RECESSIONAL

The misuse of "science" rhetoric

2011-07-19T12:59:00.005-04:00

A recent piece in International Theory provides support for the view that James Morrow is an obnoxious little twerp. Morrow is critiquing Lebow's recent book Cultural Theory of International Relations. He starts by pointing out what he sees as the differences between his and Lebow's goals.

"My central interest lies in scientiﬁc theory, while Lebow aims for a broader, almost philosophic understanding of international relations. I am inclined to a more rigorous examination of empirical tests of a given theory, while he aims for a deeper historical interpretation of key cases."

Morrow goes on to assert that Lebow "never presents a single, clear logical argument". These statements are practically a stereotype of the practice of not engaging with another's arguments and instead denigrating the opponent with ad hominem attacks. Morrow is trying to say that he, Morrow, is a serious scholar whose views are worthwhile. He is trying to link himself with ideas that are associated with being right or authoritative: "scientific", "rigorous", "empirical", "logical". Conversely, Morrow tries to paint Lebow with words and ideas that are not positively associated with truth and accurate knowledge: "philosophic", "historical interpretation".

Morrow's practice here is exactly the sort of unscientific, intellectually dishonest rhetorical politics that should have no place being in an academic journal.

Like facts, non-facts do not speak for themselves

2011-04-27T10:53:00.004-04:00

So, Obama has decided to call the birthers bluff and is issuing the long-form version of his birth certificate because, as the White House communications directors blogged: "it may have been good politics and good TV, but it was bad for the American people and distracting from the many challenges we face as a country." Even the president himself has spoken directly on the issue and chastised those caught up in the birther issue (i.e. the media) by saying, "we don't have time for this silliness."

Early (left-leaning) opinions on the rationale behind the president's move are mixed. Some see this as a sign of the president showing further weakness by legitimizing the stance of birthers such as Trump. By even discussing the issue, he has strengthened the loonies. Indeed, the Donald is crowing right now that he "played a big role" in resolving the issue. For the detractors of Obama's move, the consequences of Obama's decision can be summed thus: "Weak Obama allows Trump to look sane (for asking) and strong (for forcing a decision)."

The alternative opinion is that Obama has cannily placed a wedge into the middle of the right. Instead of ignoring a growing issue (45% of Republicans think he is a foreigner for God's sake), Obama has finally given them what they asked for. By settling the issue, the remaining birthers will be forced back to the fringe of Serious Debate. As a bonus, they may still hold onto their looniness and force Republican candidates to take a position on the issue, and thus alienate independents. For Obama's supporters, the move can be summed up as: "Crafty Obama has suddenly made birtherism look crazy again and the Republican candidates are boxed in by the fact that they have to accept that Obama has given them what they wanted, while still telling the base that the base isn't crazy."

So which interpretation is correct? Has Obama bought into the crazies' narrative and thus made himself look weak and reactive again, or has he settled the issue and, as a result, outmaneuvered the Republicans and forced them to fight among themselves over an issue which will suddenly look bonkers again? Which is the right interpretation?

The answer is we don't know, and that we can't know until after this issue has been discussed. At some point, there will be a consensus agreement that this was a strong or a weak move, and the source of the agreement will come from how successfully Obama makes the case that the pro-Obama interpretation is the "fact" of the matter. And, as I hope to demonstrate, the answer is so uncertain precisely because of the fact that Obama did somewhat legitimize the issue by reacting to it, but also de-legitimized it by rejecting it. In order to win, he needs to keep hammering on the second point. Because his enemies will certainly keep hammering on the first.

The birther issue and the President's response are a really good example of the rhetorical element of politics: how narratives are created and the meaning of political actions established. For decades political science ignored rhetoric and focused on material incentives, power, and ideas (in an abstract sense). In the last few years there has been a growing literature on how these things come together and how the words and symbols political actors deploy can been analyzed as a strategic resource in their own right. Just because someone is strong, does not mean people will accept their power; just because an idea is good or true, does not mean people will update their beliefs. Very often, actors must use words and symbolic acts to broaden their own possibilities for action and by limiting those of their opponent. Simply by getting an opponent to agree that there is a problem in the way that you define it ("climate change is an economic issue, not a security one"; or, "there is too much government spending") you can limit what your opponent can offer as a reasonable and/or authentic response. In short, as Krebs and Jackson note, frames often imply implications.

This is why Obama's strategy is tricky. He has attempted to reject the overall right-wing frame of the issue, but is not offering an alternative frame through which to understand the actions. It is important he do so. Rejecting a frame which is a very challenging act and one that his opponents will not take sitting down. They will either go full-bore and say this certificate doesn't count, Obama took too long etc. (as many already have), or they will re-frame again and say that Obama has accepted their frame by releasing his certificate. Failure by Obama's opponents to choose one of these options will mean that they will end up looking crazy and/or mean-spirited. This is a strong incentive not to just accept Obama's act. In other words, Obama's release of this certificate cannot just end the debate - it can only trigger a new one.

Obama's act does not speak for itself; it needs active cheerleaders who will say, "this is what this means, and why." It will take a concrete strategy of saying that the old frame ("Obama may be an alien") is no longer the frame through which this debate should be understood. However, in order to do this a new frame which can capably collect all of these events (accusations, denials, media reports, the final release of the certificate) into one simple narrative needs to be deployed. Such a frame cannot be anything but antagonistic to his opponents ("these people are either mad or genuinely wicked and this whole process should be understood this way"). By aggressively denouncing his detractors Obama might look strong and truly create a wedge issue ("Obama called me crazy! Do you [generic Republican contender] agree? Yes or no?!"). On the other hand, if he just releases this and then forgets about it (or more typically, hopes the issue will just go away), his opponents will get to frame his actions again, and show that Obama is easily bullied.

In short, the "success" of Obama's move cannot be assessed because the definition of success will be contested itself over the next few weeks and months. Based on the political naivety of the Democrats ("people are rational and just need the facts") and their unwillingness to pick a fight, I suspect that the detractor camp is right: this is a bad move on Obama's part. But only because the Right in this country has understood a truly sophisticated 'fact'.

That facts, or non-facts, do not speak for themselves.

Paragraph Paranoia

2011-04-15T14:42:00.004-04:00

One glaring feature of adult life in general is the lack of clearly defined markers for success and mechanisms for the delivery of positive feedback on that success. This is also true of writing a dissertation, or indeed all grad school after the coursework stage. Whereas during classes, you have a paper to write, on which you get a grade, usually delivered promptly a week or so after the end of semester, the dissertationer has nothing. Nothing. Not until the dissertation defence, which may be three or more years in the future. One of the implications of this is that it is crucial to define your own measures of success or progress. Mine has become "the paragraph". One problem with using paragraphs is that value is not monotonically increasing in volume, i.e. at some point writing more doesn't help you. The paragraphs have to be good as well. But you as the dissertation-writer cannot assess the quality of your paragraphs, first because your writing seems tropical-island-lagoon clear to you even if it is mud-bespattered Hegel to everyone else, and second because paragraphs have an emergent quality; a collection of them together can be worth more than the sum of its parts. A day in which two dynamite paras were lovingly chiseled from the Carrara marble of your thoughts might be thought a success. But what if these do not fit into the wider structure of the paper? Or if the paper itself will not be any good? From such paranoia lassitude and despair arise. It seems like a solution is not to worry about how good the paragraphs are, but then you are left in the bizarre situation of writing but not caring about it. Naive and idealistic observers would say that the dissertation committee provides feedback. But this feedback, if it is forthcoming at all, is almost never fine-grained enough to be applicable to individual paragraphs. All that is left is to drift in the leaky rowboat of our intelligence, alone.

Editing Elegy

2011-04-13T12:41:00.002-04:00

The process of editing a PhD dissertation:

The grad student stared at the computer screen. The paragraph sat there, too plump and florid, like an overweight tourist wearing a tasteless Hawaiian shirt. The point, the meaning, of the paragraph had to be preserved, for it was vital to the argument being made in the rest of the section. But it had to be made more directly, in fewer words. And, he noted bleakly, there had better not be any clauses in the passive voice or the wrath of numerous committee members would pour down upon him in the form of exhortatory blood-hued margin notes.

He deleted a clarifying sentence. Was that clarification necessary? Would someone reading the previous sentence know, guess, or even not care, that there was a potential ambiguity? The theoretical position should be obvious to anyone familiar with recent debates in "the field". And yet, it was possible that it would be taken as a caricature, a cliched stance, whereas the dissertationer was firmly convinced that his was a more nuanced and subtle appreciation of the issues involved. Maybe it would be better to leave that clarifying sentence in, just so that the sheer sophistication of the analysis not be missed. He hit "undo".

Dissertationer's Lament

2011-04-12T12:04:00.002-04:00

In a new series, I wax self-pityingly about my continued frustrations writing my dissertation. The dissertationer is not under the same pressures as other people. Strict work times, manual labor, attentive taskmaster bosses, responsibility for others; all of these are irrelevant to an ABD graduate student. I will be exploring what the stresses unique to this, in some sense pampered, creature are over the next few posts.

Tired metaphors are all that come to mind when trying to represent the problems of trying to write a dissertation. Haunting and badgering the writer at every step are contradictory impulses. Intellectual honesty dictates not only that what we do is right (as it seems to us), but that we are stringent and careful about the claims we make. Qualifications should abound. However, clarity of communication requires simplification and condensation. The shorter you can make your communication of your point, the better. Qualifications get lost, forgotton, or pruned in the quest for clarity.

The vicious demon of self-doubt jolts your typing hands and tries to move your attention away, towards something less challenging to your sense of self and the equilibrium of your composure. "Is it good?", it asks. "Will anyone like it?" Almost as bad as this generalized worry, even if it is good enough for some, maybe it will not be good enough to impress the crucial coalition of interests that will both get it published in a relatively specialized outlet and be appealing enough to a general audience that you will be hired at a department where the majority are barely aware that your subfield exists. Better than confronting the possibility of writing a bad paragraph, says the demon, read another article, or better, a blog post, or watch a youtube video, because each post or video doesn't take so long. Afterwards, you can get back to the serious business of chiselling pixels of wisdom from the glowing white screen. Except that this calculation repeats.

Why tipping is irrational.

2010-12-01T10:42:00.003-05:00

Or, the generative effect of the reification of rules of behavior.

1) Tipping after service can be defended on a rational basis if we assume repeated play. That is, if you expect to return to the place and encounter the same service person again, a post-service tip on this occasion could be reasonably expected to induce or maintain good service next time.

2) if it becomes common knowledge that tips are standard behavior, then a post-service tip might become necessary to avoid being the subject of retribution on subsequent visits.

3) But there is more to it than this. People will have an emotional reaction to not leaving a tip, as if they will be shamed or as if they are doing something slightly immoral - physiological signs include nervousness, increased heart rate, etc. Also, others will start to enforce compliance to the standard even when it is irrelevant to their own interests. Claims about tipping are conducted in moral language, using phrases like 's/he deserves it'. Appeals will be made to the potential non-tipper appearing cheap (i.e. not generous) - a status or identity challenge. Worse, these appeals can come from inside the potential non-tipper without needing to be explicit.

4) So, behavior that could have been initially started off on a rational basis is maintained and enforced and perpetuated via completely non-rational mechanisms.

5) In a situation where repeat business is unlikely, tipping is irrational, unless it is done to avoid retribution from one's peers.

Physics Envy?

2010-11-15T16:09:00.005-05:00

The social sciences are all supposed to want to be like the natural sciences and especially physics because, variously, they have great data, they can do experiments, they have complicated maths, they can predict with accuracy events in controlled settings, etc. etc. I've read this sort of thing before but here is a quote from a post about Stephen Hawking which brings the emulation of physics into a new light:

"M-theory suffers from the same flaws that string theories did. First is the problem of empirical accessibility. Membranes, like strings, are supposedly very, very tiny—as small compared with a proton as a proton is compared with the solar system. This is the so-called Planck scale, 10^–33 centimeters. Gaining the kind of experimental confirmation of membranes or strings that we have for, say, quarks would require a particle accelerator 1,000 light-years around, scaling up from our current technology. Our entire solar system is only one light-day around, and the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful accelerator, is 27 kilometers in circumference."

