Eugene Volokh notices an error in a transcript. My friend Bethany had a bunch of interviews transcribed professionally for her dissertation and now offers Transcription Bloopers: 29 Reasons Not to Waste Your Money. Choice examples include:

Errors of this sort in transcripts are at the intersection of Mondegreens and the strange phenomenon of the media always happening to desperately misreport stories you know something about personally.

Gotta love Brad Choate and his Textile 2 plugin¹, which makes it a breeze to write nicely formatted XHTML for your blog.² Now we just need an automated content generator, and CT will run itself. (Some bloggers show evidence of such a system already.)

¹ Even footnotes. Brad developed Textile for Movable Type from Dean Allen’s original implementation.

² The dangers of giving footnote functionality to a blog staffed mainly by academics should immediately be obvious.

I love America. Across its vast, extraordinarily diverse area, weird or stupid stuff happens all the time. And the media are usually there to make it into a national story:

A second-grade girl from Pittsburgh was suspended this week from her public elementary school for saying the word “hell” to a boy in her class. But 7-year-old Brandy McKenith says she was only warning the boy about the eternal comeuppance he could face for saying: “I swear to God.”

“I said, ‘You’re going to go to hell for swearing to God,’” Brandy was quoted as saying in an article that appeared on the Web site of the Pittsburgh Tribune Review on Wednesday. School officials were unavailable for comment. A Pittsburgh Public Schools spokeswoman told the newspaper that the student code prohibits profanity but does not provide a clear definition of what profanity is.

Lovely. Possible followups to this story: (1) Little boy also suspended for taking the Lord’s name in vain. (2) School issues statement saying, “It’s all been cleared up: We’ve explained to Brandy and the little boy that we were wrong to suspend them because, of course, Hell doesn’t exist and neither does God.” (3) President Bush issues statement that his No Child Left Behind Act will remedy “the unimaginative nature of profanity found in our public schools today.” (4) Brandy handed additional suspension for violating her school’s strict no-alcohol policy.

Normally I leave stories like this to the Volokhs, who have a sweet tooth for them. But they are busy at the moment trying to convince their readers that, whatever Paul Craig Roberts thinks, U.S. taxpayers are not less free than slaves. Eugene Volokh has devoted about 10,000 words of his fine legal mind to this question, so far. He even wrote up a helpful table outlining the relevant differences between 19th century U.S. slaves and 21st century U.S. taxpayers. I find myself wondering just what you’d have to say to get Eugene to write “Oh piss off, you ignorant little troll.”

If I were less tired, I would write a post exploring the applicability, in our post-WMD world, of The Five Standard Excuses for any Failed Government Project described by Sir Humphrey in Yes, Minister. I conjecture that some varietal of each of them will be found in talk about Iraq as prior certainties about Saddam’s monstrous armaments evaporate. The excuses are as follows:

1. There is a perfectly satisfactory explanation for everything but security prevents its disclosure. (The Anthony Blunt excuse.)
2. It has only gone wrong because of heavy cuts in staff and budget which have stretched supervisory resources beyond the limit.
3. It was a worthwhile experiment now abandoned, but not before it provided much valuable data and considerable employment. (The Concorde excuse.)
4. It occurred before certain important facts were known and could not happen again. (The Munich Agreement excuse.)
5. It was an unfortunate lapse by an individual now being dealt with under internal disciplinary procedures. (The Charge of the Light Brigade excuse.)

Some of these excuses have been employed by the U.S. government for some time, notably (1). A version of (2) is also becoming more popular with them. These excuses also do double-duty as rationales that critics impute to the Bush administration. Many, for instance, will favor some version of (4) or (5) in an attempt to resist alternative theories involving vulgar phrases like “blithely imperialist” or “neoconservative maniacs,” simply because of the appalling vista suggested by the latter views. I personally find it worrying that the administration’s choices in domestic and foreign policy are starting to puzzle clever economists. These, after all, are people who by temperament and training will bend over backwards till their spines snap before saying the words, “Yeah, I guess you’d have to say that was pretty irrational.” If those guys give up on you, you’re really doing badly.

Kevin Drum asks why kids don’t walk to school anymore:

according to the CDC, only 31% of children ages 5-15 who live within a mile of school walk or bike. That’s down from 90% in 1969.

But I still can’t figure out why. Why do parents ferry their kids around when there’s no reason for it? What’s the motivation?

There might be more than one initial impetus — irrational concerns about safety, heavier school backpacks making walking more difficult, busier parents using the commute as quality time, and the like. Once it gets moving, the phenomenon seems vulnerable to a self-reinforcing tipping phenomenon. By not letting your child walk to school because the streets aren’t safe, you take one more child off the sidewalks and incrementally exacerbate the problem of deserted streets.

Like the original Schelling tipping model of racial segregation , this explanation has some very attractive characteristics. It’s parsimonious, self-propelling and grounded in simple, disaggregated individual choices. It’s got all the desiderata of an elegant theory that satisfies the strictures of methodological individualism mentioned recently. It might be right. But there’s still a good chance that, empirically, it’s wrong.

For example, in many parts of Tucson you court death by walking to school, or anywhere else, because the city is built to accommodate cars and not pedestrians. You routinely have to cross 4-lane highways and often there are simply no sidewalks to walk on. The lack of children walking to school might then be explained by the design choices behind the built environment rather than by a nice tipping effect. The other potential explanations mentioned above are also exogenous in this way. But we might find that the appeal of the tipping explanation is so strong that it becomes conventional wisdom without anyone actually studying the problem.

