I’m running to catch a plane, so I’m taking the lazy blogger’s way out.

Read:

“Steven Berlin Johnson”:http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000138.html and Jack Balkin (“here”:http://balkin.blogspot.com/2004_01_18_balkin_archive.html#107480769112109137 and “here”:http://balkin.blogspot.com/2004_01_25_balkin_archive.html#107504723738260601) on whether the Internet is destroying democracy.

“Ed Felten”:http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000502.html on why Republican Senate file-snoopers may have indeed broken the law.

“Jessa Crispin”:http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2004_01.php#001423 and “About Last Night”:http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/archives20040118.shtml#67229 on changes afoot in the NYT Book Review (I’m with both of ’em – read the Washington Post’s “Book World”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/print/sunday/bookworld/, and especially the incomparable “Michael Dirda”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/style/columns/dirdamichael/ instead).

“Belle Waring”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/01/roses_really_sm.html on wusscore, a rapidly expanding musical genre.

“Amity Wilczek”:http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/natureisprofligate/2004/01/13#a145 on slugporn.

This is really Daniel’s department, but I’ve been waiting for Samuel Brittan to update his website with “his review”:http://www.samuelbrittan.co.uk/text173_p.html of John Allen Paulos’s “A Mathematician Plays the Market”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465054803/junius-20 for a while, and he’s finally done it. The most bloggable point is borrowed — I think — from Taleb’s “Fooled by Randomness”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587991845/junius-20

bq. In financial discussions you often hear how about Ms.X or Mr.Y who has had a consistently good record in beating the market indices. Paulos shows how such “successful” analysts can emerge purely by chance. Of 1,000 analysts, roughly 500 might be expected to outperform the market next year. Of these another 250 might be expected to do so well for a second year and 125 in the third. Continuing the series we might expect to find one analyst who does well for ten consecutive years by chance alone. But will she do better in the 11th year? Your guess is as good as mine.

This week at Crooked Timber, at the suggestion of Daniel, some of us will be discussing Doug Henwood‘s new book, After the New Economy. It’s an analysis and critique of “New Economy” rhetoric about productivity growth, the transformation of work and the process of globalization. Doug Henwood is probably known to many readers of CT. He’s the editor of the Left Business Observer and the author of Wall Street.

I read the book on a round-trip bus excursion to Sydney last week and wrote up a general review to kick things off. This is a fairly long post. You can get it in a more readable PDF format if you like.

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Norman Geras sees some “overlap”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/01/the_guardian_on.html between a recent interview with Benny Morris (where Morris “qualifies”:http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/386065.html some of the arguments attributed to him previously), and a “piece”:http://www.dissentmagazine.org/editors/from/10_2/fourwars.htm that Michael Walzer wrote for Dissent in 2002 on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Morris argues that the ‘war being waged against us’ [in Israel] needs to be seen in the context of three overlapping conflicts; Walzer argues that there are no less than four ‘Israeli-Palestinian wars’ now in progress. But apart from the basic organizing metaphor, there doesn’t seem to be much overlap at all – Morris and Walzer are making very different (and perhaps radically opposed) arguments, for very different purposes.

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Last week in class I asked my students where we had all learned that it is illegal to kill people. [UPDATE 1/27/04 10:30am CST: Since the comments have gotten long and some may miss this clarification: this is not the exact wording of what I had said in class. I said something along the lines of “not supposed to kill people”. My question was not about legalities it was more general.] (Let’s set aside for the moment why this question would come up in a grad seminar on the Social Implications of Info and Communication Technologies.. the question seemed to make sense at the time.:) When I posed the question I wasn’t sure about my own answer to it so I was especially surprised when I saw that most students (of the eight in this class) had an immediate response: church.

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This will mostly be of interest to philosophers and fellow travellers. The APA Pacific Divivision conference program is now online. This is worth noting for a couple of reasons. First, the conference is absolutely packed with good papers. Every session has, IMNSHO, multiple papers that are worth travelling to see. If you are undecided about whether to go to the conference, seeing the program should tip the balance. Second, there is a mini-conference on global justice running during and after the APA, organised by (among others) our own Harry Brighouse. This will be of interest to many CT readers I think. Since this does not entirely overlap the APA, those interested in it should make sure their travel plans allow them to attend. I imagine many attendees will have already booked their travel to the conference, but for those that have not, it is worth checking to see whether you want to stay around for the mini-conference after the main show.

Norm has “posted the results”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/01/favourite_movie.html in his top movies of all time poll. My “own two favourite movies”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001053.html got absolutely nowhere and fifteen people (10 per cent of the total!) were deluded enough to vote for the Shawshank Redemption (4th= best movie of all time? — you must be joking!). Still, it gives us something to talk about and has been a lot of fun. So thanks to Norm for his efforts.

