“Brad DeLong”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/03/income_inequali.html quotes “Paul Krugman”:http://krugman.page.nytimes.com/b/a/251584.htm on income inequality in America. (Note the Krugman link is behind the TimesSelect firewall.)

One of the truly strange features about discussions of inequality is the way people shy away from talking about the extent to which the gains from rising inequality have gone to a tiny, wealthy elite … A few days ago Steve Pearlstein of the Washington Post — a good guy, and sensible — wrote about income inequality. As I did in my column just a few days earlier, “Feeling No Pain,” he emphasized the “retrospective income” distribution data released by the I.R.S. (Paper at http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/04asastr.pdf. Tables at http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-soi/04asastr.xls.) As he pointed out, those data show that the share of income received by the top 10 percent of taxpayers rose from 33 percent in 1979 to 44 percent in 2003 … But Pearlstein stops there, leaving the impression that everyone in the top 10 percent was a big winner. In fact, there was hardly any rise in the share of income going to people between the 90th and 95th percentiles: almost all the gain went to the top 5 percent. And most of the gain went to a very small elite. The income share of the top 1 percent went from 9.6 to 17.5 percent, accounting for more than 70 percent of the top decile’s gain. The income share of the top 0.25 percent went from 4.9 to 10.5, accounting for a bit more than half the total gain.

Today “this story about income inequality in Australia”:http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/so-it-emisem-the-rich-what-gets-the-pleasure/2006/03/14/1142098463260.html was on the front page of The Age online.

Appearing to contradict claims that Australia is now a more egalitarian society, research by the Australian National University and Oxford University has concluded that the richest 1 per cent of the population has almost doubled its share of national wealth. The report, by ANU economist Andrew Leigh and Oxford’s Sir Anthony Atkinson, found that the wealthiest 1 per cent of Australians now took 9 per cent of national income, compared with a 5 per cent share in 1980.

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… of whom I am one, are starting to growl again.

The cenral tenet of interest rate bearishness is that if interest rates are low enough to generate negative savings, as is the case in the US and Australia, they are too low to be sustained. The counterargument, put most forcefully by Ben Bernanke is that someone must be willing to lend at these low interest rates, and this lending must reflect a “global savings glut”. Bears respond that the supposed glut does not reflect savings by households or business, but is really a liquidity glut created by expansionary monetary policy around the world, which must eventually come to an end, or be dissipated in inflation.

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Whenever a politician who has done something really bad, whether it is the result of a terrible misjudgement (the kindest gloss on Blair and Bush) or worse (Clinton), and fails even to resign, I can’t help thinking of Profumo, and wondering what he thinks.

No longer.

(Via Chris Brooke, who asks whether Profumo is the last surviving war time MP. Apparently not — but he was the last survivor who voted in the Chamberlain ousting, and on the right side, which counts for a lot.)

Orin Kerr has “partly detached himself”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_03_12-2006_03_18.shtml#1141972931 from the “Volokh Conspiracy”:http://www.volokh.com/ and now has a “new blog of his own”:http://orinkerr.com/, which will focus mostly on legal analysis “with an emphasis on current legal debates and a broader perspective on the legal academy and the legal profession.” The opening in the ideological “vacancy chain”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_labor_Markets_/_Vacancy_Chains created by this move will, I think, come to be occupied by Randy Barnett.

A while back I noted the “disquieting resemblance”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/01/02/separated-at-birth between the Emperor Gorg (of “Fraggle Rock”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0009RQSSW/kieranhealysw-20/104-7889918-1956712) and L. Ron Hubbard (present whereabouts unknown). Now my sources have alerted me to “this clip”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sH42MMepT4&search=muppet from the short-lived “Muppets Tonight”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muppets_Tonight. The premise of the clip is a look back at “The Kermit Frog Club,” like the Mickey Mouse Club but with Kermit as the object of devotion and guest Cindy Crawford in the Annette Funicello role. (The MMC is outside the range of my pop culture: I have no idea what I’m talking about here.) Anyway, of interest are the muppet Frogsketeers, whose names are emblazoned on their shirts: along with Cindy, there’s Newt, Stu, and … L. Ron. Now that I look at the screenshot again, Newt’s crop of hair is also somewhat “evocative”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newt_Gingrich.