So, basically, they have posited (i.e. made up) a bunch of theoretical entities the existence of which it is completely impossible to determine. And this explains everything. But that's alright because it is logical:

Hawking recognized long ago that a final theory—because it would probably involve particles at the Planck scale—might never be experimentally confirmable. "It is not likely that we shall have accelerators powerful enough" to test a unified theory "within the foreseeable future—or indeed, ever," he said in his 1980 speech at Cambridge. He nonetheless hoped that in lieu of empirical evidence physicists would discover a theory so logically inevitable that it excluded all alternatives.

Maybe rational choice should be driving at more becoming more tautologous rather than less. Then it would be more like physics.

Disinterestedness and Charity in Reviewing,

2010-11-02T14:09:00.002-04:00

Or Advice to 1st Year Grad Students.
From an old guardian column:

As the novelist Richard Ford has said, "Writing even a bad book is hard work." Nobody who has struggled in front of a screen or paper for three years deserves a pasting written in half a day by a 23-year-old, though the pasting might be justified in terms of what exists on the page.

Hello checks and balances; it's me: Mr. Grey

2010-09-09T11:24:00.004-04:00

Unsurprising but depressing news: U.S. courts now agree that they shouldn't have the ability to review the executive's use of power. Yesterday, in a 6-5 decision, the Court of Appeals for the 9th circuit (one below the Supreme Court) ruled that people kidnapped by the CIA and subsequently tortured could not have their day in court because it is too dangerous for the terrists or somesuch. As Judge Fisher put it:

“This case requires us to address the difficult balance the state secrets doctrine strikes between fundamental principles of our liberty, including justice, transparency, accountability and national security... Although as judges we strive to honor all of these principles, there are times when exceptional circumstances create an irreconcilable conflict between them.”

So what exactly does this "state secrets doctrine" mean? It does not just mean that some intelligence or operational details are too sensitive to be revealed to the public in a open court. Indeed, I'd have to agree that it would be mad that ongoing-operations might be jeopardized as part of hearing. But the ruling is far more sinister than that. The state secrets privilege means argues that some information is too sensitive for a day in court and so cases should be dismissed before they are seen. The logic of the doctrine is that even judges should not be allowed to look at information and thus determine whether or not it can be used in court as evidence. Ergo, the case gets shut down.

In other words, these judges agree with the executive branch that they if the President says some information is "too sensitive" then judges should just believe him. Bear in mind, aside from the various illegal detentions, tortures, and disappearances over the years, the executive recently ordered the assassination of an American citizen for national security reasons. Now the Court of Appeals for the 9th circuit agrees that not only should ordinary people have no way of finding out why, nor should the courts - the ostensible check over executive power.

Em, Court of Star Chamber much?

Also remember, this is Obama's DOJ that's arguing this. Imagine how much worse such abuse could be in the future.

Thomas Jefferson must be whizzing in his grave.

The up-is-downism of American political discourse: Special Mosque of Doom edition

2010-08-20T08:44:00.005-04:00

Agh, the "Ground Zero Mosque" (not actually at Ground Zero; and a community centre, not a mosque) issue has had me spouting off with such spittle-inflected bile around the house that I thought that I needed to write this down.

Where to begin?

As usual, I am tempted to once more highlight the complete and utter failure of the American journalistic class. It has, as is par for the course, done a bag-up shite job of: (a) do straight reporting without pushing a meme - only yesterday did AP cotton on and ordered a directive not to call it the "Ground Zero Mosque"; (b) acting as gatekeeper/watchdog of civil discourse by allowing the meme's pusher(!)- the disgusting Pam Geller - on telly to push her flavor of patriot-laden bigotry.

Instead on dwelling on the shititude of the journalistic class, I am much more interested in pointing out how the entire crux of this debate - that, to quote Sarah Palin, "is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts. Pls reject it in interest of healing" (bleh) - illustrates how Republican behavior is the very type that they claim to be against.

The Republicans (and now some cowardly Dems) claim that because some people feel "sensitive" about certain issues - in this instance the existence of Muslims,apparently - small-government decisions should be overturned.

Right, so let me get this straight. The Republican party, which claims that the government has no right to interfere with private persons and local government decisions, wants to interfere with private persons and local governemtn decisions. And the reason is that a certain segment of the population wants special and distinct consideration, on the grounds of sensitivity. This is from the party that hates affirmitative action because it privileges one group over others. Have I got this right?

Never mind the fact that the dog on the street, never mind most terrorism experts, will tell you that the best way to shore up support for terrorists is to persecute the group they claim to represent.

Wonderful. So in the up-is-down world that is American political discourse, the party that claims to value private property, small government, equal treatment for all groups regardless of race or creed, and national security wants to jepordize national security in order to persecute private individuals and small government so that the will of a distinct identiy group can be met in order to satisfy their sensitivies.

Once more the emperor has no clothes.

And is acting like a wanker.

Indoctrination through fear of failure

2010-07-03T14:43:00.002-04:00

A pithy description of the process by which graduate students are convinced to ignore their instincts to critique and instead buy into the intellectual mainstream:

"New inductees into the profession are taught that if they are to invest their scarce human resources wisely, they should believe that the best of the discipline's scientific knowledge is contained in the current main- stream "scientific" literature, and to read the heterodox literature is a foolish waste of human capital."
(Paul Davidson, 2003. 'Is Mathematical Science an Oxymoron?' Journal of Post-Keynesian Economics, 25:3)

Presumably there is also a process by which the amount of human capital expended in pursuit of, say, learning formal theory and statistics or Derrida/Heideggerian , makes one loath to confront its limitations.

Intellectual integrity anyone? Anyone?

Aha! I knew it!

2010-06-30T17:17:00.003-04:00

I am in the depths of trying to finish an endless re-write of a section of my dissertation so I have still been away.

In lieu of a long post that I have been working on (which is now a bit out-of-date anyway) I want to quickly draw attention to this very unsurprising fact.

According to this study, the four major media outlets in the US have radically altered the way they describe water-boarding since 2004. For most of the last 100 years, this practice was unequivocally referred to as torture. However, once the US started doing it, it was called something else - anything else.

I have been back-and-forthing with a friend of mine about the lackluster, obsequious, and power-shielding/power-worshiping nature of political ~~court-stenography~~ journalism in the US, and I feel this little cherry really supports my point.

Hat tip: Glenn Greenwald

'Q and A' sessions and institutional efficiency

2010-06-15T15:40:00.009-04:00

I was at a series of presentations last week and every session included some time for questions at the end. Usually, in political science at least, a lot of interesting ground can be covered in the Q&A because so much of the research is left out of the presentation and few people have read the paper the presentation is based on. However, sitting through a Q&A when you have no questions can be frustrating. In fact, sometimes you feel like stabbing your hand with your pen just so that you can receive some cerebral stimulation. In some sessions, every time there is a small pause after the speaker says, "Any questions?", your heart leaps with expectant joy, only to be crushed when another audience member tentatively raises their hand. During one such session, while doodling abstract symbols, I started thinking that this regularized practice is not merely habitual but is governed by a set of social rules. This led me to wonder whether there might be a better system. Then I conceived of a better system. The new system is simple, easy, and better than the current system. Here is my argument in favor of the new system.

The current system is that when the speaker has finished speaking, they ask for any questions and everyone has a choice between staying silent and asking a question. Once everybody who had a question has asked their question, everyone leaves/goes for a break.

Assume that there are two types of agents, P agents and Q agents. The Q agents have a question that they want to ask. The P agents have no questions. Each agent gets utility from leisure time. The Q agents get utility from asking their question and having it answered. However, every question asked involves a penalty that everyone pays - the leisure time lost from having to stay and listen to the question and answer.This system potentially involves the imposition of negative externalities on some audience members, in that if there are any P agents they have to pay the waiting costs and do not get any say in whether the questions are asked. Q agents do pay waiting costs but would rather ask their question. The total utility from the current system is everyone's leisure or breaktime utility minus a utility cost from each question:

Here b stands for breaktime utility indexed across all agents and q stands for question time costs indexed across all agents and a stands for the utility gained from having a question answered indexed across all Q agents.

For Q agents, q_j" title="a_j > q_j" />, so they would rather ask their question and wait, than stay silent and leave earlier. But the P agents pay that cost that they don't want to.

This problem could be solved with a simple institutional innovation. How about, after the speaker has finished speaking, they say, "If anyone has any questions, please stay, otherwise thank you and you can go." Then, each audience member can choose to stay or leave.

The situation is the same as the old system for the Q agents. They would choose to stay. However, as b_i - q_i" title="b_i > b_i - q_i" />, P agents would choose to leave. Under this new system, the total utility is:

If , then U_1" title="U_2 > U_1" />. That is, if there are any people who do not have a question, the new institutional rule is preferable, otherwise it is equivalent. In fact, the new system is pareto-optimal. No one is left worse off under the new system and at least some people are better off.

I intend to suggest this new rule to the people running the seminars at my university. If they don't like it, I will refer them to this proof.

I've been away...

2010-06-04T13:21:00.002-04:00

Excuses, excuses...

I stopped blogging ages ago as I couldn't justify it to myself. But my endless lurking around other blogs combined with my internal rants mean I am back.

As I sit around a computer typing a lot more these days, hopefully I'll be able to keep it up.

Just for the record, in the last however-many months and months I have begun on my research and am now obessed with rituals, symbols, honor and other squishy social science issues such as these, so expect a lot on those themes.

Following my dream...

2010-03-30T15:50:00.006-04:00

That staple of reality tv shows and Chinese students' English language essays, following one's dream has to be one of modern society's most potent rhetorical commonplaces. It seems to me that in the US the invocation of this idea is often used to justify violating one of the core principles of American public morality - earning money. Why are you doing such a low-paying activity? I'm following my dream. Oh, well that's alright then.

Clearly there is some value to pursuing activities that one finds interesting and even more specifically to trying to find some work or occupation that doesn't make you want to jump off a building. However, the idea of following your dream 1) should be reserved for serious cases, 2) can have deleterious effects on mental health.

1) Just because you happen to either enjoy your job or be relatively content in your everyday life does not entitle you to say that you are following your dream. People following dreams are either people involved in occupations with high barriers to entry and a large ratio of contenders to success where a rational evaluation of one's chances would lead one NOT to try for that success, or they are people who have wanted to be a geologist since they were 5 and now are a geologist having not ever seriously pursued any alternative career path. People following dreams either value the unlikely payoff extremely highly (actors etc.) or value the payoff from performing the activity regardless of the external rewards. Narrowing the definition would exclude most people from qualifying as "following their dream".

2) Surely it is no one's dream to be a middle manager in a regional paper distributor. But that does not mean that you cannot enjoy that job, nor does it mean that you cannot have a successful life if you either do not have a dream or try for a career that you end up not being successful in. The narrative that only people who follow their dreams are happy might mean that people are too rigid in choosing career paths, or that they feel like they have let themselves down if they cannot, for reasons entirely outside their control, pursue their first-choice career. It also has a tendency to overweigh life satisfaction derived from one's job and excluding the possibility of earning money to eat doing one activity (work) and spending one's leisure time doing something fun.

So, my point is that if I end up not getting a tenure-track academic job, everything will be alright (tremble).

On "Relevance"

2010-02-18T09:43:00.003-05:00

A common concern of undergraduates, laymen, and policy-oriented graduate students is that one's research be relevant. They rarely specify that to which the research is supposed to be relevant. Occasionally they make vague references to the 'real world'. Given that the vast majority of political science research is engaged in some sort of empirical analysis, and often it is the purely theoretical that is most interesting or useful, it is puzzling that political science is not seen as relevant. In a 1971 paper, Murray Davis provides a plausible explanation for why this is the case.

Anyone who wishes to assert a proposition that will be found interesting by laymen as well as experts must deal with the dilemma of this double dialectic. On the one hand, his proposition will interest experts only if it denies the ground-assumption of their discipline. On the other hand, his proposition will interest laymen only if it denies a ground-assumption of the commonsense world. But since the ground-assumption of experts is already a denial of a ground-assumption of laymen, he will find that any proposition which interests experts (because it denies their ground-assumption) will not interest laymen (because it affirms their ground-assumption), and vice versa. What will be interesting to the one will be obvious to the other. In the academic world, a person usually resolves this dilemma by grasping for one horn while ignoring the other, by restricting the potential audience who will consider his proposition to his fellow experts while not worrying about the opinion of laymen. He will usually publish his proposition in a specialized journal or technical text where it will be scrutinized only by his colleagues who hold the very ground-assumption he wishes to attack. But note that the propositions of these specialized journals and technical texts that are found interesting by their professional readers are actually of the form: ’What everybody, except experts on the subject, think is true is in fact true’.

