Annals of Personal Responsibility, Cathy Seipp Edition

Who is to blame for America’s obesity epidemic?

“Feminists and liberals have transformed a legitimate medical issue of the poor into identity politics for the affluent,” [author and friend Greg Christer] told me, “which I find the worst kind of narcissistic behavior.”

Efficient markets (addendum)

This is more of a footnote to John’s post on the subject than a substantive contribution, but it struck me that, despite John having made the point otherwise, the debate in comments (here and on Asymmetrical Information still seemed to be based on a few commonly held fallacies about the efficient markets theory;

• that it is basically a neutral, academic theory with few implications for the real world
• that it is basically all about the stock market (to be honest, most of the discussion revolved around the US stock market)
• and that, to quote James Surowiecki, “whether or not markets are perfectly efficient, they’re better than any other capital allocation method that you can think of.

None of these are true.

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Shut up

Need a fresh reason to dislike Bill O’Reilly?

O’Reilly scolds guest who outed gays, then calls judge a lesbian

Fox News Channel’s star talk-show personality, Bill O’Reilly, says he is uncomfortable with the practice of outing gay political figures—except, it seems, when he is doing the outing.

On his show Monday night, O’Reilly chastised guest Michael Rogers for maintaining a Web site publicizing the names of gay staffers working for politicians who oppose gay marriage….

But on the same show—and for at least the third time in the last year—O’Reilly described one of the justices on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court as a lesbian, a claim that the justice herself, through a spokeswoman, denies.

For the record, I am opposed to outing, whether it’s done by Bill O’Reilly or by people on my side.

UPDATE: “I gave up the homosexual lifestyle four years ago.” Terrific New Republic first-person story on gay marriage.

Disgusting

Dwight Merideth had an excellent post the other day called “The Top 10 Ways To Change The Tone in Washington (For the Worse).” He could not have anticipated that the White House would have such a spectacular topper:

The White House helped to block a Republican-brokered deal on Wednesday to extend several middle-class tax cuts, fearful of a bill that could draw Democratic votes and dilute a Republican campaign theme, Republican negotiators said.

The White House blocked a package of tax cuts, targeted at middle- and lower-income taxpayers, because the bill was moderate enough to attract Democratic votes. They chose to fail, by their own principles, rather than allow a small amount of concilliation with the other party. I have a hard time thinking of a more effective way to give the finger to the principle of bipartisanship.

Michael Froomkin says, “This may be one of the most cynical ploys in US politics I ever read about. And I read a lot.” Paperwight has much more; he makes a good comparison to the Republican refusal to accept a Democratic deal to confirm most of Bush’s judicial appointments. And, he notices that the White House is attempting to soothe tempers by allowing more pork in the budget.

These guys have got to go.

Mr Mee

I’m in the middle of reading Andrew Crumey’s rather intruiging novel Mr Mee at the moment. One minor point of interest is that this may be the first work of fiction to contain a description of the Monty Hall problem (see Brian’s post below ) in the form of a letter, supposedly written in 1759 from a Jean-Bernard Rosier to the Encyclopedist d’Alembert:

Sir, you may know that many years ago one of our countrymen was taken prisoner in a remote and barren region of Asia noted only for the savagery of its inhabitants. The man’s captors, uncertain what to do with him, chose to settle the issue by means of a ring hidden beneath one of three wooden cups. If the prisoner could correctly guess which cup hid the gold band, he would be thrown out to face the dubious tenderness of the wolves; otherwise he was to be killed on the spot. By placing bets on the outcome, his cruel hosts could enjoy some brief diversion from the harsh austerity of their nomadic and brutal existence.

The leader of the tribe, having hidden his own ring, commanded that the unfortunate prisoner be brought forward to make his awful choice. After considerable hesitation, and perhaps a silent prayer, the wretch placed his trembling hand upon the middle cup. Bets were placed; then the leader, still wishing to prolong the painful moment of uncertainty which so delighted his audience, lifted the rightmost cup, beneath which no ring was found. The captive gave a gasp of hope, and amidst rising laughter from the crowd, the leader now reached for the left, saying that before turning it over he would allow his prisoner a final opportunity to change his choice. Imagine yourself to be in that poor man’s position, Monsieur D’Alembert, and tell me, what would you now do?

