“John Holbo and Belle Waring”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/ have now finished their week of guest blogging with us, so I think it appropriate to say how much fun it was to have them around. With reflections on Sesame Street, the English murder-mystery, Chinese-Italian (or should that be Italian-Chinese) cuisine from Belle and on the changing experience of blogging, the FMA and conservatives in academia from John — we at CT have certainly done well from having them on board. (You can check out those posts again by clicking on the little squiggly thing next to “Guest Bloggers” on the LH sidebar.) I hope we’ll be seeing them again some time soon, but in the meantime be sure to visit their blog regularly.

bq. “The launch of his Kulturkampf has been a blitzkrieg.”

“Sidney Blumenthal”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1161399,00.html trips over the “fascist octopus”:http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/patee.html in a polemic against G.W. Bush.

I’m off to see “Das Rheingold”:http://www.metopera.org/synopses/rheingold.html on Saturday (or, rather, since the production is by “English National Opera”:http://www.eno.org/home/index.php , “The Rhinegold”:http://www.eno.org/whatson/full.php?performancekey=18 ). The anticipation of this set me off googling for a hilarious passage from a Jerry Fodor review of Steven Pinker. I’d have liked to have found the whole thing, but the money quote is there in this “review”:http://www.yorku.ca/christo/papers/Fodor-review.htm of a Fodor’s “In Critical Condition”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/026256128X/junius-20 :

bq. The literature of psychological Darwinism is full of what appear to be fallacies of rationalization: arguments where the evidence offered that an interest in Y is the motive for a creature’s behavior is primarily that an interest in Y would rationalize the behavior if it were the creature’s motive. Pinker’s book provides so many examples that one hardly knows where to start.… [H]ere’s Pinker on why we like fiction: “Fictional narratives supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them. What are the options if I were to suspect that my uncle killed my father, took his position, and married my mother?” Good question. Or what if it turns out that, having just used the ring that I got by kidnapping a dwarf to pay off the giants who built me my new castle, I should discover that it is the very ring that I need in order to continue to be immortal and rule the world? It’s important to think out the options betimes, because a thing like that could happen to anyone and you can never have too much insurance. (p. 212)

UPDATE: Thanks to commenter C.P. Shaw. The whole Fodor article, which I’d failed to find using Google is “available on the LRB website”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n02/fodo01_.html .

My post a week or so ago considering (and ultimately rejecting) the hypothesis that the 2004 election might be a good one for the Democrats to lose raised plenty of eyebrows, but the ensuing debate helped to sharpen up my thinking on the underlying issue, that of the unsustainability of current US fiscal policy and the appropriate Democrat response.

In the original post drew the conclusion that the only campaign strategy that would give a Democrat, once elected, any real chance of prevailing over a Republican congress, was that (supported by Dean, Gephardt, Kucinich and Sharpton) of repealing the entire Bush tax cut and starting from scratch. To the extent that primary voters considered this issue, they didn’t see it this way. With the possible exception of Lieberman, Kerry was the candidate most supportive of the tax cuts.

Like Bush, Kerry promises to cut the deficit in half over four years. He proposes to scrap the cuts for those earning more than $200 000, but to expand them for ‘middle-class families’, a group normally taken to include about 95 per cent of the population[1]. When other spending proposals are taken into account, the Tax Policy Center (a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution) estimates that Kerry’s proposals will yield a net increase in the deficit of $165 billion over four years , or $40 billion a year. (Of course, Bush will almost certainly spend more once the unbudgeted costs of higher defense spending and even more tax cuts are factored in). As I show below, this is relative to a baseline of around $550 billion.

I think it’s safe to say this won’t happen. The problem for Kerry, then, is when to discover the deficit. There are three basic options:

fn1. It’s evidence of the startling lopsidedness of the Bush tax cuts, and the explosion of income inequality over the past two decades, that there is, nonetheless, a substantial revenue gain from repealing the cuts for the rich and ultra-rich. About half the benefits of the Bush tax cuts go to those on incomes over $200 000 per year.