No one will recognize that the proposition is of this form until the proposition is brought to the attention of non-experts. However, the more a person’s proposition is found interesting by the experts of his field, the more he will be tempted to bring it to the attention of these non-experts. Should he be foolish enough to reveal the proposition which interested his colleagues to his non-professional friends, he will usually find that they are not impressed. Should he be even more foolish enough to disseminate this proposition to a wider public through popularizing it in newspapers and magazines, he will succeed only in convincing more people of the poverty of his discipline.

In sum, the fact that the baseline assumptions of intellectual specialities and the baseline assumptions of the common-sense world are incommensurate is responsible for the fact that propositions, which had had good receptions in the former, usually get poor receptions in the latter. Those who attempt to popularize propositions which experts had found interesting often must resort to jargon in order to obscure the fundamental lack of intertranslatability between the universe of discourse of the intellectual speciality and the universe of discourse of the common-sense world. They are aware, intuitively if not consciously, that the ’interestingness’ of an expert’s proposition, like the ’poetry’ of a foreign author, is what gets lost in translation.

(Murray Davis, 1971. 'That's Interesting!: Towards a Phemonenology of Sociology and a Sociology of Phenomenology', Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 1(2), 309-344.)

Going mediaeval

2010-02-17T18:14:00.002-05:00

One strand of the torture debate in the US at the moment is the debate over efficacy. By efficacy I mean the probability that a tortured suspect provides more or better information than a non-tortured suspect. Ex-vice president Dick Cheney recently alluded to the efficacy of torture as a justification for it. Even if we leave aside the fact that torture might be effective in this regard (my murdering the next guy I see on the street is a pretty effective way of getting his wallet), I find it hard to believe that people, the public, regular folks, anyone out there actually holds this position in the face of its obvious implausibility. A simple example of the problems with the efficacy position comes from a book I am currently reading. John Felton, in prison after having murdered the Duke of Buckingham in the summer of 1628, insisted that he had acted alone. The Bishop of London William Laud, anxious to bust a nest of Puritans, threatened him with the rack if he did not reveal his accomplices. Felton's reply is instructive:

he could not tell whom he might nominate in the extremity of torture, and if what he should say then must go for truth, he could not tell whether his Lordship (meaning the Bishop of London) or which of their Lordships he might name, for torture might draw unexpected things from him.

Apparently, "After this there were no more questions for the prisoner".

Dude, where's my data?

2009-03-23T14:32:00.006-04:00

At the risk of making it seem like I'm ranting at a dead horse, here is some more on the scientific status of social science, this time from JS Mill (1843, A System of Logic, Book VI, Chapter III).

His intro to the topic:

"1. [There may be sciences which are not exact sciences] It is a common notion, or at least it is implied in many common modes of speech, that the thoughts, feelings, and actions of sentient beings are not a subject of science, in the same strict sense in which this is true of the objects of outward nature. This notion seems to involve some confusion of ideas, which it is necessary to begin by clearing up."

True in 1843, true today. Then an interesting analogy to the analysis of another complex system:

"Any facts are fitted, in themselves, to be a subject of science, which follow one another according to constant laws; although those laws may not have been discovered, nor even be discoverable by our existing resources. Take, for instance, the most familiar class of meteorological phenomena, those of rain and sunshine. Scientific inquiry has not yet succeeded in ascertaining the order of antecedence and consequence among these phenomena, so as to be able, at least in our regions of the earth, to predict them with certainty, or even with any high degree of probability. Yet no one doubts that the phenomena depend on laws, and that these must be derivative laws resulting from known ultimate laws, those of heat, electricity, vaporization, and elastic fluids. Nor can it be doubted that if we were acquainted with all the antecedent circumstances, we could, even from those more general laws, predict (saving difficulties of calculation) the state of the weather at any future time. Meteorology, therefore, not only has in itself every natural requisite for being, but actually is, a science; though, from the difficulty of observing the facts on which the phenomena depend (a difficulty inherent in the peculiar nature of those phenomena) the science is extremely imperfect; and were it perfect, might probably be of little avail in practice, since the data requisite for applying its principles to particular instances would rarely be procurable."

To conclude:

"Hence, even if our science of human nature were theoretically perfect, that is, if we could calculate any character as we can calculate the orbit of any planet, from given data; still, as the data are never all given, nor ever precisely alike in different cases, we could neither make positive predictions, nor lay down universal propositions."

This claim speaks to my earlier question of 'what is the point?'. I do not doubt (in line with my commitment to the principles of physicalism and the causal completeness of physics) that there are fundamental laws of human behavior. But I have no idea at what level these laws obtain. It is dubious that these laws obtain at the level of aggregate collective phenomena like `democracies don't go to war with each other', especially if we are talking about any impressive level of accuracy. And this means data collection problems, and so, Mill says, screw it.

Anti-Scientism #1

2009-03-20T16:44:00.003-04:00

Friedrich Hayek, not an authority that one might automatically want to venerate, had inter alia this to say in his nobel prize acceptance speech:

There is as much reason to be apprehensive about the long run dangers created in a much wider field by the uncritical acceptance of assertions which have the appearance of being scientific as there is with regard to the problems I have just discussed. What I mainly wanted to bring out by the topical illustration is that certainly in my field, but I believe also generally in the sciences of man, what looks superficially like the most scientific procedure is often the most unscientific, and, beyond this, that in these fields there are definite limits to what we can expect science to achieve. This means that to entrust to science - or to deliberate control according to scientific principles - more than scientific method can achieve may have deplorable effects.

The progress of the natural sciences in modern times has of course so much exceeded all expectations that any suggestion that there may be some limits to it is bound to arouse suspicion. Especially all those will resist such an insight who have hoped that our increasing power of prediction and control, generally regarded as the characteristic result of scientific advance, applied to the processes of society, would soon enable us to mould society entirely to our liking. It is indeed true that, in contrast to the exhilaration which the discoveries of the physical sciences tend to produce, the insights which we gain from the study of society more often have a dampening effect on our aspirations; and it is perhaps not surprising that the more impetuous younger members of our profession are not always prepared to accept this.

Yet the confidence in the unlimited power of science is only too often based on a false belief that the scientific method consists in the application of a ready-made technique, or in imitating the form rather than the substance of scientific procedure, as if one needed only to follow some cooking recipes to solve all social problems. It sometimes almost seems as if the techniques of science were more easily learnt than the thinking that shows us what the problems are and how to approach them.

What's the point of it all?

2009-03-19T10:22:00.007-04:00

I have been prompted in the last few days to think about the dreaded question of "What's it all about anyway, when you get right down to it? What's the point?". I'm not talking about the meaning of life (which I have figured out already) but social science, and especially political science. The issues that I have been focusing on are the idea of 'cumulation' and the implications of a constructionist position for the aim of social scientific research. If that sounds ambitious, I am thinking about it in quite basic and unsystematic terms.

Constructionism includes the idea that social phenomena have no existence apart from what they mean to people. So, if everybody stops thinking about and talking about and acting as if a particular university exists, then it does not. Also, if the idea of a university is not part of the total social cluster of ideas, then it is not possible (or rather, highly unlikely) that anyone would start to think, talk, and act as if there was a university. Finally, what it is that a university means, the entirety of the actions and ideas that are associated with a university, is not unitary. By this I mean that you could have a society in which university is something slightly different from another society. This is in fact the case in the world - being at a liberal arts college in Massachusetts is a very different proposition from being at a massive regional normal university in China. So, does it make sense to aim at making general propositions about, say, the effect of having a university degree? Economists do this all the time (I imagine). If by general proposition, I mean a proposition that applies just as much in 11th century Bologna as it does in 21st century Washington DC, then it is clearly preposterous to say that it is a worthwhile enterprise. There is a clear analogy to international political phenomena, as war today involving European powers is different enough from war in mediaeval Africa for us to say that propositions about the causes, consequences, and practice of war must be bounded at least partly by the spatio-temporal context.

If this is so obvious, why would anyone think otherwise? The model of the natural or physical sciences is a powerful lure. One of the things that it is said that the physical sciences have is 'cumulative' knowledge. I am not sure what this means. If it means that later scholars use previous scholars' work in their own work, then anyone has that. If it means that scholars do not challenge earlier scholars' work, then this is patently false as scientific breakthroughs can take the form of discovering that the previous ideas were all wrong. A very convincing account of why there is this high-consensus, rapid-discovery science in the natural sciences is Randall Collins' 1994 article (“Why the social sciences won’t become high-consensus, rapid-discovery science.” Sociological Forum 9, no. 2: 155-177) where he attributes these features of the natural sciences to the appropriation of research technologies. This makes natural science look useful to outsiders (because of spin-off technology, like the internet) and directs attention away from continually revisiting and challenging the work of previous scholars. All of this is unrelated to epistemological validity, i.e. is physics more right than sociology, which I would say is a different question. So, my contention is that cumulation is not a goal that I would sacrifice very much to attain.

But cumulation is not the only thing that 'naturalists' (those wanting social science to be like natural science) want. They also want prediction. Much of the prestige and the justification for believing the natural sciences to have it right comes from being able to say stuff like, "I swing this ball on a rope here at 0.02 millifrutors and the magnesium hydrosulfate will turn green in 3.4 seconds" and then it does, again and again. Social scientists could do this sort of thing as well, like the prediction that 200 or whatever million Americans will get up tomorrow morning and go to work, many of them driving on the right-hand side of the road to get there. For some reason (and I think this reason is actually much more important than other people think it is) this is not impressive to anyone. Polisci also does other types of prediction; see Abramowitz, Alan I. 2008. It’s About Time: Forecasting the 2008 Presidential Election with the Time-for-Change Model. International Journal of Forecasting 24 209-217. This is very limited compared to what the natscis are able to demonstrate in laboratory or experimental settings, but it is not impossible in principle to use social scientific theory to predict human behavior. Again, I'm not sure that this kind of prediction is all that, or even largely what, we as social scientists should be doing.

So, why is constructionism such a threat to naturalism? Partly because many of the phenomena that political scientists study change out of all recognition. The state at all did not exist prior to about the 14th-15th centuries and the 18th century european state is so massively different now that any propositions about the causes or effects of political units of that type are unlikely to apply to anything now or in the future. It is not just acceptable that we can say that there are a set of starting conditions and whenever these starting conditions obtain, their effects also obtain. This happens in natural science, even in cases like geology or evolutionary biology they are working with similar types of evidence as social scientists, but the difference is that there are recurring starting conditions. In social science, if constructionism has any force, sets of starting conditions are only similar within tightly bounded social contexts (which are themselves bounded in space and time). This is why much of social science cannot have the same properties as natural science.

What does this mean for how we use social scientific research? I don't know, but I'm thinking about it.

One of these economists is not like the other.

2009-03-05T19:57:00.003-05:00

I feel like I cannot stop walking around muttering "fucking bankers" every fifteen minutes. Despite all the messes they have/are making of the world, they still give the impression that they are masters of the universe. Hindsight is, of course 20/20, and although no-one could know exactly WHEN the world was going to go to hell, it was going to happen, and it was the bankers' and their lobbyists' fault.

Now that we are on the beginning of what may be a very long slide, videos like this really grate.

Smug wankers.

It is nice to see them get their long-overdue kick-to-the-face; at least in terms of how they are being viewed by society, if nothing else. Check out this evisceration conducted by the Daily Show. Bankers and financial gurus (although witch-doctors might be a better description) take note: you must be truly hated for people to be booing on a COMEDY show.

DNA idenitikit

2009-02-15T22:36:00.004-05:00

This is pretty extraordinary.

I wonder if it becomes a viable technique, will court-cases just be a formality? It's got to be the ultimate slam-dunk. Very minority report.

Well, there goes my elaborate murdering scheme...(sigh)

Maybe I'll be able to get the deposit back on the van.

