Belated congratulations to the janitors in Houston. The pattern of events is strangely familiar to some of us; but none the worse for that. Have a happy Thanksgiving. Brilliant.

If you Google for “greatest rivalry in sports”:http://www.google.com/search?q=%22the+greatest+rivalry+in+sports%22&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&start=0&sa=N today you’ll get a lot of references to the Ohio State-Michigan series (largely because of last week’s game) several references to Red Sox-Yankees, and a few other college pairings. From a global perspective, these all look faintly ridiculous. Does any of these rivalries really compare to Real Madrid-Barcelona for history, or Celtic-Rangers for intensity?

It’s probably futile to say which of these is *the* greatest. But I think on the list should be the series “that starts in a few hours”:http://usa.cricinfo.com/db/ARCHIVE/2006-07/ENG_IN_AUS/.
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The elections for parliament are held in the Netherlands today. The first exit polls are expected at just after 9 pm Dutch time. While in general elections in small countries are not particularly interesting for an international audience, one never knows what surprises (which may be relevant also beyond the national borders) are waiting for us. Apart from the question which party will become the biggest and hence (most probably) deliver the prime minister, here are two other prominent issues of the current Dutch elections. [click to continue…]

The release of the Stern review on the economics of climate change has had a huge impact on the climate change debate in Australia. There had already been signs of movement, but the government was still adamant in rejecting both the Kyoto protocol and any form of emissions trading. And, although the offical position did not dispute the science of climate change, many of the government’s supporters in the media, and even some ministers, were pushing the denialist line.

That was only a few weeks ago. Now the Australian government has endorsed emissions trading (in principle at least) and is calling for a ‘new Kyoto’. Ratifying the old Kyoto is still a step too far for a government that has never disagreed with George Bush on anything, but it’s hard to see how long this position can last.

Given the impact of the Stern review, it’s important to see if it stands up to scrutiny, and I’ve done a series of posts on parts of the report at my blog. My main conclusions:

(i) Stern’s estimates of the cost of stabilising CO2 levels (1 per cent of GDP by 2050) are optimistic, but in the right ballpark
(ii) Stern’s treatment of discounting is correct (More to come on this, I hope)
(iii) Stern underestimates the costs of Business As Usual, particularly in relation to environmental damage
(iv) Headline reporting of Stern overstates the risks of worst-case outcomes in the long tail, but critics are wrong to suggest that low-probability extreme outcomes should be ignored.

Overall, my conclusion is that the Stern review gets the basic economics and the policy recommendation right, even if the presentation is inevitably political.

I had lunch at the Googleplex yesterday and as a result got to add several geeky license plates to my photo collection. I wasn’t even trying hard to look for these, I was just glancing at the plates I passed walking to and from my car.

In unrelated geekiness, if you prefer to unleash your inner geek with the help of a bit more text then I recommend the quotes on this page. A couple of my favorites:

There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses. (Bjarne Stroustrup)

[The BLINK tag in HTML] was a joke, okay? If we thought it would actually be used, we wouldn’t have written it! (Mark Andreessen)

If none of that made sense then you could go watch some Jay Leno Headlines where it is by design that many of the featured items don’t make sense.

There’s lots that I don’t agree with in Anatol Lieven’s reformulation of realism, but this quote from his LRB “review”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n22/liev01_.html of books on the Cold War (behind the subscriber wall) really has the number of the “more rubble less trouble mob”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/11/06/compare-and-contrast-2/.

One important aspect of Westad’s book is the complex connection he makes between the US and Soviet modernising projects and racism. While both regimes insisted on their right to dictate values and solutions to the benighted peoples of the Third World, both also claimed that those peoples were capable of adopting them, doing so rapidly, and thereby joining the ‘socialist community’ or the ‘free world’. But because, in classic missionary style, both sides saw their truths as self-evident, their programmes as beneficial, and their own benevolence as beyond question, they often had no rational explanation to offer when their projects failed and their clients turned against them. In these cases, there was often an astonishingly rapid swing towards racist explanations. Currently, the neo-cons in America alternate between arguing that all Arab societies are capable of making rapid progress towards democracy (and that anyone who denies this is racist) and asserting that ‘Arabs understand only force.’

Jim Henley “passed on”:http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2006/10/14/5537 one of those internets memes to me a few weeks ago which I’m finally responding to – name three authors whom you’ve given up on, and say why. Here goes …
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Does anyone around here play Fantasy Congress? I’d heard about it before, but now that I was invited to join a league, I started looking into it in more depth.

As in other fantasy sports, you – the Citizen – draft a team of real-life legislators from the U.S. Congress and score points for your team’s successes.

However, as one commentator aptly notes: “[I]t’s lifelike: you win by getting bills passed, not by passing good bills.”

If you only care about winning the game, sure, you can compile a team of senators and represenatives who have an active record. But do you really want to be sitting around hoping that some real-life bill that makes your stomach turn is successful just so you can score some points in FC?

I can see the appeal to some extent, but overall I am not convinced the system is refined enough at this point to get me sufficiently enthusiastic. And while my first reaction was that at least it has educational value by teaching people about the legislative process, now I’m thinking that since it is most likely to appeal to folks who already know much about politics, it’s not clear that it will really spread the word far and wide about how the system works.

That said, I don’t have much experience with fantasy sports so I may be missing some important factors. Moreover, I do think the idea is interesting and certainly impressive that some college students thought it up and managed to execute it. And to be fair, it sounds like its creators – four undergraduate students at Claremont McKenna – are working on refining the system.

Three weeks ago I started a project: take at least one photo a day and post these online. Of course, anyone who’s been following my various posts about Flickr knows that this is not exactly a hardship. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to make a conscious effort every day to stop for a moment and notice something in my surroundings worthy of photography for one reason or another. Part of the point is to have a visual reminder of the various things I’m up to during the span of a year. It’s called Project 365 and I got the idea from Photojojo.

