Once there were three bubbles. The one that attracted everyone’s attention was the dotcom bubble, of which no more needs to be said. The second bubble, noted by plenty of economists was the glaring overvaluation of the bubble. Given chronic deficits in both the budget and current account, and the fact that the US dollar was trading at a value well above purchasing power parity, anyone who gave any credence to the view that markets eventually reach equilibrium could conclude that the US dollar was bound to fall, and it has duly done so. (this only leaves the question of why putatively rational investors did not sell earlier)

The third bubble seemed, until this year, like part of the second. Rates of interest on 10-year US government bonds are amazingly low, currently around 4.25 per cent (the price is inversely proportional to the interest rate, so low interest rates mean a bubble in bond prices). Most economists would, I think have assumed that, as the US dollar declined in value, long-term interest rates would go up. But, apart from a brief panic a few months ago, this hasn’t happened.

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Today’s FT devotes almost half a page to the Irish presidency of the EU, which starts on January 1st and will be accompanied by a collective sigh of relief at the end to Berlusconi’s embarrassing ‘reign’ which “began with him comparing a German MEP to a Nazi camp guard and ended with the collapse of the stability pact and the diastrous EU summit in Brussels”.

The FT hits on a subject close to my heart; the big role that smaller countries play in greasing the wheels of the European machine. They also interview Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Brian Cowen, who contradicts recent reports that the Irish would kick the stalled constitution talks into the long grass. (I can’t find that one in the online FT – it’s on page 3 of the European paper edition though.) Brian Cowen, who is widely acknowledged to be very smart and very astute, says that the team Ireland brings to the presidency has recent and deep experience in the extremely tricky negotiations on Northern Ireland. We also bring to the table a prime minister, Bertie Aherne, who, while no great visionary, is a superb deal-maker. And (cleverly, I think), Cowen says straight off the bat that any verbal deals struck with Berlusconi will expire with the Italian presidency on 31 December. The Irish will start with the constitution in its current draft, and a clean slate. So, if negotiations can be re-started soon enough, it’s possible that Ireland just might deliver the constitution.

But what do small countries bring to the EU decision-making process in general?

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The seven dirty words are still a no-no on US radio (unless they’re not sexual in nature, it turns out), but what about other suggestive lyrics? It doesn’t seem clear when things do and do not get censored. Take, for example, the song Semi-Charmed Life by Third Eye Blind. I haven’t heard that one on the radio, but a friend tells me that it is not bleeped out despite the line “she comes round and she goes down on me”. Recall, however, Alanis Morissette’s song You Oughta Know from a few years ago when a portion of the line “Would she go down on you in a theatre” did get bleeped out.

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Did anyone else get the Nigerian Spam email from “John Adams” of the “Senate Committee on Banks and Currency”? I thought at first it would be moderately amusing, perhaps suggesting I get involved with something obviously fraudulent like purportedly buying the Midwest for pennies per hectare, but it turned out to just be a regular fraud letter with the grammatical mistakes fixed. I haven’t been following these letters for a while (thanks Thunderbird spam filter!) but it might be fun to see if they evolve a little.

The re-enactment of the Wright brothers’ first flight failed to get off the ground in South Carolina, but the hackers at MIT were much more successful. My favorite is still the police car that made it up there. (Via Kai von Fintel.)

I just finished a writing up a 500-word entry for a forthcoming Encyclopedia of Economic Sociology, edited by Jens Beckert and Milan Zafiroski. (I was only about a year late. You’d think the blogging would have made 500-word chunks easy to churn out.) While reading the boilerplate in the contributor’s agreement, I came across the following clause:

bq. 2 (a) … The Contributor further warrants that the Contribution contains nothing obscene, libellous, blasphemous, in breach of copyright or otherwise unlawful …

All well and good, except that my allocated entry is “Sacred.” As you will all remember from your social theory class, Durkheim‘s view is that religion is a collective representation of the social structure. “Society awakens in us the feeling of the divine.” This is not likely to get a nihil obstat from many religions.

The current fad in Australian political and social discussion (and a recurrent fad elsewhere) is to pose issues in terms of generations (Baby Boomers, X, Y etc). I’ve been arguing for a while that this is little better than astrology, and I develop the point further in today’s Australian Financial Review (subscription required) where I have a fortnightly column. Here’s the piece, with some cuts (made for space reason) restored, and hyperlinks added.

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I’ve just reached Amartya Sen’s chapter “Famines and Other Crises” in “Development as Freedom”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385720270/junius-20 . He has some discussion of the great famines that depopulated Ireland from 1845 onwards. The potato blight had destroyed the crop but the Irish peasantry lacked the resources to buy alternative foodstuffs which continued to be exported:

bq. ship after ship — laden with wheat, oats, cattle, pigs, eggs and butter — sailed down the Shannon bound for well-fed England from famine-stricken Ireland. (p.172)

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During the California recall, Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante was harshly criticized for his refusal to renounce his involvement as a student in the Chicano student group MEChA. Critics frequently called MEChA a hate group, the equivalent of the Klu Klux Klan, or “fascist hatemongers”.

Bustamante handily lost the election, and MEChA as an issue didn’t seem to make much of an impact and many voters. But MEChA as an organization is still a presence on over 300 campuses.

There was much debate here on LoserNet about the truth of the accusations against MEChA. (Lots of background from me, Pejman, and Tacitus. In short, I thought that they were being unfairly accused, and Pejman and Tacitus thought that they really were a racist group.) We spent a fair amount of time going back and forth about the documents we could find using Google. But I thought that the debate suffered from a lack of input from or contact with actual MEChA members. Few people had had any direct contact with MEChA. (A few exceptions: Kevin Drum had a MEChA chapter at his high school, and Sappho had a personal experience at college.)