I “mentioned”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/03/07/michael-moore-to-edit-economist/ a few days ago that Paddy Power had opened a book on the race to succeed Bill Emmott as editor of the _Economist_, and suggested that depending on liquidity, there was a fair amount of scope for manipulating the results. I’m sorry to report that my speculations were “bang on the mark”:http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8210-2076421,00.html.

bq. Paddy Power, the bookmaker, has been offering odds on the new editor, to replace the departing Bill Emmott. Several punters this week started to put large sums ranging up to £500 on Ed Carr, the business and financial editor, at 6-1. The bookie yesterday suspended all bets, after even more tried to open accounts. Any of them e-mails with “theeconomist” somewhere in the address? “We haven’t seen anything quite that unsubtle. They’re more intelligent at The Economist. Mind you, when we ran a book on the editor of The [Daily] Mirror . . .”

The Economist‘s journalists have always been quite keen on the “predictive”:http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3400241 “power”:http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5244000 of betting markets. Nice to see a few of them put their money where their mouth is. In other news on the race for the prize, I hear that “Clive Crook”:http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5244000 is now a hot contender, and “Chris Anderson”:http://www.thelongtail.com/about.html is climbing up that long tail. Not that you’re able to bet on either of them now, but still.

David Brooks has discovered Annette Lareau’s book Unequal Childhoods. Through the miracles of modern blogging those of you who missed the column can read it in the body of Laura’s post on it. If, like Laura, you’re unnerved in some way by Brooks’s interpretation, don’t let that put you off the book. He is right about several things, the main one being that the book is brilliant, and should be read by just about anyone interested in family life. If you’re a teacher of poor children it will help you understand what’s going on in the children’s lives; if you’re a teacher of wealthy children it’ll probably confirm what you already know. If, like me, you’re a parent, it’ll help you reflect on your own situation. I don’t do anything radically different because of reading the book, but there are several ways in which I treat my children somewhat differently; in particular giving them more unsupervised time, and being (even) less interventionist when they are at odds with each other which, as if by magic, is much less often.

So what does Brooks get right?

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I have a question for lawyers. Would it be possible simply to repeal copyright extension? Could Congress just repeal the Copyright Extension Act of 1998, for example, placing many works in the public domain with a stroke – and letting the mouse out of jail, etc.?

The main concern is that repeal would be a ‘taking’, under the 5th Amendment: “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” This would make such a repeal prohibitively expensive. But would it be a taking? That’s what I’m asking. What are the precedents in this area? I’ll spare you my untutored, a priori thoughts about this question. But I would like to focus the question a bit more, if I may. The relevant bit from Article I is brief to a fault (or virtue, as you like): “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” I realize that giving people rights – especially rights they can sell – amounts to giving them a kind of property. But Congress can always legislate to provide benefits, ergo rights to benefits, that can later be repealed. Is copyright different? I am curious what precedent there is. One (very legally naive) argument against the ‘takings’ reading would be this: if copyright is regular old property, copyright extension – which deprives the public of its property – is a taking. The right to copy, which I am going to get in 20 years is already my property, just like a trust fund that will only starting paying out in 20 years is already my property. Since apparently taking this from the public isn’t a legal taking, copyright isn’t regular old property, and repealing copyright wouldn’t be a taking. I realize this is dubious.

I also realize the argument could be made that it would be imprudent of Congress to extend copyright, then turn around and contract it. Such inconsistent shenanigans would deprive copyright holders of confidence. But no one denies that Congress has the right to make some dumb laws. (The Copyright Extension Act of 1998, for example.) Let’s just discuss whether it would be strictly possible to contract copyright without compensation to holders.

Like John Howard, I won’t be shedding any tears over Slobodan Milosevic, whose death in prison, apparently from natural causes, has been announced.

An obvious question raised by his death is whether (and how) his trial on a variety of war crimes charges could have been accelerated. The fact that he will never be properly convicted is certainly unfortunate. Even if it would have had no short run impact on opinion among Serbian nationalists, it would have helped to set the historical record straight. Milosevic’s death increases the urgency of capturing his main instruments, Mladic and Karadzic, whose connection to the crimes of the Bosnian war is more immediate, and whose trial could drive home the evil of Milosevic’s policies.