Deliverance in disturbances

Swift brash flash of blue
Nobly shielding your fledglings
Can’t I mow the lawn?

Scandal

As far as I can see, the Right seems to be winning the scandal wars just at the moment. I didn’t follow the Plame-Wilson scandal the first time around, so I can’t really tell how damaging or otherwise the latest claims from US and British intelligence may be to Wilson’s credibility. Similarly, although it seems clear that Sandy Berger has made a fool of himself , I have no idea what this means for anything that might possibly matter. Finally, it appears that last Thanksgiving in Iraq, Bush posed not with a fake turkey, but with a display turkey, never intended for carving but to adorn the buffet line. I’m glad that’s been cleared up.

All this confirms me in the view that the kind of “smoking gun” or “what did X know and when did s/he know it” scandal that has dominated politics since Watergate is a waste of everybody’s time. The real scandals are those that are, for the most part, on the public record.

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Blog paper

The paper that Dan Drezner and I have been writing on political blogging is now fit, more or less, for human consumption - it’s available here. We’re going to present it at APSA where we’re organizing a panel on blogging. We’re grateful for comments, suggestions and criticisms - this is only a first draft.

The key arguments of our paper:

(1) Blogging is politically important in large part because it affects mainstream media, and helps set the terms of political debate (in political science jargon, it creates ‘focal points’ and ‘frames’). Note that we don’t provide an exhaustive account of blogs and politics - some aspects of blogging (fundraising for parties, effects on political values in the general public), we don’t have more than anecdotal data on. There’s plenty of room for other people to do interesting research on all of this.

(2) Incoming links in the political blogosphere are systematically skewed, but not according to a “power law” distribution, as Clay Shirky and others have argued of the blogosphere as a whole. Instead, they follow a lognormal distribution.¹ We reckon that the most likely explanation for this is that offered by Pennock et al. - they argue that not only do the ‘rich get richer’ (i.e. sites that already have a lot of links tend to get more), but that link-poor sites stand a chance of becoming rich too. Late entrants into the political blogosphere can do well as long as they’re interesting and attract some attention - bad timing isn’t destiny.

(3) Because of the systematic skewedness of the political blogosphere, a few “focal point” sites can provide a rough index of what is going on in the blogosphere - interesting points of view on other sites will often percolate up to them as smaller blogs try to get big blogs to link to them, by informing them of interesting stories. Thus, we may expect that journalists and other media types who read blogs will tend to all gravitate towards a few ‘big name’ bloggers as their way of keeping up with what is going on in the blogosphere as a whole.

¹ For which we’re grateful to Cosma Shalizi - when we realized that we weren’t dealing with a power law distribution (the log-log relationship looked dodgily curvilinear), he not only suggested alternative distributions and how to test fit, but actually volunteered to do the tests himself.

Would you cut up a book?

(I promise to get around to that question in this post, albeit in a somewhat roundabout manner.)

Since Kieran has already reserved the right to ask for $50 bills here, I thought I’d ask for something else. Forget bills, they all look the same anyway. I am looking for something more random. I am still in the midst of unpacking some of my things since my move earlier this year and I recently came across my Absolut vodka ad collection. I haven’t looked at it since college when I began (and ended) gathering all the Absolut ads I could find. I have about seventy. By now there are some helpful Web sites for those of us interested in seeing the types of ads the company has featured. I found a few I had not seen before and would really like to have so I thought I’d see if anyone here can help me out.:) These mostly have to do with ads for places where I have lived (e.g. Budapest, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Illinois, Texas, Geneva, Switzerland) or visited (Paris, Brussels, Jerusalem, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, St.Louis), but also include some others just because I like them aesthetically speaking or because they are funny. I thought I would find listings on eBay, but I’ve only come across a few there and none of them of interest.

But so what’s this about cutting up a book?

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Shall We Play A Game?

How about global biological war?

Late last week, Newt Gingrich testified before the House Government Reform Technology Subcommittee on the public health system’s use of information technology to defend against and respond to terror.

Yesterday, Tom Ridge engaged in a tabletop exercise with the nation’s Governors, simulating a biological attack on the United States.

