My colleague Daniel Hausman and his collaborator Michael McPherson (formerly President of Macalester, now of the Spencer Foundation) have just published the new edition of their book Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy, and Public Policy; (UK).

This is the perfect book for many of our readers, presenting moral philosopical ideas in a way that directly shows how and why they matter for issues in economics and public policy. It contains accessible introductions to ideas in economics and moral philosophy (eg utility theory, social choice theory, game theory, libertarianism, utilitarianism and egalitarianism) and uses the controversies around pollution transfers and school vouchers to illuminate the debates about these concepts, and to show why those debates matter for public policy. There’s a great analysis of the notorious Larry Summers memo, a chapter which outlines the incredibly intricate “equality of what?” debate and an illuminating chapter about efficiency (which everyone who dares to use the word “effiicent” should be forced to read if only that were efficient). It is one of those unusual books which is great for an undergraduate or graduate class, but which as a professional economist or philosopher you will still learn a good deal from, not only about how to present complex ideas in a lucid manner, but about the ideas and debates themselves. It is also an unusual second edition, in that the authors have actually rewritten the book substantially, rather than just tacking a new chapter on the end and calling it a new edition. Strongly recommended.

The “New York Times'”:http://www.nytimes.com/ website just got a new design, and at first glance passes the test of being better-designed than “my homepage”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~kjhealy. (It had been failing this test for the past five years or so.) As I write this, the new look is set off by a “photograph of Bill Frist”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/03/us/03frist.html apparently demonstrating the best technique for strangling cats you have “rescued”, but I presume this will not be a permanent feature. My first reaction is that the page is pretty large — it looks like it’s a full 1024 pixels wide, and there’s a lot of stuff squished onto it, too. Too much, really. They could have cut out that right-hand quarter (with all the market/investor garbage) and just stopped the front page at the big six thematic blocks (Arts/World/etc). I’m sure the likes of “John Gruber”:http://daringfireball.net/ or “Cameron Moll”:http://www.cameronmoll.com/ will have more informed things to say.

Lurking in one corner is an ad for “that awful contest”:http://www.nytimes.com/marketing/winatrip/ to Win a Trip with Nick Kristof. I haven’t seen too much comment about this since it launched a few weeks ago, but I know I can’t be the only one to have winced. At present, my favorite candidate to accompany Kristof is Tom Friedman, with Anna Nicole Smith a close second and Christopher Hitchens (belligerently drunk version) trailing in third.

_Update_: On the design, “this scaled-down screenshot”:http://www.subtraction.com/archives/2006/0403_the_awesome_.php (scroll down) of the whole front page confirms that the people who will love this the most are designers with 30-inch monitors (rotated 90 degrees). It’s too wide for my laptop (a current-model iBook). “Gruber likes it”:http://daringfireball.net/linked/2006/april#mon-03-nytimes_design a lot. He thinks it’s “much less crowded than before,” though he also thinks “there’s just way too much there” — so remember, if you are talking to a designer, that word “crowded” doesn’t mean what you think it means.

Commenting on a story about “female pilots”:http://www.dawn.com/2006/03/31/top1.htm in the Pakistani Air Force, “Lindsay Beyerstein”:http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2006/04/first_female_pi.html asks “Are American servicewomen allowed to fly planes in combat?”

The answer is yes. Lt. Col. “Martha McSally”:http://www.ctie.monash.edu.au/hargrave/mcsally.html was one of the first seven female jet pilots in the USAF, and I think in 1995 was the first woman to fly a combat sortie, while she was on a tour of duty in Kuwait. In 2004 she became the “first woman to command a fighter squadron”:http://www.azstarnet.com/dailystar/relatedarticles/30666.php. She “recently returned”:http://www.azstarnet.com/dailystar/115123.php from a tour of duty in Afghanistan, where she led her squadron of “A-10 warthogs”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-10_Thunderbolt_II. In December of 2001 McSally “sued the Pentagon”:http://www.rutherford.org/about/cases.asp because a regulation forced her (and all other women in the military) to wear a Muslim abaya (covering her from head-to-toe) while she was stationed in Saudi Arabia, and also forbade her from leaving the base without a male chaperone. Amongst other objections, McSally pointed out that servicemen were actually prohibited from wearing Muslim garb. She won her case.

