Click a link, feed a Farber. He’s a nice man and could use your help.

Alex Tabarrok says that Jeffrey Sachs is descending “to the level of a third-rate politician” in his outraged response to Bill Easterly’s review of his recent book on ending global poverty; I disagree. While I’m fundamentally sympathetic to Easterly’s basic criticisms of Sachs (see my longer post on this over at John and Belle’s a few days ago), I’m also a little suspicious (as I hinted in my earlier post, and as d-squared remarks bluntly in comments) about what motivates them. A few years ago, Easterly wrote a smart and convincing book describing the World Bank’s screw-ups in development aid, which ended up costing him his job there. However, after two hundred pages of detailed examination of what had gone wrong in the past, he gave us little-to-nothing in the way of policy prescriptions as to how to improve development aid in the future – a couple of pages of vague aspirations and pious nostrums. Nor, to my knowledge, has he done much to rectify this in the intervening period. When someone repeatedly tries to take down the project of development aid as it’s been done to date, but fails to provide any concrete proposals for reform, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to speculate that he wants to get rid of large-scale development aid altogether, but doesn’t want to say so in public. At the very least, I think it’s up to Easterly to spell out in detail what his alternative approach of “piecemeal democratic reform” would actually look like in practice. It sounds like a very attractive agenda in theory – it’s certainly one that I’d be very interested in – but until and unless he spells out what it would actually involve, it’s hard to get rid of the suspicion that he’s more interested in getting rid of development aid as it stands than in creating a better system to replace it.

Update: Ivan points in comments to a long-ish working paper where Easterly apparently does lay out some positive proposals – could be that I’m being unfair here. Will read and respond.

The nominations for science fiction’s Hugo awards were announced yesterday. In alphabetical order, the nominees for Best Novel are:

Iain M. Banks – The Algebraist.

Susanna Clarke – Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

Ian McDonald – River of Gods.

China Mieville – Iron Council.

Charles Stross – Iron Sunrise.

I’ve read four of the five of them, which is a personal record (the exception is the Banks book – while I love Banks’ stuff, the reviews of The Algebraist were mixed enough that I didn’t feel inspired to buy it in hardback). Indeed I and other Crooked Timber people have blogged extensively on both Iron Council and Strange and Norrell. I haven’t blogged on either the Stross book (which has gotten a fair amount of well-deserved blogospheric love recently), or on Ian McDonald’s book, although I’ve been meaning to write about the latter for a long time. It’s both smart and fun, a collision between booster-stage cyberpunk (the underlying story of the book riffs on William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Count Zero) and a reinvented India. McDonald has been engaged in a very interesting effort over the last ten years to re-imagine science fiction from the perspective of the developing rather than the developed world, and in this novel he’s made a crucial leap forward in imagining what an India transformed by information technology might look like and mean, on its own terms. Only two of the many viewpoint characters are Westerners, and they serve more to provide contrast than to translate and domesticate the exotic. McDonald’s West retains economic and political dominance, but is quietly losing out over time, because it’s trying to shut out the disruptive impact of new technologies. It’s an aging monopolist which is about to have its lunch eaten. India is where it’s at – new sexes (neuts), AI-driven soap operas, towed icebergs, and finally, the gateway to a new universe. I’m not sure whether the book is (or even tries to be) authentic in any strong sense of the word (I’d be fascinated to hear the opinion of anyone who’s from India and has read it), but it’s exciting, thought-provoking, and (once you come to grips with the many viewpoints that McDonald uses), very entertaining. Not a book that I’d pass on to anyone who isn’t already an SF reader – the future-shock might be a little much – but something that I would recommend without hesitation to anyone who loves the genre, and wants to read something that feels fresh and new. As far as I know, it hasn’t found a US publisher yet – perhaps the nomination (and the British Science Fiction Association award that it’s also picked up) will prompt somebody over here to pick it up.

(nb – as always with my posts, all commission from the Amazon links above will go to charity).

