Soon after I moved to the United States in the autumn of 1995, I went to visit a friend in Boston. We went to a pub in Cambridge called — possibly — Grafton Street. It was an early example of the Irish Pub in a Box, sold as a unit and built to look like a slightly heightened version of the real thing back home. On the way I asked whether was like an Irish pub really, or just a poor imitation. “Well,” my friend said, “it’s not too loud, the tables are clean, and you can find the bathrooms. So not like an Irish pub at all.”

“Via Alan Schussman,”:http://www.schussman.com/article/1364/foode-newse I see that a similar thing has arrived in Tucson, just down the road from my office. (Or, if it’s good, just up the road from my old office.) The “website”:http://www.aulddubliner.com/Tucson/ says the pub will “echo the pathos of rural Ireland to a tee,” which does not augur well. [click to continue…]

The NYTimes decided to report on the extent to which Hungarians are better than Americans at recalling store prices. Given that most blogging I do about Hungary seems to result in a discussion of the Hungarian language and given that the authors explain the findings based on language differences, I thought I’d take this opportunity to address the issue head on.

Let’s start with the findings:

Hungarians are far better than Americans at recalling long prices; on average, they can recall 19 to 24 syllables with decent accuracy, while Americans can recall only 13. The authors suggested that this was because Hungarians speak 41 percent faster, both out loud and when repeating sounds to themselves “subvocally.”

The NYTimes piece ends right there. That’s not fair, the author left out the most interesting part: how do we know how fast Hungarians speak in comparison to Americans?

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Behind the hustle and bustle of the book exhibit at the recent annual meetings of the American Sociological Association was an exhibit of various data sources. That area of the room is usually very quiet. As a break from everything else, I decided to take a little tour. The posters and flyers are actually quite informative despite being abandoned and looking somewhat pathetic from afar. It seems to me that this is an underappreciated part of the meetings and could be especially helpful for graduate students. Of course, it should hold value to many others as well.

In addition to data sources, there are pointers to various tools and also reports that may be of interest. Much of the material on these Web sites is presented in a way that it should be accessible and interesting to many non-specialists, too. The teaching potential of some of these sources is considerable as well.

Below the fold I list some of the resources I saw.

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Since Daniel has identified me as abandoning the “Anti-this war now” viewpoint, and since I’m increasingly in agreement with Jim Henley’s Anti-Most Wars Most of the Time position, I thought I’d try to restate my version of ATWN as it applies to Iraq. I haven’t managed to work it all out, so as with Daniel I’d be grateful for suggestions.

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Marc Mulholland makes a very good point and one that has to be frank left me stumped. Regarding the “Anti (this) War (now)” position, which I had hitherto believed was my own view on the Iraq War, the question is quite simple.

Looking at the way in which Iraq has progressed since the war, is it really credible to say that this is just the result of poor planning? Does it not, in fact, make a lot more sense in light of the facts to say that this was a fundamentally misconceived objective which could not have been achieved by any plan at all and should never have been attempted?
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Which famous philosopher was accused of being all of the following (answer under the fold):

lecherous, libidinous, lustful, venerous, erotomaniac, aphrodisiac, irreverent, narrow-minded, untruthful, and bereft of moral fibre.

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Does it ever seem weird to you that Hegel and Hölderlin and Schelling were college roommates? Or, for that matter, that Hamann and Jacobi were housemates? The whole business strikes me as quite suspicious.

I went to see “The Wind that Shakes the Barley”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460989/ last night, and thoroughly enjoyed it. There are at least three Timberites better qualified than I to judge of the historical accuracy of the film, so I won’t comment on that. There did seem to be points of universal interest though. A group of farm-boys with a semi-theocratic ideology successfully holding off the high-tech army of a modern industrialized power next door seems to be a theme that gets repeated in other times and places. And the way in which a revolutionary nationalist movement divides into warring factions in when faced with a pragmatic compromise of its maximal goals has some parallels with the Palestinian story. An unexpected pleasure was the close physical resemblance between pompous landowner Sir John Hamilton (played by Roger Allam) and Christopher Hitchens. Recommended.