Commenters with more knowledge of the U.S. Air Force than I are free to correct me, but I think it’s no surprise that McSally (who, like most women pioneers of her type, is by all accounts outstandingly qualified) should fly an A-10. It’s pretty much the lowest-status fighter combat aircraft in service. (One joke is that its airspeed indicator is a calendar.) Which isn’t to say I would want to see one bearing down on me with “one of these fuckers”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAU-8_Avenger blazing away. One of the reasons I know any of this, incidentally, is that McSally’s squadron is based at “Davis-Monthan AFB”:http://www.dm.af.mil/ here in Tucson. A-10s (and other jets) fly sorties out from Davis-Monthan to the “Barry M. Goldwater Bombing Range”:http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/goldwater.htm (no, really) a couple of times a day, and the flight path runs over my office. You understand the meaning of the phrase “air superiority” when you see a couple of those things go overhead.

The _Financial Times_ “editorializes”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/8ed824fc-c11b-11da-9419-0000779e2340.html on the aftermath of the Walt/Mearsheimer paper.

bq. On various counts, this is a shame and a self-inflicted wound no society built on freedom should allow. Honest and informed debate is the foundation of freedom and progress and a precondition of sound policy. It is, to say the least, odd when dissent in such a central area of policy is forced offshore or reduced to the status of samizdat. Some of Israel’s loudest cheerleaders, moreover, are often divorced by their extremism from the mainstream of American Jewish opinion and the vigorous debate that takes place inside Israel. As Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, remarked in Haaretz about the Walt-Mearsheimer controversy: “It would in fact serve Israel if the open and critical debate that takes place over here were exported over there [the US].”

bq. Nothing, moreover, is more damaging to US interests than the inability to have a proper debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, how Washington should use its influence to resolve it, and how best America can advance freedom and stability in the region as a whole. Bullying Americans into a consensus on Israeli policy is bad for Israel and makes it impossible for America to articulate its own national interest.

This seems to me to draw a good and important analogy. The internal Israeli debate, for all its faults, is vigorous and real. There’s no similar debate happening in the US, nor is there likely to be one anytime soon if the response to the Mearsheimer/Walt piece tells us anything. Some of the critiques of the piece seemed to me to be useful (and indeed sound); but they’ve effectively been drowned out by diatribes like “this one”:http://www.adl.org/Israel/mearsheimer_walt.asp from the Anti-Defamation League which accuses Mearsheimer and Walt of engaging in “classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis.”

I’m opening this up to comments – but on the condition that these comments remain civil, respectful of opposing viewpoints and on-topic (and I’ll vigorously delete comments which fail to measure up to my doubtless idiosyncratic definitions of these terms).

Update: Matt articulates what should become known as “Yglesias’ Law”:http://www.tpmcafe.com/node/28465.

bq. any conversation that starts with the question of America’s Israel policy all-but-inevitably turns into a conversation about Israel’s Palestinian policy.

In 2002, Google brought us PigeonRank.

Today, Ask brings us RhymeRank. Check out the results for Crooked Timber (right-hand side of the screen) or try the service on your favorite search term. [UPDATE 4/2/06: As of April 2nd this is no longer available.]

Yahoo! went a bit too geeky on this judging from reactions to my various past posts by making their April Fool’s all about Web 2.0 and calling it “All Your Web 2.0 Are Belong To Us”. After all, if you don’t know what Web 2.0 is then you’re certainly not going to find that post amusing. In any case, it’s just a blog post on their Search Blog, it’s not as though they introduced a whole new service.

What other April Fool’s have you come across today? No, they do not have to be search related.

This year’s Google April Fool’s joke is Google Romance, a service that will help you find your romantic match. It’s sort of cute, although I think some of their past jokes have been better.

The site does bring up something I have been meaning to blog about so I’ll take this opportunity. It concerns the paradox of matching services such as dating Web sites or job search sites. I haven’t thought about this issue too much, but enough to blog about it. (What’s the threshold for blogability, by the way?:)

Services such as dating and job search sites promise the user to find a perfect match, whether in the realm of romance or the labor market. But deep down, is it really in the interest of these sites to work well? After all, if they do a good job then the seekers are no longer relevant customers and the sites lose their subscribers.

One way to deal with this is to offer additional services that go beyond the matching process. For example, the match-making site eHarmony now has a service for married couples. It is an interesting idea. It seems like a reasonable way to expand their user (subscription!) base so they are not dependent on keeping matchless those whom they promise to connect. Moreover, I can see that they may have quite a loyal user base in those whom they helped find their matches. Job sites can also offer services that go beyond the initial match. Nonetheless, I think there is an interesting tension in all this.

