Now that Brian has started the hare running on gender-neutral pronouns, I thought I’d weigh in on the old chestnut “When did the 21st century start?” (I saw this raised in a recent comments thread, but can’t locate it now). The commonsense view is that it began on 1 January 2000, and I think the commonsense view is right. Against this we get a bunch of pedants arguing, that, since there was no year zero, the 1st century (of the current era) began in 1CE, and therefore included 100CE. Granting this, the 21st century began on 1 January 2001.

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Draft review of “A Man After His Own Heart”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1565847709/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/, by Charles Siebert. (Final version to appear in “The Drawing Board”:http://www.econ.usyd.edu.au/drawingboard/.)

The language of the heart is all-pervasive. Art and everyday life are full of emotions expressed through talk about the heart, be it given or joined, singing or broken, closed or kind. The Ancient Greek view that the liver is the seat of the soul can seem plausible on a good Friday night, and Descartes’ case that it’s our head that matters may be felt with some force the following morning. For sheer range of metaphor, though, the heart has no serious competitors. But what about the thing itself? The cheerful curve of a Valentine’s heart does not convey what a real heart looks like. A heart ache is not a heart attack. We all know that the heart is a pump that moves blood around the body, but very few of us could give an accurate account of how it happens. The dynamic interplay of all those chambers, arteries and valves is difficult to picture, hard to explain, and took a very long time to discover.

Yet, at the same time, we are more familiar than ever with the risks of cardiac arrest and the danger of heart disease. Coronary bypasses are routine and a heart transplant these days is a standard (if difficult) option rather than an exotic experiment. So there are two ways of talking about the heart: as a metaphor for ourselves and our innermost feelings, and as a key bit of internal plumbing, in need of maintenance and regular upkeep. Advances in medicine over the past century or so, and especially in the last thirty years, have made it difficult to keep the two separate. The real heart intrudes more and more on its imagined counterpart.

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“BoingBoing”:http://www.boingboing.net/2004/08/19/happy_birthday_dd.html reports that “Dungeons and Dragons”:http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/welcome is “30 years old”:http://pc.gamespy.com/articles/538/538848p1.html. And it’s _still_ a virgin.

I had always thought there was a dialect of English where _he_ could be used as a gender-neutral pronoun. That is, I always thought there was a dialect of English where one could say (1) without presupposing that the person we hire next will be male.

(1) The person we hire next will be able to teach whatever courses he wants.

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Atrios has a good question:

I really don’t understand why there hasn’t been more attention paid to this, from little Scott McClellan:

We’ve called on Senator Kerry to join us and call for an end to all of this unregulated soft money activity.

What exactly does this mean? Should all expenditures be “regulated?” Regulated how? Should my friends and I not be able to throw some dollars together and buy ads?

I mean, I’m a tepid supporter of various Campaign Finance Reform endeavors, but I didn’t realize that president had such extreme views. Or does he? Can someone pin him down?

The quote isn’t out of context– I’ve got the whole exchange under the fold. McClellan repeatedly says that the President calls for an end to all unregulated soft money activity. Surely he can’t mean that?

McClellan also says “the President thought he got rid of all of this unregulated soft money activity when he signed the bipartisan campaign finance reforms into law.” Incredibly, he seems to be making the argument that Bush doesn’t understand the laws he signs. Even I know that campaign finance reform did nothing of the sort.

But let’s take McClellan seriously for a second. Are we supposed to believe that Bush thought he was signing away the right of Americans to engage in “unregulated soft money activity”? I mean, we Timberites pay money for our bandwidth. We engage in political speech. And we’re completely unregulated.

Did Bush think that he was outlawing this?

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Gosh, I remember this from my small collection of BCCI books, but had never realised it was the same John Kerry. This really ought to count in peoples’ minds a lot more than any tales of heroics in Vietnam. The fact that George W Bush borrowed money from BCCI in 1987 but John Kerry launched the investigation in 1988 that eventually brought them down really says about all you need to know about the character of the two men. BCCI was a really quite extraordinarily bad organisation and Kerry’s investigation opened the eyes of the whole world to the extent that it was possible to get away with corruption in high-quality financial centres. It was about this time, by the way, that the liberal media of the USA were smearing Gary Webb as a “crackpot conspiracy theorist” for reporting, accurately, on the fact that politically well-connected Nicaraguans were being allowed to get off easily on cocaine smuggling charges. The Washington Monthly story is well worth a read.