This morning, President Bush signed into law S.15, the Project Bioshield Act of 2004, which sets aside billions of dollars for the development and stockpiling of vaccines for bioterrorism agents, such as anthrax and smallpox (a/k/a lots of money to Bush’s Big Pharma Buddies).

All this, and anonymous rumors of sock stuffing just hours before the 9/11 commission report comes out! How about that.

Tabletop exercises and Rose Garden signing ceremonies make for pretty decent special effects, but in the case of bioterrorism preparedness, when you look behind the curtain, it becomes clear that the Administration’s committment has very little brains, heart or courage.

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Pandering to the wrong base

Mr. Bush noted: “The enemy declared war on us. Nobody wants to be the war president. I want to be the peace president. The next four years will be peaceful years.” He repeated the words “peace” or “peaceful” many times, as he has done increasingly in his recent appearances. (emphasis added)

A few weeks ago, Kevin Drum asked, just what is it that people who support Bush on security grounds think that Bush will do and Kerry will not? Gregory Djerejian at the Belgravia Dispatch answered, in part:

To Kevin’s query: “(b)ut does anyone think there are any more wars coming up in the near future?”I’d answerwe’re in the middle of a war right now….
There’s, er, a lot going on—and I’m not confident that Kerry a) fully gets the stakes and b) will field a national security team that will be up to the challenge.

I’ve seen some version of this sentiment on a lot of pro-Bush blogs, and I think that it enjoys a lot of support. But how can it hold if Bush has decided to go around making the ludicrous promise that the next four years will be peaceful?

Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan

Dem Panic Watch

(Ron Burgundy is off tonight.)

From Radley Balko:

If you plug the latest battleground state poll results from Real Clear Politics into the L.A. Times’ handy interactive electoral map, the race right now stands at Kerry 322 and Bush 216.

Charlie Cook, via Mark Kleiman:

This race has settled into a place that is not at all good for an incumbent, is remarkably stable, and one that is terrifying many Republican lawmakers, operatives and activists.

Tony Fabrizio of the Republican polling firm Fabrizio McLaughlin & Associates, via Ryan Lizza:

Fabrizio found that undecided voters in 2004 are overwhelmingly anti-Bush and pro-Kerry. By almost every criteria they look like Kerry voters, according to the memo… As the memo notes, “Clearly, if these undecided voters were leaning any harder against the door of the Kerry camp, they would crash right through it.”

Ruy Teixeira:

And in the last four Gallup polls, independents are averaging a 14 point margin against Bush. To make up that deficit, Republicans would have to not only equalize their turnout with Democrats—against historical patterns—but actually beat the Democrats by about 4 points as a proportion of voters.
I don’t think this is remotely plausible. Such a scenario is only possible with high mobilization of Republicans that is not counterbalanced at all by mobilization of Democrats. That just isn’t going to happen this year (memo to Rove, Dowd and loveable ole Grover: we’re not in 2002 any more); to think it might is a complete fantasy.

UPDATE: From the Washington Post:

John F. Kerry and the major Democratic Party committees have collectively outraised their Republican counterparts this year, blunting one of the GOP’s biggest and longest-standing political advantages, new Federal Election Commission reports show.

For the first time since 1992, the Democratic candidate and the national and congressional fundraising committees combined to outraise their GOP counterparts over a six-month span of an election year, FEC data compiled by The Washington Post found. (emphasis added)

UN Human Development Report 2004

Via Norm , I see that the United Nations Human Development Report 2004 is out. Most of the headline coverage is about various country rankings in the Human Development Index. Oil-rich Norway comes top, the US is 8th, the UK 12th, and France has slipped to 16th with Germany down at 19th. But, for the high-income nations, this is not particularly meaningful. As the report warns:

The HDI in this Report is constructed to compare country achievements across all levels of human development. The indicators currently used in the HDI yield very small differences among the top HDI countries, and thus the top of the HDI rankings often reflects only the very small differences in these underlying indicators. For these high-income countries an alternative index—the human poverty index (shown in indicator table 4 and discussed in Statistical feature 1, The state of human development)—can better reflect the extent of human deprivation that still exists among these populations and help direct the focus of public policies. (p. 138)

So what rankings (p. 151) do we get for high-income countries on the human poverty index?