On a not completely unrelated note: Happy Birthday to GMail! Fortunately, that was not an April Fool’s two years ago. I came across the Google Romance notice on Google’s homepage, because I saw the GMail birthday icon and wanted to see if they had it in bigger on the Google homepage (a page I never visit otherwise, because why would I in the age of search toolbars). The birthday image is not reproduced there, but I did see the Romance link. (Yes, I’m obsessed with knowing how people end up on various sites and I’m projecting here by assuming that anyone else cares.)

Jim Henley:

bq. The NOT A CIVIL WAR OH NO marked by Shiite death squad attacks on Sunnis, some of whom are surely guilty of guerrilla activity and some of whom are surely not, is really Insurgency Plus.

This reminds me of something I meant to say the other week. In much the same way as we’re not supposed to call Iraq a quagmire, we’re also not supposed to say it’s on the brink of — or already stuck in to — civil war. It’s worth bearing in mind that just as there are different “kinds of quagmires”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2003/09/01/kinds-of-quagmires/ there are also varieties of civil war. An example familiar to me — with the usual caveats that this just meant as an illustrative comparison, not a strong correspondence — is the “Irish Civil War”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Civil_War of 1922–23. It was a conflict between Free State forces (the government, who supported the “Anglo-Irish Treaty”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Irish_Treaty that ended the “War of Independence”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Irish_War), and the opponents of the treaty, including a majority of the old IRA.

For present purposes, what’s worth noting is that while the conflict was relatively short it was also vicious, especially towards the end, and especially amongst the elites. There was a cycle of execution, retaliation and retribution both in the field and against prisoners. A relatively large proportion of the political class was killed. What did _not_ happen, however, was something like the American Civil War, where large armies repeatedly confronted one another on the battlefield. Moreover, life, as always, went on. The Irish Civil War was largely confined to active combatants, and casualties were heavily concentrated in the leadership. For instance (I’m open to correction here), the Free State army was of course targeted but its unarmed police force was generally not subject to attacks. It’s also worth noting that a very large majority of people did not support the Anti-Treaty side, but that didn’t stop the conflict from happening.

Less than eight years after the war ended the government peacefully handed over power to the party directly descended from the Anti-Treaty forces. For years afterwards many of those in Parliament looked across the aisle at the murderers of their fathers, uncles or brothers. Iraq is very different — much more complex — in all kinds of ways, not least because of its strategic importance, its oil reserves and the continued presence of an occupying army. So the Irish case offers little real direction. Optimistically, maybe, it reminds us that it is in fact possible for severe civil conflict to resolve itself into something like peaceful coexistence. But it also shows that you don’t need to wait for an Antietam or a Gettysburg to say that a country is in the middle of a bitter civil war.

AP:

NEW YORK – In the largest study of its kind, researchers found that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery. In fact, patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications.

The study looked at complication rates within 30 days of heart bypass surgery and compared three groups of about 600 each: “those who knew they were being prayed for, those who were prayed for but only knew it was a possibility, and those who weren’t prayed for but were told it was a possibility.”

Results showed no effect of prayer on complication-free recovery. But 59 percent of the patients who knew they were being prayed for developed a complication, versus 52 percent of those who were told it was just a possibility.

A kind of reverse placebo, I guess.

Dr. Harold G. Koenig, director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at the Duke University Medical Center, who didn’t take part in the study, said the results didn’t surprise him….

Science, he said, “is not designed to study the supernatural.”

No, it’s designed to study the natural. Like, for example, whether prayer can help recovery from bypass surgery.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to the abstract in the American Heart Journal. The full text is behind a pay wall.

John McGahern “has just died”:http://www.rte.ie/arts/2006/0330/mcgahernj.html. I knew that he’d been ill; he had been supposed to come to Washington DC a couple of weeks ago, but his trip was cancelled at short notice. This recent “Jonathan Yardley review”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/09/AR2006030901841.html of his memoirs give some flavour of the man.

bq. His mother hoped that he would become a priest and say Mass for her, but his life took a different direction. In his early teens, he discovered reading, “a strange and complete happiness when all sense of time is lost,” much of which he did floating on the nearby river in a small boat. Gradually “a fantastical idea” formed in his mind: “Why take on any single life — a priest, a soldier, teacher, doctor, airman — if a writer could create all these people far more vividly? In that one life of the mind, the writer could live many lives and all of life. . . . Instead of being a priest of God, I would be the god of a small, vivid world. I must have had some sense of how outrageous and laughable this would appear to the world, because I told no one, but it did serve its first purpose — it set me free.”

bq. McGahern has taken full advantage of that freedom. He has published six novels and four collections of short stories, received numerous honors and much well-deserved praise. He is regarded as one of Ireland’s finest contemporary writers, not least because he writes about his native land with such clarity and honesty. His difficult childhood informs much of his work — in particular his best-known novel, The Dark (1965) — but in that as in this memoir, he seeks not to exploit his past but to understand it and to make it pertinent and meaningful to others.

