Bruce Ackerman has an “op-ed piece”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/17/opinion/17ACKE.html in the New York Times today arguing that the Ninth Circuit should not delay the vote in California. I have to admit that I was a bit surprised by Ackerman’s willingness to limit the possibilities raised by the equal protection claims upheld in Bush v. Gore. Here’s his argument:

bq. This time around, the candidates in California have already invested heavily in a short campaign. Their competing strategies have been designed to reach a climax on the Oct. 7 election date. If they had known they would have to compete until March, they would have conducted their campaigns very differently. By suddenly changing the finish line, the three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit disrupts the core First Amendment freedom to present a coherent political message to voters . . . Worse yet, the decision disrupts the First Amendment interests of the millions of Californians who have participated in the recall effort. State law promised them a quick election if they completed their petitions by an August deadline.

It also offered them a fair election. It seems reasonable for a court to postpone an election long enough to permit the installation of fair voting systems, rather than going through with error-prone machines and then trying to sort out the mess afterwards.

What about Ackerman’s First Amendment argument? It always helps to have the text around. So the First Amendment says: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” The core of the First Amendment may be the protection of political speech. But even if that’s right, it’s a big stretch to say that its core is the freedom to present a coherent political message to voters. That’s either rhetorical flourish or wishful thinking. Ackerman is asserting a First Amendment right to have an election run on time. I’m sure it would be a good thing to have prompt elections, and there may be statutory law requiring it. But, if there’s a constitutional claim involved here, it is the right to have one’s vote counted equally in a fair election. Ackerman thinks that this claim isn’t strong enough to override his First Amendment concerns. I think those concerns are overstated, at best. But even if they aren’t, this is an opportunity to see whether the Supreme Court was serious about the equal protection arguments of Bush v. Gore. It’s worth waiting for a decision about whether the Court meant what it said about guaranteeing fair elections.

The UK Adam Smith Institute has started its own blog. It’s quite a good, snappy read, and the first few days cover many of the hoary old chestnuts you might expect; how vouchers are the panacea for under-performing public services, how Naomi Klein attacks branding, but actually is a brand herself (fair enough), and how, erm, left-wingers are too angry and put upon to be funny.

It’s worth keeping a look at to see how this blog develops. Though, as with other more ‘corporate’ blogs, the house style is a bit uniform. There seems to be a word limit on entries which has the effect of making the pieces sound a bit samey, and also rather superficial.

Funnily enough, on my way back from lunch today I was giving out (extremely superficially) that all the rich seem to do is distort markets by defending their privileges and/or monopoly rents. While the ASIs of this world seem to spend their time defending these guys (you know, ‘the rich’, i.e. suitably vague) – e.g. saying embezzlement and fraud should be dealt with by companies, not law enforcement – it seems to me that the really rich have no interest at all in truly competitive markets. Just ask Bill Gates, Halliburton, et al. And then the conversation turned to whether George Bush was a kleptocrat, plutocrat or just a plain old vanilla flavoured oligarch…

Maybe there’s a joke in there, but I was too down-trodden to see it.