Another strike by graduate student instructors in Michigan, looking for better pay and working conditions. The arguments that many professors (and most university administrators) make against graduate student unionization have always struck me as extremely weak. The claim that grad students aren’t actually workers, but instead are the equivalent of apprentices in a guild, simply don’t make sense. Grad students provide cheap labour in the academic system; they aren’t learning by doing so much as they’re providing an essential underpinning to cash-strapped universities’ teaching programmes. The fact that a very large percentage (perhaps the majority?) of teaching grad students don’t then go on to become professors suggests that they don’t derive all that much benefit from their experience – and certainly nothing that would make up for the miserable pay and poor working conditions they have to put up with. Before coming to the US system, I spent two years in University of Toronto, where grad students were unionized, and the system seemed to work very well. While issues that US departments can resolve by fiat had to be resolved through (sometimes tedious and lengthy) negotiations, the university system didn’t come crashing to a halt, and grad student instructors got a manifestly better deal. There’s no reason in principle why the same shouldn’t be true in the US. Of course there are practical difficulties, which in large part stem from the National Labor Relations Board’s disgraceful decision of last year that grad students don’t have the right to unionize. However, this decision was less a reflection of the underlying principles of the matter than it was of the NLRB’s transformation from one of the key components of the New Deal into an organization that systematically takes the side of the bosses in labour-management disputes.

Update: Lemuel Pitkin suggests in comments that my post misunderstands the law here – I should have more correctly stated that the NLRB has ruled that grad students at private universities don’t have the right to unionize. As Lemuel notes, the basic point (there’s no good principled reason to oppose graduate student unionization) still stands.

You are spending a few days in Budapest and decide to get some souvenirs. You walk down the most famous tourist street (Váci utca) and browse the shop windows. You wonder: should it be an embroidered tablecloth or maybe a plate with a sketch of the Parliament? Neither quite makes sense for your home so you keep on looking. And voila, look no further: a little plastic Hitler figurine. Just what you needed. And so he is not lonely, you can get another guy with an armband sporting the swastika.

“Justwartheory.com”:http://justwartheory.com/ is a very useful set of resources on just war theory maintained by Mark Rigstad of Oakland University. There’s also “an accompanying blog”:http://www.justwartheory.com/editorial.html .

You should read Scribblingwoman more. Also, Jonathan Goodwin. Here’s a thing, courtesy of the former. [Specifically, tomorrow I want to visit Miriam’s blog and find more edifying ‘recent comments’ are available than those left by that hopeless ‘online casino’ character. Not that I blame Miriam. She just deserves better.]

“The patient then was a 65-year-old drilling contractor, badly injured in a freak accident at his home. … In 1988, however, there was no such fiery rhetoric as the congressman quietly joined the sad family consensus to let his father die. … Doctors advised that he would ‘basically be a vegetable,’ said the congressman’s aunt, JoAnne DeLay.”

The product liability lawsuit that followed, a class of tort which DeLay later described as “frivolous [and] parasitic,” and sponsored a bill to outlaw, would be like an added bonus if this whole thing wasn’t so sad and wrong.

Jim Callaghan, the Labour Prime Minister defeated by Thatcher in 1979 and, amazingly the oldest living former British PM in history, has died at 92. I’m struggling to think of anything nice to say about his tenure as Home Secretary, Chancellor, Foreign Secretary or PM. He was a machine politician rather than someone animated by a sense of social justice, and it is noteworthy that “the BBC obituary”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/941478.stm can’t find a single policy achievement worth listing to his credit. His government collapsed in chaos and recrimination and was followed by bitter civil war with Labour. Thanks to him and his ilk we suffered 18 years of Tory misrule. Still, RIP and all that.

Matthew Yglesias has a pair of interesting posts up (1, 2), responding to David Brooks’ latest. Basically I agree, but let me make one critical point about where Matt ends up.

I described the liberal as having a two-stage view about end of life issues. First, comes something like the "life as continuum" view Brooks attributes to us. Second, comes a principle of free choice – I think that I should make my own decision on this, but that my view should not control others, though I may try to persuade others that my view is correct (non-relativism). The problem here is that I think a lot of liberals don’t recognize that the second principle really does depend on something akin to the first. If you hold views about the sanctity of life and the doing/allowing distinction that lead you to the conclusion that failing to keep alive someone who could be kept alive is the equivalent to murder, then adopting a principle of free choice at the second level makes no sense. An absolutist view on the first question requires an absolutist view on the second question.