John Scalzi emails to tell me that his Hugo-nominated book, _Old Man’s War_ and Robert Charles Wilson’s _Spin_ are “both available”:http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/004115.html to potential Hugo voters. The catch is that you have to confirm that you’re an attendee at LAcon IV, and thus able to vote for Hugos. The upside is the books aren’t crippleware; they’re being made available in .rtf format on the honour system. Charles Stross’ _Accelerando_ is also part of the package, but it’s been available “under Creative Commons”:http://www.accelerando.org/ in a variety of formats since it was first published.

“Scott McLemee”:http://www.mclemee.com/id4.html is a superb critic, and one of the things that makes him good is that he is generous. He can get something interesting out of not very interesting books, and he doesn’t go out of his way to be snarky. But when he feels like filleting something, “his knife is very sharp”:http://www.mclemee.com/id165.html.

THE MAN ON WHOM NOTHING WAS LOST: The Grand Strategy of Charles Hill, by Molly Worthen. Houghton Mifflin, 354 pp.

… Charles Hill — a former Foreign Service officer who served in important positions under Henry Kissinger and George Schultz – has for a few years now taught a class at Yale University called Grand Strategy. Young aspirants to the diplomatic corps flock to it. … Molly Worthen, a recent Yale graduate, was one of Hill’s junior illuminati, and her book The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost is an authorized biography of the great man. … The result is not a book so much as it is an alumni-magazine profile gone horribly, horribly wrong. … Hill comes across as a single-minded careerist who did not notice his wife’s alcoholism until she mentioned it during the final days of their marriage. If not for the element of hero worship pervading the book, one might suspect an element of sarcasm in Worthen’s title … something is missing from Worthen’s gale-force proclamations of wonder … There is nothing resembling a substantial idea in the entire book. Worthen presents Hill as a neoconservative guru. But her portrait is that of a mind bearing less resemblance to the political philosopher Leo Strauss than a walking edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. … the author never forgets herself entirely. Or at all, really. … She also indulges in a considerable amount of “my generation” babble: “We sit in coffee shops and complain about the doldrums of ‘real jobs,’ the stress of having to commit to a career that won’t ever let out for the summer,” etc.

This is not a biography, but a study in self-absorption by proxy. The publisher ought to be ashamed. The manuscript should have been left in a drawer, where it might embarrass the author 10 years from now, and in private.

Ouch.

Geraldine Brennan is blogging for the TES at the Bologna International Children’s Book Fair. A good place to pick up tips on children’s books. Come to think of it, further tips are welcome in comments.

Here’s “an apposite comment”:http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/03/cloning_as_solace.php from P.Z. Myers about someone who has had some cells from his late pet dog, Tito, cultured and frozen:

This is a personal decision, and I wouldn’t argue one way or the other about what Hank should do; it sounds like he’s wrestled over the issues already. All I can say is what I would do if I were in his sorrowful position.

I wouldn’t even try cloning.

… the essence of Tito isn’t reducible to a few million cells or a few billion nucleotides. While the genome is an influence and a constraint — a kind of broadly defined bottle to hold the essence of a dog — the stuff we care about, that makes an animal unique and special, is a product of its history. It’s the accumulation of events and experience and memory that generates the essentials of a personality and makes each of us unique.

Even if cloning were reliable and cheap, I wouldn’t go for it. It would produce an animal that looks like Tito, and would be good and worthy as an individual in its own right, but it wouldn’t _be_ Tito.

I’ve half-joked before that, purely because of this basic point, sociologists should welcome _human_ cloning with open arms. Technically achieving the sort of things many people imagine they could do with cloning — recreate a lost child or relative, produce a new version of themselves — would in fact have just the opposite effect. It would show just how important social structure, local environment and historical contingencies are to forming people. And that’s without even getting in to the metaphysical questions of what’s essential about people’s identity. Some people are going to be really upset when they realize that the genome is not some kind of magic essence of self. I hope public understanding catches up with the reality before actual cloned people are subject to the resentment of their creators.

Shorter Volokh Conspiracy today: “The people have spoken — the bastards.”