1 Sweden
2 Norway
3 Netherlands
4 Finland
5 Denmark
6 Germany
7 Luxembourg
8 France
9 Spain
10 Japan
11 Italy
12 Canada
13 Belgium
14 Australia
15 United Kingdom
16 Ireland
17 United States

Cold comfort for the advocates of the “anglosphere”, “anglo-saxon capitalism” etc etc. one would have thought. No doubt they’ll be posting shrill comments: “It just isn’t trooo!” etc.

Ministry of Truth

This bit from a NYT article on iTunes struck me as a particularly noteworthy example of the regurgitated press-release masquerading as analysis.

Sometime before the end of the year, Microsoft is expected to begin its push into the music download business. Microsoft will attempt to catch up with Apple by deploying its new Windows technology, called Windows Media Digital Rights Management, that will let users more easily transfer song collections from their personal computers to their portable MP3 players.

Freedom is Slavery how are ya. Media DRM 10 has nothing whatsoever to do with making it easier for users to transfer their song collections, and everything to do with making sure that they don’t do things with their song collections that the record companies wouldn’t like them to do. In other words, it’ll make transferring music harder, not easier - if it makes it easier than it already is, then it’s not doing the job that it’s supposed to do. I suppose that you could make some class of a contorted argument that DRM will make record companies happier to flog tunes for portable players etc etc, but that isn’t what the journalist is saying. Sloppy work.

Congratulations to Eszter

My fellow sociologist, former office-mate and CT Comrade-in-Arms Eszter Hargittai has won the National Communications Association’s G. R. Miller Outstanding Dissertation Award for How Wide a Web? Inequalities in Accessing Information Online.

The Adversary

I recently read Emmanuel Carrere’s The Adversary cover-to-cover in one night. It’s the true story of a man named Jean-Claude Roland who takes a terrible path.

Roland missed an important exam at the end of his second year of medical school, but never rescheduled it. Impulsively, he told his parents that he had passed. Roland pretended to continue his studies. He married and had children, convincing everyone in his life that he was a high-ranking official with the World Health Organization. He paid the bills by defrauding his parents, in-laws, and friends. He told them that he was investing their money, or sold them worthless cancer treatments. He managed this way for eighteen years. Eventually, on the verge of being uncovered, he murdered his wife, his children, his parents, and made a (strikingly half-hearted) effort to kill himself.

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Tort Transform

Reformation of the medical malpractice system has been an issue of great contention in recent years. And then, John Edwards got the nod as the Democratic Vice Presidential Candidate. I’m not sure if you’ve heard this, but there are a few people who would like you to know that, before becoming a Senator, Edwards used to spend his days before neutral triers of fact representing those who may have been injured by others. And he was pretty good at it. Edwards’ presence on the ticket has whipped the pro-“tort reform” crowd into a frenzy, and over the past few weeks the drum beat for change has grown even louder (and the band would appreciate it if you pay no mind to whether the drummer has any rhythm).

The problems within the medical malpractice system are myriad. The legislative solutions proposed, however, have generally been myopic. This is because the proponents of change — the Republicans and physicians — have successfully boiled down the debate to One Big Thing: a cap on damages. And that’s precisely the One Big Thing the Democrats and trial lawyers do not want to see put in place. It’s been largely like this for thirty years, and so long as the discussion remains on this single axis, there is little hope for making significant progress toward improving the quality of care delivered in our health system.

Fortunately, there are a few people who are trying to reframe the debate, and in this month’s issue of Health Affairs, William M. Sage offers some exciting and innovative solutions to the medical malpractice quagmire. He does it by noting how different the health care system is from when the debate began three decades ago, and by focusing his attention on the aging hippopotamus that has been standing quietly in the corner, hoping no one would notice him.

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House Party

1. I went to see Outfoxed at a MoveOn house party this weekend. A good time was had by all. The house was easy to identify; it was the one surrounded by cars with pro-Kerry, anti-war or anti-Bush bumper stickers.

