“Tyler Cowen”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/08/the_libertarian.html at _Marginal Revolution_ today.

bq. The libertarian vice is to assume that the quality of government is fixed. … If the quality of government is fixed, the battle is then “government vs. market.” Not everyone will agree with libertarian views, but libertarians are comfortable on this terrain. … But sometimes governments do a pretty good job, even if you like me are generally skeptical of government. The Finnish government has supported superb architecture. The Swedes have made a good go at a welfare state. The Interstate Highway System in the U.S. was a high-return investment. … The libertarian approach treats government vs. market as the central question. Another approach, promoted by many liberals, tries to improve the quality of government. This endeavor does not seem more utopian than most libertarian proposals. The libertarian cannot reject it on the grounds of excess utopianism, even though much government will remain wasteful, stupid, and venal. More parts of government could in fact be much better, and to significant human benefit and yes that includes more human liberty in the libertarian sense of the word. Libertarians will admit this. But it does not play a significant role in their emotional framing of the world or in their allocation of emotional energies. They will insist, correctly, that we do not always wish to make government more efficient. Then they retreat to a mental model where the quality of government is fixed and we compare government to market.

When reading this post, it’s hard not to think of Albert Hirschman’s brilliant little book, _Exit, Voice and Loyalty_. Hirschman’s theoretical innovation is precisely to assume that quality (of organizations, of products etc) _isn’t_ fixed, and that there are different mechanisms through which we might imagine that quality would be improved. “Exit” – the threat of switching to a competing organization – is one such mechanism, and it’s one that libertarians will be very comfortable with, as it’s greatly enhanced by free markets or market-like competition under many circumstances. The other is voice – which refers to more directly political actions, of argument, protest, criticism etc, and which doesn’t seem to me nearly as congenial to libertarians, because it suggests that faulty organizations and governments can be made better without recourse to market mechanisms. Indeed, under some circumstances, increased opportunities for exit may reduce the ability of voice to bring through change. Authoritarian regimes frequently allow some critics to go into exile, for fear that they’d become rabble-rousers at home.

Which makes me curious. What do libertarians think about Hirschman’s arguments? Do they read him? Do they have a sophisticated response?

Update: Alex Tabarrok points me to an “old post”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/09/the_tragedy_of_.html of his, which rightly points out that under some circumstances exit and voice can be complements.

Via Arms & Influence, a passage from that Thomas Ricks book [amazon] everyone has been reading (my copy isn’t here yet): [click to continue…]

The “IBM PC is 25-years-old today”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4780963.stm . Me, I resisted at the time, but I’m not sure I could have afforded one. I’m pretty such that the first personal computer I used was a “Commodore 64”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64 in the early 80s, followed by an “Apple IIc”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIc when I worked at Verso around 1985 (I remember seeing “the first Mac”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K in a window by Liverpool Street Station at about the same time). Liking Macs but not being able to afford them meant that I invested in an “Atari 1040STFM”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_st in about 1987 which I used at home for about five years or so (lovely crystal clear b&w monitor). I also spent a good deal of time on “Amstrad PCWs”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW. When I arrived in Bristol (1989) my Department had one (1) “BBC Micro”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bbc_micro in the basement, and there was a great deal of resistance to my suggestion that we should all have pcs on our desks. Some time in the mid 1990s, we all got i386 based clones, and it has been all upgrades to Pentiums since. Except that I just got my “MacBook”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macbook , and had a new “iMac”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imac delivered to my office.

By the time I got to Chicago yesterday my flight to Montreal had been cancelled and I got re-routed through Toronto. (One Canadian city is as good as another, eh?) My bag went on a mysterious and still-unfinished journey of their own. As a consequence, I did something I’m slightly ashamed to admit I rarely do these days: I read a novel. I picked up Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in Chicago and by the time I arrived in Montreal I had just finished it. The main protagonist is Oskar Schell, a nine-year-old boy whose father was killed in the World Trade Center, and the novel is told mostly from his point of view. When we’re not inside Oskar’s head, the voices of his grandmother and grandfather (who have complicated stories of their own) take over.