About a month ago, I thought that I’d try to contact some actual, current members of MEChA to see how they would respond to some of the controversies about their group. I sent out a lot of emails, mostly to dead email addresses culled from infrequently updated chapter web pages. Unfortunately, I’ve only ended up getting two complete responses, but they’re good ones. The first is from the MEChA chapter at New Mexico State University. (UPDATE: Not all responses are from NMSU; the questions were distibuted to other chapters as well.) A representative of the chapter distributed my long list of questions to members and assembled the responses, so it’s not any one person’s response.

The second response is from an individual who started his email by saying:

I want to emphasize that MEChA IS NOT A HATE/SEGREGATIONALIST/SEPARATIST GROUP

I’ve edited these responses slightly for spelling and typos, but I haven’t added or deleted anything. I have no independent ability to fact-check these responses.

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A few new books in political philosophy have crossed my desk today either in the form of physical copies or publishers’ announcements. First among them is a new collection called “Social Justice”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1405111461/junius-21 edited by Matthew Clayton (Warwick) and Andrew Williams (Reading) which contains an excellent selection of readings for an undergraduate course (and I’ll be recommending it to my charges). Second, my former PhD student Colin Farrelly (Waterloo, Canada) has a textbook — “An Introduction to Contemporary Political Theory”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0761949089/junius-21 — and an accompanying reader: “Contemporary Political Theory: A Reader”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0761941843/junius-21 . Finally, my friend Axel Gosseries (Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium) has a new book out on intergenerational justice: “Penser la justice entre les générations”:http://www.editions.flammarion.com/catalogue/fiche.php?l=a%3A12%3A%7Bs%3A2%3A%22st%22%3Bs%3A4%3A%22tout%22%3Bs%3A8%3A%22searchId%22%3Bs%3A44%3A%22ZQQbtDLpauusMmxHw2aKcfLHLiDCLFn7suP%2BiicTp30%3D%22%3Bs%3A1%3A%22p%22%3Bi%3A1%3Bs%3A1%3A%22s%22%3Bs%3A8%3A%22DatParut%22%3Bs%3A4%3A%22mois%22%3BN%3Bs%3A7%3A%22editeur%22%3BN%3Bs%3A15%3A%22STEPTYPE_RAPIDE%22%3Bs%3A9%3A%22Gosseries%22%3Bs%3A14%3A%22STEPTYPE_TITRE%22%3BN%3Bs%3A15%3A%22STEPTYPE_AUTEUR%22%3BN%3Bs%3A7%3A%22isbnean%22%3BN%3Bs%3A10%3A%22tracktheme%22%3BN%3Bs%3A9%3A%22trackedit%22%3BN%3B%7D&i=2-7007-3687-7&nonotice=2003390240 which addresses some of the topics we’ve been discussing on CT recently including pensions and demography.

A “piece in the Financial Times”:http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1071251586971&p=1012571727085 contains the following startling claim:

bq. Webroot, a small US security software company that provides spyware blocking software for Earthlink, estimates up to 18 per cent of computers could be infected with keystroke loggers or RATs. Its estimate is based on results from 300,000 people who in November used its “spyware audit”, a free internet-based program that detects whether a computer has been infected.

18 per cent sounds like a crazily high number to me — the sort of number people come up with when they have a commercial interest (you know, “piracy is costing the music industry $40 trillion per nanosecond”). But it would be interesting to have some indication of how widespread the problem really is.

It isn’t just “the season to be girly”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001013.html , but also the one of good will to all men (and women). Which ought to provide ample opportunity for critical reflection on the various stories, lyrics, symbols and so forth that we encounter at Christmas time. I’m sure that many readers have already encountered this “libertarian reading”:http://www.fee.org/vnews.php?nid=4491 of Dickens’s _A Christmas Carol_ (sample quote “Nowhere in the story does Dickens endorse welfare. Rather, he suggests that charity and hard work in the business world are how best to combat poverty.”) There are surely other possibilities. “Good King Wenceslas”:http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~av359/xmas/carols/gkw.html for example, as discussed on a blog’s comments board:

bq. We just aren’t told how the “poor man” came to be living a good league hence (which is a serious omission in a work of this nature). How about some rigorous comparisons with others in the kingdom? And for all we know he was poor because _he chose_ to live near St Agnes Fountain (which was a pretty stupid thing to do). Why was King Wenceslas — who as king should have been safeguarding property rights and looking after national defense — wasting our taxes on flesh, wine and logs for someone whose lifestyle is _no business_ of the state?!

Other suggestions?

My post on equality of outcomes and opportunity produced a huge comments thread, much of which focused on the question of the original acquisition of rights, a big problem for Locke and Nozick. Rather than dive into the thread, I thought I’d point to an argument I put forward a few months ago, and repost a bit of it:

Nozick claims that libertarianism is right not because it produces good outcomes (he doesn’t argue one way of the other on this) but because a requirement for just process implies that property rights should be inviolable. Nozick’s position has been criticized in various ways, often focusing on the fact that he never specifies a just starting point. I want to present a different argument: that given any plausible starting point, Nozick’s approach leads to the conclusion that the status quo, including taxes, regulations and other government interventions is just. I illustrate this point with a story.

You can read the rest here

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Surnames were invented sometime in the Middle Ages in response to the crisis caused by the oversupply of men named John. Since the same problem has alreadycaused some interesting confusion, I’ve breached CT style by switching to my full name. I hope this isn’t a problem.