This is a very interesting “post”:http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1052:

bq. The second trend I identified in the talk was toward the use of DRM-like technologies on traditional physical products. … some printer makers have their printers do a cryptographic handshake with a chip in their cartridges, and they lock out third-party cartridges by programming the printers not to operate with cartridges that can’t do the secret handshake. … Doing this requires having some minimal level of computing functionality in both devices (e.g., the printer and cartridge). Moore’s Law is driving the size and price of that functionality to zero … so it will become economical to put secret-handshake functions into more and more products. Just as traditional DRM operates by limiting and controlling interoperation (i.e., compatibility) between digital products, these technologies will limit and control interoperation between ordinary products. We can call this Property Rights Management, or PRM. … A pen may refuse to dispense ink unless it’s being used with licensed paper. … A shoe may refuse to provide some features, such as high-tech cushioning of the sole, unless used with licensed shoelaces. …Will these things actually happen? I can’t say for sure. I chose these examples to illustrate how far PRM might go. …What we can say, I think, is that as PRM becomes practical in more product areas, its use will widen and we’ll face policy decisions about how to treat it.

There’s an economic case to be made that this would be efficient and promotes innovation (see “Austan Goolsbee”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/technology/27scene.html?ex=1303790400&en=37d41d9406c1d512&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss in the _NYT_). I think that the negative distributional consequences (i.e. the transfer of bargaining power from consumers to producers that it would lead do) would be more important. Other opinions?

Update: Link to Felten’s post added. Duh.

While we’re talking about Scott, this “piece on John Derbyshire”:http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/29142.html is the best example of how to do intellectual garbage pick-up that I’ve seen in some considerable while. The lede:

bq. Few things are quite so instructive (if not quite in the sense he intends) as watching John Derbyshire pretend to wrestle with what he supposes to be deeply transgressive thoughts about matters of politics, culture, and morality. The topics vary. The method does not. “Why, it is shocking to find myself considering things from this angle!” he says sotto voce. “Yet one must be brave, and consider the possibility that I am, in fact, completely correct.”

Click through to read the rest.

So, it’s the 25th anniversary of Scott’s high school graduation. That reminds me that it is mine too (though I’d call it leaving school, no graduation having been involved), indicating, contrary to my impression over these many years, that we’re the same age (I thought he was a little younger, making him all the more impresive, somehow). He spent his last two years of high school thus:

In particular, there was no love lost between me and the principal, a crusty old cracker named Theo “Cotton” Miles. I thought he was an idiot — an estimate there has been no occasion to revise — and tended to shake my head every time I passed his office. To judge by later hostilities, he may have noticed this.

It got really bad sometime during my junior year, around spring 1980, when I was walking around with Socialist Workers Party literature as well as running for student council president on some approximation of a “student power” platform, influenced by old radical paperbacks.

During the school assembly where the candidates gave their speeches, my appeal got a very enthusiastic and rowdy response, particularly from the black kids who gave it a standing ovation. Rumor had it that I actually won, but Theo wouldn’t stand for it.

My last two years of secondary school were spent battling the British associates of the American SWP inside the peace movement (a central combatant being, I now know, a housemate of Chris Bertram’s at the time — one of several ways in which our paths have crossed over the years). And I liked both my secondary schools a good deal, despite not fitting in very well at the school where I spent my final two years. The head was not fantastic by any means (unlike his successor, whom I missed), but the teachers were mostly serious, smart, and caring. Most of them, I thought, really wanted to teach in a comprehensive school, which that school was in name only, so the smattering of middle class kids like me got a lot of good attention. But at least one of my best A-Level teachers, I later discovered, was adored by many of his pupils who left at 16 for his efforts to find them suitable employment at a time when that was not especially easy. (And this, I’ll add, after having pleaded with them to stay on for A-levels, instead of leaving for marriage and a steady income). I have many happy memories of that school, and few unpleasant ones, despite not having been especially cheery at the time. I feel intense gratitude to the teachers I had, especially (if you are reading) Mr, King, Mr Matthews, Colin Ross-Smith, and, at my previous school, Mr Thomas and Mrs Flint.