It’s a good novel. I was unconvinced by some aspects of each of the main characters, and I thought the central plot device could have been handled better. But at the same time, the book drew me in and I found parts of it quite moving. It is exceptionally difficult to write plausibly about the inner world of a child, if only because it’s so easy to forget what being a child is like. Foer’s strategy is to make Oskar irresistibly kinetic: high-energy, endlessly talkative, exceptionally smart, and independent to an almost absurd degree. It mostly works, except of course when the plot requires that Oscar not be as smart as all that. It would have been easy to have Oskar come off as a kind of miniature Woody Allen, neurotically roaming New York in search of something or other. But Foer manages to make you like him.

It strikes me that Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha would make for a good comparison with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Paddy is ten and Oskar is nine. They are both quite talkative. In different ways, bad things happen to both. Yet Paddy is ordinary and Oskar is one of a kind. Paddy lives a routine existence in late 1960s Dublin. Oskar is on the Upper West Side. Paddy’s parents fight. Oskar’s father was killed in a terrorist attack. I read Paddy Clarke when it came out (ten or more years ago I think), and remember being astonished by how well Doyle got the reader inside Paddy’s world, especially the way he showed how awful even ordinary domestic problems can seem when you are ten and don’t fully understand what is happening. I may be biased because it’s easier for me to identify with Paddy’s life and mode of speech, but I think Doyle meets the challenge of writing from a child’s point of view better than Foer. Perhaps Foer’s problem is that the weight of 9/11 is just too much for Oskar as a character to bear, just as within the novel it is too much for him as a person to manage.

I was reading a paper by Samuel Freeman the other day and came across a passage that I found arresting. I found it arresting because it asserted propositions that looked false to me. But Freeman is a very smart guy (and a very distinguished Rawls scholar) and I rather suspect that the points he’s alluding to are symptomatic of some very deep differences in philosophical opinion. They’re also of interest because Freeman’s denial that a state’s control of its territory is akin to property ranges him against both those who are more egalitarian than he is (Pogge and Tan in the passage quoted, but also those like Philippe Van Parijs who claim the existence of borders is sufficient to establish that there is a global basic structure) and Lockean libertarians. I reproduce the passage below together with some (possibly inept) reactions from me.

bq. The one significant practice or norm Rawls’s critics allude to which might at first appearance be regarded as a basic global institution is peoples’ recognition that nations have “ownership” or control of the land and natural resources in the territories they occupy. Pogge, K. C. Tan, and others see this example as justifying a need for a global distribution principle to regulate this practice, and decide how global resources are to be distributed. But it is a mistake to regard this norm as a basic institution, on a par with the institution of property. For control and jurisdiction over a territory by a people is sui generis: it is the condition of the possibility of the existence of a people and their exercising political jurisdiction. As such it is not a kind of property; for among other reasons, it does not have the incidences of property: it is not legally specified and enforced, nor is it alienable or exchangeable, but is held in trust in perpetuity for the benefit of a people. But more importantly, rather than being a kind of property, a people’s control of territory provides the necessary framework for the legal institution of property and other basic social institutions. Finally, peoples can and have controlled territories without norms of cooperation or even recognition by other peoples at all. Indeed this has been true of many countries for most of history; they have existed in a Hobbesian state of war. The point is not that there is anything just about this situation – on the contrary, it has been sustained by aggression and injustice for most of history – but that, unlike property and other basic social institutions, a people’s control of a territory is not cooperative or in any way institutional. It is then misleading to call a people’s control of a territory and recognition of others’ boundaries “property,” a “basic institution,” or part of a “global basic structure,” simply in hopes of showing an inconsistency in Rawls and smuggling in a global principle of distributive justice. (Samuel Freeman, “Distributive Justice and _The Law of Peoples_”, in Rex Martin and David A. Reidy (eds) “Rawls’s Law of People’s: A Realistic Utopia”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/1405135301/junius-20 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).)

The following points strike me as relevant:

[click to continue…]

Kieran wasn’t the only one traveling internationally today for the ASA meetings. It was interesting to watch the myriad of items accumulating in the bins scattered alongside the security line. There seemed to be some interesting perfumes in there (well, at least the containers looked interesting), otherwise, just a bunch of half-empty water bottles, toothpaste, shaving cream and lotion. I wondered whether they would let you take an empty water bottle in, but I decided not to test the system. The wait was longer than usual, but still not impossible (this in the Premier check-in area though). I was also curious to see whether the hotel would be ready for the numerous people showing up without toothpaste. Having forgotten French for toothpaste, I mumbled something about brushing teeth, but before I could finish the sentence, the concierge handed me a small tube. Good for them. (Yes, of course I could’ve asked in English, but what’s the fun in that?)