I think the last sentence is not actually true, due to ambiguity in ‘absolutist’. It can mean either: cleaving to a black-white view of a matter (that other folks say they see in shades of grey.) Or it can mean: insisting that views besides one’s own are beyond the pale of moral reasonableness and tolerability. Let’s thumbnail the first absolutism: denying the continuum; the second: denying pluralism. These may sound as though they come to the same, and they probably have a tendency to run together; but in fact they are distinct. [click to continue…]

I don’t share Mark Kaplan’s philosophical predilections, but he is a sharp observer of blogospheric rhetoric. At “Charlotte Street he announces”:http://charlotte-street.blogspot.com/2005/03/note-on-notes-turkey-ruse.html that his perceptive “Notes on Rhetoric” “now have their own site”:http://notesonrhetoric.blogspot.com/ . I particularly enjoyed his latest reflections on the “Turkey” ruse:

bq. Turkey – If your opponent is criticising the policies of some state you favour, demand that he talks about Turkey instead. This may sound a feeble ploy, equivalent to saying ‘please talk about something else’ but can be effective if you use language like ‘if you’re being consistent’ ‘disproportionate and selective attention’. (You may if you wish substitute some other country for Turkey – obviously so if, by chance, your opponent is talking about Turkey.)….

bq. The reductio ad absurdum of this position is that one should busy oneself with impotent cursing and condemnations of foreign regimes over which one has zero influence, while exempting your own government and its allies from criticism. In other words: ethical bombast on the one hand, and ethical abdication on the other.

bq. At worst, the ‘Turkey’ tactic can also short-circuit moral universality – the belief that we should apply to ourselves the same principles we apply to others. So, for example, moral condemnation of torture by American and British soldiers (in accordance with moral universality) meets with ‘but why are you silent about much more horrific things elsewhere..’; patient criticisms of the ‘democratic deficit’ in our own societies meets only with our attention rerouted to utterly undemocratic regimes. So it goes on, diversionary and insidious.

The FT has a good article on Kyrgyzstan today, suggesting that the recent upheavals in Russia’s ‘Near Abroad’ doesn’t actually have all that much to do with George W. Bush.

There is certainly a domino effect at work. Supporters of the US’s democracy campaign have been quick to cast Kyrgyzstan as the latest state to join “the global march of freedom led by President Bush”, as the conservative Wall Street Journal said on Friday, praising Washington’s policies in Afghanistan and Iraq.

However, of more relevance to Kyrgyzstan have been the peaceful revolts against authoritarian leaders in the former Soviet Union, in Georgia and Ukraine. Television and the internet has spread the message. The common element has been a drive to get rid of self-serving corrupt cliques which have often been in power, as in Kyrgyzstan, since Soviet times. These cliques have generally been supported by Moscow, but the revolts against them have not been principally anti-Russian or pro-western. Domestic issues have mattered most.

[click to continue…]

For some revealing insights as to where David Horowitz’s so-called Academic Bill of Rights is bringing us, check out Scott Jaschik’s article today in Inside Higher Ed. Dennis K. Baxley, who is one of Jeb Bush’s allies has gotten a bill based on the Bill of Rights approved by the relevant committee in the Florida House of Representatives. The reasoning behind his sponsorship?

Baxley said his own undergraduate education at Florida State University — in the 1970s — illustrated the failings of higher education: The problem was that an anthropology professor “did a tirade” in his course that evolution was correct and that creationism was not. Baxley said that students should not “get blasted” as he did for not believing in evolution.

When Florida legislators say that students need to be exposed to a ‘diverse’ set of viewpoints, they aren’t joking around. I could make the obvious sarcastic comments about requiring geographers to recognize flat earth theory as a valid point of view in the classroom and so on, but this isn’t funny – it’s rather horrifying.

Update: bad link fixed.

Update2: I should of course have linked to Ted’s earlier post on the same topic.

This may well be something that everyone else has known for weeks or months, but I for one didn’t realize until yesterday that the new version of the Google desktop search tool can now make your Thunderbird mail folders, PDF files, and much more besides searchable. It’s really a great piece of software.