I’ve posted this before, but indulge me (or skip it). This is the monologue from the Late Show with David Letterman on September 17, 2001, his first night back on the air after September 11th.

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In January of this year, there was a short flurry of posts about the incredible discrepancy between the wealth of black households and white households. I had no idea that the median white household has seven times the assets of the median black household. It’s primarily a legacy of history; there’s a gap in wages between white and black workers, but it’s not a 7-1 gap. Black households even save slightly more than white households at the same income level.

This has all sorts of implications, as family wealth (for example) makes higher education and entry into the housing market much easier for a young adult. As Dalton Conley notes, black college students are more likely to drop out than white college students, even if their families have the same incomes. When you control for wealth, however, black and white students perform equally as well.

(My posts on the subject are here, here, and here. Kevin Drum, Kieran Healey (the link is probably not working), and Rob Lyman all had excellent posts on the subject.)

Recently, I got an email from Jonathan Maccabee with more detail about the value of owner-occupied homes, the primary source of wealth for most families. He took a look at the US Census’ American FactFinder, table HCT 66, “Median Value of Owner-Occupied Housing Units.” (I’m restricting this to white and black for the sake of simplicity.)

Says Jonathan,

As you can see, the racial gap in housing prices is significant. Though in New York State, to my surprise, the gap works in reverse, as most minorities who own homes live in the very expensive New York City area. The percentage of those who live in owner-occupied housing, of course, is very low in much of New York City and generally lower for minorities than whites; the Census doesn’t calculate the percentages, but the comparison is at Summary File 4, HCT 2 – Tenure (translation: living in owner-occupied housing vs. renter-occupied housing). This is one reason why these numbers enormously understate the wealth gap between whites and minorities.

It’s worth making the point that the proportions of white and black households who own their own homes are very different. According to the Local Initiatives Support Coalition, black home ownership rate was at 46.3% in 2000, while white home ownership was at 73.8%.

I can’t get over it. I finally got Dalton Conley’s book, Being Black, Living in the Red, and I’ll have to report on it later.

Jacob Levy argues that one of the costs of dual citizenship is that it may give too much electoral power to overseas voters. This is only a serious problem if all non-resident citizens have voting rights, and that isn’t a universal feature of modern democracies. In Australia, if I’ve read the rules correctly, the only non-residents allowed to vote are those out of the country for under 6 years. (And the only non-residents who can enrol are those who have been away for less than 2 years and are away for work-related reasons.) I don’t know what the rules are for other countries (those rules aren’t quite as relevant to me, so I’ve never had need to learn them) but if they are at all similar Jacob’s quite reasonable concern is already being addressed.

UPDATE: Don’t get electoral law advice from me! As Alan from Southerly Bluster notes in the comments, an overseas Australian can keep voting after being out of the country for 6 years provided s/he keeps enrolling every year. And it looks like the law will be amended soon in order to remove even that constraint. Part of my initial point still remains. We can in principle allow dual citizenship without having the worry Jacob alludes to by having residency restrictions on voting. If that was the only reason for not wanting dual citizenship, there is a workaround. But the (only!) data point I drew on in arguing that was mistaken. Much thanks to Alan for pointing me to the relevant bit of the law here.

because the Pixies are getting back together.

In April, the legendary Pixies will reunite for the first time in over a decade. The notoriously quarrelsome quartet have buried the hatchet, clearing the way for all four original members to hop onstage together for a world tour, according to a spokesperson for the band.

If all goes as planned, the triumphant return of one of the most influential rock bands of the late ’80s might also be followed by a new studio album, the source said. The band has not yet gotten together to begin rehearsing for the tour, but, given their ugly breakup in 1993, the announcement is one of the most unlikely and anticipated reunions in the history of indie rock.

Best band ever. I couldn’t be more delighted.

(link via TMFTML)

Distributive-Justice.com offers various quizzes which aim to tell you what your political position is and how it maps onto the work of various recent political philosophers. Have a go, you know you want to.

I turned out to be both a Communist and a follower of Ronald Dworkin. I’m somewhat puzzled but, I have to admit, rather pleased by this result.

(Found via the ever-readable MaxSpeak.)

Evidently Distributive-Justice.com was not a domain name for which there was fierce competition during the tech boom. I wonder why that was?

Update: Blush. Micah has already posted on this, I now see. Oh, the perils of group blogging. Assume I’ve just written myself an appropriately harsh memo about the importance of checking for duplication before sharing my, er, thoughts with the world.

According to the “NYT”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/10/obituaries/10TELL.html?hp, Edward Teller has finally met his “antimatter twin”:http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/795.html.

Mark Kleiman has a timely reminder that Al Sharpton is a horrible person.

If you just manage to hang around for long enough in politics, you can achieve some kind of undeserved quasi-respectability. If Al Sharpton spent his time apologizing to his victims instead of demeaning the Presidential race, the world would be a better place.