Yeah... he looks like a drug dealer... shoot him

2009-02-11T18:30:00.003-05:00

I don't know if it is a good idea to get most of my news from the International Herald Tribune, but I haven't found another source with its international yet mainstream focus. Anyway, yet more developments in Afghanistan. NATO is going ahead with plans to kill drug traffickers and bomb drug labs to cut Taliban financing... but without any sissy evidence or intelligence needed. Until someone got upset about that, and now:

"[NATO] Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said in an interview that "a number of buffers and filters" had been put in place to safeguard the legality of combating what he termed the nexus between the insurgency and narcotics."

The American NATO commander Craddock had previously said up yours to international law and had thus caused a scuffle. Plus, the Europeans are not so happy about the militarization of counter-narcotics operations. A good point is that:

"German diplomats have feared that a more robust NATO approach toward dealing with the narcotics industry, without giving small poppy farmers an alternative livelihood, would turn more Afghans against the alliance."

I bet Jack Bauer wouldn't give a crap about the consequences of his actions as long as the bad guys bite the dust! And should we really be taking policy advice from those responsible for the highly successful 'war on drugs' in Latin America?

In case you're wondering, you're a Steelers fan

2009-02-03T16:24:00.003-05:00

The Superbowl was on last weekend and it came down to a nail-biting finish in the match-up between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Arizona Cardinals; the Steelers snatching victory in a ballet-like touchdown in the last few seconds of the game.

Irish people, like most Europeans, couldn't give a shite about American football, and this outcome in particular. But they should, as Obama may be about to appoint the Steelers owner as US Ambassador in Dublin. "We are all Steelers fans now," Irish people might, but probably won't, yet should, say.

By the way, if you ask why do I like American football, I answer: Once you think of it like this, what's not to like?

My long absence

2009-01-28T15:21:00.002-05:00

I have been gone a long long time. This gives you a clue as to why.

But now I am back. Expect interesting/boring/self-important (delete as applicable) posts from here on in.

An oblique critique of rational choice

2009-01-17T22:05:00.004-05:00

'Once upon a time there were three little sisters,' the Dormouse began in a great hurry; 'and their names were Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie; and they lived at the bottom of a well--'

'What did they live on?' said Alice, who always took a great interest in questions of eating and drinking.

'They lived on treacle,' said the Dormouse, after thinking a minute or two.

'They couldn't have done that, you know,' Alice gently remarked; 'they'd have been ill,'

'So they were,' said the Dormouse; 'VERY ill.'

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Shovelling

2008-12-20T14:49:00.004-05:00

Today was the first time I shovelled snow. I've never lived in a place where it snows enough for this to be necessary. I've been skiing a few times but then I was more concerned with not falling over (and getting to the cafe with the heisse schokolade) than clearing driveways. But this Christmas I am staying with my girlfriend's family in Massachusetts and we've just had a snow-storm. So this morning, I wake up, pull up the blinds and see a gentle canvas of crisp white snow covering the land, with more snow gently wafting down from the sky. Idyllic, pastoral, classic Christmas moment.

When it snows, ain't it thrilling,
Though your nose gets a chilling
We'll frolic and play, the Eskimo way*,
Walking in a winter wonderland.

"It's snowing", I say to my girlfriend. "That's pretty cool isn't it!"

"We're going to have to shovel," she says sweetly. Hmmm. That doesn't sound very fun or idyllic. "In fact, we should do it before breakfast to get it out of the way of the cars."

Wait.

What?

Ten minutes later, I find myself outside in the snow with a shovel. Luckily the family has special clothing to wear in such an eventuality, including hats, gloves, scarves and snow-pants (trousers). Given that I am wearing my own trousers and wearing long pajamas in bed, I am now wearing 3 pairs of trousers. Rarely is it the case when I am getting dressed that I wonder to myself, "How many pairs of trousers shall I wear today?"

There was a brief discussion about shovelling tactics before leaving the house. It was mentioned that some people used a snow-blower, which turns out to be like a lawn-mower for snow. You push it a little and the snow flies away from where thou wants it not. Sounds quite easy, I think. "But we do it the traditional Massachusetts way!", i.e. back-breaking manual shovel-work. Can't we do it the English way? Whatever way that is must be easier than this. Maybe take-over a small country and get the indigenous inhabitants to do it for us.** Maybe the English way is to shovel with a stiff-upper lip, fuelled by the prospect of a hot cup of tea at the end of it. My girlfriend, aware of the power of promised tea, had fiendishly used this image as a motivational tool to get me out of bed.

The shovelling itself was not too bad to start with as the snow was very powdery and thus light and didn't resist the edge of the shovel. The only issue was the sheer amount of it. The pool run the previous evening had included 3, 5, 6 and 8 or more inches. My incredulous low estimate had been surpassed before yesterday was out and it looked closer to a full foot of snow on the ground. After a while it was necessary to walk across to the other side of the lawn to dump the snow taken from around the cars, adding to the labor. At one point when I was over on other side I heard the rumble of an engine starting and then I saw the next-door neighbor roll out of the garage with what I quickly guessed to be a snow-blower. In the time it took me to make two trips across the lawn and back, the snow-blower-chap had gone around his house, walking effortlessly in the wake of his triumph of technology, and was back in the garage taking off his boots. I asked why we didn't just borrow that dude's snow-blower. The answer was that there was bad feeling between the two households after the clash over the Adjoining Tree Question back in '06. Inter-house relations in the suburbs are governed by the eternal rule of Anarchy and the Security Dilemma. No-one wanted to hear my analysis of how the situation was non-zero-sum and could be converted into a pareto-optimal Nash equilibrium through the judicious application of confidence-building measures and manipulation of incentive structures. "The guy is a asshole", was the final word on the matter.

Towards the end of the process we had been shovelling for about an hour and we were now essentially scraping ice off the pavement. Even though it was sub-zero temperature I was starting to get hot. Maybe I should have worn fewer trousers. Once I was back inside with my long-desired cup of tea, I looked outside and saw that it was still snowing and that our footprints were disappearing under fresh fall. Rather than winter idyll, my thought now was that it was a metaphor for the exploitation of the sisyphean working-class under free-market capitalism. This was definitely one of those rare cases of stuff looking better on a Christmas card than it was in real life.

*Song composed in 1934, pre-decolonization and before the spread of racial-equality and anti-imperialism norms.
**Blog-post also composed in 1934.

A view from an unlikely source

2008-12-06T14:19:00.002-05:00

Where would you think this statement came from?:

Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being. As a solitary being, he attempts to protect his own existence and that of those who are closest to him, to satisfy his personal desires, and to develop his innate abilities. As a social being, he seeks to gain the recognition and affection of his fellow human beings, to share in their pleasures, to comfort them in their sorrows, and to improve their conditions of life. Only the existence of these varied, frequently conflicting, strivings accounts for the special character of a man, and their specific combination determines the extent to which an individual can achieve an inner equilibrium and can contribute to the well-being of society. It is quite possible that the relative strength of these two drives is, in the main, fixed by inheritance. But the personality that finally emerges is largely formed by the environment in which a man happens to find himself during his development, by the structure of the society in which he grows up, by the tradition of that society, and by its appraisal of particular types of behavior. The abstract concept "society" means to the individual human being the sum total of his direct and indirect relations to his contemporaries and to all the people of earlier generations. The individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he depends so much upon society—in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence—that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society. It is "society" which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought; his life is made possible through the labor and the accomplishments of the many millions past and present who are all hidden behind the small word “society.”
...
However, while the whole life process of ants and bees is fixed down to the smallest detail by rigid, hereditary instincts, the social pattern and interrelationships of human beings are very variable and susceptible to change. Memory, the capacity to make new combinations, the gift of oral communication have made possible developments among human being which are not dictated by biological necessities. Such developments manifest themselves in traditions, institutions, and organizations; in literature; in scientific and engineering accomplishments; in works of art. This explains how it happens that, in a certain sense, man can influence his life through his own conduct, and that in this process conscious thinking and wanting can play a part.

Albert Einstein, in an article titled "Why Socialism?"

Triumphalism - is it so wrong?

2008-11-16T14:05:00.002-05:00

Obama and the World: Introduction

2008-11-14T01:38:00.005-05:00

The election is finally over and now it's time to think about how the U.S. is going to interact with the world under an Obama administration. Considering that I am an International Relations scholar first and foremost (and hackish political pundit only in my spare time) I am going to spend the next few posts analyzing how I think Obama's administration is going to deal with the various foreign policy challenges that are coming down the pike in the next few years, with an emphasis on diplomatic issues. Diplomacy is a pretty nebulous concept, so I will be hoping to unpack it to help make sense of what is going on in various regions.

At the most basic level, it seems people in general have high hopes for Obama. The world clearly wanted him to win in a big way prior to the election. Take a look at this very pretty interactive Gallup poll that Foreign Policy Magazine had on their website in the run-up to the elections; I'll be referring to it in subsequent posts. The numbers are pretty striking. If the world had a candidate it supported, it was generally Obama, and then overwhelmingly so. McCain only had more support in Georgia, the Philippines, and Cambodia (Laos is within what I imagine was the polls margin of error - usually +/-3%).

But look carefully at the map. Certainly, the West was heavily invested in this election and very pro-Obama. Middle-Eastern countries and China - i.e. the tricky areas - tended to not have an opinion on who should win, or if they did, said they didn't think it would make a difference. This is a bit of cold water in the face of people who think the whole world is as happy with Obama's win as the people who are reading this blog might be(all three of them).

This evidence is further supported by the interactive map at Pew, which is even more fun. While McCain was truly despised the world over, there is not a huge amount of support for Obama in geo-strategically significant areas outside of the West.

The Obama administration is not going to get it easy at the start in other words. In fact, there is a chance that they may be tested early on. But, based on the policy direction that Obama outlined during his campaign, as well as his response to issues such as the Georgia-Russia war(?) in August, I think he is going to help the U.S. adjust to a changing world, bring allies closer together, and calmly but firmly put challengers back in their boxes.

So consider this the prologue to a number of discussions/predictions on what an Obama administration might do in the world. I will have separate posts on the Middle-East & Iraq, China, U.S. allies/Europe/NATO, Afghanistan and the Global War on Terror (though I just found out yesterday that it is no longer called that), and maybe even Climate Change (I haven't decided yet).

But to start with in the next post, I will go with everyone's favorite new Hollywood-esque threat: Putin's..er Medvedev's Russia.

Would YOU like to be the Great Satan?

2008-11-13T22:56:00.004-05:00

Two pieces of writing have recently come to my attention regarding US policy towards Iran. This paper by some people at the University of North Texas uses, of all things, an event history model to address what they call ``The Podhoretz Argument''. This is the idea that the most effective strategy by which to redress the threat of Iran is for the United States to employ military force to eliminate Iran’s nuclear capability. Enterline et al look at the relations between the US and opponents from 1945-2002 and find that:

`` our model shows strong support for the idea that American military clashes reduce, rather than extend, the durability of peace following a use of military force. Historically, American military clashes have sharply reduced the durability of peace afterward, although this effect diminishes the longer the United States and an opponent go without fighting again. We note a similar effect in terms of the number of fatalities produced by a military interaction; specifically, the greater the number of fatalities resulting from a military interaction between the United States and an opponent, the less durable the peace between them afterward. Undoubtedly, there is a selection effect at work here, such that the United States is most likely to be involved in high casualty clashes with those states with which it has the most hostile relationships. Nevertheless, this historical tendency runs in direct contrast to Podhoretz’s argument.''

Then, on Duck of Minerva, there is this interesting argument that Obama's willingness to talk to Iran could cause a legitimacy crisis for the regime because they have premised so much of their foreign policy rhetoric on denouncing the US as the Great Satan. As Peter observes, ``Its a terrible thing to take away one's enemy''

Bottom line: I don't think we should bomb Iran.

The GOP is eating its young

2008-11-12T13:18:00.006-05:00

Sorry I have been away for so long. Friends came in from out of town, there was an election, and I am officially up to my eyes in disgusting statistics.