Still, the long, and now abortive, trial in The Hague is better than the alternative on offer in Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein, whose wars cost millions of lives, is being tried, and may be executed, for a comparatively minor crime, but one which is politically convenient for the purposes of victors’ justice.

* An adaption of the headline of the Sydney Telegraph on the good news of 5 March 1953.

As Jim Henley has noted, there’s a lot of ressentiment on the right these days. And “not only”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/5824c998-b0a3-11da-a142-0000779e2340.html in the US.

bq. Two years after the Madrid train bombings, Spain’s main political parties cannot agree on who was responsible for the nation’s deadliest terrorist attack. … The Popular party, which lost power in a general election three days after the train bombings, accuses the Socialist government, the police and the judiciary of taking part in a massive conspiracy to cover up alleged links between Islamic radicals and Eta, the violent Basque separatist group. … The Popular party’s conspiracy theory has been taken up by rightwing talk- show hosts, some of whom have even accused unamed Socialists of financing the terrorist attacks to oust the Popular party from power. …

bq. After a two-year investigation spanning nine countries, Juan del Olmo, an investigating magistrate, says he will lay formal charges against dozens of suspects within the next three weeks. … The Popular party refuses to endorse Mr del Olmo’s conclusions, perhaps because José María Aznar, the former prime minister, retains a powerful influence over his party. Mr Aznar blamed Eta for the Madrid train bombings and continued to insist on a Basque connection long after evidence began to point to Islamist extremists.

Reading this, and drawing the obvious comparison with Cheney’s “bogus claims”:http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/18/cheney.iraq.al.qaeda/ about the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection, and Wolfowitz’s “fantasies”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0312.bergen.html, about who ordered the original World Trade Center bombing makes it seem pretty strange to me that the meme of lefties as conspiracy theorists has stuck. Not that there aren’t some strange conspiracy theories out there on the left – but they’re weak beer in comparison to some of the deeply weird shit that our Right Wing Overlords in the US administration, and our former and would-be future Overlords in Madrid, take as gospel truth.

Today I was wondering whether it was worth buying Slavoj Zizek’s new book, “The Parallax View”:http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10762 and reading it, even in a spirit of ironic detachment or what have you. Reasons to Buy: 1. Some smart people I know like him. Selected Reason Not to Buy: 1. Life’s too short to deal with bullshit, even if it’s high-quality, triple-sifted, quintessence of ironic Lacanian crunchy-frog bullshit like this: “Zizek is interested in the “parallax gap” separating two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible, linked by an “impossible short circuit” of levels that can never meet. … Modes of parallax can be seen in different domains of today’s theory, from the wave-particle duality in quantum physics [I assume he put this in just to irritate people — KH] to the parallax of the unconscious in Freudian psychoanalysis between interpretations of the formation of the unconscious and theories of drives. … Philosophical and theological analysis, detailed readings of literature, cinema, and music coexist with lively anecdotes and obscene jokes.” From this — especially the last bit — it’s clear to me that it’s not the Mainstream Media that has anything to fear from the blogosphere, but rather Slavoj Zizek — he will shortly be rendered obsolete by the universe of pop-culture enriched slacker grad-student/ABD bloggers. Even Zizek can’t write fast enough to keep up with them all.

Anyway, here’s “another slightly breathless example”:http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=rs6ZjbSWsvgFHx6bhccDzTtjYNwYhggx, this time from the _Chronicle_ about the philosopher Alain Badiou:

bq. Monday’s discussion celebrated the publication of a long-awaited English translation of Mr. Badiou’s 1988 book, _Being and Event_ … First, he dissects “being” with the aid of set theory, the mathematical study of abstract groups of objects (sets) and their relations to one another. … Indeed, Being and Event makes the striking claim that “mathematics is ontology.” And chunks of the book are studded with equations and theorems that may frighten off the scholar who fled to the humanities to escape mathematics.