As for getting through passport control, I continue to be unimpressed by Canadian immigration officials. After greeting the guy with a friendly Bonsoir I was asked why I was visiting. I mentioned the sociology meetings, which was only so obvious given that even the official greeting signs at the airport had the ASA written on them and at least half my flight was sociologists. (When I assumed about the couple standing next to me a minute earlier that they were here for the ASA they asked if it was that obvious. Isn’t it?) Anyway, the passport control guy got on the offensive to push me on “what about the sociology meetings”? What about them? I’m giving some talks. I wonder if he was that combative with the Americans. (Don’t bother getting on my case about how this doesn’t sound combative. It was, perhaps you had to be there.)

In any case, the city looks neat from my 23rd floor room. I look forward to exploring it this weekend.

We recently had the dubious pleasure of watching CNN in a hotel room — Bill Schneider was analysing poll figures concerning whether America should attempt to put a stop to the fighting in Lebanon. It reminded me why I maintain a boycott of stupid news, but it also supplied me with the third of my three wishes, each prompted by recent experiences.

My first wish was prompted by hearing an old radio outside braodcast report. The reporter was watching the Crystal Palace burning to the ground. After a few minutes he said “Well, I don’t have any more useful information, so perhaps you should give some other news”. My second was prompted by hearing the music playing in The Gap when I made a rare trip, accompanying a friend.

1. I wish I could hear a contemporary reporter on TV acknowledge that he has nothing more interesting to say.

2. I wish I could walk in to a regular store and hear Roy Harper singing “I Hate the White Man” followed by Kevin Coyne singing “Lunatic” (from what I still think is his greatest album). Or just either one would do.

3. I wish I could hear an analyst of a foreign policy opinion poll on the TV say “well, that’s what the distribution of opinion is among the public. But, youo know, this is a complicated and difficult matter, about which intellectually honest people who are well informed and have given it a good deal of thought, do not know with much certainty what should be done. So, really, the opinion of the British/French/American/Whateverian public isn’t worth paying any attention to, because almost everyone who answered this poll knows virtually nothing about the issue, and has given it even less thought”.

Just once, in each case, would be brilliant.

3 wishes then; the rule is that their realisation would not materially benefit or harm anyone you care about (other than, I suppose, Roy Harper and Kevin Coyne’s estate, in my case).

Well, I picked a good day to be taking an international flight. At least I’m not in the UK. Next time I travel, I’ll be sure to check to see whether “John has identified any empirical regularities”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/08/09/two-point-scales/ about my mode of transport and act accordingly. This is why economics is the queen of the social sciences.

Here in Tucson’s airport, people are pretty good-humored about it all. The TSA staff aren’t making any exceptions, though: while in line waiting to be screened, I saw an octogenarian in a wheelchair have her bottle of Chanel tossed in the bin.

I’m off to Montreal for the “American Sociological Association Meetings”:http://www.asanet.org, which naturally are being held in Canada this year, as part of an ongoing arrangement whereby the Canadian Sociological Society will meet next year in Australia, and the American Economics Association will have their meetings run by the Indian Society of Chemical Engineers. Be on the lookout for amusing articles in the newspaper picking out papers with embarrassing titles.

Until a couple of weeks ago, I kept my television at the bottom of a cupboard. The idea was to waste no time watching tv when I should be studying. Now I watch the news every morning instead of reading improving literature. And it is starting to drive me up the bloody wall.

Whatever channel is on, it’s always the same set up; an older man and a younger woman tag-team the reporting, switching hyperactively from screens on either side, back to each other, and on to full-screen reports. Which is bearable, if patronising. Whenever the man is talking, the woman looks at him, listens, clearly engaged, nods slightly at the right bits, matches her facial expressions to his speech. It’s almost imperceptible, a simple empathic behaviour most women do when others speak. But every bloody time the woman opens her mouth, the man stares straight ahead, completely ignoring her, and only barely acknowledges her when it’s his turn to cut in.

