Free Trade Agreements are bad for your health

Most of my blogging time this week has been devoted to criticism of the Free Trade Agreement between Australia and the United States. Wait! Don’t stop reading yet!

I know that “Trade agreement said harmful to small faraway country” is the stereotype of a boring newspaper story, but this one is really important to Americans as well as Australians, and to anyone interested in health policy. If you ever hope to see affordable health care in the US, you’d better hope that (against all the odds) this agreement falls at the final hurdle.

Not for all the money in the world ...

Due to a sudden period of enforced idleness, my insomnia is back (my previous schedule of working five caffeine-fuelled 14 hour days a week and recovering at the weekend had cured it nicely. I can recommend this method to anyone although to be honest, my doctor frowned on it). As a result, I find myself thinking about the aggregativity of capital, labour theories of value, and so on. I therefore pass on this small question which may be of some amusement to those of our readership who indulge in either cannabis or value theory; the two groups may find it equally interesting.

If you had all the wealth in the world, ie you owned every single object of value that was known to humanity ….

what would you spend it on?

Presidential campaign ads

I realize some blogs have already covered this, but just in case people missed it, the American Museum of the Moving Image has an interesting online exhibition about presidential compaign commercials since 1952. You can watch all the ads online, which are organized by year, type of commercial and issue. They also have a section on Web ads. A propos the Museum and campaigns, Richard Gere had a related comment at the end of the Museum’s tribute to him in April: “Never trust anyone who believes that God is exclusively on their side. [—- long pause —-] Especially when that man is the President.” [Hat tip: my friend Jeff whose site is currently down so no links.]

Babbling taxis

I’m preparing an introductory course on game theory at the moment, and selecting readings for the week on communication and games of limited information. One of the key contributors to this literature is Joseph Farrell (no relation) who has done seminal work on how “cheap talk” (costless communication) may affect rational actors’ behaviour when it conveys useful information about an actor’s type. He also shows that “babbling equilibria” are always possible, in which actors’ communication conveys no information about their type whatsoever, and is consequently always ignored by others. This seems to be a rather abstruse argument with little real world relevance - but I reckon that one nice way to bring it home to my students is to point to how it helps explain DC taxi-cabs. In many (perhaps most) cities, cabs use their cab-sign to signal whether they are available or not. A lighted cab-sign indicates that the taxi-cab is free; an unlighted sign indicates that the cab is occupied. Washington DC, for some reason, is different. As far as I can tell, whether or not a cab’s sign is lighted bears no relationship to whether it is occupied. Thus, after some initial confusion, newcomers learn to ignore whether the cab has a lighted sign or not, instead squinting as best they can into the interior, to see whether they can spot any passengers. This is about as close to a babbling equilibrium as one may reasonably expect to find in the real world. How this came about in DC, and not in other American cities, is anyone’s guess.

Congratulations to Chris!

In an effort to demonstrate that blogging is not detrimental to one’s health, uhm, career that is, I am happy to let you know that Chris Bertram is no longer “Senior Lecturer in Philosophy” but “Reader in Social and Political Philosophy” at the University of Bristol. From now on, when you imagine him writing blog posts, feel free to add a special purple robe to the image. Congrats, Chris!

Have Faith or Pandemonium/Liable to Walk Upon the Scene

I have it on excellent authority that small kittens have done literally dozens of impossibly cute things in Iraq, yesterday alone. But are we going to read about that in the so-called paper of record? No, it’s all “there was this coordinated attack on Christian churches”, and “militants kill Turkish hostage; trucking group withdraws from Iraq over safety concerns.” As Tacitus blogger Bird Dog rightly asks, “Which is actually more newsworthy, something we hear about every day (terrorist bombings) or previously unheard of signs that Iraqis are stepping forth and taking steps to restore their country?” Signs like that one time in Mosul, when the kitten pretended to stalk and pounce on that dented beer cap, like it was a mouse or something, and everybody laughed. Remember that? Right before the mortar attack, remember?

Then and now

I bought a copy of Transformer the other day. I was fourteen when it first came out in December 1972, and I probably paid about the same amount of money back then (£5), or maybe the year after. 1972 is a long time ago — thirty-two years — but Transformer is clearly an album that lives on this side of a temporal watershed. If a song with the lyrical content of “Walk on the Wild Side” had been made ten years earlier, it probably wouldn’t have received much exposure, and certainly wouldn’t have been in the record collections of fourteen-year-olds (invisibly shaping their perception of sexual possibility and acceptability). But if it is an album from now, rather than then, it is still stiking how close it was to then. In Britain the Sexual Offences Act had been passed only five years before. Five years . Not that the following years have been ones of seamless progress, what with Section 28 and that.

To check on some of the dates, I looked at this gay rights timeline . Shocking — so shocking — to read entries like the following

* 1945 - Upon the liberation of concentration camps by Allied forces, those interned for homosexuality are not freed, but required to serve out the full term of their sentences under Paragraph 175

Unimaginable. And yet closer in time to 1972 than we are. Remember that next time you hear a commentator deploring the influence of the 1960s.

Sidney Morgenbesser

Brian Leiter reports that Sidney Morgenbesser has died at the age of 92. NPR have an audio tribute with Arthur Danto . I’ll post links to obituaries as they appear. There was a rash of Morgenbesser anecdotes posted a while back, the best place to start is probably with this post at Normblog and follow the links back. My favourite:

Question:”Why is there something rather than nothing?”
Morgenbesser: “Even if there were nothing you’d still be complaining!”

Maybe that's where they're going wrong ...