One car, in particular, was just plastered with at least 30 or 40 liberal bumper stickers. I happened to meet the woman who drives it, and she said that she’s had the bumper stickers on the car since the 2000 election. In all that time, living in Houston, she’s never had anyone say anything rude or critical to her. Not one middle finger, one “why do you hate America”, or anything.

2. Another woman at the party mentioned offhand that under Bush, we now spend over half of the federal budget on the military. This isn’t even close to being correct. She was an activist, and surely considered herself quite well-informed.

3. Some people that I know well had a MoveOn house party in Houston to discuss Fahrenheit 9/11 after its premiere. A couple of guys brought lawn chairs and rifles and sat on public property across the street, watching people drive up. They apparently weren’t breaking any laws by doing this, but the police sent them on their way when some people who had come for the house party crossed the street to argue/fight with them. (I don’t know which.)

David Brooks, are you listening? You can coast on this stuff for a week.

When Cheney Is On The Mic, It's Like a Cookie, They All Crumble

The New Yorker has the inside scoop on what really ocurred when Dick Cheney threw down on Sen. Patrick Leahy, (D.-Vermont):

As a quick-thinking senatorial aide switched on the Senate’s public-address system and cued up the infamous “Seven Minutes of Funk” break, Mr. Leahy and Mr. Cheney went head-to-head in what can only be described as a “take no prisoners” freestyle rap battle….

Unfortunately, as other senators (along with assorted aides and support-staff members) were casting their votes to decide the winner, using the admittedly subjective but generally accepted “Make some noise up in here!” protocols, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Leahy took the proceedings to what one aide accurately described as “the next level.”

Edward M. Kennedy (D.-Mass.) was the first to notice that the two men were circling each other, Mr. Cheney brandishing a switchblade and Mr. Leahy the jagged neck of a broken bottle.

“Oh, snap!” Mr. Kennedy recalls thinking at the time. “It’s getting kind of hectic up in this piece.”

Man, some of those professional writers are almost as funny as the Fafblog!

Monty Hall Problem

Via Justin Leiber, here’s a playable version of the Monty Hall Problem. It’s simultaneously a lesson in decision theory and in the perils of small sample sizes - my first two plays I lost the car by switching.

Liberal Islamophobia

One thought that went through my mind during the recent fuss over the visit of Yussef al-Qaradawi to Britain was this: what did those who, after September 11th, uttered variations on “Islam needs a Reformation” expect the agents of such a Reformation to look like? Martin Luther or Calvin maybe? Because those guys had some pretty nasty views, and yet ….

Marc Mulholland has written a very useful and serious post on “liberal Islamophobia” over at Daily Moiders, and, in comments, Anthony Cox responds.

The virus of error

In the most recent London Review of Books, Hugh Pennington has a generally excellent article on measles and erroneous (to put it charitably) research linking the combined MMR vaccine to autism. It's a pity therefore that, on a peripheral issue, he perpetuates an equally glaring error, saying

'Most people have an intuitive appreciation that the best vaccine programme, from an individual's point of view, is one where almost everyone else is vaccinated while they are not, so that they are indirectly protected without incurring any of the risks or inconvenience associated with direct protection.' If too many people act in this way, the infection becomes commoner in the population as a whole, and returns as a real and significant threat to the unimmunised. This is a modern version of the 'Tragedy of the Commons' described by Garrett Hardin in his influential 1968 essay: 16th-century English peasants had free grazing on commons; their need to supplement food supplies and income was very great; the resulting overgrazing wrecked the commons for everyone.

As I've pointed out previously Hardin's story was, in historical terms, a load of tripe. It's interesting to note that, in repeating Hardin's story, Pennington adds the spurious specificity of "16th century England", whereas Hardin's account was not specific regarding dates and places, and therefore harder to refute. This is characteristic of the way in which factoids are propagated.

For All Your Causal Counterfactual Needs

New from MIT Press comes Causation and Counterfactuals, an anthology edited by John Collins, Ned Hall and L.A. Paul. At the Pacific APA meetings, the latter was recently identified, much to her disgust, as “Kieran Healy from Crooked Timber’s wife.” Causation and Counterfactuals presents the best recent work on the counterfactual analysis of causation, which helps us understand the metaphysical underpinnings of sentences like “If you don’t buy it you’ll be sorry,” “If I hadn’t blogged so much my own book would be finished by now,” and “If everyone on CT posted a shameless plug simultaneously, who’d be responsible?” The book is also perhaps the only place to read the full, gripping saga of Billy and Suzy, a tale of passion, overdetermination, war, double prevention and appalling violence.