Update: Brad de Long points to Kerry’s appointment of Roger Altman as his budget priorities advise as evidence that Kerry will choose Option 1. Kevin Drum is underwhelmed. He supports Option 2 and expects Option 3, or worse.

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When blogger and journalist Tim Blair discovers a Chicago Tribune reporter fibbing about a source, they look into it and fire the reporter. (Good job, Tim.)

When blogger and programmer Rogers Cadenhead discovers Matt Drudge fibbing about a source, that’s just another day at Drudge.

Advantage: old media.

Before I argue that the Borda voting system is fatally defective, it may be worth considering what kinds of weaknesses could justify such a verdict. We know from Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem that any nontrivial voting system will encourage strategic/insincere voting in some circumstances and will not always elect the right candidate (unless ‘right’ is defined to coincide with the outcome of the voting system in question). So a fatal defect must be a lot worse than this. I claim that the Borda voting system is so vulnerable to strategic manipulation that it would be completely unworkable, provided only that there are no restrictions on candidacy.

Note: I did a Google before writing this and couldn’t find anything similar, but of course, when I checked again after doing the work, I found this almost perfect anticipation of my counter-example. But having done the work, I thought I’d post it anyway.

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The post below, which arose out of some discussion in my philosophy seminar last week, is a fair bit less topical than most posts on CT, but since it touches on some topics in philosophy of science and economics some people here might find it interesting. Plus I get to bash Milton Friedman a bit, but not for the reasons you might expect.

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And while we’re on the subject … Erin O’Connor’s blog performs a useful service; a bit one-sided to be sure, but then we all have our particular bugbears to belabour. Still, could she _please_ cease and desist from calling her ham-handed academic “comedy-by-installment”:http://www.erinoconnor.org/archives/000876.html (apparently contributed by an anonymous reader), “Pictures from an Institution”? Poor old Randall Jarrell‘s corpse must be up to 1,500 rpms by now. Jarrell certainly had his conservative side, and a caustic turn of phrase when skewering academic pomposity, but he wrote like an angel. He could never, _never_ commit a sentence like:

bq. Erwin R. Sackville had made a career out of staying ahead of the field’s steep curve of philosophical abandonment.

to pick just one of many. It’s flabby, saggy, and doesn’t really mean anything. The reference to Jarrell’s novel doesn’t do O’Connor’s ersatz academic satire any favours; she’d be much better off abandoning it. Read the original instead; it’s a delight (an academic comedy of manners that is one of the saddest books I know).

Via “Volokh”:http://volokh.com/2004_02_29_volokh_archive.html#107825967035504173 comes news of the controversial firing by “Penn State Altoona”:http://www.aa.psu.edu/ of Professor “Nona Gerard”:http://www.aa.psu.edu/fpages/lgt1/lgt1.htm. Penn State aren’t talking about it. “Erin O’Connor”:http://www.erinoconnor.org/archives/000873.html gives the Prof’s side of the story. Gerard was dismissed, it seems, for making what in diplomatic circles would be called a full and frank assessment of her colleagues. The details of what she said do not appear to be public. Given the lack of information I make no judgment either way, though on its face firing tenured Professors because they are opinionated jerks seems to set a dangerous precedent. “Eric Rasmusen”:http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/04.03.02a.htm, whom you may remember is everyone’s “favorite”:http://www.erinoconnor.org/archives/000727.html “homophobic economist”:http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/chi-0309180370sep19,0,7121293.story?coll=chi-technology-hed, is on Gerard’s side. He comments:

bq. We see also that her criticism was indeed stinging. Her mere words were so effective that they led one person to retire and another to resign. To me, that implies that her criticisms must have had merit– otherwise, why react so strongly?

“Revealed preferences”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001446.html strike again! It _must_ be true, otherwise why are you reacting like that? QED! My students sometimes try a variant of this idea, viz, “You’re only giving me an F because You Can’t Handle The Truth, man.” It’s a useful rule to live by, especially late at night, in bars, when talk turns to the personal qualities of people’s mothers.

