Hey up everyone, it’s the Prospect Magazine Intellectual of the Year contest!! I’m afraid that everyone at CT forgot to put our forms in (again!) although I see that bloody Yusuf al-Qaradawi did (and Airmiles too). This is a real shame, since I recently became The Most Important Thinker In The World. As Tyler Cowen pointed out in a post on Ray Kurzweil, the previous holder of that title, the secret to being the Most Important Thinker In The World is a mastery of the expected utility rule.

No matter how ludicrous your predictions, if they are sufficiently wildly utopian, then your thinking has a greater expected value than anyone else’s (see here for the general idea). Thus, if Kurzweil reckons that we will upload our consciousness onto software and live for ever as pure energy on the internet, then I say all that and a pony too! Not just any old pony by the way, but a super technonanopony! Which eats racism and shits pure gasoline … on the internet! Oh yeh and we will constantly be having multiple orgasms … and not just the normal kind either (more details to come). You might say that it’s pretty unlikely and I’ve failed to spell out important details, but as long as there is at least some probability that I’m right, then I am more important than Ray Kurzweil to the tune nU^(-rT), where U is the utility of a magic pony, n is the probability I’m right, r is the discount rate and T is the time it will take to sort us all out with one. Keep reading CT folks, because in expected value terms, it is only going to become more important!!
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“Matt Yglesias”:http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/9/18/222052/918 a couple of days ago:

bq. The other thing to say, though, is that even if you accept the main premise of [English language coverage of the German election results] — that Germany’s welfare spending and labor market rules are responsible for an inordinately high unemployment rate and low level of economic growth — the tone of indignation at the voters’ persistent refusal to vote for the dismantling of this situation is odd. After all, it’s not as if Germany is some sort of desperately impoverished country whose citizens are going to be doomed to misery unless they achieve rapid growth. It’s not Chad or China or even Chile.

“Jeffrey Gedmin”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/29c1cfac-2a10-11da-b890-00000e2511c8.html, director of the Aspen Institute in Berlin, writes a quite jawdropping _reductio ad absurdum_ of this trope for the _Financial Times_ (sub required).

bq. Germans know [that they face a fundamental choice over their economy]. But they still love their “social-market” economy and have not yet decided whether allowing more market forces can be in tune with their values. Until now, it has been too easy for Germans to defer painful choices. The country has been doing – simply put – too well. In Berlin, a city with 19 per cent unemployment, the cafes are packed with people ­drinking over-priced café lattes, the employed and unemployed alike happily indulging themselves. Will economic circumstances soon hurt enough to give people the swift kick they apparently need?

I had to read this paragraph twice to be sure that my eyes weren’t deceiving me. The problem with the German economy is that it’s _doing too well_ for people to, like, actually want the cleansing winds of free-market reforms? That the unemployed can sip their café lattes too? I dunno whether this sort of Frummagem smacks more of Jonathan Swift or the Medium Lobster – but it speaks volumes about the motives of some of continental Europe’s would be ‘reformers.’

Update: non-paywalled version of link available “here”:http://www.aspenberlin.org/jeffgedmin.php?iGedminId=185&sShowMedia=0 (thanks to ‘luc’ in comments).

Sounds as though Bill Frist isn’t the only prominent Republican in trouble over stock-market shenanigans. “P O’Neill”:http://bestofbothworlds.blogspot.com/2005_09_01_bestofbothworlds_archive.html#112736156774172634 links to an interesting story in the “Irish Times”:http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/ireland/2005/0922/1702575727HM9USAMBASSADOR.html (behind their paywall) that deserves more attention. Richard Egan, former US ambassador to Ireland and major Republican fundraiser is in very hot water with the IRS for tax avoidance.

bq. Following an investigation, the IRS claims that Mr Egan set up an “economic sham” whose principal use was to reduce his tax payments. The IRS said that Mr Egan, the billionaire co-founder of Massachusetts’ most valuable technology company, EMC Corp, used two companies to set up the scheme using a European-style options scheme as soon as he resigned as the head of EMC to become ambassador. Mr Egan and his family were the most successful fundraisers for President Bush’s re-election campaign and have long been major contributors to the Republican Party.

Like Mr. Frist, Egan seems to have set up this scheme in order to repackage the proceeds from selling shares in his family company. The Irish Times has been following Mr. Egan’s progress for a while; it ran a story last year on his and his family’s “selfless contributions”:http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/front/2004/0708/3003256094HM1AMBASSADOR.html to the campaign of their ideological opponent, Ralph Nader. From that story:

bq. The Egans, now known in the Republican Party as the “First Family of Fundraising”, are reportedly the only US family that has three members who have raised more than $200,000 (€161,767) each for Bush’s re-election campaign.

“PZ Myers”:http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/why_didnt_anyone_tell_me_its_lurker_day/ announces that it’s Lurker Day, that day of the blogospheric calendar where readers who usually never make comments tell us what they like about our blog, what they don’t like, who they are etc etc. Sounds like a good idea – we have no idea who y’all are, but would like to find out.