Link comes via Atrios, btw, who obviously needs the vast publicity that a CT link can generate.

I basically agree with everything “Daniel”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002359.html and “Atrios”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004_08_15_atrios_archive.html#109286835802888918 said about “Alex Tabarrok’s post on renting”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/08/economic_founda.html, but I just wanted to add one anecdote to support Daniel’s side of the story.

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I’m pretty sure that it was JK Galbraith (with an outside chance that it was Bhagwati) who noted that there is one and only one successful tactic to use, should you happen to get into an argument with Milton Friedman about economics. That is, you listen out for the words “Let us assume” or “Let’s suppose” and immediately jump in and say “No, let’s not assume that”. The point being that if you give away the starting assumptions, Friedman’s reasoning will almost always carry you away to the conclusion he wants to reach with no further opportunities to object, but that if you examine the assumptions carefully, there’s usually one of them which provides the function of a great big rug under which all the points you might want to make have been pre-swept.

A few CT mates appear to be floundering badly over this Law & Economics post at Marginal Revolution on the subject of why it’s a bad idea to have minimum standards for rented accommodation. (Atrios is doing a bit better). So I thought I’d use it as an object lesson in applying the Milton Friedman technique.

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The meeting of the Iraqi National Conference has wound up in Baghdad, leaving, from the limited reports available, a very mixed record. Given the series of disasters we’ve seen in the last eighteen months or so, a mixed record is certainly better than the par outcome of total failure.

It was certainly good that the gathering was held at all, and appears to have encompassed a much broader and more representative sample of Iraqi opinion than anything of the kind held since the overthrow of Saddam (or, of course, while Saddam and his Baathist predecessors were in power). This report on the televised proceedings,at Healing Iraq gives an idea of what it was like.

On the other hand, the supposed purpose of the Conference, to elect an advisory council of 100 members to oversee the Allawi government, degenerated into farce. It appears that the Conference was presented with a slate of 81 members agreed by the big parties and a US-imposed decision that 19 members of the old IGC (originally 20, but Chalabhi was excluded after falling from grace). In the absence of any alternative, this slate was accepted by default.

But the biggest success (still not a sure thing, but promising) was the intervention of the Conference in the Najaf crisis, demanding that the assault by the US and the interim government cease and that Sadr withdraw from Najaf, disband his militia and enter the political process. Clearly, if it were not for the Conference, there would have been little chance of a peaceful outcome here, and the potential consequences were disastrous. Sadr has stated acceptance of the Conference’s demands, though it remains to be seen what that means.

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Finally, with the Google IPO pricing way below expectations and with a serious arbitrage[1] showing up on the Iowa Electronic Markets, I get round to reviewing James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds”. I’ll save the suspense; it’s a cracking read and well worth buying. To give you an idea of the style, I’ll start this review with my own shockingly unfair parody …

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In the brutally competitive, take-no-prisoners world of fantasy sports team managment, sometimes we have to take matters into our own hands. That’s when McSweeney’s guide to heckling might come in handy.

While you’re out and about in your town, try heckling some of the locals to build your confidence and work on your repertoire.

To the Mailman: “Karl Malone would be ashamed.”

To the Paperboy: “Who taught you how to throw? David Cassidy?”

To the Grocer: “This orange blows.”

To the Bank Clerk: “I can buy and sell you at will.”

To the Bus Driver: “Flunk out of chauffeur school?”

To the Ice-Cream-Truck Driver: “Flunk out of bus-driver school?”

To the Town Vampire: “Even I have bigger teeth. And you call yourself a reanimated corpse that has risen from the grave to suck the blood of the living? You suck. In a nonliteral, yet highly amusing, way.”

To the Waiter: “How’s that whole aspiring-to-be-an-actor thing going? Not good? At least you got your degree in …? Oh. I’m truly sorry. Can I get a refill?”

In his reply to Chris B’s response to his article on desert Will Wilkinson expresses dismay that no-one has taken up a point he made in his original piece, viz,

bq. Material inequality is one kind of inequality among many. Political
inequality is more troubling by far, for political power is the power to
push people around. Coercion is wrong on its face, and so the existence
of political inequality requires a specially strong and compelling
justification. However, if the luck argument cuts against moral
entitlement to material holdings, it cuts equally against any moral
entitlement to political power.