I just got back from an interesting conference in Newcastle (UK) organised by the Institute for Public Policy Research, and presided over by Matthew Taylor as his last big act before going to direct policy at number 10. (Actually I got back a week ago, but pressures of work and technical set-backs have kept me silent till now). Basically it was a ‘looking for a new big idea’ kind of gathering for New Labourish types – IPPR had asked a bunch of academics to present their thoughts and findings about meritocracy, social mobility, and equality of opportunity, and a bunch of politicians, policy makers, and representatives of domestic NGOs to engage with them. I confess that I anticipated a kind of dialogue of the deaf, but it wasn’t like that at all. The academics (including John Goldthorpe, John Roemer, Stephen Machin, Adam Swift, Michael Hout) made brief, pertinent, and not-dumbed-down presentations; and the in-session and out-of session discussions were to the point and thoughtful. Gordon Brown gave a talk on the first afternoon with which I, very much not a New Labour person, was very impressed. He seemed not only to have a coherent, worked out view, and a straightforward comfortableness with the language and concerns of traditional social democracy, but also to have read and understood all of the preparatory readings. (Apparently he called up John Goldthorpe the previous Thursday to ask him about some of the technical points in Goldthorpe’s paper). My brief was to respond to the minister for school standards, David Miliband’s, speech on why the government is focussing its attention on teaching and learning more than on admissions and funding. Again, I was impressed by the thoughtfulness and reasonableness of his presentation, and the care with which he distinguished issues of what should ideally be done and what is feasible given political and constitutional constraints; though, fortunately, disagreed with enough to make it worth debating him. One large disagreement among the attendees was the extent to which a society should try to reward ‘merit’ financially. Again, though, whereas I’d assumed on going in that I’d be in a minority with Swift and Roemer against meritocracy, it was striking how soft the support for meritocracy was in all the discussions, and how well disposed Brown was, for example, to prioritizing the interests of the least advantaged.
Cynics will dismiss my impressions as the consequences of either being over-susceptible to politicians charm, or (more likely) jet lag, and in another couple of weeks I’m sure I shall relapse into my own negativity. But the fact remains (as Americans I’ve described the conference to keep saying) that such a conference, in which senior elected politicians discuss the work of serious left-wing academics on their own terms, in the presence of senior policy-makers, is utterly unimaginable in the US.
All the papers for the conference, by the way, are accessible here at Ippr.

I suppose lots of people will have seen it anyway, but for those who didn’t it’s worth pointing out that Kevin Drum has an excellent but thoroughly terrifying interview with Paul Krugman.

An appropriately spine-chilling taster:

Train wreck is a way overused metaphor, but we’re headed for some kind of collision, and there are three things that can happen. Just by the arithmetic, you can either have big tax increases, roll back the whole Bush program plus some; or you can sharply cut Medicare and Social Security, because that’s where the money is; or the U.S. just tootles along until we actually have a financial crisis where the marginal buyer of U.S. treasury bills, which is actually the Reserve Bank of China, says, we don’t trust these guys anymore — and we turn into Argentina. All three of those are clearly impossible, and yet one of them has to happen, so, your choice. Which one?

I’m almost certainly spending too much time reading lefty American blogs, but I now have far more emotional investment in the result of the US Presidential Election in 2004 than I have in that of the next electoral flurry in the UK.

We’re having a good old back and forth slagging off each other’s music tastes and calling each other fascists in the comments section at John Holbo’s site. As you can see, the issue of “whither the music industry in a world of reduced intellectual property” is bound to bring out a lot of interesting opinions; I think this is because a) we don’t know what the heck will happen b) we’d all like to believe that the answer will involve us all owning loads and loads of fantastic music for next to no cost but c) we all suspect that it probably won’t. As you can see if you follow the link, my role in the debate appears to be partly to snipe about obscure, irrelevant and probably wrongly remembered points of price theory and partly to act as the de facto defender of the music industry as she currently stands. I’m not sure that this reflects my genuine views, but in all similar discussions, I have historically ended up in it because of a number of points on which I think people are badly misunderstanding the economics of the music industry. I don’t want to start on a five thousand word thesis which will never be finished on this, so I’ll try to list my points of disagreement one by one in a series of posts. Starting with the easiest point and the one on which I’m most sure of my ground; micropayments are not going to happen any time soon.

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Musing further on whether technological development has helped or hindered thinking, and especially philosophical thinking, it occurs to me that the ideas of which I’m (rightly or wrongly) most proud have generally started not when I’ve been trying to do philosophy, but when I’ve been daydreaming about it whilst doing something else: travelling on a train, riding a bicycle, swimming or whatever. Purely mechanical and repetitive activities can been good for this too, though it is for good reason that there are a whole range of philosophical stories in which philosophers let cooking pots boil over, poison people or run them down whilst in the middle of their reveries.

Then there’s the business of writing, of trying to turn ideas into publishable prose. I’ve adopted two strategies for getting this done – both of which work very well, but eventually seem to run their course.