Thinking about the German election outcome, it struck me that this would be an ideal test for betting markets. I’ve always thought that, if there’s a bias in such markets it would be towards the right, so the toughest test for them would be predicting a left-wing upset win like this one (I’m calling a win on the basis that left parties got a majority of the vote, not making a prediction about what goverment might emerge). A quick Google reveals that there is such a market, called Wahlstreet but my German isn’t good enough to deal with their site, which has lots of graphs bouncing around without an obvious control. Hopefully someone will be able to help me.

Anyway, if there’s a contract allowing a bet on the share of votes for the three left parties (SPD, Greens, Left party) and if, two weeks in advance, that market was predicting a vote share of more than 50 per cent (as actually happened), I’ll concede that the case for the superiority of betting markets over polls has been established, at least as a reasonable presumption. [I didn’t follow the polls closely but I had the impression that most of them were predicting a CDU/CSU win until the last days of the campaign].

What with “all”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/09/21/selecting-future-moms/ the “kerfuffle”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/09/20/mommy-tracking-the-ivy-leaguers/ about the “NYT article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/national/20women.html?ei=5090&en=6a8e0c413c09c249&ex=1284868800&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all on Ivy League women and their labor market / parenting plans, I took a look at some “BLS”:http://www.bls.gov/ data on long-term trends in earnings patterns within families, and in mothers’ labor force participation. Here are a couple of figures I created that capture some of what’s been happening in these areas over the past thirty-odd years.

The first figure shows trends in earning patterns within families. (You can get it as a “PDF file”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/fe-trends.pdf.) Here you can see that even in 1967, when the series starts, families where the Husband was the only earner were already a minority of all families. By the 1990s, there were almost as many families with no earners as families where only the Husband was working. The percentage of families where only the Wife was working rose from 1.7 to 5.2 percent from 1967 to 2003. The percentage of families where both the husband and wife were working peaked in 1999 (at just over 60 percent) and has fallen slightly since then. Note that this figure doesn’t tell you how earning patterns change once families have children, just the absolute numbers of each type, whether they have children or not.

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Bill Gardner

Kimberly Morgan

Cosma Shalizi

David Goldenberg at “Gelf Magazine”:http://www.gelfmagazine.com has a copy of “the survey”:http://www.gelfmagazine.com/gelflog/archives/media.html#surveying_ivy_league_motherhood that Louise Story conducted as the basis for her “irritating”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/09/20/mommy-tracking-the-ivy-leaguers/ “article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/national/20women.html?ei=5090&en=6a8e0c413c09c249&ex=1284868800&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all about Ivy League women and their plans for motherhood. Doing a reliable survey is hard, and by far the two biggest difficulties are sample selectivity (when the probability of participation is related to the outcome you want to measure: this a very tricky problem) and poor design of questions (where you look for what you want to find). Here are the first few questions from the survey, which was emailed to a group of freshman and senior women at Yale:

When you have children, do you plan to stay at home with them or do you plan to continue working? Why?

If you plan to continue working, do you plan to work full-time in an office, or full-time from your house, or part-time in an office, or part-time from your house? Why?

If you plan to stay at home with your kids, do you plan to return to work? If so, how old will you wait for your kids to be when you return?

Was your mom a stay-at-home mom? Explain whether she worked, and how much she worked! Were you glad with her choice (to either work or stay-at-home or whatever combination she did)?

At what age do you think you’ll have kids? How many kids do you want?

More commentary “at Gelf”:http://www.gelfmagazine.com/gelflog/archives/media.html#surveying_ivy_league_motherhood.

If something can get worse it will
Is a phrase I’ve often sardonically used
But here’s some grist for Mr Murphy’s mill
I used to be disgusted
Now I’m just amused

Pretty much sums up the way I feel about the Lancet/Iraq debate these days. To be honest all the work has been done; all the big mistakes have been made and corrected, the conspiracy theories have been more or less put to bed and there are really very few people left who believe either a) that things didn’t get worse in Iraq as a result of the invasion or b) that they only got a little bit worse. All that really remains for me to do is to keep on using the term “Kaplan’s Fallacy” to describe the practice of using the mere fact of uncertainty about an estimate to draw conclusions about the direction of the estimation error, in the hope that the bloody dreadful article Fred Kaplan wrote about the Lancet study will stick to him for the rest of his career. But apparently there are still some people out there with a little bit of credibility intact (no really) who think that they can still get away with this one.

Update: Have a look at this from Simon Jenkins in the Guardian. I think it’s quite extraordinary in that a) each of the individual sentences is simply a bald statement of fact and b) the cumulative effect of the whole lot of them is really much more damning than anything George Galloway has come up with.
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ABC’s Dancing with the Stars Dance-off is on right now live. I should’ve blogged about this earlier, but I didn’t realize it until an hour ago. It’s exciting to see a fairly marginal activity that you are passionate about attract widespread attention and enthusiasm. The show ran in the summer and already named a winner. But enough people were disgruntled about the results that they are having a rematch.