I thought I'd take a few minutes to comment on the current civil war that is brewing in the GOP, between the lunatic fringe and the dwindling moderate conservatives. That these two groups should eventually clash was somewhat inevitible. Nixon's Southern Strategy met with the Goldwater conservatism of the 60s and set the Republican party up to be able to marry the social issues of race and religion to economic issues of lower taxes and free market liberalism. The apogee of this strategy was seen in the coming of Reagan, who managed to obliterate Carter (and later Mondale) by snatching a huge amount of blue-collar Regean Democrats: people who were democrats on economic issues but conservatives on social ones. With them in tow, the Republicans stomped to victory.

Ah...the glory days.

However, such a coalition could not last forever. In this election cycle the big tent, already creaking, finally splintered. The proximate cause can be found in Sarah Palin, but I think the tensions were already showing. Nonetheless, Plain acts as a good symbol of what both sides expected from the party. Moderate Republicans saw Palin as a cynical choice but good enough to get them the tax breaks they wanted; radical Republicans genuinely liked her, much more than they liked McCain. As the election proceeded, moderate Republicans began to jump the sinking ship - many citing Palin as the problem; whereas the radicals complained she was being stifled.

Here, in microcosm, we saw the inconsistencies of the last 30 years of the Reagan coalition. Since the 70s moderates were happy to have the rubes along, provided the rubes didn't get ahead of themselves. But the rubes, however, saw moderates as as pointy-headed as liberals, and certainly had no intention of bowing to them. In time, the rubes ran for office and won. Consider the Republican primaries. 3 of the 10 candidates did not believe in evolution. The words lunatics and asylum jump into the mind.

Now, with the election over, both sides are blaming each other. Moderate republicans are holding their heads in their hands, wondering what went wrong, suggesting the Republicans redefine their brand and ditch backwoods politics. The Radicals argue that the campaign was insufficiently nutso in flavour and are advocating that Republicans tack even further right.

I have been enjoying the public weeping no end. I can remember the time when these thugs were intimidating everyone around them and slowly driving America into ruin and pulling the world along with them. So nice to see them in the wilderness. Even better for my schadenfreude is the public battling and purging that is going on. Any time a moderate jumped ship they were harrassed as traitors and heretics. Now with the election over, McCainites and Palinites are blaming each other for the loss. It seems to me that the radical side - as one might expect from a group which has a, let's say, instrumental view towards democracy - are baying for the most blood. The best example of this is "Operation Leper", the goal of which is to:

[track] down all the people from the McCain campaign now whispering smears against Governor Palin to [journalist] Carl Cameron and others...We intend to constantly remind the base about these people, monitor who they are working for, and, when 2012 rolls around, see which candidates hire them. Naturally then, you'll see us go to war against those candidates.

This program has the backing of loony-in-chief, Michelle Malkin.

The despair, the rage, the desperation. What can I tell you? I'm loving it.

Above: Ann Coulter and David Frum debate what went wrong

Epigraph to a phd dissertation...

2008-11-11T09:07:00.003-05:00

From Mr Sludge, "The Medium"

by Robert Browning

And all this might be, may be, and with good help

Of a little lying shall be: so, Sludge lies!

Why, he’s at worst your poet who sings how Greeks

That never were, in Troy which never was,

Did this or the other impossible great thing!…

But why do I mount to poets? Take plain prose—

Dealers in common sense, set these at work,

What can they do without their helpful lies?

Each states the law and fact and face o’ the thing

Just as he’d have them, finds what he thinks fit,

Is blind to what missuits him, just records

What makes his case out, quite ignores the rest.

It’s a History of the World, the Lizard Age,

The Early Indians, the Old Country War,

Jerome Napoleon, whatsoever you please,

All as the author wants it. Such a scribe

You pay and praise for putting life in stones,

Fire into fog, making the past your world.

There’s plenty of ‘How did you contrive to grasp

The thread which led you through this labyrinth?

How build such solid fabric out of air?

How on so slight foundation found this tale?

Biography, narrative?’ or, in other words,

‘How many lies did it require to make

The portly truth you here present us with?’

International Relations 101 #2

2008-11-04T17:01:00.003-05:00

As an example of the effective integration of theory and substantive questions, I would like to submit the example of Ruth Lane from American University, who wrote an article (gated) in the latest (Oct 08) PS: Political Science and Politics. She writes about teaching a class in comparative politics, rather than IR, so her substantive conclusions and reading list are not relevant. But, the general approach seems to hit the target that I outlined in my previous post. Her major point is that introducing game theory as an organizing principle enables a theoretically sophisticated way to analyze international phenomena. At this point I can hear the mental red flags going up in anyone within political science. The point here is not that science isn't science without multivariable calculus being involved. Rather, Lane's use of game theoretic concepts helps students focus on the ``players, goals, strategies, and outcomes'' as well as the interdependence or independence of action. This, she claims, has beneficial effects. When students find out about a policy they often simply say that it has been put into effect. In Lane's class

``they are then challenged to redefine such opaque reports with game theory's sharp questions: who exactly were the players (who proposed the policy, who opposed it), what were their goals (stated and unstated), why did the interaction result in this particular outcome (how did the players see the payoffs and choose their strategies?)? This makes an important pedagogical point, that events do not just happen but are part of an ongoing battle between social forces of various types. Game theory provides essential tools to undertake what might otherwise be an unguided journey.''

But game theory is the complete antithesis of a focus on substantive phenomena! Lane complements the use of game theoretic concepts with what she calls idiographic studies that are `interesting' and `make learning a pleasure'. I wonder what kind of idiographic studies we have in IR. Maybe this would include a history book on the Cuban Missile Crisis or some contemporary foreign policy, like Dennis Ross's Statecraft. I think that this concept could be taken further though. Lane uses some books that are chosen more for their accessibility and wow factor than their scholarly rigor. She even assigns a travel book for the material on China. I can see the immediate criticism here (to echo someone I was speaking to recently about teaching), i.e., ``It's not supposed to be fun, it's supposed to be informative!'' The response here is that choosing readable material, rather than a textbook (for god's sake, this isn't chemistry), is aimed at effective pedagogy, not infotainment. If a non-theoretical book is assigned, with the aim of providing accessible information on a substantive empirical topic, and then the events are analyzed using either game-theoretic concepts or constructivist theories, then I don't see how this can be dismissed as `fun'. I do think that there might be a problem with finding accessible accounts of international phenomena, or maybe it is just that those are not the books that I am reading at the moment.

Next, I'll cannibalize another article for concrete ways to teach game theory to IR undergrads.

International Relations 101 #1

2008-10-27T14:39:00.005-04:00

I've been thinking for a long time about what a good ``Intro to IR'' class might look like. I have experienced several, both at the undergraduate and graduate level, but I feel like there is something systematically wrong with the way that IR theory is presented to students. It is possible that this problem is due to the way that IR scholars think about IR theory, but I will bracket this issue (perhaps for later discussion). The immediate motivation for my current post was this post over at Worlds Apart about what he calls the `Baylis and Smith' approach to IR theory after an undergraduate textbook edited by these two scholars.

This approach treats the field of international relations as an ongoing debate between proponents of between three and a half dozen theoretical approaches (depending on how eclectic the course/tutor/academic institution is) ... [B]y pigeon-holing approaches into one of a few theoretical positions, it has intellectually and pedagogically unhealthy consequences.

What he seems to mean by this is the idea that IR theory is best understood by starting with the idea that there are a number of competing `paradigms' or theoretical traditions and then learning ``what they are'', i.e. what Realism is, what Neo-Liberal Institutionalism is, etc. etc. Some challenges to this approach might take the position that what is really important is to add to this list of paradigms, in that it is important to include constructivism, feminism, critical theory (Marxism?) et al. I claim that this is misguided. The problem with teaching IR theory in the `B&S' way is not that it limits the exposure of students to theoretical viewpoints. The problem is, or the problems are, that these paradigms are not internally coherent and so do not provide us with guidance about analyzing substantive topics of international politics, AND that the focus is then on the theories as theories, rather than on theories as ways of understanding substantive questions/phenomena. If we put the practical application of IR theory at the forefront of the pedagogical enterprise, this should have several effects:

1) students will understand why IR theory is important

2) students will be aware that theory is imperfect, in the sense that assumptions and simplification are inevitable and even desirable sometimes

3) students will be able to explain phenomena theoretically when they successfully complete the course, rather than only be able to delineate where Realism stops and critical theory starts (a largely fruitless enterprise and not one that is or should be at the center of a scientific discipline - solving conceptual problems is important, but not one that undergraduates should necessarily be doing on day one) or recite potted, atheoretical accounts of terrorism, humanitarian intervention or whatever.

By `practical application' I don't mean policy oriented. There is a place for policy prescription and it is professional MA programs, not undergraduate or doctoral programs in political science departments. By practical application I mean the ability to take some international situation and explain it in a way that would not be possible without having learned the theories in the class; hopefully in a more sophisticated way. This sounds all fine and dandy, but how can we go about addressing substantive questions while still maintaining theoretical emphasis? One example will be in my next post.

Total Recall for total real

2008-10-24T16:20:00.006-04:00

Now my paranoid rants will seem even more plausible:

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US researchers have said they are able to selectively erase memories from mice in a laboratory, raising hopes human memory afflictions like post-traumatic stress syndrome can one day be cured.

"Targeted memory erasure is no longer limited to the realm of science fiction," the research team headed by Joe Tsien, from the Brain and Behavior Discovery Institute at the Medical College of Georgia, said in Thursday's issue of Cell Press magazine.

The new technique, which the team stress is at a very early stage, could be applied one day to the human brain to erase traumatic memories or deep-set fears, and leave all other memories unaffected.

....

Tsien said the technique might one day be applied to war veterans who "often suffer from reoccurring traumatic memory replays after returning home."

...or to those who know too much

Signs of decline in US authority?

2008-10-22T07:53:00.003-04:00

With the US having lost moral authority during the `war on terror' and the occupation of Iraq, and with its position as global economic and financial hegemon looking shaky, other states are less in awe of it. In this article two senior British officials criticize US counterterrorism policy. Shocker, you say. But these are not 2nd-year vegetarian philosophy undergrads; you know it is serious when M from James Bond is criticizing your intelligence activities. And a worrying point that Americans should take notice of is that it is apparently no longer taboo to bring 9/11 into a discussion of terrorism NOT as part of the justification for anything the US does:

The response to Sept. 11 was "a huge overreaction," Dame Stella told The Guardian newspaper in an interview published on on Saturday.

I'm not sure that the US would want to suddenly install CCTV everywhere (not that it would be feasible in a place where the pavements are 17 times bigger than would be considered seemly in little Britain), but the difference between a criminal prosecution and global military action is not an insignificant one. Also, with recent reverses in the curtailment of civil rights in the UK, it appears as if the US rush to suspend liberties is not an inevitable nor necessary piece of the process. As the head of the Crown Prosecution Service in the UK said:

"Of course, you can have the Guántanamo model," he said. "You can have the model which says that we cannot afford to give people their rights, that rights are too expensive because of the nature of the threats we are facing.

"Or you can say, as I prefer to, that our rights are priceless. That the best way to face down those threats is to strengthen our institutions rather than to degrade them."

(in an aside, he was convicted of supplying marijuana at university but was only fined £75 - some evidence that minor drug offenses might be better off lightly punished than having a brain-spasmic-7-year-sentence reaction?)

On the subject of scapegoating ACORN

2008-10-17T19:44:00.003-04:00

Here it comes:

An ACORN community organizer received a death threat and the liberal activist group's Boston and Seattle offices were vandalized Thursday, reflecting mounting tensions over its role in registering 1.3 million mostly poor and minority Americans to vote next month.

Really great

The Great Transformation III: Society's Backlash

2008-10-16T11:35:00.010-04:00

This follows from this and this.

Last week we saw the McCain camp take a turn towards a very ugly form of populism during campaign rallies, which basically amounted to asking who was the "real" Barack Obama; the implication being that he was some sort of alien 'other'. This type of paranoid fantasizing has been a staple of modern American conservatism; as a cursory glance at right-wing blogs can testify.
The "black helicopter" crowd in the U.S. were around all during the Clinton era, so in some ways, there should be no surprise to see them around in this election cycle (and certainly long into a Obama presidency: see this comments page).

