Copenhagen Consensus

The results of the Copenhagen Consensus are out, and as predicted, that is, with climate change at the bottom of the list. I’ll give a more detailed response later on, but I thought I’d respond to this point in the Economist

The bottom of the list, however, aroused more in the way of hostile comment. Rated “bad”, meaning that costs were thought to exceed benefits, were all three of the schemes put before the panel for mitigating climate change, including the Kyoto protocol on greenhouse-gas emissions. (The panel rated only one other policy bad: guest-worker programmes to promote immigration, which were frowned upon because they make it harder for migrants to assimilate.) This gave rise to suspicion in some quarters that the whole exercise had been rigged. Mr Lomborg is well-known, and widely reviled, for his opposition to Kyoto. These suspicions are in fact unfounded, as your correspondent (who sat in on the otherwise private discussions) can confirm. A less biddable group would be difficult to imagine.

On the contrary, as I suggested at the outset, a panel that included, say, Joe Stiglitz and Amartya Sen would have been considerably less biddable¹, as well as being better qualified to look at the issues in question.
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Obscenity

Check out the speech made by art critic Robert Hughes at Burlington House last night, and note the following judgment:

I don’t want to disparage dealers, collectors or museum directors, by the way. But I don’t think there is any doubt that the present commercialisation of the art world, at its top end, is a cultural obscenity. When you have the super-rich paying $104m for an immature Rose Period Picasso - close to the GNP of some Caribbean or African states - something is very rotten. Such gestures do no honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it pathological. As Picasso’s biographer John Richardson said to a reporter on that night of embarrassment at Sotheby’s, no painting is worth a hundred million dollars.

I wonder what they’ll make of that over at Marginal Revolution ?

[Expletive Deleted]

Favorite moment from the Enron Energy Traders gloatfest:

Employee 1: He just f——s California. He steals money from California to the tune of about a million.
Employee 2: Will you rephrase that?
Employee 1: OK, he, um, he arbitrages the California market to the tune of a million bucks or two a day.

Always nice to see those technical financial terms (“f——k”) explained in terms the layman can understand (“arbitrage”). I’m sure the whole thing was the fault of a few bad apples.

Punctuation and human rights

Eve Garrard, who figured prominently in our comments last week on my posts discussing Amnesty International (here and here ) has written an impassioned criticism of AI over at Normblog. You should read what she says, although I happen to disagree with her claim — which I regard as obviously misguided — that the universal applicability of a principle entails that all who violate it are equally blameworthy for so doing (penultimate paragraph). The most serious criticism to be made of Garrard’s post, though, is that it seriously misrepresents what Amnesty said.

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Re-form

Robert Samelson argues that we should stop using the word ‘reform’. I’ve grappled with this question for a long term, having been generally critical of the neoliberal policies generally referred to as “microeconomic reform”. I’ve tried all sorts of devices, such as the use of scare quotes and phrases like “so-called reform”, before concluding that the best thing is just to use the word in ways that make it obvious that I am not attaching positive connotations to it.

Over the fold is an old post on the subject, from my blog (I needed to repost to fix broken links).

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Geek Moment

Cribbed from Dirk Eddelbuettel’s email signature on the R-help List …

FEATURE: VW Beetle license plate seen in California

Well I thought it was funny.

Defining Deviousness Down

I think Michael Rappaport is straining to find the silver lining in this intelligence cloud.

Consider this an open thread about this important story, with optional special reference to the question: is it a source of consolation if it turns out the whole spy game is usually just seeing how many clowns you can cram into a riddle, wrapped in a question, locked inside an enigma?

Faith Schools in the UK

Americans are often shocked when they learn that not only does ‘public school’ mean ‘private school’ in the UK, but also in the UK the state not only funds, but collaborates with religious organisations in running, religious schools. I used to be strongly opposed to this practice, at least in principle, though I have also long thought that Muslim schools should be candidates for funding given that RC and C.of E. schools were funded. I’m still unenthusiastic about the situation, but also have a suspicion that the practice is part of the reason that religion, though powefully present in the public culture, is a less rich source of social division than it is in the US. Alan Carling has very nicely posted my idiosyncratic take on this subject on his website. The piece is written really for a UK audience, but its nice and short, and comments somewhat on the US situation. Although it is scheduled for publication as is I’m very curious about reactions to it and, as usual, take my own tentative views to be evolving objects of critique rather than anything set in stone.

Envelopes and limits

And further into the envelope madness …

Although I started out on the side of John and Bill Carone in believing that there was something funny about the two-envelope problem, I’ve always been suspicious of claims that the class of inifinty paradoxes (even Zeno’s Paradox) can really be tamed by asserting that they disappear if you know how to take limits properly. With that in mind, I mercilessly torture some of Greg Chaitin’s work to create a version of the two-envelope paradox in which I don’t think there are any limit arguments to make use of. Once more into Socratic dialogue ….

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Bad education

Apart from going to the Rivals, the bank holiday weekend was something of an Almodovar fest for me. I watched All About My Mother on Friday and Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown on Sunday, capping it all with a visit to Bad Education at the cinema last night. Bad Education really is a terrific film, and the main device of a film-within-a-film (and a script-within-a-script) works well. I won’t post any spoilers, but I will say that it contains one great cinematic moment and that Hollywood would deal with the sexual abuse of boys by priests rather differently. Highly recommended.

Australia and Abu Ghraib

John Howard’s government gets sucked further in to the Iraqi torture scandal. The Defence Department is found to have been aware of the Red Cross’s documenting of torture much earlier than previously believed. Howard insists that he only learned about the abuses in April and claims to have been misinformed by the defence department. Senior civil servants at the Defence department seems to be taking the flak. Tim Dunlop has more.