The Central Intelligence Agency is committed to protecting your privacy and will collect no personal information about you unless you choose to provide that information to us.

All about oil?

There’s an article in today’s Guardian by John Laughland , warning us that the Tony Blair’s humanitarian concern about Darfur is just a cloak to mask his desire to launch another oil-resource grabbing war. Of course, the facts should speak for themselves, but I’m not above a bit of ad hominem , especially when it comes to wondering where the Guardian gets its op-ed contributors from these days. Thanks to Google, it is possible to read an earlier Guardian article denouncing the Spectator as bonkers , partly on the grounds of a John Laughland interview with Jean-Marie Le Pen, that same, highly sympathetic interview , a review by the Virtual Stoa’s Chris Brooke of a book by Laughland (“read the whole thing”), and Laughland’s views on Zimbabwe , Slobodan Milosevic (one representative piece, google for more if you like), John Kerry (more of a warmonger than Bush), Blair and the Euro , and Cyprus . Readers may find that Laughland’s views on this issue or that coincide with their own, but, taken in the round, a certain picture emerges. (UPDATE: This Laughland article , about recent events in Georgia, is a particularly fine example of his work. Scroll down for his speculations about why Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić remain at liberty!)

More Mieville

I’m just back from a week in the Bay Area, with limited web access - John H mentions a friendly argument that we had last year over China Mieville and the economics of fantasy. My two posts on the subject are on my old blog, which is a bit difficult to access these days - for those (if any) who are interested in the topic, I’ve posted them below the fold. I note that I’ve mellowed a bit on the topic in the meantime, partly in response to criticisms from PNH and others.

More on Netflix

Hunt Stilwell has let me know via email that the Netflix fallacy that I talked about last week seems to replicate a very interesting experiment on the psychology of intertemporal decision-making. His email (with permission, and some light editing) is reproduced under the fold.

Enron of the Eggheads?

I had rather taken my eye off the ball, but was informed by a pal this week that a charge of civil fraud has been confirmed in a US Court against Andrei Shleifer and one of his assistants for investing in Russian companies while they were running the Harvard Institute for International Development’s project in Russia, contrary to their agreement with USAID not to do so. To be honest, it all looks pretty sleazy stuff, and not at all good for the international reputation of the American economics profession (Shleifer was a recent John Bates Clark medal winner).

On the other hand, I find it quite difficult to get wrapped up in moral outrage over this particular charge; the actual charge on which Shleifer and Hay were found to have committed civil fraud was that they acted in concert with Hay’s girlfriend to set up a mutual fund company and try to become the Fidelity of Russia. Which strikes me as a pretty silly idea at the time, but hardly on a par with Pol Pot.

On the other hand, it appears that nobody at the HIID is going to jail (or even being seriously criticised) for the genuine crime that was committed by that institute during the 1980s; their partisanship of Anatoly Chubais and the disastrous privatisation program associated with that government (here’s a potted summary by FAIR of why you should care, and my own analysis of why it was such a bad idea). This, in my opinion (which I hope to flesh out a bit next week) was a crime which does bear serious comparison with some of the middle-ranking atrocities of the last century. And of course, nobody cares, because such is the nature of things. JK Galbraith has a book out this week called “The Economics of Innocent Fraud”, in which he suggests that innocent frauds perpetrated by people acting in good faith are in general far more damaging than culpable frauds perpetrated by people who know what they are doing. It looks like l’affaire Shleifer is proving once more that even at 96 years of age, he’s got more marbles than most of the rest of us put together.

A name that will live in infamy

Herve Gaymard. Remember the name of this philistine, moron, horrific Gaullist placeman and all-around fils de putain. I suspect that if the revolution comes and some semblance of humanity, civilisation and decency is restored to the moral cesspool that we see around us, your grandchildren will be encouraged to ceremonially burn him in effigy once a year, on a ritual fire made of oak chips. You might also want to make a note of the name of Denis Verdier, who revisionist historians of fify years’ hence may even suggest deserves more of the blame than the hated Gaymard.

Spot the Difference

Our wise masters at the UK’s Home Office have decreed that, being bears of little brain, Her Majesty’s loyal subjects can’t be trusted to distinguish between Preparing for Emergencies, the official government site designed to scare the living shite out of us all by waving the threat of a terrorist attack in our faces offer useful information to concerned citizens about the government’s plans for coping with a terrorist attack, and this parody.

1-2, I Got a Crush on You

I’ve been talking a lot about this with a friend of mine. My friend confesses to a blog crush here and there, too. But my friend’s position is that the crushes are on the blog, not the blogger. I think my friend believes that the image of bloggers we get via the blog aren’t “real,” and my friend would rather have a crush on the idea of a person, based on what one sees on the blog, rather than the reality.

Do you think blogs reveal a person’s true personality? Is the truth-shading, the omission of embarassing details, etc. one gets in a blog any worse than one would get from a conversation with the person? Or are people perhaps more exhibitionist in print than they would be otherwise? (This must be true for many shy bloggers. And, I think, none of you will be surprised to learn that I am not shy.) A friend who hasn’t seen me in a long while read John and Belle Have a Blog recently and said that it was just like talking to me—that the posts were perfectly Belle-ish. I think that’s true, although I try not to curse so much on the blog. (Then again, now that I have small children I don’t curse in front of them either.) Thoughts? Do any of you hasve blogcrushes? Are we seeing the real Kieran here? Can Little Green Footballs possibly represent the real Charles Johnson, who appears at one time to have been a mild-mannered web designer of some talent, not notably lizardoid in any respect?