“Tim Dunlop”:http://www.roadtosurfdom.com/surfdomarchives/002045.php tells us about another signal contribution to the “David Bernstein school”:http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/002568.html of revealed preference theory.

bq. It’s hard to take Keith Windschuttle seriously when he says things like this, apparently without irony:

bq. “In other words, since the ’60s the great majority of Aboriginal people have voted with their feet in favour of integration with white Australia.”

bq. Same way I used to vote with my fork and eat my Brussels sprouts when told I couldn’t eat anything else for the night if I didn’t.

(minor corrections and reformatting of original)

There will be a panel discussion this afternoon at Princeton (4:30pm EST) about the Passion movie (see live Webcast). My good friend, the very smart Steven Tepper will be on the panel as will some other interesting Princeton academics plus representatives of national Catholic and Jewish organizations. Steve studies controversies over art and culture so it should be interesting to hear his take on the reactions to this movie.

Over on my other blog, a discussion started up about whether it is valuable to do a terminal MA before starting a PhD. My impression is that in philosophy, the answer is sometimes yes. The obvious costs are that you spend longer in grad school, and may have to move once more often. The benefits are that you may get into a better PhD program after an MA than after a BA, that you’ll be better prepared for the PhD, and you’ll have an opportunity to tell whether you want to be in grad school before making a serious commitment. I think that if you don’t get into a top PhD program, and you do get into a top MA program[1] on balance it probably is better to do the MA. Is this true across the humanities in America? Is it true even in philosophy? The structure of graduate degrees in the UK and Australia is quite different to America, so I’m not sure how well this would generalise across the oceans.

fn1. Assuming these exist in all fields. In philosophy a few schools offer highly respected terminal MA programs, and many of the graduates of those programs are placed in top PhD programs. The most prominent examples are Tufts and Arizona State, but there are several other such programs.

I see that Tom DeLay is “trying to push forward”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20867-2004Mar1.html one of the Republican talking-points that has been doing the rounds the last couple of weeks.

bq. DeLay used his weekly news briefing to denounce Kerry’s Vietnam War record, citing what he described as the senator’s “accusing his brothers-in-arms in Vietnam of wholesale rape and murder, and his bizarre refusal to answer questions about his disturbing record.” Kerry, a decorated war veteran, testified before Congress in 1971 about reports of atrocities committed by U.S. troops.

Leaving aside DeLay’s dubious reporting of what Kerry said, there’s an interesting question here – what is the precise slur that he’s trying to cast? Is he claiming that there weren’t instances of wholesale rape and murder by US troops in Vietnam? If so, he’s lying. Is he saying that that US soldiers shouldn’t testify about true instances of rape and murder to Congress, because they’d be betraying their ‘brothers’? Rather hard to defend that one if you think about it. Indeed, the question could be turned back on DeLay. Either he’s making the mendacious claim that US troops didn’t commit atrocities in Vietnam, or he’s arguing that rape and murder should be hushed up when they’re committed by men wearing US army fatigues. I don’t know which is the more disgusting position. I’m not precisely enthusiastic about Kerry’s candidacy (or about the US Democratic party more generally), but given the behavior and positions of the other crowd, I don’t think there’s much of a choice.

For a country with a better than average social welfare safety net, Britain still seems to enjoy plenty of social entrepreneurship. These days the UK is a seething hotbed of activity aimed at opening up the political process to the masses.

MySociety has just launched a blog-based website called Downing Street Says. It strips out into a readable format each topic covered in the Prime Minister’s spokesman’s daily Q&A with political correspondents, and allows the public to add comments. (BBC story here.)Official transcripts of the daily Q&A and the PM’s monthly press conference are available somewhere on the UK government website. But they’re difficult to find, published in long clumps of text, and of course have no comments sections. Downing Street Says has been put together by volunteers who simply want to make the process more open to the public, and it makes for an interesting read.

I’m still a bit on the fence about how much these initiatives really improve democracy, but hats off to the people who’ve used their spare time and talents to put this together. Also worth looking at is faxyourmp, and a whole slate of projects that MySociety is currently fundraising for. James Crabtree at VoxPolitics is an excellent source of information and opinion about developments in this field.

Now if only someone would take on Hansard…