Steven Landsburg, perennial bete noire of people who want to say that economists aren’t an entirely baleful influence on public debate, is doing his poor man’s version of Freakonomics again over at Slate and attracting an entirely fair amount of opprobrium for doing so (via Matthew). This week, we have the “counterintuitive” “result” (note two different flavours of scare quotes here; the first set are mocking Landsburg for constantly referring to things as “counterintuitive” when they are actually just silly, while the second set is there in order to indicate that his argument is intended to resemble a result from economics, but is no such thing) that turning off the ventilators of patients too poor to pay their medical bills is the right and even the moral thing to do. I don’t think anyone was ever likely to have been convinced by this, but below I present an argument which might help to sort out cases in which economists might have something useful to add to a debate of this kind, from cases like this where they probably don’t.
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The _Boston Review_ has posted a very interesting “forum”:http://bostonreview.net/ndf.html#Exit where Barry Posen puts the realist case for getting out of Iraq, and various pundits and political types respond. The WWW version, however, is missing the introductory note from the print version of the forum, which closes with the following.

bq. Unfortunately, however, none of the proponents of the current policy whom we invited to respond – including several who have previously commented publicly on Posen’s views – were prepared to join the debate here. Suffice it to say that we sought a very broad range of opinion in the interests of moving policy forward, and we regret that proponents were unwilling to join in.

In her hugely successful memoir, Olivia Saves the Circus, Olivia gives a virtuoso account to her school class of how she single-handedly rescued a circus performance (all the performers were sick with ear infections, she claims) by doing everything herself. The book is replete with astonishing but true accounts of Olivia the Lion Tamer, Olivia the Queen of the Trapeze and Olivia and her Amazing Trained Dogs. At the end, Olivia’s teacher suspects something and the following exchange takes place.

In his hugely successful memoir, A Million Little Pieces, James Frey gives a virtuoso account of his life of crime and drug abuse. The book is replete with astonishing but true accounts of Frey getting a root canal without anesthesia, Frey involved in a fatal train accident, and Frey in jail for desperate crimes. At the end, The Smoking Gun provided “detailed evidence”:http://www.thesmokinggun.com/jamesfrey/0104061jamesfrey1.html that Frey’s “memoir” is in fact a highly fictionalized — not to say falsified — version of events. The “following exchange”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/11/books/11memo.html?ex=1294635600&en=d54d1a2e5fa09232&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss takes place between Doubleday, Frey’s publisher, and the _New York Times_:

Two days after an investigative report published online presented strong evidence that significant portions of James Frey’s best-selling memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” were made up, the book’s publisher issued a statement saying that, in essence, it did not really matter. … “Memoir is a personal history whose aim is to illuminate, by way of example, events and issues of broader social consequence,” said a statement issued by Doubleday … “By definition, it is highly personal. In the case of Mr. Frey, we decided ‘A Million Little Pieces’ was his story, told in his own way, and he represented to us that his version of events was true to his recollections.”

Olivia would be proud.

The online journal Democratiya has an interview with Kanan Makiya. Now Makiya is a smart guy who did much to expose the brutal nature of the Baathist regime in Iraq, so he deserves our respect. Nevertheless, I have to take issue with his narrative about “the left” according to which there was once a body of people who stood for universal values who then became seduced (around the time of the fall of the Soviet Union) by various kinds of relativism and postmodernism. Moreover this intellectual collapse into “relativism” explains, according to Makiya, that same left’s unwillingness to support the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam.

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Just to say, that the new “Google video search”:http://video.google.com/ (and the associated Google Video Player) is fantastic. I particularly enjoyed the search results for “Liverpool” (gets you Sky highlights of the comeback against Milan) , “Steven Gerrard” (his 10 best goals) , and “England” (which got me the Channel 4 report of Ashes victory and Owen’s hat-trick against Germany). I had a bit less success in other categories, but I did find a clip of Buddy Miller playing a festival somewhere. (Obviously, Irish people, Welshmen, Australians, Chelsea fans and people taking an interest in so-called “American sports” would derive more pleasure from other clips.)

A friend just told me a story: he left a post-it in a book, returned it to a university library, was soon summoned into the presence of an enraged librarian, informed that post-it’s destroy books and the one he had returned had been sent to the lab for testing. If deemed contaminated with corrosive post-it glue, he would be charged for replacement.

I am very sorry to hear that post-its in books are like facehuggers on all the minor characters in the Alien films; because I use post-its like mad. I have a copy of Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation with post-its on the post-its. (So I guess I should figure out whether post-it glue is bad for post-it paper, if I’m planning on saving those post-its for years.) I always assumed I was being kind to books, not writing on/dogearing the pages. I will change my habits if I must but I’ll miss the useful darlings.

