to stop them (among other issues). We’ll also think differently about history. The rise of the modern state and the claim of states to jurisdiction (separately or communally) over the earth’s surface, has been at the expense of non-state forms of organization, of tribal peoples, of anarchists. Simply accepting the legitimacy of statist territorial claims shuts out the perspective of the losers in an disturbingly peremptory fashion.

One of the most annoying responses we get from our students is when we ask what (if anything) might justify some aspect of social life (income inequality, say) and they shrug and reply “That’s just the way the world is”. Maybe. And maybe it always will be. But that doesn’t mean we should shirk the task of justification. Of course there’s a difficulty here, because we often aspire to practicality. But utopianism _in the pejorative sense_ is surely theorizing that assumes crazy things about human nature (universal perfect altruism, for example). Discussing state jurisdiction isn’t like this. We have states _now_ but they aren’t a permanent feature of the human condition in the way that some psychological or physiological facts plausibly are.

(Recommendation: A. John Simmons, “On the Territorial Rights of States” , _Philosophical Issues_ 35(2001) (Supplement to _Nous_ ).)

One the day my child turned one, “TRex”:http://www.firedoglake.com/index.php?author=35 wrote about “Esten”:http://www.firedoglake.com/2006/12/06/late-nite-fdl-for-esten/, a three year old boy with leukemia, asking his readers to donate money for his treatment.

I am surprised about my increasing inability to read posts about children in pain, or children in miserable circumstances, without producing tears. Is it age? Or is it triggered by a growing awareness of how vulnerable children can be? Or a permanent change in my hormonal balanance due to childbearing or breastfeeding? Or is it the psychological effects of motherhood?

Whatever…. Hang in there, Esten!

Did you know?

On April 2, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany despite considerable public opposition. Just a few months after the United States entered the war, Secretary of the Treasury, William Gibbs McAdoo, called the public mood a “delirium”. Sauerkraut became liberty cabbage, German Shepards became Alsatians and the city of Syracuse banned pinochle, a German card game. The press published calls for mass hangings of “disloyal German-Americans” and some clergymen compared Germans to cholera germs that must be annihilated. Despite this, naturalized Germans collected relief funds for the Red Cross and served in the U.S. Army.

They banned pinochle? (Wikipedia informs me it is etymologically derived from the German Binokel.) ‘Liberty cabbage’ puts that whole ‘freedom fries’ episode in perspective. At least we aren’t getting any dumber. I wonder whether some shrewd entrepreneur marketed pinochle decks under the badass tempting slogan ‘banned in Syracuse!’