Social Dynamics, a recent volume of studies of tipping and agent-based simulation models of various phenomena showcases some nice work on trying to capture the emergent character of many social phenomena. But lovely as these models are, we know empirically that many phenomena that can be formulated as tipping processes do not, in fact, happen in that way. Neighborhood racial segregation, for instance, has historically been actively enforced and collectively sustained, and is not simply the unpleasant byproduct of innocuous choices. Similarly, social movements that successfully propagate ideas or initiate collective action tend not to rely on contagion but are usually very well organized. (In my experience, although they may not describe the empirical process properly, Schelling-type models are good rhetorical tools for motivating people to admit that there might be a problematic pattern of racial or gender discrimination in their organization. This is because they give you the ability to say “There is this collective problem but it wasn’t caused by any of us making choices that were racist/sexist/whatever.” Very handy.)

To put it (somewhat unfairly) in disciplinary terms, economists are really clever model builders with no tradition of fieldwork, particularly in the more sociological areas that are now becoming popular amongst empirically-minded economists. They’re also strongly predisposed to explanations that can be put in terms of the collective consequences of isolated individual rational choices. Because these kinds of explanations can be really, really appealing, the need to go back and forth between the empirical data and the models is even more pressing than usual.

Update: I just remembered where I was channeling some of this line of thought from: I’d read a review of Social Dynamics by Michael Chwe a while ago, I think in the Journal of Economic Literature.

Coming up with a good title for your book is a tricky business. There was an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education a few weeks ago about the convention of “Vague General Title: More accurate but perhaps less interesting subtitle.” Sadly, the working title of my own draft book falls squarely into this mode. It’s hard to avoid it while also staying away from the grandiose, the misleading, the glib or the overly cheesy. Not all disciplines face this problem to the same degree. My other half is an old fashioned analytic metaphysician, for instance, and when you are developing a new property mereology to solve problems in ontology then you can get away with a book title like Objects, which might in other respects seem rather general.

One persistent trend is books titled “American [Whatever].” American Dynasty, American Skin, , American Terrorist, American Nightmare, American Empire … Those are just the ones I knew off the top of my head. Are there any other countries where authors or publishers have this habit? Maybe it happens because the adjective “American” scans easily in a way that, say, “French” or “Azerbaijani” doesn’t. So we should expect, say, Namibian Psycho but not Welsh Skin.

Given the prevalence of this kind of title, maybe I should re-name my own book — which is about blood and organ donation in the U.S. and Europe — to American Kidneys.

Tim Dunlop encounters U.S. sports commentators at their most excitable:

Over the last few days I’ve heard four radio commentators refer to the Superbowl as the “most important sporting event in the world”. Those exact words.

This is especially true this year with the eagerly-awaited Lingerie Bowl at half-time. Depending on your outlook, the Lingerie Bowl is either (1) A measure of how deeply the Title IX revolution in women’s athletics has penetrated into the football industry, (2) A high-end version of the noble American tradition of powder puff football; or (3) Sadly available only on Pay-Per-View.

Anyway, the most important sporting event in the world is the All Ireland Hurling Final.

An episode of Blackadder I just watched makes a point relevant to recent discussion on the plausibility of alternatives to the theory of evolution:

Blackadder [to Baldrick]: If I don’t come up with an idea soon, in the morning we’ll both go to meet our maker. In my case, God; in your case, God knows — but I doubt he’s won any design awards.

My department has a job offer out to Emory’s Lane Kenworthy, a comparative macro-sociologist. We hope he accepts, of course, because his stuff is very interesting. His homepage has a list of his papers, along with various datasets. He also has a complete draft of a forthcoming book, Egalitarian Capitalism [2mb PDF]. It’s an examination of trends in growth, employment and income in 20 of the advanced capitalist democracies. The analytical focus is on whether there is a tradeoff between each of these desirable goals, on the one hand, and income equality, on the other. The general conclusion is that there is no such tradeoff —- or at least, the kind of income distribution that would look very good to egalitarians can be achieved without substantial sacrifices to economic growth. Egalitarian Capitalism is very accessible to the general reader, I think, and relevant to the question “If not the New Economy, then what?” that’s been suggested by our ongoing discussion on Crooked Timber of Doug Henwood’s book.

Mark Kleiman notes that the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) program has been killed. This was a useful dataset on patterns of drug-use amongst criminals. In his post, Mark quotes John Coleman, a former bigwig at the DEA, who says

The importance of ADAM always has been its stark statistics showing the large percentage of criminals high on drugs and alcohol at the time of their crimes. ADAM surveyed arrested felons and then drug-tested them to confirm their statements about drug use. It was all voluntary but showed, nonetheless, extraordinary levels in some cases of drug use by criminals.

This confirms my non-expert belief that there’s a great deal of evidence telling us that a big chunk of violent crime happens when the perpetrators have been using alcohol or some other drug. People under the influence of drugs tend to have a diminished capacity for rational decision-making. This makes me skeptical about, e.g., fiendishly clever analyses of the rational deterrent effect of prison sentences on crime rates. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the detail of such analyses per se, it’s that they throw away reliable knowledge before they begin. Ignoring information of the sort that ADAM provides may make an elegant theory of crime more tractable, but it makes a true theory of crime less likely.

This is a test of ecto, a Mac OSX desktop client for writing blog entries. I haven’t used these tools much before, but this looks quite good.