Googling I’m getting some confirmation of the ‘post-its are bad’ thesis. But why haven’t I heard this before? Is everyone else in the know? Did the Volokhs already take sides two days ago and I missed the memo? I often walk around carrying library books that flutter like colorful tropical birds. I never noticed anyone glaring at me.

In other news, have you ever noticed how computer and software and general IT advertising often features a picture of a multiethnic, mixed gender group of co-workers, smiling faces all lit by the light of the monitor of the obviously excellently working computer they are gathered around. When in fact the only time five people are ever staring at the same lit computer screen is when one of them is saying something like ‘really? even the off button doesn’t work?’

No, not another post about how legal scholars are into it. Via Adam Kotsko, I learn that anonymous blogging is a lot less legal than you probably thought.

The fine print of the Waste of The Supreme Court’s Valuable Time Waiting To Happen Act Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act:

“Whoever…utilizes any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications or other types of communications that are transmitted, in whole or in part, by the Internet… without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person…who receives the communications…shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”

Given that for all x, such that x is a political opinion, there exists some y, such that y is a person who will be annoyed by x, hell I’d say it’s no longer legal even for the NY Times to post unsigned editorials on their website. I guess you can invoke some sort of doctrine of double effect here. But you get into a position in which it is legal, say, to intend to damage someone’s political career by criticizing them; but not legal to intend to annoy that person? Am I missing something here?

UPDATE: Comments inform me the Volokhs are already debating this. Sorry to have missed that. (I should read more blogs.) Kerr says it’s just a kerfuffle. Eugene V. says maybe it’s really a problem.

Following up on Chris’s post below, Dan Solove at Concurring Opinions has also written a post on the “pros and cons of blogging without tenure”:http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2006/01/blogging_withou_1.html. In favour: name recognition, exposure to other disciplines, increased ability to network, higher google rankings, and ability to talk to non-academics. Against: risks to reputation if your blogging seems shrill or frivolous to colleagues, and risks of distraction from producing peer reviewed articles (or whatever it is that you’re supposed to produce in order to get tenure in your discipline). I’m probably the wrong person to opine on this, as (a) I started blogging precisely in order to talk about things that I couldn’t talk about in my research, and (b) despite these initial intentions, have ended up turning blogs into part of my research, and thus something (I hope!) that contributes to tenure chances etc. But I would be interested to hear from CT reading academics – whether untenured (what are the tradeoffs that you perceive in blogging or not blogging as an untenured assistant or visiting professor or whatever?) or tenured (what do you think of junior colleagues blogging? A good or bad idea?).

Over at Legal Theory Blog, Larry Solum has “an interesting post on the difference that blogging, and the internet more generally, has made to legal scholarship”:http://lsolum.blogspot.com/archives/2006_01_01_lsolum_archive.html#113683990156732487 . Key points include the speed of dissemination, the bypassing of the gatekeepers that have traditionally mediated between legal scholars and the wider world, and the globalization of legal debate. Larry also has a few words about blogging and how it might affect your career as an academic lawyer (including some cautionary words for the untenured). Go take a look.

A few years ago, way back in the days before Crooked Timber, I wrote a post about “Princeton’s old library-borrowing cards”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2002/11/26/the-network-of-ideas/. A snippet:

When I was a grad student at Princeton, someone told me that (just like most libraries before computers) the books in Firestone library used to have a pocket inside the cover where the book’s borrowing record was kept on a card. When someone wanted the book from the library, the card would be removed and stamped with the date. Faculty and students then stamped their own name on the card or (either earlier, or instead) simply signed the card when they borrowed the book.

The computer catalog and University ID cards replaced this system. Books now have barcodes and the computer system holds a record of everyone’s borrowing. But Firestone has a huge number of volumes, so the library staff couldn’t simply stick the new barcodes in every one. Instead, they did it on demand. If an old book was borrowed under the new system for the first time, a barcode sticker would be affixed to its inside cover. The old card was thrown away.

Very occasionally, then, one would come across a book or journal that had been acquired by the library under the old system, had been borrowed a few times, but then lost popularity and just sat in the stacks. Inside the back pouch would be the old library card, with its list of dates, stamps and signatures on it.