What was surprising about last week, however, was the open (and extremely cynical) way that the McCain camp - desperate to alter the media narrative - decided to just go for it, take these memes out of the fringe, and put them directly into the campaign.

This is a unsettling strategy for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is simply not good for democratic discourse for politicians to be suggesting that their political opponents may or may not be traitors. This type of discourse should be left to the fringe. Bringing it into the mainstream gives it a a legitimacy that it does not deserve.

Secondly, there is a lot of rage out there. This is understandable as the it looks like the world is heading for the crapper, but this is not a constructive way to direct this anger, and - if it continues - is truly worrying. This type of smearing is especially destabilizing to democracy when the speaker knows full well that people will buy into it; leading audience members to shout out "kill him" or suggest Obama is a terrorist,

Think I am exaggerating about how disturbing this might be? Even the mainstream media in the U.S. - which usually tortures itself by trying to present everything in terms of moral equivalency - had commentators speaking out:

CNN contributor David Gergen, who has advised Democratic and Republican presidential administrations, said Thursday that the negative tone of these rallies is "incendiary" and could lead to violence. "There is this free floating sort of whipping around anger that could really lead to some violence. I think we're not far from that," he said. "I think it's really imperative that the candidates try to calm people down."

Thirdly, once you let the genie out of the bottle, it may not be as easy to put back in - as McCain has found out since his campaign realised that this tactic was not helping him in the polls.

When you link these points together, there is cause for genuine concern. There has always been a radical fringe in American politics. However, for it to surface so openly at the same time that there is a economic crisis - which makes a radical message that more attractive - has a distinct whiff of the 1930s about it. This is, in other words, one potential societal backlash that might be occurring as part of the global meltdown. Just as Polanyi predicted, the right rises in such economically dislocating times times.

Of course, it is a little too easy to dismiss one's political opponents and call them fascists just because they like flags, or are socially conservative, or choose slogans such as "Country First". I am not suggesting that anyone who does not share my political persuasion is further right that Joseph Goebbels. Plenty of conservatives are fully democratic, intelligent, and able to defend their intellectual positions.

However, there is a real darkness going on in these fringe movements that has a definite crypto-fascist element, and which is frightening when it is dragged out from under its rock. Take a look at this video, of a rally in Ohio to see an example of what I mean.

These people are displaying many of the key features which would make them susceptible to right-wing movements.
First, and most obviously, they are highly emotional and are reaching conclusions about the world based on how they feel rather than their basis in fact (are we really to believe that that woman had heard of Palin before she heard of Obama, for example?).
Secondly, it is not clear what people in this movement are for so much as what they are against. Fascism is a classically anti-intellectual movement partly because it has to be, as its theoretical edifice is often incoherent (it is egalitarian whilst also hierarchical; it believes in private property except when it doesn't etc). Therefore the unifying component of fascism - what brings many people together to believe in it - is its strong sense of what it doesn't like. Aside from the unifying themes of flag and country (which right-wingers get to define in ultra-nationalist terms of their own choosing), fascist movements are negative about other movements and political positions, without have a clear unifying program of their own.

Part of this process of negation is done by identifying what you don't like in your opponents, and saying you believe the opposite. So if you hate liberals and liberals believe in global warming, then you don't believe in global warming. If they believe in evolution, then you don't. This can help explain how otherwise intelligent people believe that man ran with dinosaurs just a few hundred years before the pyramids were built (this also once again highlights the anti-intellectual element of such movements).

It also leads to scapegoating of your enemies and holding them responsible for your own failures, or failures in general. I was wondering for a while who the right-wingers were going to hold responsible for the economic catastrophe of late. I would have put my money on "liberals" as they are generally held up by the Right as everything that is wrong with the U.S., or the immigrants and foreigners as they always get it. Perhaps unsurprising it seems that black America and the voter-registration group Acorn are being held involved and responsible, at least by many of the nuttier groups.

All of this wouldn't matter if it weren't for two things. As I said, the backlash against the status quo is beginning. Although (thankfully) this right-wing populism does not look like it will dominate the discourse in any way, and that calmer heads are prevailing, it is present and liable to become stronger and certainly more shrill; especially once its coalition partner (e.g. the mainstream Republican party) gets thrown out of power. The other worrying issue is that these headbangers really are dangerous. They have a documented history of violence in the U.S.. They have extremely noxious eliminationist views gowards their political opponents. And they are they are feeling threatened.

It seems like a sensible administration is about to come just in time.

NB: Orcinus is a very good site for tracking these issues

Update: This is exactly what I am talking about

Update II: And this

Update III: Sigh...and this

Um, honey?

2008-10-15T16:31:00.006-04:00

One problem that I have and that I see others having is just what the concept of probability is supposed to be doing for us. My lawyer gf was reading me some statistics from a survey on divorce the other day and two of the (paraphrased) questions were

1) What percentage of marriages end in divorce?

2) What is the probability that your marriage will end in divorce?

The answers to 1) were pretty accurate; median answer around 40%. However, the median answer to 2) is 0%. Now, one of the points of the survey was that people can't realize their own potential for getting divorced, but I was struck by the view of probability that was inherent in the way the question was asked. Usually, when I am thinking about probability, I think in terms of properties of empirical data, i.e. what is the probability that a rich male from Connecticut votes Republican? Probability is here just a simple proportion; those who do, over the total. There is another step to be made, extrapolating from the data you have to the whole population. This is not really the same idea that is inherent in question 2). Part of the idea here, as I see it, is that probability is an epistemological property. So, if I don't know whether something is going to happen, I can theoretically estimate whether it is going to happen or not by thinking about the possible things that could happen and then putting the amount of possible worlds in which the outcome obtains over the total amount of possible worlds. So, if we think about re-running history, maybe sometimes we would get divorced, and maybe sometimes we wouldn't.

How would we go about thinking about this? One way to get a grip on what possible worlds there are, is that we can look at other existing situations as an approximation of how our lives might go. But this is a different enterprise from thinking about our own lives being re-run again and again. If history was run again, it would be exactly the same (I make no apology for being a causal determinist - quantum mechanics be damned), so the probability (as an ontological concept) that I will get divorced is 1 (if I do) and 0 (if I don't). I don't know whether I will or not and my best guess as to whether I will is by using other people's experiences. So, it is inconsistent to say that on average 40% of people get divorced but that my own probability of getting divorced is anything other than 40%.

My girlfriend was not best pleased with this discussion.

Now you're talking smack...

2008-10-11T12:37:00.005-04:00

Every so often, someone says something about the `forgotten war' in Afghanistan. I didn't realize, but there are 50000 troops in Afghanistan right now, with some countries sending more soon. It also looks like there is going to be some mission creep, with NATO forces now targeting the drug trade. The Taliban insurgency is now making $100 million a year providing Europe with 90 per cent of its heroin. Mission creep is almost never a good idea. In Somalia in 1992-93, UNITAF did a pretty good job at doing what it was tasked to do by the UN Security Council - provide a secure environment for the delivery of humanitarian aid. When UNITAF was replaced by UNOSOM II and the mandate changed to the establishment of state institutions, it was the inadequate trying to solve the insurmountable. I can't see a good end to the Afghanistan war if victory or success is going to be judged by how much Afghanistan looks like Denmark in 2010. I don't want to succumb to the wickedness of patriotism, but it seems to me that the Brits have a more pragmatic view of the matter:

The British commander on the ground, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, warned this week it would be impossible to defeat the Taliban and even suggested that dialogue be opened with some sections of the Taliban.

That is a Realism I can appreciate; prescriptive/normative outlook rather than analytical position. If this seems like `defeat' to anybody, this kind of decision sounds like the `divide-and-rule' strategy that was so effective in colonizing India (whether you think that was a good idea or not). The recent book Failing to Win: Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics, the winner of the ISA Best Book Award for 2008, focuses on situations where objective measures do not line up with subjective perceptions of victory or defeat. One of the points to come out of that was that defining victory beyond your capacity to deliver invites disappointment and other negative outcomes, like loss of office for leaders. There may be rhetorical limits to what can be claimed for Afghanistan, but it seems to me that if the drug trade in the US, UK and other states with high capacity, no language barrier and relatively compliant population is resistant to policing, it can only be worse in the 7th most failed state in the world.

Add to this the conclusions of a US State Department report in 2002, in which it said that the Taleban regime both cut heroin production by 95% and was financed by it (I say, that's a bit rummy, what?), and I am left unable to choose between several overlapping possibilities:

1) The Taleban are both ideologically opposed to and materially dependent on heroin production, and are daily wringing their hands over their ill-gotten gains,

2) The opium production is not actually being run by an organized group of ex-islamic studies students,

3) The US/NATO are trying to delegitimize the warlords they are not friends with in Afghanistan by saying they are both Islamic fundamentalists and drug kingpins

4) The US/NATO don't really know what is going on or what to do about it.

I'd like to point out that I don't have a clear plan for victory either. However, if the developed nations are running out of cash by giving it all away (viz Davy's bailout posts), maybe soon we won't be able to afford foreign expeditions like this for much longer.

The Great Transformation II: Economics and Society

2008-10-10T20:05:00.003-04:00

In one of my inaugural posts I was discussing the bailout and the importance that Congress ensure that it had oversight power when I finished on this point:

"Solving" the financial crisis by only helping the financial sector - which is responsible for this to begin with - will not enamour ordinary people very much to the governing classes. In fact, such a situation will not only enrage most people; it will enrage them at a time when we can expect day-to-day life to become seriously tough for the next few years. Such an environment is a breeding ground for radical politics. Considering the current state of political discourse in the U.S., this something that should not be encouraged.

I said I'd come back to that point and here I am. That first post was called "The Great Transformation" in reference to a book of the same name by a theorist called Karl Polanyi. Polanyi was a Austrian who fled to the U.S. in the 1930s to escape the rise of fascism. Here he worked on his book which was published in 1944. His central question was where did fascism come from, and the answer he gives seems especially relevant in today's climate.

The basic argument runs as follows:
We are inculcated to believe that "the market" is some sort of asocial and universal entity that exists in of itself (this belief is probably more prevalent today than it even was in Polanyi's time). Markets are considered to operate with a law-like regularity much like gravity. It is this belief system that leads people and organizations such as the WTO to argue for things such as "market access rights" or against "interference in the market". The market is a natural system that exists independent of man, and is only screwed up when we stick our hands in and interfere. This is the fundamental principle of the Chicago School of Economics and the Washington Consensus, for example.

I use the phrase "belief system" intentionally for, as Polanyi points out, there is no natural market system that exists independently of human beings. On the contrary the natural market requires a huge and conscious intervention by society in order to survive. There cannot be a functioning market without contract enforcement, laws, courts, means of exchange, credit etc. How many successful markets do you see in governance-free zones such as Mogadishu or Darfur? In other words the market is a social construction that is embedded in society.

The danger before WWII, according to Polanyi (thought the logic applies for contemporary times too), was when people advocated for markets being disembedded and being allowed to act "naturally". When this occurred elements of society such as land and labour were treated as if they were market commodities. However, they were not. Land cannot suddenly reproduce itself if demand requires it too, as commodities do. Labour cannot suddenly retrain itself so it can "flow" into new opportunities ,as capital can. To treat them as if they can is to generate massive strains and tensions in society as people and land becomes increasingly subject to extremely anti-social and repressive systems of governance. All in the name of the "natural" market.

At the expense of overstating the point, the entire edifice of markets is a social construction designed to legitimate the rule of the richest in the world. Yet the more that this market disembeds itself from society the more dangerous and unstable society becomes. For as Polanyi points out, the only natural part of this whole story of disembedding is that at some point there is a backlash and people revolt. The exact nature of this revolt is uncertain, according to Polanyi, but not the fact that it happens. The fact of revolt is natural. In Germany this revolt manifested itself in the form of fascism, where Jews and other marginal elements were blamed for society's woes, as the German state began to re-embed the market into a new, and crazy-warped society.

This is why I argued that further removing the market from the control of the people would not solve its problems, but probably only hasten its own demise by generating some form of backlash. The possible nature of that backlash is the subject of my next post.