Anyway, the real point is this. Scott doesn’t dare to ask for himself, but could someone get him a copy of this book about his hated high school principal. He obviously wants it, but can’t bring himself to pay for it (understandably). Meanwhile, I’ll try to find my old copies of Permanent Revolution for him (explanation at the bottom of his page, entries for July 2, 5 and 7).

Matt Yglesias announces the institution of “Krauthammer Friday”:http://yglesias.tpmcafe.com/blog/yglesias/2006/aug/11/the_krauthammer_charade_part_i

bq. Charles Krauthammer’s columns are published on Fridays. Thus, I hereby proclaim a new recurring feature — the second Friday of every month, we’ll revisit the man’s January 18, 2006 column, “The Iran Charade, Part II” in which he confidently proclaimed — contrary to the judgment of every relevant intelligence agency — that “Iran is probably just months away” from a nuclear bomb.

But even better, to my mind, was Krauthammer’s confident judgement on Iraq WMDs back in “April 2003”:http://www.aei.org/events/filter.,eventID.274/transcript.asp.

bq. Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem.

Indeed.

The best recent books about capitalism and the circumstances in which it helps poorer people escape their poverty are Hernando de Soto’s “Mystery of Capital” and Rajan and Zingales’ “Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists”. I met with Fred Mishkin yesterday, who has convinced me that his new book – ” The Next Great Globalization: How Disadvantaged Nations Can Harness Their Financial Systems to Get Rich”
will be a worthy complement to these two.

Certainly, I suspect it will be a lot more insightful than the other globalisation book about to appear, Joseph Stiglitz’s “Making globalisation work”, the follow up to his anti-World Bank rant, “Globalisation and its Discontents”.

What I most like about de Soto’s work is its emphasis on the legal system, and the importance of it being accessible to the poor and supportive of their de facto property rights. The great strength of “Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists” – a book that deserves to be much more widely read – is its focus on the problems that flow from the existence of an entrenched elite that writes the rules of capitalism to secure its own position, rather than to allow the bulk of the population to participate fully.

Mishkin, who says he will not be allowed to give interviews about his book under impressively strict conflict of interest rules once he becomes a governor of the Federal Reserve in a few weeks, takes the story one step further, arguing that opening a country up to international capital markets in the right way is crucial to growth. As he notes, so many countries have botched the process of joining the world financial system that many are tempted to conclude it is better not to try – Argentina being a recent example. But, says Mishkin, rightly I think, doing so sentences them to remaining a poor, low growth economy.

That is, above all, because to successfully open up to international financial markets, a country has to develop the right domestic institutions, including rule of law, central banks and good governance.

Mishkin is particularly worried about Latin America, where he fears a serious reversal of the process of building sound institutions. The outcome of the current Mexican stand-off may be particularly important – not because Calderon, the declared winner of the Presidential contest, is necessarily the better candidate (his closeness to powerful business interests may limit his capacity to be a reformer) but because if the loser, Lopez Obrador, succeeds through public protests in overturning the result, that would deal a death blow to the election commission, the establishment of which was a huge step forward for institution building in Mexico, a country not hitherto known for its strong independent institutions. Here’s hoping the election commission stands firm.

On reflection, maybe the ban on carry on luggage won’t be so bad: without a pc, let alone a phone, there need be no guilt about watching some movies on the seat-back video instead of working. My colleague who writes inflammatory editorials arguing for segmenting families with kids from other passengers, or charging higher prices for kids, because of the externalities they impose, will no doubt be delighted at the thought that a ban on baby food will deter more families from flying.

Another friend thinks the logical conclusion is to fly naked – but then he was a fan of the now-grounded Hooters Air. The reality would be less delightful than he imagines, I suspect, given the unbuff bodies that most of us would get to expose to our fellow fliers. On the other hand, I noticed during a previous flight in “a tad above steerage” that BA provides First Class passengers with a delightful pair of blue pyjamas. Perhaps this generosity could be extended to all classes, and terminals transformed into giant changing rooms?