In today’s FT, Samuel Brittan reviews John Gillingham’s European Integration, 1950-2003 : Superstate or New Market Economy?. One interesting snippet, which I knew about but deserves wider publicity:

bq. Readers may be more surprised to find the name of Frederich Hayek given as the source of the alternative neoliberal interpretation. For most of today’s self-proclaimed Hayekians view everything to do with the EU with intense suspicion. Indeed I was sufficiently surprised myself to look up some of Hayek’s writings on the subject. Although he played no part in the post war institutional discussion, he had written at some length on the problems of federalism in the late 1930s. Hayek was among those who believed that some form of federalism, whether in Europe or on a wider basis, was an important step towards a more peaceful world. In a 1939 essay, remarkably anticipating the EU Single Market Act, he argued that a political union required some elements of a common economic policy, such as a common tariff, monetary and exchange rate policy, but also a ban on intervention to help particular producers.

Like “Jacob Levy”:http://volokh.com/2003_09_07_volokh_archive.html#106312814305620404 I’m waiting on the release of Neal Stephenson’s _Quicksilver_: and the early signs are good. Dave Langford, who’s part way through reading it for Amazon UK “pronounces”:http://www.ansible.demon.co.uk/cc/cc143.html it to be a “joy to read, with a genuinely fresh slant on 17th/18th century history (or ahistory).” And Jacob and I are not alone – I confidently predict that September 23 (the book’s release date) is going to see prolonged blog-silences from everyone from Glenn Reynolds to Atrios.

But I’m digressing … I wanted to post about another book that I’m nearly as excited about, which will be released at around the same time. JG Ballard’s new novel, “Millennium People”:http://associatesshop.filzhut.de/shop/product.php?ID=7e33e52a9f201e22872aa9c926e79e21&Mode=&CategoryID=&Asin=&ASIN=000225848X, is about to come out. Ballard isn’t as popular in the blogosphere as Stephenson – but he should be; he’s a writer of genius. Which isn’t to say that he’s without flaws. He’s notoriously obsessive; ever since he developed his own voice, he’s written the same novel over and over. His language is (deliberately) flat, and his imagery repetitive – abandoned swimming pools; empty wastes of sand; rusting launch platforms. But there’s something admirable about his singlemindedness; something important.

For my money, John Gray has the most concise “take”:http://www.newstatesman.co.uk/199905100041.htm on why Ballard’s important (indeed, I think that this short review-article is likely the best thing that Gray has ever written). Gray’s essay highlights the main theme of Ballard’s work – “life as it is lived when the fictions that sustain society have broken down.” If the Revolution was immanent in every moment for Walter Benjamin, the Catastrophe is immanent in every moment for Ballard. Polite society is always wobbling on the verge of savagery. Gray also mentions how funny Ballard is – something that a lot of people miss (his humour, like Beckett’s is black and so understated as to be very nearly obscured in the shadows).

Two of Ballard’s recent novels are of particular interest to social scientists. If I ever teach my dream course on muddy thinking in social science, _Cocaine Nights_ will be the first required reading in the section on social capital. It presents in satiric form the disturbing thesis that the vibrant civic activism prized by Putnam, Fukuyama, Etzioni and other neo-communitarians is best produced through systematic clandestine violence. For Ballard, it’s not only impossible to have Salem without the witchburning; it’s the witchburning that brings Salem together as a community. _Super-Cannes_ is of more interest to sociologists, geographers, and urban planners. It’s all about the return of the repressed in a very thinly disguised version of “Sophia-Antipolis”:http://www.sophia-antipolis.net/. The orderly planned community of Super-Cannes doesn’t so much break down into chaos, as it perpetuates it – again, community and violence reproduce each other.

At the end of “Science as a Vocation”:http://www2.pfeiffer.edu/~lridener/DSS/Weber/scivoc.html, Weber famously claims that the age of prophecy, when an inspiration might sweep ‘through the great communities like a firebrand’ is over; we live in an age of disenchantment. Ballard’s work is a direct riposte to Weber; it claims that the New Millennium is most likely to have its start amidst the bored and deracinated upper middle classes and suburbanites, the willing victims of Weber’s ‘rationalization.’ A rough beast is slouching towards Shepperton to be born …

Didn’t someone tell this guy that things can go badly wrong if you try mailing yourself across the country?

I see that Christopher Walken nearly walked out of the remake of The Stepford Wives because he was unhappy with changes in the script.

When the star of The Country Bears, Kangaroo Jack, Gigli, Jungle Juice, Joe Dirt, The Prophecy 1,2, and 3, Blast From the Past, and Mouse Hunt nearly leaves your movie because of the script, that’s got to hurt your feelings a little bit.

This is a “game”:http://www.distributive-justice.com/mainpage_frame-e-n.htm everyone should play. And, if you like, try it in German or Italian.

Of the people who’ve played the “Discover your Distributive Profile” game (almost 4000 of them), Dworkinians are out in front. Right-libertarians aren’t well represented. Two weeks floating around the blogosphere, and I bet the numbers would change a lot. Just a hunch.

Next month I plan to go to Washington D.C. for a fellowship event of the 21st Century Trust. But with the new visa rules to the US, I can’t simply rely on being white and English-speaking to get me through immigration without a scratch. Luckily, citizens of countries belonging to the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) won’t need a visa as long as they have a machine readable passport. My passport isn’t ‘machine readable’, so from 1st October I’ll need to either have a new passport or apply for visa.

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Why is it, that when I see a “headline”:http://www.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET_2100-1016_3-5072973.html like “Study: Windows Cheaper than Linux,” I can expect with near 100% certainty to see the words “Microsoft commissioned” in the text of the article?