Chris’s post on higher education in the UK has reminded me of an idea I devised when I was experiencing the regime of UK Higher Ed. Numerous UK academics are dissatisfied with their working conditions in exactly the way that Chris’s correspondent is, though not all of them would feel comfortable decamping. If I were a member of the Welsh Assembly or Scottish Parliament I would be very tempted to capitalize on this. I’d try to get a long-term commitment for funding a small new academic institution in whichever country I was in, which would provide an elite undergraduate and graduate education to a small number of students (at first), and would, by providing much happier working conditions and slightly better incomes, provide a magnet for high-quality academics in English institutions (whom I would pursue aggressively).

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Via “Kevin Drum”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_04/003769.php comes this comment from political scientist “Hans Noel”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A39044-2004Apr24?language=printer, quoted in the Washington Post:

bq. “Most people say they are ‘moderate,’ but in fact the country is polarized around strong conservative and liberal positions.” [Noel said, and the article continues] … As it becomes more difficult to reach across the party line, campaigns are devoting more energy to firing up their hard-core supporters. For voters in the middle, this election may aggravate their feeling that politics no longer speaks to them, that it has become a dialogue of the deaf, a rant of uncompromising extremes.

Noel is pushing the attractive idea that polarization feeds on and reinforces itself. (Attractive from the point of view of elegant social mechanisms, I mean.) And Kevin can’t see a way to break the cycle. Red and Blue America is the latest version of the Culture Wars thesis. However, while it’s clear that the chattering classes — at least their representatives in the media — have become more polarized over time, I’m not sure I believe that everyone else has.

My main evidence for this comes from a 1996 paper by Paul DiMaggio, Bethany Bryson and John Evans called “Have Americans’ social attitudes become more polarized?” (JSTOR link, institutional subscription required).[1] They used a long time-series of “General Social Survey”:http://www.norc.uchicago.edu/projects/gensoc.asp opinion data and measured how skewed the distribution of public opinion on a wide range of questions was, and whether that changed over time. Respondents to opinion questions are generally given a statement and asked to choose a place on a five- or sometimes seven-point scale ranging from “Strongly Agree” to “Strongly Disagree.” If polarization was happening, you would see more and more people at the extreme ends of the scales and fewer in the middle. But DiMaggio et al found that, with the exception of questions about abortion, the distribution of opinion had not become more skewed. Across a wide range of issues, there were about as many people in the middle in the early 1990s as there had been in the early 1970s. I don’t know of sample-based research that rebuts this finding. At the same time, as an “an update”:http://www.princeton.edu/culturalpolicy/workpap/WP24%20-%20Evans.pdf by John Evans demonstrates, more recent data suggests that such polarization as does exist is being driven by the political system: “it seems clear that members of the public who are involved in politics are becoming polarized on moral issues.”

fn1. Full disclosure: Paul was my Ph.D advisor and John and Bethany are friends of mine.

A chink of hope in an otherwise dismal season as Danny Murphy becomes the first player to score a league penalty for an away team at Old Trafford since 1993.

A while ago, I made the observation that

since most libertarians envisage a minimal state with no real taxing powers but a continuing responsibility for defence, reliance on conscription would be almost inevitable. From the libertarian viewpoint, any form of taxation constitutes slavery[1], and fairness is not a proper concern of policy, so there can be no particular objection to the press gang as opposed to, say, voluntary recruitment financed by involuntary income taxes.

I was speaking in the context of the Aubrey-Maturin novels, set during the Napoleonic Wars, but the issue has come up again in relation to contemporary debates about the draft. Julian Sanchez has a very good discussion of the issues from a libertarian viewpoint, rejecting Nozick and arguing that rights over property are derivative of, and potentially far more qualified than, rights over one’s own labour.

My own view is broadly similar to Julian’s. Conscription may be justified in the kind of total war situation that also requires “conscription of wealth”, but not as a cheap way of filling the military.

fn1. Nozick is clear on this, and a lot of other libertarians say much the same thing, though usually more foggily. As noted below, however, it’s always a mistake to refer to “the” libertarian viewpoint.

There’s often a strong temptation to think that only other people have culture, a mistake of the same kind as thinking only other people speak with an accent. The odd beliefs and attitudes of foreigners are best explained by reference to their culture, whereas our own actions are generally rational and defensible on their own terms. This fascinating story is about the Japanese hostages recently released in Iraq and their subsequent reception on their return home. It’s a reminder that culture matters and an invitation to the comparative sociology of culture. Thanks to my friend Marion Fourcade-Gourinchas for the pointer. Incidentally, you really should read Marion’s terrific article on Politics, Institutional Structures and the Rise of Economics.

I’m looking ahead to the June 30 “handover” of power in Iraq with increasing trepidation. As this NYT story indicates, the handover is shaping up to be a complete sham (more on this from Nathan Brown, guest commentator for Juan Cole). Anybody silly or corrupt enough to join the new “government” will be in the same position as the Iraq governments of the British Mandate/Treaty period, taking responsibility for policies dictated by a foreign occupying force, while having no effective power over anything that matters.