Ken Lay is Innocent OK

Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling and Andrew Fastow will all shortly be going on trial for their liberty over the Enron bankruptcy fiasco. I have to say that it seems to me that it would be a little bit unfair if any of them were to go to jail in the current political climate.

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Welcome bloviations

We’re delighted to announce that Ross, the man behind the excellent blog The Bloviator, will be joining us on Crooked Timber as a guest poster. I’ve long been a fan and an admirer. At the Bloviator, Ross concentrates non-exclusively on public health policy and law. For a while, he was surely the only blogger with a recommendation in his masthead from both me and Bill Quick of Daily Pundit.

After taking a few months off of blogging, he’s tanned, tenured and ready to debate. It’s a great pleasure to have him join us this week.

Countdown

Via the Virtual Stoa I have learned that you have to sign up to MPs’ email lists. I suggest that Tim Collins find out who is faking his site and email list, and close them down. I know it’s a fake, because if it were true Gyles Brandreth would be listed.

Respect for the Dead

Norm’s rock stars poll closed the other day, and, like others , I’m inclined to protest a little about the results. [1] The source of my dissatisfaction is that the incomparable Grateful Dead not only miss the top 25 but aren’t even among the further 30 also-rans. Meanwhile, talentless losers like REM (someone had to say it) capture 11th place. Young people today….

¹ I fear I may have misread the rubric, since the results include bands and I voted inter alia for Keith Richards, Joe Strummer and Jerry Garcia. I assume that Norm just folded those in as votes for the Stones, the Clash and the Dead.

Paul Foot dies

British socialist journalist Paul Foot, contrarian and campaigner against many miscarriages of the criminal justice system, is dead.

Hansard report on political blogging

The Hansard Society have produced a report on political blogging

Political Blogs – Craze or Convention? [pdf] reports on the relatively new phenomena of political blogging and examines whether these blogs can offer an alternative to traditional channels of political communication in the UK . The research study focuses on eight political blogs as representative examples of how individuals and organisations are harnessing blogging as a tool to promote political engagement. The research monitored activity on these blogs and, in addition, a blogging “jury” of members of the public with little or no experience of blogging scrutinised the blogs to assess their relevance as channels of political thought and debate.

[via Harry’s Place ]

Rational manias

There’s a cottage industry within economics involving the production of historical arguments giving rational¹ explanations of seemingly irrational historical episodes, of which the most famous is probably the Dutch tulip boom/mania. This Slate article refers to the most recent example, a complex argument regarding changes in contract rules which seems plausible, but directly contradicts other explanations I’ve seen.

Once opened, questions like this are rarely closed. Still, articles of this kind seem a lot less interesting in 2004 than they did in, say, 1994. In 1994, the efficient markets hypothesis (the belief that asset markets invariably produce the best possible estimate of asset value based on all available information) was an open question, and the standard account of the Dutch tulip mania was evidence against it. In 2004, the falsity of the efficient markets hypothesis is clear to anyone open to being convinced by empirical evidence.

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Faux Pas

Guest-blogging over at Volokh, Cathy Seipp tells us why we should learn French rather than Spanish:

Last year, when she took French at Pasadena Community College, we got the same reaction: “Why French? Why not Spanish? Isn’t that more useful around here?” Well, no. What’s useful in Los Angeles, just like everywhere else in the country, is English. I suppose if I were a contractor rounding up day laborers every morning, and wanted my daughter to learn the family business, Spanish would be invaluable. … I do speak enough Spanish to communicate with the cleaning lady … This is sort of useful, but not vital. Since 1066, educated English speakers have studied French. Even if we don’t speak it … it gives us a deeper understanding of our own language, and prevents embarrassing gaffes like “I just love that Why-vees Saint Laurent!” Which some trophy wife actually said to me at a fashion show once.

An example of the kind of embarrassing gaffe that the study of French seems powerless to prevent is left as an exercise to the reader.