He goes on, in the original piece, to say that

bq. The justification for political power is generally sought in the “consent” of the people through free, fair and open elections. Yet the fact that someone has gained power by a democratic ballot can be no more or less relevant than the fact that Warren Buffet gained his billions through a series of fair, voluntary transactions. John Edwards (who, by the way, is a mill worker’s son) didn’t deserve his luxuriant tresses and blinding grin. Reagan didn’t deserve movie-star name recognition. Bushes don’t deserve to be Bushes. Kennedys don’t deserve to be Kennedys. Kerry’s war medals? Please.
If the luck argument is any good, then democratic choice and the resulting distribution of coercive political power is also, as Yglesias says, “chance all the way down.” And if luck negates the moral right to keep and dispose of one’s stuff, it also negates the right to take and dispose of others’ stuff.

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“Paul Krugman”:http://www.pkarchive.org/ and “Fernando Cardoso”:http://www.harrywalker.com/speakers_template.cfm?Spea_ID=624 were the final plenary speakers yesterday evening at the “American Sociological Association Meetings”:http://www.asanet.org/convention/2004/ in San Francisco. The topic under discussion was “The Future of Neoliberalism,” and both of them did a pretty good job. The panel was introduced and moderated by “Juliet Schor”:http://www2.bc.edu/~schorj/, who spoke for twenty-odd minutes at the beginning and seemed just a tiny bit reluctant to give up the mike. That was understandable, I suppose, as the ballroom was jammed — standing room only and spillover into the hallways outside, and it’s hard to resist a crowd that big. I hadn’t seen Krugman speak before. He was refreshingly nerdy. His detractors work incessantly to make the “shrill” label stick, but in person he comes off more like Woody Allen’s accountant brother.

Krugman made a passing reference to Enron and wondered whether Homeland Security was responsible for the intermittent problems with the lights and sound, but otherwise stuck to the topic at hand, arguing that “neoliberalism” could and should be decomposed into policies that ought to be evaluated independently. So whereas free-trade and export-led growth has clearly gotten _much_ better results than tariffs and import-substitution, the benefits of unrestricted capital mobility or gung-ho privatization aren’t as well established. He emphasized the complexity of the problems at issue and the dangers of hubris in development policy. He came across, in other words, like a theoretically-driven social scientist determined to learn from the data and looking for the answer to the question “How can we make as many people as possible better-off?”

All of which made some of the questions from the audience (passed up on cards and read out by Schor) more than a little irritating. The worst one, stupid as well as rude, asked whether economics was “too mired in the muck of right-wing thought” to do any good in the world. (I should say that no-one clapped at that one, and a lot of people were clearly embarrassed: in many respects this was the friendliest of all possible audiences.) Krugman politely stood his ground. Whoever submitted the question is probably well-used to (correctly) arguing that the horrors of Stalin don’t invalidate the fundamental insights of Marxists. How hard can it be to apply the same basic point to the WTO and the neoclassical toolkit?[1] Questions like that are the bobblehead left-wing analogue to the pez-dispenser right-wing trope that if only you understood “Econ 101” or “the basic laws of the market” you’d agree with every wingnut idea put to you. I have all kinds of criticisms and qualms about economics as a body of knowledge and a professional enterprise, and naturally I’d like to be right about all of them all the time. But, sadly, easy certainty is continually frustrated by the fact that many of the economists I know are much smarter than me and have the irritating ability to make good arguments for their point of view. And so even though I will of course prevail in the end I can’t just dismiss them out of hand. I expect the same consideration in return, the odd snotty economist (or, more often, their camp-followers in political science and law) notwithstanding.

Anyway, if you get a chance to see Krugman at a book-signing or whatever — especially of the topic is international macroeconomics — take it. He’s good value.

fn1. Comments to the effect that I am implying that the WTO is as bad as Stalin here will be ignored.

“Daniel Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/001578.html posts an extract from a _Wall Street Journal_ article (subscription only, and I don’t have a subscription), suggesting both that there is a serious shortage of skilled machinists in the US, and that “U.S. apprenticeship programs have dwindled as the large American companies that once provided the bulk of such training have cut back to save money and now outsource some of the work.” As I’ve noted “before”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000689.html, there’s a serious case to be made that both these problems reflect underlying weaknesses in the US model of capitalism.

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