I let my contacts in Flickr know about this and several have joined in on the undertaking. I set up a Flickr Group where everyone can post their additions. (It does have some rules though so don’t just start dumping photos into the pool.) Some of us are also using tags that allow an easy look at how any one day is represented by different people.

Needless to say this is definitely in the realm of personal diary blogging, which is not something I had engaged in much before. But it’s fun with photos. Intrigued? Join us. Grab a free Flickr account or just post to your un-Flickred blog if you’re so inclined. Let me know, I have a Project 365 section on my personal blog‘s sidebar and would be happy to expand it. It is not a requirement to post a photo each day, that can be done in clusters of a few. The requirement is to take at least one photo each day and before midnight strikes, decide which photo represents something about the day.

In response to my complaints about Trevino, Hilzoy went and procured an actual historian to comment on the Phillipines Insurrection and – generally – on the advantages and disadvantages of such things for national life. I take the key sentence to be:

Once the indigenous resistance was stronger – more politically conscious, better armed and trained – this unspoken calculus no longer applied. Instead, the "home field advantage" came back into play. No longer could small numbers of well-armed foreigners dominate much larger numbers of "natives" on their home soil, as they had been able to do during the 19th century.

I have nothing to add, except that Lemuel Pitkin – I loved A Cool Million, too – requests that I tell you what comics to read.

I’ll start by completing my Green Lantern Geopolitics thoughts. (See also here.) It seems to me that what Matthew has forgotten to mention is that the Lantern in question is obviously Guy Gardner. We missed Guy Gardner appreciation week at Dave’s Long Box – just keep scrolling down below the Stiltman stuff – down, down – and election day ‘whose side is your superhero on?’ stuff. He has a nice essence of Guy frame. Before that he did a ‘what is Guy saying?’ caption contest. One of the entries seemed particularly Green Lantern Geopolitics relevant:

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Ferenc Puskás, whose Hungarian team thrashed England at Wembley in 1953 with tactics that anticipated “total football”, and who is widely considered to have been one of the great talents of all time, has died. Obits and articles: “Brian Glanville in the Guardian”:http://football.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/0,,1950662,00.html, “Jonathan Wilson in the Guardian”:http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/sport/2006/11/17/best_beckenbauer_platini_zidan.html, “Soccernet”:http://soccernet.espn.go.com/news/story?id=392277&cc=5739, “Football365”:http://www.football365.com/story/0,17033,8750_1694091,00.html, “Simon Barnes in the Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,27-2458213,00.html, “Times obituary”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,27-2458262,00.html .

“Milton Friedman has died”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6156106.stm at the ripe old age of ninety four. Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution “writes a brief appreciation”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6156106.stm from the point of view of a fan. As “Harry said”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/11/10/adam-swifts-political-philosophy-an-beginners-guide-for-students-and-politicians/ around here only the other day, everyone should read “Capitalism and Freedom”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226264211/ref=nosim/kieranhealysw-20 at least once.

_Update_: The “Milton Friedman Choir”:http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6407847019713273360&q=milton+friedman sings about corporations, markets and social responsibility. (Hat tip: CB.)

Alex Müller emails to tell me that he’s singlehandedly translated the Susanna Clarke seminar that we ran last year “into German”:http://molochronik.antville.org/stories/1511971/ (as best as I can tell it’s a very nice translation). When you do something under a Creative Commons license, you hope that people are going take it and play with it and do fun things that you can’t do yourself, and it’s wonderful to see it happening. Apparently the China Mieville seminar is next on his list …

Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen has “responded”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/11/xxx.html to “my claim”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/11/13/relativities-local-and-global/ that, once societies have achieved a certain threshold level, continued growth in output doesn’t matter that much (and that inequalities among such societies matter little, certainly when set beside the absolute poverty of the global poor). Tyler writes:

bq. Just as the present appears remarkable from the vantage point of the past, our future may offer comparable advances in benefits. Continued progress might bring greater life expectancies, cures for debilitating diseases, and cognitive enhancements. Millions or billions of people will have much better and longer lives. Many features of modern life might someday seem as backward as we now regard the large number of women who died in childbirth for lack of proper care. Most of all, economic growth limits and mitigates tragedies. It is a simple failure of imagination to believe that human progress has run its course.

I think what is most striking about what Tyler writes here is the way in which he runs together human progress and economic growth, as if they were the same thing. I’ll leave to one side any moralized or perfectionist thoughts about human progress and just notice that there’s a basic distinction to be made between scientific and technological development and economic growth in the sense of increased per capita GDP. Capitalism’s advocates have always had a tendency to equate progress with increased output, but there are other possibilities, chief among them being that output remains constant and people become progressively freed from burdensome toil. Jerry Cohen has some trenchant observations about Max Weber’s enslavement to a Tyler-like view towards the end of his _Karl Marx’s Theory of History_ (p. 321 and thereabouts). If the passage were online, I’d link. But you should all own a copy anyway.

The other thing to note is the way Tyler holds out the carrot of the benefits of medical technology, including “cognitive enhancements”. If scientific progress can come apart from growth in GDP I could just suggest that giving up on growth in one sense doesn’t necessarily require us to forgo such future benefits. (And I could also point to a list of societies that have innovated in medical technology despite not being at the front of economic development: the British invention of MRI scanning in the 1970s being a case in point.) But it is worth noting that the really great advances in longevity (so far) have mainly come from improvements in diet and public health and rather less from hi-tech. Maybe Tyler thinks that all this will change in the future and that we need to incentivize innovators now so that the benefits of “cognitive enhancements” trickle down to ordinary Westerners and then to the global poor. I’m unconvinced.