I’ve read the transcripts of today’s press conferences (this one and this one), and it seems clear to me that Scott McClellan chose his words very carefully to avoid saying that Rove told him that he’s not the source of the leak. This certainly doesn’t prove that Rove is one of the leakers, but it’s pretty conspicuously not a denial.

Some people would consider this a long, nitpicking post. (Heck, I consider it a long, nitpicking post, but I don’t know another way to write it.) If you’re one of those people, and you know who you are, don’t continue reading.

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Jonathan Ichikawa, who has a shiny new blog, asked me an interesting question the other day. Why are there so few ethics blogs? One simple answer would be that there are lots of ethics blogs, they are just spread around between political theory and legal theory and other areas of normative philosophy. Sad to say, these bloggers seem to be just as interested in day-to-day affairs as in high points of theory. Where’s the fun in that? (Not that they don’t write excellent posts when they do turn their attention to more theoretical matters. If only the world was less pressing.) So if any aspiring (or established) ethicist wants to start up a blog on the finer points of Korsgaard’s or Blackburn’s or Smith’s views, there’s probably a market niche waiting to be filled.

By the way, it’s a sad day when the graduate students start seeming to be appallingly young. Sad day indeed.

Brad DeLong has a good post asking, “Where are the grown-ups in the Republican party?”

Hanyes Johnson and David Broder wrote a book called The System about the rise and fall of Clinton’s health care plan. (Incidentally, DeLong reviews the book here.) One of the most interesting threads is about the struggle between “Bob Dole Republicans” and “Newt Gingrich Republicans” for the soul of the party. Sheila Burke was one of Bob Dole’s advisors who found herself at the pointy end of the Gingrich Republicans:

By June, Sheila Burke found herself experiencing abuse of a kind she had never known before, all as a consequence of “the Right being ginned up.” The True Believer mentality was at work, she thought. “They support nobody who doesn’t totally agree with them,” Burke said then. “It’s not about governing, which is what we do.” She paused, and repeated for emphasis, “It’s not about governing. That’s not how they think.”

The System, page 385.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that quote this weekend as the Plame/ Wilson story developed.

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One of the claims that features in the “Legrain piece I mention below”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000586.html is that US-European comparative growth rates give a misleading picture of the relative health of the two economic zones because US population is growing fast (more mouths to feed from that greater output) whereas European population is static. Of course the low population growth in Europe can be looked at the other way: as evidence of Eurosclerosis and the harbinger of a massive pensions-and-health crisis. Now I’ve always been a bit puzzled by the differential demographics. After all, the career pressures are perhaps greater in the US, there’s probably less in the way of subsidized childcare, and access to birth control is similar in both areas. So having children is pretty much elective in both zones and the individual cost-benefit calcultation is probably more favourable to having children in Europe than the US. So I’d predict, if I were just coming at things _a priori_ , a lower birthrate in America than in Europe.

Obviously that’s not what’s happening. So why not? And who is having the kids? After all, the dynamic America/sclerotic Europe claims are usually made by looking at the aggregate statistics. But if middle-class, educated Europeans and middle-class, educated Americans are behaving similarly to one another, but the “excess” children in the US are all being born to impoverished single parents in trailer parks, the aggregate figures may be less favourable to the US. So how do the figures actually break down, by income group, immigrant/non-immigrant, and so on? I’ve no idea what the answer is, and my googling skills haven’t helped here: but maybe someone else does.

Matt Yglesias linked to this very interesting exit poll from the last Presidential election. Like Matt, I thought some of the voting breakdowns are striking. I knew Jewish voters tended Democratic, but I had no idea it was 79-18. I wasn’t as shocked to see that voters with no religion favoured Gore 61-28, with another 9% for Nader, but that’s still a noticable gap.

Do these results have anything to do with the ‘liberalism‘ (meaning, in this context, disposition to not vote Republican) of American academia? Perhaps. At a guess, I would say that atheists, agnostics and Jews are pretty well represented in the academy, and Protestants are not as well represented, at least relative to their size in the broader community. As noted the well represented groups tend much more Democratic (and even Green) than the under represented groups.

