Running about a month behind the Zeitgeist, PP McGuinness picks up the Old Europe/New Europe meme (the new European states will be pro-market, more friendly to the US etc). Oddly enough he picks on Vaclav Klaus, who recently became President of the Czech Republic, succeeding his former ally and more recent opponent Vaclav Havel.
In fact, Klaus’ career is an illustration of why the Old Europe/New Europe thesis is wrong on nearly every point, and McGuinness tacitly concedes as much.
Read More »
Kevin Drum at Calpundit posts on the disarray in the reconstruction plan in Iraq. He focuses on the fact that postwar Iraq has been very different from what was expected by the Administration – many fewer refugees but much more civil disorder and much less enthusiastic cooperation with the occupying powers.
The big problem, though, is lack of commitment.
Read More »
For the first (at least the first functioning) time on the new MT weblog, it’s time for Monday’s Message Board. Post comments on any topic (no coarse language and civilised discussion only please). I’m still interested in feedback on the new site, suggestions for additional features and so on.
Update Be sure to read Observa’s account of his family’s brush with paedophilia. It will help to inform discussion of this difficult problem.
Kevin Drum at Calpundit says:
But why do I get the feeling that most people who complain about traffic cameras are actually just people who routinely push their luck at intersections and are afraid of getting caught? Is it because their principled arguments always strike me as completely lame?
Yeah, that’s it.
I’d note that, in my experience, complaints about enforcement of road safety laws of all kinds come mainly from the political right, and, as Kevin notes, mostly from people who routinely break the law themselves.
By contrast, suggestions for more lenient treatment of burglars, drug users etc come mostly from liberals, most of whom are not prone to burglary or even (relative to the general population) illegal drug use. This, along with the Bill Bennett affair, leads me to the following gigantic overgeneralisation. Conservatives make excuses for their own wrongdoing, liberals for the wrongdoing of others.
Kieran Healy fresh from defending sociology against attacks from ignorant economists, returns fire with this sly dig in a post about the underrepresentation of women
Even the lower-status fields in Economics (e.g., those that involve looking at data of any sort, hem hem) require a very high degree of competence in formal methods.
Actually, Kieran is out of date here. The availability of large cross-section data sets and the development of new techniques for analysing them has led to a resurgence in the prestige of empirical methods accompanied by a decline in the status of abstract theory. Steve Levitt’s Clark Prize is the most recent example (of winners in the last decade, I’d say only Matt Rabin is primarily a theorist).
What remains striking is the ambiguous status of policy. Although quite a lot of high-profile economists are engaged in the policy debate, there’s still quite a strong undercurrent of academic disdain for such a grubby activity, especially when it involves being embroiled in controversy (Stiglitz, Krugman etc). The situation in Australia was quite different in the generation preceding mine, when the top economists were almost automatically those actively involved in making or criticising public policy (Gruen, Gregory and Pitchford, just to name a few of the ANU contingent), but we now conform to the global norm. For the general public, an economist is someone who shills for a bank, and within the academic profession, involvement in policy is at best an optional extra . As in many things, I prefer the attitudes and institutions of the past, to those of the present in this matter.
I’ve been reading lots of different things, but a couple of books illustrate the opposite ends of the spectrum of thought about the Internet and its possibilities.
Clifford Stoll’s 1995 Silicon Snake Oil was one of the first manifestations of neo-Luddism. An interesting example of a failed reductio ad absurdam is a critique of estimates of the growth rate of the Internet, where Stoll says
Just by counting network nodes, the Internet is now doubling in size every year. This growth rate can’t continue for long – at this rate, everyone on Earth will be connected by 2003. Impossible
Here we are in 2003, and while it’s not literally true that everyone on Earth is connected, it is true that almost everyone in the developed world has access to the Internet.
Stoll is similarly dismissive of prospects for a revival of public debate on the Internet, taking as his model the dying days of UseNet. He misses almost completely the impact of the Web. Of course, he does not anticipate blogging which, I think, has gone a long way towards fulfilling the early promise of the Internet. Imperfect as blogs are, they contain a lot of well-written and well-argued discussion of a wide range of issues that would have had very little chance of publication in the days before the Internet.
If Stoll was too pessimistic, this was nothing compared to the ludicrous overoptimism of the dotcom boom, chronicled in James Ledbetter’s Starving to Death on $200 Million a Year: The Short Absurd Life of the Industry Standard We have yet to see a really good book on this topic. (Thomas Frank’s One Market Under God, which I reviewed here is easily the best book on the 1990s boom as a whole, but is only peripherally concerned with the dotcoms.
After a long period of relative quiescence, Jason Soon is back with a string of interesting and lengthy posts (made lengthier by the narrowness of his blogger template!). As he implies in one of them, his long-delayed adoption of a comments facility has been a major stimulus and has implied something of a change in blogstyle.
Julian Sanchez has a nice piece in Reason on the John Lott affair as an illustration of the strengths of bloggers compared to traditional media. You can read my thoughts on the same issue here.
BTW, I’ve finally got around to adding Julian’s blog to my blogroll.
Keneth Miles has returned from hiatus with a string of interesting posts. He’s particularly good on the science of global warming (I think I’ll just point to him from now on rather than chasing down the data myself).
I’ve added Keneth to the blogroll as an Ozplogger even though his title “The UnAustralian” indicates he clearly isn’t (he’s from those other nearby islands).
This is consistent with standard Australian practice of claiming for ourselves anything creditable done by a Kiwi who has even the most tenuous link to this country (see Jane Campion, Russell Crowe, Phar Lap etc etc).
Kieran Healy and Brian Weatherson, among others, have been discussing the absence of women at the top levels of economics and analytic philosophy. For example, all the winners of the JB Clark Medal and the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences have been men.
Kieran is mainly concerned to dismiss the idea that this reflects some fundamental difference between men and women. He takes the hypothesis of discrimination within the occupational groups as the alternative, more or less by default.
I’d argue that the bulk of the explanation can be found in high school or earlier.
Read More »