The card shown here has a signature from “John Rawls”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rawls, from March 21st 1950. Beneath him is “Jacob Viner”:http://cepa.newschool.edu/~het/profiles/viner.htm, the economist. And there also is “Gregory Vlastos”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Vlastos, the ancient philosopher and ethicist. As it happens, this evening we’re having a philosopher stay with us for a night or two — one who collects and sells antiquarian books. This topic came up over dinner, and I mentioned my tiny card collection. The philosopher expressed an interest, so I fished them out from a box in the garage, where they’ve been (inside another box) unlooked at for several years. I only have four cards — perhaps I should have worked harder to pilfer Princeton’s treasure trove — but there on one of them (The Philosophical Quarterly v.6, 1956, 6000.7163), quite unexpectedly, just below the signature of “Walter Kaufmann”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Kaufmann and just above the stamp of “Gilbert Meilaender”:http://www.bioethics.gov/about/meilaender.html is a name that’s been in the news just today: S. A. Alito, ’72. How odd.

In this post, I mentioned that I hadn’t seen any commentary from pro-war bloggers on reports that the US will spend no more on Iraqi infrastructure once the current allocation of $18 billion, most of which was diverted to military projects, is exhausted. Although there was lengthy discussion both here and at my blog, no one I noticed pointed to any examples of pro-war posts on the topic.

I said at the time I didn’t want to get into a “Silence of the Hawks” pointscoring exercise on this. As a general rule, no particular blogger is obliged to post on any particular topic. But I would have thought, if you made it your business to report regularly on Iraqi reconstruction, that such a report was worth covering or correcting.

The Winds of Change website gives a weekly report on Iraq, with a focus on reconstruction news. It appears to be a successor to Chrenkoff’s Good News from Iraq, though less relentlessly upbeat. This week’s report contains no mention of the end of reconstruction funding. In case the WOC editors missed it, the WP report is here.

Update Armed Liberal at WoC responds (graciously) to this provocation, calling the Administration’s decision “bizarre” and pointing to an earlier critique of the wiretapping policy. That still leaves the policy undefended, so I thought I’d try again.

Instapundit is usually quick to disseminate pro-Administration talking points (for example on wiretapping) and has posted regularly on Iraqi reconstruction. Only a month ago, Instapundit linked to an Austin Bay post headed (rather ironically in retrospect) The White House Finally Gets Serious About Iraqi Reconstruction. So, now that the nature of “seriousness” in the White House has become clear, does Glenn Reynolds support the cessation of reconstruction funding? Does anybody? End update

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Max Hastings had an interesting piece in the Guardian during the break attacking the comments on History teaching in the recent QCA report. I haven’t read the report, so can’t evaluate his critique, but I can say that he gets one thing exactly right.

He singles out the ‘alarm call’ about the

perceived “lack of relevance” of history to pupils’ future working lives. This echoes the notorious remarks of Charles Clarke, when education secretary, dismissing medieval and classical studies.

and rightly knocks on the head the idea that everything in the school curriculum should be relevant to our working lives:

At the weekend, I glanced at some of my old school essays. The questions seem interesting: “Should one think of Henry II as a lawless and arbitrary monarch, or as the founder of an orderly legal and administrative system?”; “Why did Edward I succeed in Wales and fail in Scotland?”; “Can anything be said in favour of James I’s foreign policy?”
Even in 1961, one could scarcely argue that familiarity with such themes contributed much to employability. They were no more “relevant” to middle-class white teenagers then than to schoolchildren of West Indian or Muslim origins now. We addressed them, first, because education is properly about learning to think, and objectively to assess evidence; second, so that we knew something about a broad sweep of the history of the society to which, whether by birth or migration, we belonged.

He’s right to attack the utilitarian approach he identifies to the curriculum.

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The BBC are reporting an interesting speech by David Cameron in which the leader of the Conservative party describes the rough shape the British education system might take if he were to be elected as Prime Minister.

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I was intruiged by some throwaway comments by David Boucher at the Oxford Political Thought Conference last week, concerning Robert Blakey, author of perhaps the first history of political thought to be written in English, the two-volume History of Political Literature from the Earliest Times which devotes 11 pages to Milton and one-and-a-half to Hobbes. Blakey was brought up to be a furrier and worked in the trade, was a Cobbetite Radical and newspaper editor, Mayor of Morpeth, novelist, philosopher of mind, logician, autobiographer, and academic. He was sacked from his Chair at Queen’s Belfast for “neglect of duty” and awarded a Gold Medal by King Leopold of the Belgians, but was best known to his contemporaries as an expert on angling under the pseudonym “Palmer Hackle”. Fuller details are “here at via Roger Hawkins at Morpathia”:http://www.morpethnet.co.uk/entertain/antiquarian/local_worthies.htm#1.%20ROBERT%20BLAKEY . We shall not see his like again!