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Originating from who-knows-where (Uncle Jazzbeau is looking) but spreading fast comes the following:

bq. Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. ceehiro.

Language Hat was my source. There’s also a Slashdot story.

Now this is very neat. But the explanation — “we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe” — raises some questions. The original researchers may have answered them, of course, but a post’s reach should exceed its grasp or what’s a blog for? If the first and last letters must always be in the right place, then any word three letters long or less will always be spelled properly. Having those words around adds a lot of context to a sentence, helping the reader to process the other words. To really test the idea, we need samples of text where that kind of context is missing.

Recrsheears souhld csrncotut secntnees unisg olny wodrs edxcieneg terhe lttrees. Tihs wlil psoe seevral polrbems beaucse wwreell-ittn Esglinh sluohd nlurtaaly cointan mnay sorht wrdos iunidnlcg pvrn-eborses, gtienvie csaes, cncoeinvets and (howpos) penrpsoitois, aongmst many ohtres. Lnoegr wrods soluhd povre useufl when tteinsg tihs ieda. Fatiensnredg wdors dviorecd form hplfeul cnotext mhgit aslo mkae fnie cidenadats for (siht) iiulsocnn. Eelhapnt. Preorpritay. Mainargl. Avtrinmdatiise. Boyend. Caainnbl. Wree tsohe tcekriir tahn tpyical sentecens? Ppostecirve linigusts wlil find csnuotntrcig w-llromefed, ativce senetcens fere form tohse mnay hfepull sroht wrods raehtr dcffiuilt. Tihs txet semes edecnive eonguh of (carp) taht ponit. Neevretslhes, linigstus slohud sitrve twoards tihs gaol. Cvioncning sitedus msut searapte ecah slaml wdor’s cepvidnino-troxtg rloe form the (admn) sipecfic ieda taht praticular otparhghiroc tosntrianipsos gaurantee taht sesne wlil reiman eevn toughh itrnael snbairmclg occrus. Fanlily dleabielrty minlaaitpnug sacmrbled lteter order sohlud mkae tihngs eevn mroe duffiilct. Raeeedrs wlil fnid wdros wtih vbres or (fcuk) cooatsnnns aaenrrgd ceiuoesctlnvy mkae uiansmnrbclg mroe dcffliiut.

(Tankhs to Jmaie Zainkswi and Pehobus for saciftoiimrbclan asstasince.)

The “New Yorker”:http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?030915ta_talk_mcgrath reveals that Wesley Clark has outed himself not only as a Democrat, but as a sf fan.

bq. “I wanted to be an astronaut,” Clark said. “That was back when we had a real space program. We all wanted to invade the red planet, right out of Ray Bradbury’s ‘Martian Chronicles.’”

bq. The Oxonian looked puzzled, and Clark asked, “Are you familiar with Ray Bradbury?” He was not. “Not a science-fiction fan? What about ‘Lord of the Rings’? ”

Daniel’s post on the Cancun trade talks explains that their failure was rooted in disagreement about restrictions on foreign investment and capital controls. This reminds me that it’s time you all re-read Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas and Olivier Jeanne’s paper “The Elusive Benefits from International Financial Integration,” which I blogged about a few months ago.

You’ve probably seen the quote from Dick Cheney that Sept. 11 is “over with now, it’s done, it’s history and we can put it behind us.” In context, it’s obvious that he doesn’t mean that we should forget 9/11. Obviously, the White House observed a memorial, as is appropriate.

No, it’s much worse than that. In context, what he’s doing is arguing that any public investigation of September 11th will hurt the war on terror. Specifically, he’s responding to a question about the abundant evidence of Saudi involvement in 9/11. If we let that evidence influence our approach to terrorism, it would be bad, for some reason.

Except for that misleading quotation, I’ve got to give credit to Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus for this report. They do what Tim Russert repeatedly failed to do during his interview of the Vice-President: when Cheney said something false or misleading, they provide the correct information. It’s astounding. I hope that Milbank is writing a book.