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We’ve been having some server problems which have disrupted the publication of both posts and comments. They should now be resolved – you should be able to comment again without receiving weird error messages. There will probably be further short term disruption in a few days, when we move to a new hosting provider – watch this space for further details.

I realise that this is about the fourth time I’ve had a hit-and-run shot at an Airmiles column, while crying off doing the proper Globollocks analysis for lack of time. I am a bit short of time at the moment, but the real reason is thatit’s so dispiriting; the general miasma of Globollocks overwhelms any specific instance. Check out today’s example.

Friedman believes that it would be a danger to the USA on a par with global terrorism if someone in India working for a US-owned firm were to invent something useful. Think I’m joking? Read the bugger. He actually uses the phrase “war for innovation”.

Apparently the USA isn’t bringing through enough research scientists. What’s the solution? Presumably the rush to global competition of the free market. Nope, sorry, wrong, the solution is massive amounts of government money. In the Airmiles world, agricultural subsidies are terrible, awful anticompetitive, protectionist. But massive subsidies to the science industry are imperative, because of globalisation or something.

Wretched analysis. Someone has told Airmiles that “basic research” is a phrase meaning “science that it’s OK to want a subsidy for”. And he’s taken it as the intellectual equivalent of a Sapphire Class Admiral’s Club pass to support the contention that we need to incentivise domestic private research to keep its facilities onshore. What about “Susie Smith at the pillow factory?”, who would also presumably like a say in how this tax-funded largesse is to be distributed? Scrwe her, apparently; her role in Friedman’s weightless globalised world is a source of funds and a punchline to jokes. What a piece of work.

We seem to be having some technical difficulties, possibly related to our SQL server. Rebuilds aren’t working properly and Movable Type is complaining it can’t find template modules that it should know perfectly well are there (because they are now and always have been).

Ted’s recent post reminds me of a question I have been pondering recently due to a change in my media use habits. Where do you go first in the morning for an update on current events? I don’t necessarily mean just online, but in general? If online, what site(s) or lists? It used to be that I would just go to nytimes.com as a starting point and then take it from there often clicking on to some blogs (like some of the precursors of CT) to see what other items of news people found of interest. But starting with the New York Times doesn’t quite do it for me anymore. I haven’t developed a new system yet. For now, I often just start at whatever site I visited the night before. A friend of mine recently told me that he always starts at Talking Points Memo then he looks at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and finally checks out the BBC. That sounded like a good way to start the day. I’m curious, where do others go first?

A prominent philosopher in the UK emails to tell me that he has had enough and that he’s looking for employment in the US. The proximate cause of his frustration is the ridiculously complicated process that the Arts and Humanities Research Board (soon to be Council) imposes on us as a condition for distributing the pitiful funding that is available for research students. Increasingly, universities have to demonstrate that they are providing all kinds of “training” in order to access this money and this is part of a wider trend where government (or its arms-length agencies like the AHRB, HEFCE etc) seeks to regulate and micromanage activity within higher education by such conditionalization of funding. My correspondent draws attention to the recent review of “Business-University Collaboration” undertaken by former FT-editor Richard Lambert at Gordon Brown’s behest. Suprisingly, given Brown’s predilection for micromanagement and control across the public sector, one section of the report offers a trenchant exposition of the mess that the government has made as it has tried to subject higher education in the UK to its will.

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I thoroughly recommend this article in the New York Times. While I have no particular opinions on the management of the Maine state pension fund (well, if you really needed one, I daresay I could get some for you cheap rate), it’s a nice and clear explanation of an interesting little part of an issue that I’ve always thought the plain man should be more interested in than he in fact is.

Isn’t she lovely
Isn’t she wonderful
Isn’t she precious
Less than one minute old
I never thought through love we’d be
Making one as lovely as she
But isn’t she lovely, made from love

Congratulations, John and Belle!

I’ve been reading Anthony Grafton’s “Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astronomer”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0674006704/henryfarrell-20 which is a lot of fun. Grafton has a lively writing style, well exemplifed by the following (unfair but funny) dig at the dismal science.

bq. At the most abstract level, astrologers ancient and early modern carried out the tasks that twentieth-century society assigns to the economist. Like the economist, the astrologer tried to bring the chaotic phenomena of everyday life into order by fitting them to sharply defined quantitative models. Like the economist, the astrologer insisted, when teaching and writing for professional peers, that astrology had only a limited ability to predict the future. … Like the economist, the astrologer proved willing in practice, when powerful clients demanded it, to predict individual outcomes anyhow. Like the economist, the astrologer generally found that the events did not match the prediction; and like the economist, the astrologer normally received as a reward for this confirmation of the powers of his art a better job and a higher salary.