So does Howard bear any responsibility or is it just that no-one tells him anything? Though they wouldn’t like to admit it, in many respects Australians have a self-image very similar to that of Americans — they take the same pride in being down-to-earth, straight-talking types. It’s the legacy of a frontier country. A No-BS image is prone to its own distinctive kind of bullshit, but Australian politics does have more of a social-democratic conscience than America and less religiously-inspired self-righteousness. So we’ll see whether they put up with this.

Sociology of Culture

Draft Syllabus for Soc 508, a graduate seminar/survey course in the Sociology of Culture. Coming this Fall¹ to a University of Arizona near you. Comments welcome.

¹ If August 24th can count as the Fall. The University of Arizona thinks it can.

Paradoxes and infinity

Following up my three-way classification of paradoxes,¹ I want to argue that paradoxes involving infinity are always of type-3, that is, the result of ill-posed problems or inappropriate ways of taking limits. (Much the same position is defended in the comments thread by Bill Carone). In fact, I’d argue for the following general principle, applicable to all models relevant to human decisionmakers.

Whenever a result, true for all finite n, is strictly² reversed for the infinite case, the problem in question has been posed incorrectly

To defend this, I rely on the premise that we are finite creatures in a finite universe. If a mathematical representation of a decision problem involves an infinite set, such as the integers or the real line, it is only because this is more convenient than employing finite, but very large bounds, such as those derived from the number of particles in the universe. Any property that depends inherently on infinite sets and limits, such as the continuity of a function, can never be verified or falsified by empirical data. Since we are finite, any result that is true for all finite n is true for us.

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The perils of knowledge

On Saturday night we went to a performance of Sheridan’s The Rivals at Bristol’s Old Vic , which has some claim to being the oldest working theatre in Britain (a claim that is carefully qualified to exlude some rivals, though). A very enjoyable evening, complete with a reminder that anxieties about the corrupting effects of new media (internet, the telephone etc) had been fully awakened by the 18th century. Libraries were identified as the cause of moral decline in this exchange between Mrs Malaprop and Sir Anthony Absolute:

Mrs. Mal. There’s a little intricate hussy for you!

Sir Anth. It is not to be wondered at, ma’am,—all this is the natural consequence of teaching girls to read. Had I a thousand daughters, by Heaven! I’d as soon have them taught the black art as their alphabet!

Mrs. Mal. Nay, nay, Sir Anthony, you are an absolute misanthropy.

Sir Anth. In my way hither, Mrs. Malaprop, I observed your niece’s maid coming forth from a circulating library!—She had a book in each hand—they were half-bound volumes, with marble covers!—From that moment I guessed how full of duty I should see her mistress!

Mrs. Mal. Those are vile places, indeed!

Sir Anth. Madam, a circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge! It blossoms through the year!—And depend on it, Mrs. Malaprop, that they who are so fond of handling the leaves, will long for the fruit at last.

George Formby

Last week was the centenary of George Formby’s birth. You can hear about his life in a sweet bio-documentary by Russell Davies (probably only for the next couple of days) called (misleadingly) George on George. The best bit concerns Beryl Formby (George’s wife and manager) who, when the South Afrcan Prime Minister phoned her to complain about George’s enthusiam about playing to mixed audiences and apparent colour blindness, shouted “Why don’t you just piss off you horrible little man”, and slammed the phone down. If only more had been like them.

A Government of Laws and not of Men

Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor whom Richard Nixon attempted to fire in the Saturday Night Massacre has died at the age of 92. I use a video about those events in my social theory class, when we read Weber, because it nicely illustrates Weber’s views about authority and bureaucracy.

As the video goes on, you can draw an organizational chart of the official relationships between the main players — Nixon, Agnew and Haig in the White House; Cox, Elliott Richardson, William Ruckleshaus and Robert Bork at the Justice Department — and see how Nixon’s efforts to fire Cox were, in effect, an effort to act like he was the King rather than the President. Nixon didn’t have the authority to fire Cox even though he had the authority to fire Cox’s superiors. After Attorney General Richardson and his deputy Ruckleshaus had refused Nixon’s demands and themselves been fired, Robert Bork — then Solicitor General and third in line at Justice — agreed to do the job. Weber’s analysis of office-holding is nicely illustrated in Richardson’s refusal: “Methodical provision is made for the regular and continuous fulfilment of these duties and for the execution of the corresponding rights … When the principle of jurisdictional ‘competency’ is fully carried through, hierarchical subordination — at least in public office — does not mean that the ‘higher’ authority is simply authorized to take over the business of the ‘lower.’ ” In the video, Bork is interviewed about his decision and in his defence says “Cox had done nothing wrong, but the President can’t be faced down in public by a subordinate official.” When paired with Cox’s famous statement that night — “Whether ours shall be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people” — you get a perfect articulation of the difference between traditional and legal-rational authority in a democracy.

The interesting thing is that you don’t have to stop there. Because it’s clear from the video that Richardson’s great personal integrity (Nixon called him a “pious son of a bitch”) carried him through Nixon’s efforts to pressure him, and the following day Richardson got a standing ovation from the staff at Justice as he formally announces his resignation. So two other Weberian ideas — that office-holding is a vocation, and that charisma can persist in bureaucracies — are also relevant.

It’s an effective way to teach this bit of Weber, because he isn’t the most charismatic writer in the world himself, and although the students have heard of Watergate, the details of the constitutional crisis that culminated in the Saturday Night Massacre are new to them.