UPDATE: For the record, here are some of the misleading statements that Cheney used to defend the Bush administration’s conduct re: Iraq. These are all from Sunday’s interview:

– We still have reason to believe that Mohammed Atta, one of the September 11th hijackers, met with Iraqi intelligence agencies in Prague months before the attack. (The FBI concluded that Atta was in Florida at the time of the alleged meeting. The meeting is not supported by the CIA, Czech intelligence, or the actual Iraqi intelligence officer in question.)

– Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s government had an ongoing relationship throughout the 90s. (They had eight meetings, primarily in the early 90s.)

– Cheney was correct to dismiss the views of Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, who said we will need, quote, ‘several hundred thousand for several years.’ (Shinseki did not mention “several years” in his testimony.)

– David Kay used to run UNSCOM. (David Kay did not run UNSCOM; he spent one year the chief inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency.)

– Before the war, Saddam posessed “500 tons of uranium.” (Highly misleading; it was the waste product of a nuclear reaction that Saddam wouldn’t have been able to refine.)

– “A gentleman” had come forward “with full designs for a process centrifuge system to enrich uranium and the key parts that you need to build such a system.” (Iraqi scientist Mahdi Obeidi, had denied that the nuclear program had been reconstituted after 1991. I’m pretty sure that Cheney is overstating when he talks about “full designs” and “key parts”, but I don’t know enough to swear to it.)

– Two trucks found in northern Iraq were mobile biological weapons labs. (The government had previously backed down on this claim after Pentagon investigators couldn’t back it up.)

– British intelligence has revalidated the statement in Bush’s SOTU address that Saddam was trying to acquire uranium in Africa. (British intelligence is re-investigating that claim. They haven’t revalidated it, although they say that the judgement that it had occurred was “reasonable”.)

– Iraq was the “geographic base” for the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. (The report doesn’t say it, but I’m pretty sure that we attacked Afghanistan because it was the geographic base of the perpetrators of the September 11th attacks. (NOTE: Cleaned up because of sloppy proofreading.))

Larry Solum “adds his thoughts to the philosophical immortality discussion”:http://lsolum.blogspot.com/2003_09_01_lsolum_archive.html#106355086488797710. His has lots of interest to say, and some extra thoughts on which legal theorists will survive, but I feel a bit sceptical about this:

bq. The twentieth-century was the first time in human history that literally tens of thousands of very smart people worked on philosophical problems for most of their waking hours–with all of the advantages of modern technology– _try writing a really big book with a quill pen or traveling four hundred miles by horse to consult a library_ . In the twentieth century, there was a lot of low hanging philosophical fruit. Much of it was plucked. History will remember.

Does technology really help? Sure, there’s been some philosophical progress but I’m not convinced it has much to do with the availability of typewriters, computers and motor vehicles. Philosophy is a funny business, sort of stuck half way between scientific research and creative writing or music. To the extent to which it is like scientific research then the good thoughts are dissociable from the person having them. But we can also think of a style of writing and thinking as being characteristic of a creative individual and not easily pulled apart from them. Some philosophers are closer to one pole than the other. It is at least arguable that music and literature did a lot better with the horse and the quill pen than they have in the electronic age. Maybe in 100 years we’ll think philosophy did too. Technology might help, but it might just get in the way.

Apparently the Cancun ministerial conference of the World Trade Organisation has got to such an appalling standstill that they all decided to pack up and go home. And the interesting thing is that what killed it wasn’t EU intransigence on agricultural subsidies, but rather something called the “Singapore issues”; a set of proposals about foreign investment on which the developed world is more or less united. Which is really rather a scandal., but as I argue below, the good thing about the Cancun collapse is that it allows us to get the measure of the character of the WTO as an organisation.

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The music industry claims the download pirates are killing music. So how bad would things be if the music industry died? “John Holbo paints a plausible picture”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/09/i_saw_this_tyle.html.

Jim Henley at Unqualified Offerings has the best post I’ve seen in the highly competitive field of flypaper-theory-debunking.

I can’t improve on it. But I’m going to make a prediction that I feel pretty good about: a year from now, no one will be very proud of the flypaper theory.