Normativity in Public Discourse

2008-10-10T10:00:00.003-04:00

Having zero expertise on the financial crisis, and thinking Davy is doing a bang-up job of sorting it out, I'm going to post on something different. I want to talk a little about the normative/positive distinction and why it is so difficult for people to make this distinction consistently. Basically, a normative statement is one that includes the idea that something SHOULD be the case, and a positive statement holds that something IS the case. Undergraduates (the motivation for my recent thoughts on the matter) often seem unaware of this distinction. For example, John Mearsheimer's claim that war is a recurrent feature of international politics and the claim that this should not be the case are not inconsistent with each other. Claiming that the Holocaust happened is different from saying that you think it was a good idea.

Sorting out which is which goes beyond undergrads struggling with a paper. It strikes me in the face all the time while I am watching political speeches, debates or adverts. Recent use by the McCain campaign and Sarah Palin of a quote by Barack Obama that US troops in Afghanistan are "air-raiding villages and killing civilians" is a prime example. There is little doubt that US troops are in fact doing this. So, why should Obama get flack for stating an empirical fact? It must be because saying this is being interpreted to have some normative content as well as the descriptive content. Maybe there is something in the latent US cultural militarism that requires Americans to say that US troops are doing a great job, or maybe it is an aversion to the idea that US troops are not winning (both also possible motivations behind the blind acceptance of the claim that "the surge worked"). It could even be something to do with the idea that America is "the greatest force for good in the world" and if this is true then US troops can't possibly have killed anyone who wasn't a terrorist.

Actually, Obama's quote was itself probably being used to imply normative claims. I doubt that he went on to say "... and that is a great thing". But you could do so and not be logically inconsistent. It comes as no surprise that political rhetoric doesn't play by logical rules, but maybe this is something that is theoretically interesting. The process by which statements of fact become proxies for moral/normative positions and how this can be manipulated (I'm looking at you Karl Rove) seems like it is important politically. Practically speaking, the quality of public discourse suffers from excessive simplification if there is no way to distinguish between what is and what should be the case. The only reason I can think of that this kind of discourse is effective and proliferating is that people do not consciously make the normative/positive distinction when they are thinking about stuff in general and politics in particular.

Palin's debate

2008-10-04T22:00:00.002-04:00

Another graph. Graphs are my thing today.

Hat tip: Kiss my Big Blue Butt

No more worrying about the economic crisis for me

2008-10-04T13:04:00.006-04:00

I have been very busy so apologies for the lack of posting. But the good news - em, at least for me - is that I don't need to worry about the crisis anymore. In my case, this chart reads all the way down the left side with nary a divergence.

It's nice for some

"Maybe this thing ain't men at all"

2008-09-30T15:08:00.004-04:00

In a previous post, I made a structural argument for what is taking place. Steinbeck makes the argument more convincingly:

Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshipped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling. If a bank or a finance company owned the land, the owner man said, The Bank —or the Company— needs—wants—insists—must have—as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them. These last would take no responsibility for the banks or the companies because they were men and slaves, while the banks were machines and masters all at the same time. Some of the owner men were a little proud to be slaves to such cold and powerful masters.

..................

Well, it's too late. And the owner men explained the workings and the thinkings of the monster that was stronger than they were. "A man can hold land if he can just eat and pay taxes; he can do that."

"Yes, he can do that until his crops fail one day and he has to borrow money from the bank.”

“But—you see, a bank or a company can't do that, because those creatures don't breathe air, don't cat side-meat. They breathe profits; they eat the interest on money. If they don't get it, they die the way you die without air, without side-meat. It is a sad thing, but it is so. It is just so."

..................

"It's not me. There's nothing I can do. I'II lose my job if I don't do it. And look—suppose you kill me? They'll just hang you, but long before you're hung there'll be another guy on the tractor, and he'll bump the house down. You're not killing the right guy."

"That's so," the tenant said. “Who gave you orders? I'll go after him. He's the one to kill."

“You're wrong. He got his orders from the bank. The bank told him, 'Clear those people out or it's your job.'"

"Well, there's a president of the bank. There's a board of directors. I'll fill up the magazine of the rifle and go into the bank."

The driver said, "Fellow was telling me the bank gets orders from the East. The orders were, 'Make the land show profit or we'll close you up.' "

“But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don't aim to starve to death before I kill the man that's starving me."

"I don't know. Maybe there's nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn't men at all. Maybe, like you said, the property's doing it. Anyway I told you my orders."

“I got to figure," the tenant said. "We all got to figure. There’s some way to stop this. It's not like lightning or earthquakes. We've got a bad thing made by men, and by God that's something we can change." The tenant sat in his doorway, and the driver
thundered his engine and started off, tracks falling and curving, harrows combing, and the phalli of the seeder slipping into the ground. Across the dooryard the tractor cut, and the hard, foot-beaten ground was seeded field, and the tractor cut through again; the uncut space was ten feet wide. And back he came. The iron guard bit into the housecorner, crumbled the wall, and wrenched the little house from its foundation so that it fell sideways, crushed like a bug. And the driver was goggled and a rubber mask covered his nose and mouth. The tractor cut a straight line on, and the air and the ground vibrated with its thunder. The tenant man stared after it, his rifle in his hand. His wife was beside him, and the quiet children behind. And all of them stared after the tractor.

Read the whole chapter here. Better yet, read the whole book. It's worth it for the end alone.

I'm so lonely

2008-09-29T22:48:00.004-04:00

A few people have told me that they are reading this blog (thanks mum). I have no added the "Followers" gadget on the sidebar so that you can publicly proclaim yourself and I will know that I am talking to someone.

The Blame Game

2008-09-29T16:56:00.007-04:00

Well folks, here it is. The world is officially going to hell. In the face a serious disaster House Republicans (and some Dems - but credit where credit's due) decided to vote along ideological grounds - or to save their congressional seats - and show Wall St. who's boss by taking a big knife and cutting off all our noses.

That will teach, uh, someone..?

As result of the bill failing to pass the DOW had its single biggest drop in history: a whopping 777 points (I foresee this number being the answer to an IPE question for undergrads 40 years from now*).

One of the big questions which has been an integral part of the story so far - and is going to become a bigger and bigger one as time goes on - is who do we blame for this mess? In big disasters there is often a tendency for some to deride the "blame game" (a term I hate) as unhelpful and besides the point. We're in a disaster; get on with it. For example:

Representative Maxine Waters, a Democrat, said the measure was vital to help financial institutions survive and keep people in their homes. “There’s plenty of blame to go around,” she said, and attaching blame should come later.

However, apportioning blame and responsibility is hugely important for a number of reasons, and correctly locating the source of the problem should be a big part of what happens as soon as the fire is finally (ever?) put out.

Why?

Well, somebody is going to be blamed; so we might as well get it right. People apportion blame differently, often according to their levels of education. Following Hurricane Katrina, people at higher levels of sophistication were likely to blame the states, people with lower levels were likely to blame the President (the relevant study is here though is behind a paywall). The point is someone is going to get it either way.

Already the debate is beginning. The generally populist view - and much of the way the that the media is telling this - is that Wall St. got us here though unscrupulous practices and they deserve to suffer for it. Some on the right have (implausibly, in my opinion) argued that much of the fault lies not with Wall St. but with foolish borrowers who should have known better than to take the loans offered. In one instance, I heard one hack argue that banks were forced to give these risky loans due to the "Carter-Clinton" policies (yes, I noticed the 16 year hole in this argument too)which tried to make housing accessible to the less well-off. (Hat tip to Sadly, No! for this nugget and its rebuttal.) Others argue the political establishment is to blame: either for not passing the bailout right now; or for repealing regulatory legislation all the way back when.

So, in the midst of this crisis the "blame game" (ugh) has already begun. For many this is probably simply catharsis. In the middle of a mess it is nice to have a scapegoat for one's woes. Indeed, for many who may genuinely be responsible, shifting the blame may not only be a way of avoiding punishment, but it may be a way of telling themselves that it really isn't their fault at all. Cognitive dissonance studies have shown that when people make morally negative decisions they tell themselves that what they did really wasn't wrong. It's either do that, or admit to yourself that you're piece of nasty work. This second choice has a high psychological cost that many do not want to pay. It is less costly to convince yourself that it truly isn't your fault.

But aside from this motivated element of blame-assignment, there are more practical reasons to determine who or what is to blame.

Obviously, this is a big disaster that we're getting ourselves into and it is worth truly understanding what got us here. This is not just a simple matter of discovering which "facts" are more salient. Facts rarely speak for themselves, and in the social world many "facts" - poverty, the international system, democracy - are not readily apparent at all. Determining what did the analytical leg-work and when can help us better identify the causes of this event, and leave us better equipped to guess when the next one is on the way. (Of course, this wasn't an entire surprise; this crisis has been bubbling for about 18 months and many knew it was only a matter of time.) For me there are two large theoretical questions that must be asked which radically alter the way we assign blame for this crisis.

(A) When did this crisis begin?
For example, if it began with the repeal of the Glass-Steagal act, then our explanation would treat the crash as the final consequence of a process of increasingly risky financial transactions etc. which finally culminated in Congress allowing it all to go to hell. However, if we say that the crisis began last week, then Congress and its decisions feature prominently in the narrative and today's failure is the primary cause of the disaster. So locating the temporal precedence is important in determining the causal story.

(B) What caused the crisis?
This is the more critical question for us to understand as it means that in future we might spot the "thing" if it pops up again. It also lets us assign blame properly. Although I am no IPE expert (and therefore do not have an especially compelling explanation of my own) what we think "exists" is at the centre of this explanation. Bear with me as I take a small detour into theoretical wankese but what I am really talking about here is ontology - or our theory of "being". Do we think that there are broad social forces which have pushed this outcome along, for example? An argument that "capitalism" or the "market" is to blame means that we believe - at least for the purposes of analysis - that there is a structure bigger than the individuals involved which is forcing along the outcome. Anyone who has read War and Peace (a set which does not include me) might recognise such an argument. Tolstoy basically argues that "History" drives the actors on, and that individuals do not, in of themselves, have any real effect. Alternatively, if we don't believe in social forces or structure we may think that "CEOs, and their lobbyists in Congress" or "individual homeowners" are responsible. By prioritizing the individual and saying that they are the cause of the outcome we saying that they are therefore ultimately to blame. As Colin Wight points out many political arguments shift ontologies depending on whether the politician is trying to avoid blame (they say its the system) or assign it (they say its another politician or whoever).
This structure-agent problem dominates certain (sub)disciplines in social science - such as international relations - and the two concepts do not necessarily have to be mutually exclusive, although often they are (classical economists put all the explanation in the market, for example). At times, one might privilege structure over agency and vice versa.

My two-cents explanation is that at one time, the CEOs etc. did exercise their power and changed the system to their favour by having Glass-Steagal repealed. This individual action helped to alter the fundamental structure of the financial system, which in turn became the primary cause of outcomes from then on. In other words, I blame the "financial system" for the last 18 months of the crisis (brokers were just doing what brokers do) but ultimately I blame the individual private actors and politicians for setting the ball in motion back in 1999. I should note that this (half-baked) argument is heavily influenced by this very good book.

This populist conclusion is not out of the mainstream to say the least. As I will discuss in my next blog, however, the backlash against Wall St. - while cathartic - could usher in some nasty politics of its own.

*Yes I know it's 778 in the story, but that's only because they rounded up.

Campaign Suspended?

2008-09-25T13:07:00.002-04:00

Right

The politics of the financial crisis

2008-09-24T22:40:00.004-04:00

It seems that McCain is swooping in and saving the day. How wonderfully presidential. McCain has postponed his campaign and says he won't debate on Friday - the first time a debate will have been canceled since TV debates began - because the economic crisis is too serious. Instead, his campaign has suggested that Obama and McCain debate the day the VP candidates were supposed to face off. Biden and Palin will then have their debate, y'know, whenever.

I don't want to be a cynic all of the time but this is truly a load of horlicks if I ever saw it. McCain, who is not a member of any finance committee now suddenly wants to show up to help out, and this behavior is not influenced in any way by the new polls or by the fact that Obama is finally opening his war-chest and outspending McCain in the ad-market?

Also, I find it pretty hard to believe that the McCain camp were not trying to find any excuse not to have to have Palin have to respond to questions, if this performance is any indicator of what she might be like in the debate. Bear in mind this is only the third time she has taken questions since declaring her candidency.

Smashing.

