Since CT has a decent-sized readership, I’m appealing for help to try to get hold of a copy of a biopic about Jean-Jacques Rousseau by the Swiss director Claude Goretta. The title is “Les Chemins de l’Exil”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077322/ and it appeared in 1978 and was, I believe, broadcast on the BBC. All my googling has drawn a blank, and contacts have come up with nothing. But if someone out there has a copy or knows how to get hold of one, drop me a line at chris-at-crookedtimber.org.

Via The Big Picture’s Barry Ritholtz, CNN has an interesting article about which Democratic presidential candidate Wall Street might prefer. You’ve got to love the lead:

A recent study from the University of California at Berkeley, published in the October issue of the Journal of Finance shows that between 1927 and 1998, the stock market returned approximately 11 percent more a year under a Democratic president versus safer, three-month Treasurys. By comparison, the stock market only returned 2 percent more a year versus the T-bills under Republicans.

(Dwight Merideth had a marvelous series of posts on this subject called “Just For the Record”, by the way.)

I shouldn’t have been surprised, but Bush’s support from the “investor class” is far from monolithic. A Money magazine poll of “investor class” voters, however defined, revealed that only half planned to vote for Bush. And while Republicans got more in donations, they didn’t get that much more.

The piece goes on to detail:

* the Republican vs. Democratic donations of some of the largest major financial institutions.
* the positions re: corporate governance, taxes, international outsourcing, of the major Democratic candidates that would affect the investor class. (There’s a lot there I didn’t know- Dean used to be a stockbroker? Edwards is the only guy who would require expensing of stock options? Wow.)
* non-crazy quotes from Don Luskin about prominent Democrats.

It’s short and well worth a look; go to it.

Over the last year, those of us who were against starting the particular conflict in Iraq which took place in the second quarter of 2003, have taken an awful lot of criticism from those of our fellow left-wingers who supported it. Which is fair enough; robust debate is important. But it is a bit much to be accused of supporting the murder of innocents, by people who know perfectly well that you don’t, because you refuse to lend your voice to an already deafening clamor of approbation for a policy which you didn’t support, still regard as misguided, but which happened to have some favourable consequences. For example.

I personally have a very great antipathy to loyalty oaths, but am never happier than when discarding principles in order to fight dirty. So, it’s sauce for the gander time.

I hereby question the “left” credentials, and indeed the commitment to democracy, of anyone who takes the government side against Katharine Gun. Saddam’s gone and nothing can bring him back. Whatever happens in Iraq, happens. The war was fought and cannot be unfought. All that turns on this case, is whether someone who is aware that the government is trying to do something in private which they would not dare to do in public, has the right to blow the whistle. If you think that Ms Gun deserves to go to jail, then all I can say, mes amis is examine your conscience.

[EDIT] Just to emphasise that this is my own personal view, rather than the “party line” of CT. I’ve not discussed it with any other contributor and suspect that a number of them won’t agree.

An email from a reader alerts me to “The Cheating Culture”:http://cheatingculture.com/ by David Callaghan, a new book which blames a whole raft of scandals in the US — from Enron to athlete doping — on the erosion of a sense of fair play in the winner-takes-all society. The book’s website has “an interview with the author”:http://cheatingculture.com/davidcallahaninterview.htm and also incorporates “the author’s own blog”:http://www.cheatingculture.com/cheatingblog.html on the issues covered by the book. Worth a look.

Readers of Crooked Timber will know that I have an old and unhappy relationship with the New Left Review. I mention this just to trigger an appropriate level of discounting for bitterness and resentment in the reader. The “latest NLR has an attack on the record of New Labour”:http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR25901.shtml by the person now listed alone as “editor” on the masthead: Susan Watkins. Watkins, married to Tariq Ali and co-author with him of _1968: Marching in the Streets_ but perhaps best known for the cartoon book _Feminism for Beginners_ , has written an extraordinarily poor rant in sub-Andersonic tones. It begins thus (afficionados will recognise the style):

bq. The Centre Left governments that dominated the North Atlantic zone up to the turn of the millennium have now all but disappeared.

Since when was “North Atlantic zone” a category worth bothering with?