I know, I know. This is how conversations go, whether in a private or professional settings. I can’t tell how many times I’ve seen women colleagues cut off by men in a group conversation. The men don’t seem to even notice they do it – it’s as if they have a divine right to speak at any moment. Yet when male colleagues are in full flight, we do our ‘active listening’, and send out all those signals which we think are supportive of their right to speak, and they probably think are just weak. Because they sure as hell almost never send them back.

There are several ways to respond to being cut off and talked over. Mostly I ignore it unless he’s a repeat offender. Then, I just keep talking. It makes the point that you were already talking and aren’t about to back out of the conversation. It injects a noise level and tension into the conversation that wasn’t there before and is frankly unpleasant – which is a fair way to spread the pain around, I think. Otherwise, of course, I just turn off the telly.

Fate is turning me into Crooked Timber’s airline correspondent. One moment I’m calling for the right to use my mobile phone in flight; the next I’m forced to contemplate having no carry on luggage on my flight. I presume that will be one of the consequences of the terror plot apparently uncovered in Britain, which, if there is anything to it (which, despite initial cynicism, there may well be), strongly suggests that however much is spent on pre-screening carry on baggage, there is no way to stop terrorists collectively carrying on enough ingredients to make a bomb in flight.

I am generally a hawk on terrorism, not least as a consequence of being in NY on 9/11. I hope I will be able to congratulate the British police on good work in this instance – and that they keep up that good work. But I wish I felt more confident that this is the case.

Of course, pre-emptive action is better than cleaning up afterwards, and proving that pre-emption actually was needed is inevitably difficult. But British politicians and the police, in particular, do seem sometimes to react in an especially heavy handed way when they pre-empt. (The killing of the Brazilian electrician last summer being the most glaring example.) If they have been tracking the current plot for some time, surely they could have phased in changes in check-in and pre-screening earlier, in ways that avoided the massive disruption to flights we have seen today. I find myself wondering if today’s disruption is deliberate, to send a message – though to whom, and what it is, I’m not sure.

There is surely also a need for some genuinely independent scrutiny of the police and government action with regard to alleged terrorist plots, especially given how few of the plot-arrest headlines actually seem to result in trials. That would make me more confident that something is going on here that is more than political grandstanding and career protection.

But the bigger point today, of course, is that rumours of terrorist plots, and actual plots, are going to remain a fact of life, the authorities have a huge and difficult responsibility that I do ot envy them, and we have only started to see how living with that fact is going to effect how we all go about our daily business. Dammit.

Had lunch with a Wall Street tycoon who has been sizeing up the likely candidates for the Republican presidential ticket in 2008. Other than John McCain, the current front-runner but no shoo-in, he thought Rudy Giuliani had no chance, Bill Frist too intense, Chuck Hagel statesmanlike, but burdened with a voting record, and George Allen a nice guy, but don’t get it, “George Bush lite”. One person impressed him a great deal: Mitt Romney, the governor of Massachussetts, who earlier in his career turned around Bain & Co and then made a success of the Winter Olympics in Utah.

The question that neither of us could answer – and nor apparently could Romney – is how Romney’s mormon faith will play in the primaries, where the hardcore christian right holds sway. My guess, based entirely on time spent with evangelical christians in Britain, is that it will not play well at all. Romney may be a pro-lifer (with a few caveats), but although evangelicals sometimes admire the missionary zeal of mormons, those I have met universally regard mormonism – with its indestructible undergarments, shunning of coffee and magic scripture-reading spectacles – as bonkers, and a cult, up there with or even worse than scientology. Perhaps it is viewed differently in America: does anyone know?

Still, it is the fastest growing religion in the world, apparently, so there may be some supportive voters out there for Mitt, whose sensible economic views may also appeal to centrist Republicans. Meanwhile, I am trying to figure out why I find HBO’s mormon polygamy show, “Big Love”, such compulsive viewing.