Non-UK readers might not be aware of this, but there is the most almightly kerfuffle going on in the UK at the moment on a subject which I strongly suspect Americans would regard it as bizarre to be having a debate about. We’re all throwing beer bottles and calling each other fascists over the question of … whether different universities should charge different fees. Why? Well, for one thing, Blair and his government promised us in their last manifesto that they weren’t going to do this, and apparently some of us still care about the government’s habit of allowing us to go into the ballot chamber believing things that aren’t true (by the way, where the hell are our oversized pint glasses and longer opening hours?). But there is another, more fundamental reason; a lot of people believe that this is a fundamentally inegalitarian measure. And on my analysis (though not that of most other economists) they are right. Read on …

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I went to see “Les Parapluies de Cherbourg”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0058450/ at my local cinema yesterday afternoon. An extraordinary banal story, real soap-opera stuff, but so strange and wonderful when every line is sung to French semi-jazz music. And the final scene when Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo meet again is so moving. Wonderful multicoloured wallpaper in every room too! The poignancy was accentuated by the mentions of war in Algeria: ambushes, comrades killed and so on. If I’d seen this a year ago these would have been little more than words but now it is easy to imagine the scenes.

From Thomas “Even More Airmiles” Friedman’s column today:

“Former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo remarked to me: “I don’t think I would have been successful in political reform without the decent economic growth we had [spurred by Nafta] from 1996 to 2000. Those five years, we had average growth of 5 percent.”

Who can tell me what might be considered by harsh judges to be perhaps a leetle bit misleading about this quotation?

Answer below the fold.

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My summer holiday activities over the last couple of months included a lot of work on my music collection (I’m slowly transferring from vinyl to MP3/AIFF) and rereading Nick Hornby. So, I was naturally struck by how rapidly the skill of making compilation tapes, a central theme of High Fidelity has gone from the esoteric to the everyday. Not surprisingly, not everyone is happy about this. Joel Keller, writing in Salon, says

Putting together a home-brewed compilation of songs used to be an act of love and art. Now it’s just too damn easy to be worth caring about.

and much more in the same vein, though his conclusion is more elegiac than polemical

When making the decision between practicality and artistic merit, I’ll choose practicality more often than not. I may be wistful for the old days, but I’m not an idiot.

So let’s have a moment of silence, for the mix as we used to know it is dead. Technology has overtaken the experience and made it cold and impersonal. But it’s time to look forward, as the Internet has allowed us to trade and download more varied types of music, making for better-sounding, albeit more antiseptic, mixes. One of these days, Nick Hornby should do a sequel to “High Fidelity” and list Rob’s Top 5 music downloads. I’m sure it’ll be a nice read. But it just won’t be the same.

The first time I heard this form of argument, it was from my Grade 4 teacher, lamenting the arrival of the ballpoint pen, and its adverse effect on the quality of handwriting. Possibly since I never mastered the steel nib/inkwell technology still favoured by the South Australian Department of Education in the 1960s, I was not impressed. Since then, I’ve seen the same argument applied to calculators, word processing and desktop publishing. And of course, the argument wasn’t new when I first met it – in one form or another, it’s been applied to almost any technical innovation that replaces a complex skill with an easily usable machine. (It’s separate from the income-distributional arguments that apply when skilled workers are displaced by unskilled ones, although the two are often entangled).

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I’m very happy to report that, after his stint as a guest blogger recently, John Quiggin will be joining us as a regular here at Crooked Timber. John is a distinguished Australian economist at the University of Queensland, and many readers will already know him from his own excellent blog. We’re delighted John’s agreed to join the gang, and his doing so brings our number to thirteen. I’m not sure who gets to be Judas. Or Jesus, for that matter.

Head over to Wampum and vote for your favorite blog named “Crooked Timber.” We are nominated for Best Writing, Best Series, Best Group Blog and Best Design. Unfortunately, the “Best Group Blog” and “Best Blog” categories seem mutually exclusive.

I just saw a documentary yesterday about the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the organization behind the Golden Globes. Apparently it’s made up of people who need be neither foreign nor press, but who share a desperate desire to be photographed with celebrities. I will happily pose for a photo with anyone who votes for us in the Koufax Awards. Head and Shoulders shots only, though.

I see from comments to “another thread”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001197.html that Daniel is preparing to argue against the British government’s case for top-up fees for universities. A good thing that we don’t have a CT party-line! Actually, I’m not sure I would be in favour of them either if the choice were between the current proposals and any alternative that I’d care to formulate for an ideal world. But that isn’t the case. British universities have been starved of resources for over two decades, academic pay is extremely poor (especially at the start) and we’ll face a real difficulty in recruiting people to teach some subjects if things don’t change (Daniel — fancy a job an a junior econ lecturer in a British university?). So since the extra money we need isn’t going to come from increasing taxation and isn’t going to come from a graduate tax (both of which I’d be perfectly happy with), and since the likely outcome of a government defeat is further drift and starvation — I hope Blair wins this one.

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