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Interesting times for the European Union’s Growth and Stability Pact, according to an “Economist”:http://www.economist.com/World/europe/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2349980 story that touches on a disagreement between Dan Drezner and I. Over the last couple of years, big member states such as France and Germany have been flouting the terms of the Pact, which is supposedly binding. It’s looked as though they were going to escape any punishment for doing this.

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From Chapter 3 of Tacitus’s Annals:

In the same year, there was a religious innovation: a new Brotherhood of Augustus was created, on the analogy of the ancient Titian Brotherhood founded by King Titus Tatius for the maintenance of the Sabine ritual. Twenty-one members were appointed by lot from the leading men of the State; and Tiberius, Drusus, Claudius, and Germanicus were added. The annual Games established in honour of Augustus were also begun. But their inauguration was troubled by disorders due to rivalry between ballet-dancers.

Factotum: Caesar, the ballet dancers are rioting!
Tiberius: Oh, not again.

Heard in passing on some Australian morning TV show, during a report about flooding in New South Wales, where there’s a music festival underway:

[Presenter]: So would you say the Tamworth floods have made much difference to the country music?

[EMT]: No, I wouldn’t say so.

“The BBC reports”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3403775.stm that the French government’s proposed ban on the Islamic headscarf and other symbols of religious adherence in schools has upset the 15,000 Sikhs who live in and around Paris. If they insist on wearing the turban they risk being denied access to education. Even with the law merely a proposal, Sikhs are already being refused admission to institutions of higher education.

Today is the centenary of “Cary Grant’s”:http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cary_Grant birth. Grant was born Archibald Leach in “Bristol”:http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol, the city where I live and work and attended Bishop Road School, the same local primary school where my own children went many year later (and which Nobel-prize-winning physicist “Paul Dirac”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirac also attended). There’s a “statue of him”:http://aboutbristol.co.uk/sta-06.asp in the new Millennium Square (near to Bristol boy-poet and forger “Thomas Chatterton”:http://www.bartleby.com/65/ch/Chattert.html ). His best films? I’d vote for “Bringing Up Baby”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0029947/ and “North By Northwest”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053125/ .

Norman Geras tells a couple of “Sidney Morgenbesser anecdotes”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/01/philosophical_t.html , but (at least IMHO) omits the best one, where Morgenbesser was asked his opinion of pragmatism:

bq. “It’s all very well in theory but it doesn’t work in practice.”

“Jack Balkin”:http://balkin.blogspot.com/2004_01_11_balkin_archive.html#107428705909763064 on the Pickering appointment.

bq. I don’t have much of a problem with Bush appointing judges he believes in to recess appointments. Presidents should appoint the best people possible to the federal judiciary. My problem, rather, is that the fact that Bush believes so strongly in Pickering says something deeply troubling about Bush’s politics.

Via “Cosma Shalizi”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/archives/000161.html, a very nice “article”:http://octavia.zoology.washington.edu/publishing/BergstromAndBergstrom04.pdf on the economics of academic publishing in the _Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences_. The authors provide compelling empirical evidence of a large differential between the price of commercial journals and the price of journals put out by professional societies and academic presses, which isn’t explained by journal quality. The graphs almost jump from the page – there are dramatically different relationships between price and number of citations, depending on whether you are looking at commercial or non-commercial journals. Furthermore, according to the authors, the differential between the two has increased over time. Commercial journals are lousy value for money – but they’re apparently hard to displace in the marketplace.

The authors’ wider argument is also interesting – and worrying. Increasingly, academic publishing is moving towards a model based on the licensing of electronic access to a bundle of journals to universities and other research institutions. The authors’ model suggests that site licensing of journals by commercial publishers will leave scholars worse off on average than if each scholar purchased individual licenses to the journals that she wanted to read. While site licences to larger groups are more efficient, these efficiency gains are more than absorbed by the sellers, if the sellers are profit maximizing firms.

Economists who are interested in new economy issues, like “Brad DeLong”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000033.html, usually focus on the massive productivity gains that we can expect from information technology. While these are important, so too are the distributional consequences – the ways in which new technologies affect who gets what. Even if new technologies, such as electronic publishing, are more efficient in some broad sense of the term, the efficiency gains may be distributed in ways that are difficult to justify.

As the primaries creep up on us (in the US), I want to make a point against the primary system that seems obvious to me but I’ve not heard made elsewhere. It is simply this: it constitutes an unwarranted violation of the principle of freedom of association.

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