I have been a huge fan of ballroom and Latin dancing ever since senior year in high school when I joined a club and attended classes regularly. After thirteen years away from the sport, I found my way back to it this past January. I am incredibly passionate about it and was happy to find a great club in Chicago. I get to take classes with super-talented dancers/teachers Tommye Giacchino and Gregory Day (the club owners) who are U.S. and Blackpool Champions. It’s a blast and also very good exercise. I even considered competing, but decided that that level of commitment wouldn’t be conducive to tenure.

I find it problematic that the Dancing with the Stars show has participants competing with each other doing different dances. Some dances are much harder than others so it doesn’t make sense to compare them. For example, Cha-Cha and Quickstep are sufficiently different that a comparison is nearly impossible. Granted, you can do super hard moves in all of them. To someone who takes this seriously – like moi – the dancers are not always great (some are better than others), but it is clear that they put a lot of effort into it and are taking it seriously. To be sure, you do need more than a few weeks of training to do this well.

Tonight’s winner will depend completely on audience feedback. ABC is making a donation to the charity of the winner’s choice so that’s an incentive to participate even if you’re not interested in dancing.

PS. If anyone knows of good clubs in the Stanford area, I am curious to hear as I would like to continue doing this when I’m out there next year.

PPS. If any Chicagoland readers are inspired to take lessons, feel free to contact me for more info about Chicago Dance. And if you decide to join, let’s use the referral discount special.:)

“Matt Cheney”:http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2005/09/genius.html voices a common complaint about the MacArthur foundation awards.

bq. I’m glad Lethem was chosen, and certainly am excited for him, but this choice continues the unfortunate trend of the MacArthur award often going to writers who have already found a lot of success. Imagine, for instance, how much it would have changed Lethem’s life to get this award not right now, when his books sell well, but ten (or even five) years ago, when the $500,000 would have done exactly what it is supposed to do: free the recipient from financial considerations that limit their ability to experiment.

And indeed, a cursory glance at the list of awardees tells us that well over half of them are over 40, and/or well established in their career paths. Of course, the MacArthur foundation has excellent institutional reasons for choosing people who already seem to have established themselves – to do otherwise would be to take much bigger risks that MacArthur awardees are going to flake out later or have mediocre careers. But then, would you do better? If you think so, your nominations (more or less serious please) invited in comments for people who _should_ get awards in the future. Less serious speculations as to the most plausible blogger to receive a MacArthur are also invited (my money would be on “Cory Doctorow”:http://www.craphound.com/bio.php).

Next year we’ll be adding a time zone to CT representation. I will be a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. I am super excited about this opportunity. The Center got a grant from the Annenberg Foundation last year to add Communications to the fields represented among its fellows and I’m going as part of such a cohort.

There’s something amusing related to all this. Or I thought it was amusing until I shared it with a friend who didn’t think it funny at all. You be the judge. While I was lifehacking away a few weeks ago, Chris pointed me to Google Sets for various associations. I decided to see what Google Sets had to say about my academic affiliations. I typed in the names of my BA and PhD granting institutions plus Northwestern (the place of my current employment) and pressed Large Sets. The fourth school on the list was Stanford. When I did this I already knew that I was headed to the Center next year so I found this amusing. But perhaps you need to have a certain geek factor to get anything out of this exercise.:)

Here’s an “irritating piece”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/national/20women.html?pagewanted=1&hp from the New York Times about how high-achieving women students at elite schools are planning to quit their jobs and have children when they’re a bit older:

Cynthia Liu is precisely the kind of high achiever Yale wants: … So will she join the long tradition of famous Ivy League graduates? Not likely. By the time she is 30, this accomplished 19-year-old expects to be a stay-at-home mom. “My mother’s always told me you can’t be the best career woman and the best mother at the same time,” Ms. Liu said matter-of-factly. “You always have to choose one over the other.” … Many women at the nation’s most elite colleges say they have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children. Though some of these students are not planning to have children and some hope to have a family and work full time, many others, like Ms. Liu, say they will happily play a traditional female role, with motherhood their main commitment.

Now, let’s be clear about why the article is annoying. I don’t begrudge these women their choices in the slightest. I hope they make happy lives for themselves. In many ways they get the absolute best deal possible. But as usual, the article is steeped with the standard way of framing the issue, viz, only women have work-family choices. It’s up to them to be “realistic”, while of course the male students do not have any work-family choices at all. The subtext of the piece is the indirect vindication of those crusty old bastards in the 1950s who couldn’t see why they should hire, say, Sandra Day O’Connor because she’d only be taking a place away from a man with a family.

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In passing the other day, I mentioned the Moondoggle. This is the idea floated early last year that NASA might return to the moon and build a base there, for no particular reason. At the time I thought it was just a “failed trial balloon”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/09/16/tax-and-spend-or-just-spend/ that rose out of Karl Rove’s head. But several commenters said that in fact it was alive and well, and now I see the “BBC reports”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4261522.stm that 2020 has been set as the date NASA will triumphantly return to 1969 — er, I mean, the moon. Nasa Administrator Mike Griffin said the new launch vehicle and lander would be “very Apollo-like, with updated technology. Think of it as Apollo on steroids.” This is an appropriate comparison, because it makes clear that the new project will be bloated, prone to fights, and, when it comes to producing anything of lasting scientific value, probably impotent.