Scott McLemee’s “column”:http://insidehighered.com/views/2006/08/09/mclemee today is on a new collection of essays by George Scialabba. I’ll be getting the collection – everything by Scialabba that I’ve read I’ve enjoyed – but I want to take issue with Scialabba’s very interesting “essay”:http://www.nplusonemag.com/hitch.html on Christopher Hitchens for _N+1_ last year. The burden of the piece is that Hitchens used to seem like a brilliant essayist when he agreed with Scialabba, but now seems anything but; less because of his disagreement than the manner of it, a form of argument which is, in Scialabba’s lapidary phrase, “a tempest of inaccuracy, illogic, and malice.” After having thought about it on and off over the last year, I think that this is right in broad outline, but it doesn’t get at the root of what’s wrong with Hitchens’ writing. Hitchens can be a brilliant stylist (less so today than he used to be, but even now a beautiful sentence occasionally pierces through the fog), but he doesn’t seem to me to be a political thinker. Which is to say that the political positions that he takes seem to me to be grounded more in a sensibility than in a coherent view of politics. This was as true when he was unambiguously on the left as it is now – his earlier essays are sometimes wonderful taken one by one, but they really don’t add up to a whole. Hitchens is notoriously fond of comparing himself to George Orwell, but the better comparison is with Orwell’s friend, “Cyril Connolly”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyril_Connolly. A bit of a waster, with a prose style to die for, but not much at all in the way of political _nous_.

There are some budding investigative hacks among my fellow Timberers, I see – Jim having concluded from my reading of a free Daily Mail that I must have traveled ‘a step above steerage’ on my BA flight from London to NY. Spot on! I actually flew premium economy (World Traveller Plus), having been upgraded (probably due to the frequency of my flying) from the steerage ticket which is all that The Economist allows its journalists to have (except on flights of more than 11 hours, I think, which none of us ever take. Genius). Premium economy means more leg room, which is frankly all I want, but is otherwise identical to the steerage service – with the one great advantage that you get off the plane sooner, and so have to spend less time queueing in US immigration.

Compared to that of, say, an Arab, my experience of US immigration is admittedly a doddle. But standing in line for an hour after a long flight is no fun, with the only entertainment being celebrity spotting. Sir David Frost delighted us steerage types by trying and failing to get to the front of the queue – though a small lady mysteriously appeared (perhaps from steerage?) to carry his bags. I also saw John Porter, the son of Lady Shirley Porter, the famous Tory jerrymanderer and Tesco heiress, who has controversially just returned from exile to England. I have met John before, and had hoped for a chat – but he was led off into the dreaded private room by immigration officers. His traveling companion said that this is the fifth time this has happened, as he has a name similar to someone on the US watch list. Presumably not a terrorist – but maybe the director of a British online gambling firm or an investment bank that did business with Enron? The US really does itself no favours on the PR front.

Anyway, to my point. I tried to use my mobile phone while waiting in immigration, and was soon ordered to stop. The same happened on the plane, as we were taxi-ing to the terminal. Can anyone explain this intolerance of phones? Perhaps the immigration officers prefer silence in their halls, but there is no ban on conversation per se. As for mobile phoning on a plane, surely it is time for a consistent policy for all airlines, which clearly have no idea why they have the policies they do. Most US airlines allow phones to be switched on as soon as the wheels hit the ground, which surely makes sense if you buy the main justification offered for banning the use of mobile phones in the air – namely that they might interfere with the plane’s electrical instruments. However, my science and technology colleagues tell me that there is no way that a mobile phone can interfere with the electrics in this way, and that it is perfectly safe to use phones in the air. Indeed, several phones are usually on, inadvertently, during a typical transatlantic flight, and do no harm. Surely it is time to free the mobile phone for use in flight – though if it happens, I bet the first flight I’ll be sat next to a teenage girl from California who spends the entire flight, like, gossiping, like, to, like, her, like, friends.

Via “Billmon”:http://billmon.org/archives/002661.html , I see that the Bush administration “is now proposing amendments”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/08/AR2006080801276.html to the War Crimes Act in order to protect CIA operatives and former military personnel from prosecution for violation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. The proposal is to replace general protections against degrading treatment with a list of specific offences. Guess what gets excluded:

bq. … humiliations, degrading treatment and other acts specifically deemed as “outrages” by the international tribunal prosecuting war crimes in the former Yugoslavia — such as placing prisoners in “inappropriate conditions of confinement,” forcing them to urinate or defecate in their clothes, and merely threatening prisoners with “physical, mental, or sexual violence” — would not be among the listed U.S. crimes, officials said.