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In case anyone’s wondering why I haven’t been posting, it’s because I’m off in the Southern Alps of New Zealand’s spectacular South Island. I feel the blogosphere will survive without me for a week.

Like most everybody else in the blogosphere this morning, I’ve been reading about the “Plame affair”:http://www.calpundit.com/archives/002263.html. It’s potentially an enormous story – if the facts are as they “appear to be”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11208-2003Sep27.html, there are at least two senior White House officials who deserve to be hauled off to jail. But I’m disturbed by the tone of triumphalism coming from a few left blogs and their commenters. It’s understandable that some see this as an opportunity to stick it to the warbloggers. It’s still a mistake. This story is too important to be turned into a cheap gotcha. There’s a growing groundswell of outrage on the right as well as the left. People should be building on this, rather than using the affair to score short-term ‘told you so’ points. If nothing else, a more constructive attitude will make it more likely that the story will stick around, and receive the sustained public attention that it obviously deserves.

Update: See also Kevin Drum’s “plea to conservatives”:http://www.calpundit.com/archives/002264.html – angry, but carefully worded and targetted.

Update 2: But of course, some will never be convinced … for a sampling, see “Belle Waring”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/09/is_not.html

John M. Ford comments in an “Electrolite”:http://nielsenhayden.com/electrolite/archives/003727.html#003727 thread on mixed metaphors and cliches.

bq. If you want a vision of the future, it is a wireless broadband network feeding requests for foreign money-laundering assistance into a human temporal lobe, forever. With banner ads.

As Brad DeLong readers may recall, Ford is responsible for introducing “Zweeghb”:http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000845.html into the Scrabble lexicon. A man of many talents.

Via the “very interesting blog of Dr Anthony Cox”:http://www.blacktriangle.org/ , I see that Gerd Gigerenzer has “a paper on risk”:http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/327/7417/741 in the British Medical Journal. Doctors, it seems, are alarmingly ignorant about statistics:

bq. The science fiction writer H G Wells predicted that in modern technological societies statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read and write. How far have we got, a hundred or so years later? A glance at the literature shows a shocking lack of statistical understanding of the outcomes of modern technologies, from standard screening tests for HIV infection to DNA evidence. For instance, doctors with an average of 14 years of professional experience were asked to imagine using the Haemoccult test to screen for colorectal cancer. The prevalence of cancer was 0.3%, the sensitivity of the test was 50%, and the false positive rate was 3%. The doctors were asked: what is the probability that someone who tests positive actually has colorectal cancer? The correct answer is about 5%. However, the doctors’ answers ranged from 1% to 99%, with about half of them estimating the probability as 50% (the sensitivity) or 47% (sensitivity minus false positive rate). If patients knew about this degree of variability and statistical innumeracy they would be justly alarmed.

Simon Kuper has been pretty busy this week. Not content with analyzing the Islamic vote, he also provides “a handy compendium of weird animal sports”:http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1059480156751&p=1045677866454 , including elephant polo, goat racing and tortoise racing. Many of these pastimes are products of the British empire it seems. The champion tortoise answers to the name of Rosa Luxemburg.

Simon Kuper has an “interesting piece in the FT”:http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1059480107034&p=1012571727132 on the importance of the Islamic electorate in Europe. Though the piece is mainly about Europe, I was amused to read the following (which everyone else probably knows already):

bq. the Muslim bloc vote first appeared in the US, home of the ethnic lobby. A fortnight before the 2000 election, the American Muslim Political Co-ordinating Council, a political action group, endorsed George W. Bush for president. The council said he had shown “elevated concern” about the US government’s profiling of Arab-Americans at airports, and about its use of secret evidence against Arab and Muslim immigrants. (Bush had mentioned this issue in a debate with Al Gore.). Bizarre as it now sounds, Bush’s concern for the civil rights of suspected Islamic terrorists possibly won him the election. It is estimated that more than 70 per cent of American Muslims voted for him, and that in the crucial Florida election he polled at least 60,000 more Muslim votes than Gore.