The idea that set theory might be useful to philosophy is not exactly new, nor are claims about the relationship between math and ontology. (Maybe “Kenny”:http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~easwaran/blog/ will show up in the comments with the relevant reading list.) On the other hand, although often ignored in English-speaking countries, it is nevertheless an important fact that an elite French education can entail learning quite a lot of math in addition to ploughing through the great philosophers. So your typical Next Big French Intellectual often has the wherewithal to bug the shite out of technoids _and_ comp-litters, although only one of these constituencies is typically targeted. Badiou looks like he might be a rare double-header. He can alienate the humanities people with the set theory and simultaneously annoy the technoids with stuff like this:

bq. “Love is an event in the form of an encounter,” said Mr. Badiou, and it has the effect of forming “a new relation to the world.” … In response to one question that asked Mr. Badiou to link his philosophy to contemporary politics, he noted that “names in politics are impoverished. … The weakness of politics today is a weakness of poetry.” The fall of communism, he continued, also influenced that impoverishment. “Marxism,” he said, “had a constellation of names” for political concepts. “It was a sky of names. We lost the sky.”

Lovely. The other great thing about French academic culture, by the way, is that in addition to producing high theorists like Badiou it also produces the “best theory of the theorists”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0804717982/kieranhealysw-20/. The cafés at the Collège de France sell bottled reflexivity instead of Evian.

A favorable citation of my arguments at Tech Central Station. Normally, I’d be pretty concerned about this, but it’s from Tim Worstall, the sole exception, AFAIK, to the otherwise uniform hackishness of that site[1].

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[This post is co-written by Harry and Chris and is an extended follow up to Chris’s “initial response”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/03/06/cato-on-inequality/ to David Schmidtz’s Cato Unbound piece “When Equality Matters”:http://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/03/06/david-schmidtz/when-equality-matters/ .]

We live in a highly unequal world and in strikingly unequal societies. The income discrepancies between the global poor and those in wealthy societies are enormous, with around one quarter of the world’s population living on less than $1 US per day, and many suffering from acute malnourishment, disease and premature death.[1] (For some further details see articles by Thomas Pogge “here”:http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=3717 and “here”:http://portal.unesco.org/shs/es/file_download.php/9c2318f24653a2a4655347d827f144acPogge+29+August.pdf .) But even within the very wealthiest societies great wealth coexists with severe poverty. Moreover, this is not simply an inequality in outcomes. Whilst the United States, for example, likes to imagine itself as a land of opportunity, social mobility is extremely low and in recent years the benefits of economic growth have been ever more concentrated in the very richest sectors of the population. According to one study, only 1.3 per cent of children born to parents in the bottom 10 per cent of income earners end up in the top 10 per cent. By contrast, almost a quarter of children born into the top 10 per cent stay there, and almost half stay in the top 20 per cent. Children born into the richest tenth of households are 18 times more likely than children born into the poorest tenth to end up in the top tenth. (Further see the “Economist”:http://www.economist.com/world/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3518560 and “Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis”:http://www.umass.edu/preferen/gintis/intergen.pdf .)

David Schmidtz’s recent piece for Cato Unbound, “When Inequality Matters”:http://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/03/06/david-schmidtz/when-equality-matters/ is an artful and unnerving attempt to make use of some recent work within egalitarian political philosophy to argue against what we what we think of as the core of egalitarianism: the demands for greater equality of condition and opportunity. We are not convinced. In our view Schmidtz’s case neglects the impact that relative inequalities have on absolute levels of flourishing and depends at crucial points on dubious analogies and on muddying important distinctions. But it would be churlish not to acknowledge that he gets some things right. For instance, he is correct to emphasize that we must identify the dimensions in which equality matters, for the basic reason that making people equal on one dimension will often have the simple effect of making them unequal on another. Equalizing incomes, for example, would leave people unequal in well-being, because different people have different capacities to convert their income into well-being.

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Crooked Timber is going boingboing with all the ‘cool stuff!’ links. On we go. Amazon has piles of books slashed up to 75%. Mostly utter depths of crap, like you’d expect. But: The Locus Awards is a bargain. $4.99 for 30 years of the best, including Wolfe, LeGuin, Ellison, Varley, Russ, Butler, Tiptree, Bisson, Crowley, Chiang, couple others.

I’ll tell you a secret about Belle. She’s loves Hornblower. Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis? (Was it really bad? That’s what I heard.) This looks good: The War Against Cliche, 500 pages worth of essays and reviews by Martin Amis. (Yes, I’m serious.) For the kids: Neil Gaiman, The Day I Swapped My Dad  For Two Goldfish; Daniel Pinkwater, The Picture of Morty and Ray; and for the kid in all of us, Peter Bagge, Buddy’s Got Three Mom’s. Maybe there’s something else good in there. I missed it, apparently.