Congress says, "Thanks but no thanks," to bailout to nowhere

2008-09-24T22:27:00.002-04:00

As I mentioned in a post two days ago, much of what is driving a quick adoption of a bailout for the stock market is the impending sense of doom. This was most apparent when it first hit last Thursday, but it still remains. A couple of hours ago Bush warned the U.S. that failure to adopt the $700 billion dollar bailout would result in a "long and painful recession."

Now, I am not suggesting that there isn't a crisis, but I am becoming increasingly skeptical that only Paulson's uberplan can save us.

In fact, it seems that a plan is close to being finalised and is far closer to a solution for the whole country; rather than just a Wall St. bailout. This plan is apparently 98% complete and

includes a strong provision for congressional oversight, limits executive pay, and would allow bankruptcy judges to adjust mortgages in order to help homeowners, among other items. In other words, the major Democratic priorities.

So it seems calmer heads have prevailed and that instead of the blank check Paulson had wanted last week, a much more nuanced and - ahem, accountable - plan is in the works. Let's hope they can get it out before Friday so McCain can stop making silly excuses for not turning up to debate.

The greatest philosopher of science in the 21st century?

2008-09-24T00:34:00.002-04:00

Donald Rumsfeld

Hat tip: Monkey Cage

Information Asymmetry and the Financial Crisis

2008-09-23T19:43:00.005-04:00

As the credit crisis continues it is becoming increasingly difficult to figure out what exactly is going on. Like most people, I am not an expert in economics so it is difficult to understand what is really causing the problem, how to fix it, and what to do next.

Last Friday, Treasury Secretary Paulson was arguing that the sky was about to fall unless intervention happened immediately. Said Paulson:

“There will be ample opportunity to debate the origins of this problem,” he said. “Now is the time to solve it.”

On Sunday he reiterated his point on a number of morning shows, arguing that there could be no time for debate and urging Congress to rush through a "clean" bill as fast as possible, although even then Congress was already beginning to push back a little.

Nonetheless, if you were like me last week, you were buying the urgency.

However, as a new week dawned, it started to become apparent that the deal may be as much a welfare package for banks as it was an emergency stopgap. Leading economists such as Paul Krugman were questioning why Paulson was seeking so much money and power in deal that gave so little to the taxpayer. By today, it seems Congress got properly skeptical. Charles Shumer even asked Paulson why not just $150 billion as opposed to $700? This evening I even read one journalist ask why - if credit is so "dried up" - is he still being offered plenty of loans? What gives?

If you are asking, "So, what is actually going on with the economy?", I don't know the answer. That wouldn't be so terrible if it also wasn't true that most people don't know the answer. As sophisticated a thinker as I might like to think I am, trying to fathom - never mind de-tangle - the inner workings of the financial markets is way beyond my abilities or training so I am left reading other experts, trying to figure out who to trust, and then coming to an educated - though variable - position.

Even though I am not sure what is exactly going on with the financial crisis, I am able to give a much stronger answer to the question, "What's going with Secretary Paulson and Congress?".

The answer to this problem lies in understanding the principal-agent problem.

The principal-agent problem has its origins in Economics but has been slowly imported into mainstream Political Science. Here is how it works. Often people want things done but may not posses the time or the skill to be able to do them themself. As a result, they employ an agent. The agent is hired to preform the job on the principal's behalf. But there are two elements which can negatively affect this relationship (at least for from the perspective of the principal): conflicting goals, and information asymmetry.

Consider the following example. One morning you get up, go out into the snow, and get into your car. When you turn the key in the ignition, nothing happens. You try again; nothing. You get out. You open the bonnet. You look inside. You touch a wire. You wonder can you electrocute yourself by touching a wire. You get back in the car. You get out again. You wander around the car. You curse. You have a small and very undignified tantrum. A neighbour sees you. You go back inside and call a mechanic to come tow the car.

A few days later you head over to the garage to see what happened to your car. You are obviously eager to get it back as fast as possible and as cheaply as possible. This is your goal. Unfortunately for you, this is not the mechanic's goal. His goal is to be able to charge as much as possible for repairing your car. So, conflicting goals.
Compounding this issue is an information asymmetry. You don't know what's wrong with your car. The mechanic does. This means it is difficult for you to asses for yourself whether the agent is doing his best for you. Furthermore, the mechanic knows it.
Voila: a principal-agent problem.

This is a popular concept in Poli Sci and appears a fair bit. Some examples:
Principal(s): The nations of the UN; Agent(s): The UN.
Principal(s): Citizens; Agent(s): Elected representatives.
Principal(s): The State; Agent(s): Bureaucracies.

So in this instance it breaks down as follows:
Principal(s): Taxpayers; Agent(s): Paulson (plus Bernanke).

It is clear from the get-go that Paulson had more information. When the crisis first struck last Thursday, Paulson ushered in leaders of both parties and painted a stark picture of what would happened if his counsel wasn't heeded:

"The room got very serious, very quickly," said a House Democratic aide who attended the session.
"When you listen to them describing this, you gulp," said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. He said he felt the weight of "history hanging over them" in the room.

Now, less than a week later, the same Schumer is starting to question Paulson. Why? Because he spoke to other experts. Importantly, he spoke to experts who had no stake in the outcome. It's the same logic that has you give a car-expert friend twenty bucks for coming to look at the new car you're about to buy. Once he has his twenty bucks, he has no reason for you to buy a dud. If anything, the twenty bucks as an incentive for him to give you accurate information (as you may ask him next time too).

So with the information asymmetry somewhat reduced, Congress is now more skeptical of a plan drawn-up by an ex-CEO of one of the investment banks that got us into this mess; a plan which would have allowed him to keep distributing golden parachutes to his chums while Joe Michigan gets his house pulled up from under him.

Perhaps Congress are wondering if the Agent has the same goals as the Principal.

The Great Transformation

2008-09-22T15:27:00.005-04:00

It seems that Paulson and chums may not be getting all they want in the big bailout. As I detailed yesterday, the bill that was originally being drafted would have given the Treasury Secretary complete and unreviewable discretion to control the entire $700 billion that was earmarked for the bailout. The key passage in the bill as it stood then, was this one:

Sec. 8. Review.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

It may be that it was generous terms such as these which had encouraged the market rally on Friday.

Since then, things have been moving very fast and it seems that the usually pliable Congress has realized that granting what will in practice be $1 trillion dollars in debt relief without any oversight may not be the most functional behavior for a democracy. Furthermore, the original bill had made no compensation for ordinary peons at the bottom of the trickle down effect. The plan was for banks to be bailed-out sufficiently well to be able to continue the hard work of ousting people in foreclosure.

Now Congress is demanding oversight, debt relief for the hard-up at the bottom of the pyramid, and a share in some of the future profits of these otherwise bankrupt institutions. This has not made Wall St. especially happy.

I am glad that Congress is trying to take charge of such an important and wide-reaching solution and has not handed dictatorial powers over to big-business just yet. If Congress fails to respond actively it will be extremely damaging to U.S. democracy in two ways.

1. Such a radical nationalization of business, without democratic accountability, pushes the U.S. further into a corporatist form of government. The idea that one individual, a previous head of Merril Lynch, who was appointed - not elected - to office, should be able to wield total control of what is left of the federal reserve is something that should make anyone - no matter how commited to fixing this problem, pause.

2. "Solving" the financial crisis by only helping the financial sector - which is responsible for this to begin with - will not enamour ordinary people very much to the governoring classes. In fact, such a situation will not only enrage most people; it will enrage them at a time when we can expect day-to-day life to become seriously tough for the next few years. Such an environment is a breeding ground for radical politics. Considering the current state of political discourse in the U.S., this something that should not be encouraged.

I will post further on this second point at a later date.

It's a slam dunk!

2008-09-22T15:00:00.003-04:00

Hopefully we can begin the attack as soon as possible.

There can be no doubt about the target.

Hat tip: Marginal Revolution

Understanding the financial crisis

2008-09-21T21:43:00.007-04:00

I like to think that I have a fair understanding of basic economics but the current financial disaster is considerably beyond my means. If Alan Greenspan saying it a few days ago didn't make it obvious, the enormous 700 billion dollar bailout offered by the Bush government has really hammered home how bad this is. So, sayin that, how bad is it?

It is really bad. The NYT is reporting that if this goes unchecked it could get to the stage where people will not be able to get car loans. A professor who I am TAing for, and who teaches IPE (International Political Economy) said she was surprised that she'd be teaching students the political aspects of economics during the second great depression. Unsettling stuff, to say the least.

But it is worth considering the political aspect of what is going on right now. Currently, the Treasury Secretary - Henry Paulson - is pushing for a recovery package which may be worth up to 1,000,000,000,000 dollars. Take a long look at that number and, while your whistling, understand that he is requesting that there be almost no oversight on how this money is spent (the details of the bill are here). Barney Frank is making a decent stab at trying to push in some relief for homeowners who are being turfed out on their ear right now, but it seems sauce for the goose is not necessarily distributed equally. In a nutshell, the financial industry wants the government - that is taxpayers - to pull them out of the enormous slurry pit of greed they jumped into with their eyes open, but they don't think that taxpayers should (a) alter some of the conditions under which the banks foreclose or (b) interfere with the messed up incentive scheme (e.g. obscene bonuses etc.) that fails to punish this kind of sociopathy. It's fine for these financial gluttons to take our money to fix a problem they asked for, but not for anyone to benefit from that recovery except for themselves.

Insert comments about all animals being equal here.

Incidentally, for a good rundown on exactly how we got here, my friend Tim helpfully posted this

UPDATE: I may have spoken too soon

Explaining 35% of voters

2008-09-21T13:28:00.003-04:00

This seems about right

Hat tip to TPM

Supporting what I've thought for some time

2008-09-21T11:59:00.003-04:00

Interesting article in the Washington Post the other day. The bit that stands out for me:

People who startle easily in response to threatening images or loud sounds seem to have a biological predisposition to adopt conservative political positions on many hot-button issues, according to unusual new research published yesterday.

The finding suggests that people who are particularly sensitive to signals of visual or auditory threats also tend to adopt a more defensive stance on political issues, such as immigration, gun control, defense spending and patriotism. People who are less sensitive to potential threats, by contrast, seem predisposed to hold more liberal positions on those issues.
.....

The study, published in the journal Science, recruited 46 white partisan Republicans and Democrats in Nebraska. The volunteers were quizzed on their views on a variety of topics -- including the war in Iraq, same-sex marriage, pacifism and the importance of school prayer. All the questions were designed to test how strongly people needed to guard against various internal and external threats. None focused on economic issues.

Read the whole thing to get further details on the argument. In a nutshell the researchers are saying there may be biological traits to being a conservative or a liberal. While I have some reservations with that assertion (from my knowledge of political preference, a person's parents are the best predictors of their voting behavior - which strikes me as much as a nurture as a nature argument). Plus, there might be some questions about the methodology used (e.g. sample size).

Nonetheless, it does appear to me that support for policies such as wire-tapping and torture - while often being dressed-up and reported as hard-nosed and tough - actually usually smack of cowardice. As I put it in a comments section about torture a long time ago (when I was obviously very worked up about it):

What really gets my back up [about the torture issue] though, is how the whole issue is framed to begin with. Somehow making the moral argument is characterised as a kind of weak, flabby, naive, and all-round “liberal” point of view. It’s not the hard-nosed stance of Bush and co. and wingnuts consider it indicative of how some people (i.e. the right) are more willing to make “tough” decisions than others. This is total BS.

How does you condoning the torture of another person so that you can marginally increase your own chances of survival make you tough? It strikes me as the essence of cowardice. Being tough means standing up for the principles you believe in, even if it increases the risks of your own demise. I live in DC and know that if anywhere has a chance of getting hit it’s here. Big deal. I’ll take my chances. I certainly am not so craven and terrified that I am willing to compromise pretty much all of my principles (habeus corpus, torture etc.) just so the big nasty Osama bin-monster-under-the-bed won’t get me.

Being tough means standing up for your principles and accepting that living in a free society carries risks. And the test of this toughness comes at times of danger.

Whatever supporters of torture may think they are, tough they ain’t.

Cowardly and pathetic might be better adjectives.

It's nice to see a little evidence backing up my rant.