As an further antidote to the Paul Johnson rant, I thought I’d link to euro-cheerleader Philippe Legrain’s “hymn to European dynamism in Prospect”:http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/ArticleView.asp?accessible=yes&P_Article=12246 . There are one or two moments when Legrain has to turn up the volume in the hope that people won’t notice weaknesses here and there, but it is a pretty gutsy response to a certain widely-received view of Europe and America:

bq. over the past three years, living standards, as measured by GDP per capita, have risen by 5.9 per cent in the EU but by only 1 per cent in the US. So says the IMF, an institution hardly biased against the US. An unfair comparison, perhaps, given America’s recent recession? Then look at how the EU and the US size up since 1995, a period that includes America’s late 1990s boom. While living standards in the US have risen by a healthy 16.1 per cent over the past eight years, they are up by 18.3 per cent in the EU. This is not a sleight of hand. Pick any year between 1995 and 2000 as your starting point, and the conclusion is the same: Europe’s economy has outperformed America’s.

bq. It is true that the US economy has grown by an average of 3.2 per cent a year since 1995, whereas Europe’s economy has swelled by only 2.3 per cent. These headline figures transfix pundits and policymakers. But this apparent success is deceptive. Not only are US growth figures inflated because American statisticians have done more than their European counterparts to take into account improvements in the quality of goods and services, but the US population is also growing much faster than Europe’s. It has increased by nearly one tenth in the past eight years, whereas Europe’s population has scarcely grown at all. So although the US pie is growing faster than Europe’s, so too is the number of mouths it has to feed. Most people care about higher living standards, not higher economic growth.

I’d planned to do a number on Paul Johnson’s extraordinary “rant”:http://www.forbes.com/columnists/free_forbes/2003/1006/037.html against Europe, but “Mark Kleiman”:http://markarkleiman.blogspot.com/2003_09_01_markarkleiman_archive.html#106461571572522168 has beaten me to it. I don’t have much to add, except to say that Johnson is a dreadful old fraud, even as superannuated Tory farts go. And his prose style is wretched; the sort of sub-Burkean lugubrious sententiousness that conservatives are liable to mistake for profundity when they’ve overdone the port a bit.

Still, there’s good news for those of you who think that Johnson’s right about Europe’s economic backwardness. Silvio Berlusconi has just launched a “new marketing effort”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3137406.stm, encouraging foreigners to invest in Italy. As Berlusconi describes it:

bq. “Italy is now a great country to invest in… today we have fewer communists and those who are still there deny having been one … Another reason to invest in Italy is that we have beautiful secretaries… superb girls.

It’s a cliche to say that you can’t make this stuff up. But you can’t. You really can’t.

Do conservatives have a hard time getting tenure in American universities? “David Brooks”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/27/opinion/27BROO.html suggests as much in a NYT op-ed today. This isn’t David Horowitz-style ravings; Brooks makes a real argument. He quotes various conservative professors to say that:

bq. A person who voted for President Bush may be viewed as an oddity, but the main problem in finding a job is that the sorts of subjects a conservative is likely to investigate – say, diplomatic or military history – do not excite hiring committees.

Brooks’ respondents may be right about history (although military history is making a bit of a comeback; look at “Niall Ferguson”:http://www.boston.com/globe/magazine/2003/0629/coverstory_entire.htm). Even so, I think that Brooks exaggerates. While the average political scientist is somewhere to the left of the average punter, she isn’t all that far to the left. In my experience, most political scientists are moderate liberals, with substantial minorities who are real leftists, centrists, or mild to moderate Republicans. There aren’t many hardcore conservatives in top political science departments, but there aren’t many Marxists either. Indeed, I’d guess that there are rather more conservatives than Marxists – conservatives dominate certain areas of political theory (classical political philosophy) that most pol-sci departments have to offer courses in.

There’s also another factor that Brooks doesn’t talk about (although he hints at it at the end of the article). If you’re a young conservative, who’s just gotten a Ph.D. in pol. sci. or pol. theory from a good school, you have many attractive options outside the academy. Conservative think-tanks like Heritage and the American Enterprise Institute are remarkably well-funded (thanks to the “charming”:http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh022403.shtml Richard Mellon Scaife and other mega-millionaires), and provide direct access to the US policy process. They offer better pay (usually), more immediate recognition and more influence. It’s a wonder that any bright conservatives stay in the academy at all.