It’s not often realized that many of the insights on politics as studied in the social sciences are drawn from theories of the firm.  Far from being a criticism, theories of the firm have helped to produce some very valuable general understandings of organizational behavior.  Much of these insights have been incorporated into rational choice and game theory based “new institutionalist” theories of states, empires, parties, etc.  (See occasional 3QD contributor Alex Cooley’s Logics of Hierarchy for an lucid use of the approach.)  In n+1, Jules Treneer gives us quite a tour through new institutionalism in a look at US-Pakistani relations:

[T]he White House has been attempting to manage its relationship with Musharraf according to the logic of a specific class of economic game, which economists call the “Principal-Agent Problem.” You give your money to someone; how do you know they will manage it with your interests in mind? The answer, according to economic theory, is to make sure the incentives of the principle and the agents are aligned. Though elegant in concept, this game-theoretical approach proves thorny, because aligning the interests of independent actors is not all that straightforward. Among other things, there is the problem of information: How does one measure an agent’s performance? Quantitatively? Qualitatively? Over what length of time? The choice of the wrong benchmark or time frame can lead to all sorts of perverse outcomes.

Take Merrill Lynch. The financial giant recently let former CEO Stan O’Neal walk away with $250 million in compensation based upon short-term measurements of its stock price, which rallied in part due to the $25 billion in pretax profits O’Neal helped generate during his tenure as CEO. The problem, and the reason O’Neal was shown the door, is that the $25 billion was illusory. Though not alone in suffering credit-related losses, the write-offs Merrill Lynch will be forced to take this year – a direct result of strategies O’Neal aggressively pursued – may amount to $16 billion or more. If Merrill had made only $9 billion in pretax profits over the same period, the stock’s performance would have been less spectacular, and O’Neal’s compensation less spectacular as well. Put another way, if Merrill had measured O’Neal’s performance over the proper time frame, he would have earned much less.

Is it worthwhile, then, to think about the US relationship with an autocrat like Musharraf in terms of the Principal-Agent problem?

[H/t: Asad Raza]

UPDATE 3/24/08: My response to Treneer’s article is here at n + 1. –Abbas Raza.

With Fidel stepping down, the fierce fight over how to judge Castro’s Cuba has begun.  Chris Bertram over at Crooked Timber:

[O]f course, Castro ran a dictatorship that has, since 1959, committed its fair share of crimes, repressions, denials of democratic rights etc. Still, I’m reminded of A.J.P. Taylor writing somewhere or other (reference please, dear readers?) that what the capitalists and their lackeys really really hated about Soviet Russia was not its tyrannical nature but the fact that there was a whole chunk of the earth’s surface where they were no longer able to operate. Ditto Cuba, for a much smaller chunk. So let’s hear it for universal literacy and decent standards of health care. Let’s hear it for the Cubans who help defeat the South Africans and their allies in Angola and thereby prepared the end of apartheid.

Theories of Time and Space
Natasha Trethewey

You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.

Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been. Try this:

head south on Mississippi 49, one-
by-one mile markers ticking off

another minute of your life. Follow this
to its natural conclusion – dead end

at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where
riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches

in a sky threatening rain. Cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand

dumped on a mangrove swamp – buried
terrain of the past. Bring only

what you must carry – tome of memory
its random blank pages. On the dock

where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture:

the photograph – who you were –
will be waiting when you return

..

From brownvboard.org:

On May 17, 1954, the United States Supreme Court ruled, in the landmark case of Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, that “separate but equal” educational facilities were “inherently unequal,” and therefore segregation in public education was unconstitutional. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the overriding decision, and Thurgood Marshall headed the legal defense team of the NAACP.

The 1954 United States Supreme Court decision in Oliver L. Brown et.al. v. the Board of Education of Topeka (KS) et.al. is among the most significant judicial turning points in the development of our country. Originally led by Charles H. Houston, and later Thurgood Marshall and a formidable legal team, it dismantled the legal basis for racial segregation in schools and other public facilities. By declaring that the discriminatory nature of racial segregation … “violates the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees all citizens equal protection of the laws,” Brown v. Board of Education laid the foundation for shaping future national and international policies regarding human rights.

Picture on right: George E.C. Hayes, Thurgood Marshall, and James Nabrit, congratulating each other, following Supreme Court decision declaring segregation unconstitutional, 1954. 

Brown v. Board of Education was not simply about children and education. The laws and policies struck down by this court decision were products of the human tendencies to prejudge, discriminate against, and stereotype other people by their ethnic, religious, physical, or cultural characteristics. Ending this behavior as a legal practice caused far reaching social and ideological implications, which continue to be felt throughout our country. The Brown decision inspired and galvanized human rights struggles across the country and around the world.

What this legal challenge represents is at the core of United States history and the freedoms we enjoy. The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown began a critical chapter in the maturation of our democracy. It reaffirmed the sovereign power of the people of the United States in the protection of their natural rights from arbitrary limits and restrictions imposed by state and local governments. These rights are recognized in the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

While this case was an important historic milestone, it is often misunderstood. Over the years, the facts pertaining to the Brown case have been overshadowed by myths and mischaracterizations:

• Brown v. Board of Education was not the first challenge to school segregation. As early as 1849, African Americans filed suit against an educational system that mandated racial segregation, in the case of Roberts v. City of Boston.
• Oliver Brown, the case namesake, was just one of the nearly 200 plaintiffs from five states who were part of the NAACP cases brought before the Supreme Court in 1951. The Kansas case was named for Oliver Brown as a legal strategy to have a man head the plaintiff roster.

The Brown decision initiated educational and social reform throughout the United States and was a catalyst in launching the modern Civil Rights Movement. Bringing about change in the years since the Brown case continues to be difficult. But the Brown v. Board of Education victory brought this country one step closer to living up to its democratic ideas.

More here.

Thurgood Marshall was America’s leading radical. He led a civil rights revolution in the 20th century that forever changed the landscape of American society. But he is the least well known of the three leading black figures of this century. Martin Luther King Jr., with his preachings of love and non-violent resistance, and Malcolm X, the fiery street preacher who advocated a bloody overthrow of the system, are both more closely associate in the popular mind and myth with the civil rights struggle. But it was Thurgood Marshall, working through the courts to eradicate the legacy of slavery and destroying the racist segregation system of Jim Crow, who had an even more profound and lasting effect on race relations than either of King or X.

It was Marshall who ended legal segregation in the United States. He won Supreme Court victories breaking the color line in housing, transportation and voting, all of which overturned the ‘Separate-but-Equal’ apartheid of American life in the first half of the century. It was Marshall who won the most important legal case of the century, Brown v. Board of Education, ending the legal separation of black and white children in public schools. The success of the Brown case sparked the 1960s civil rights movement, led to the increased number of black high school and college graduates and the incredible rise of the black middle-class in both numbers and political power in the second half of the century.

And it was Marshall, as the nation’s first African-American Supreme Court justice, who promoted affirmative action — preferences, set-asides and other race conscious policies — as the remedy for the damage remaining from the nation’s history of slavery and racial bias. Justice Marshall gave a clear signal that while legal discrimination had ended, there was more to be done to advance educational opportunity for people who had been locked out and to bridge the wide canyon of economic inequity between blacks and whites.

He worked on behalf of black Americans, but built a structure of individual rights that became the cornerstone of protections for all Americans.  He succeeded in creating new protections under law for women, children, prisoners, and the homeless. Their greater claim to full citizenship in the republic over the last century can be directly traced to Marshall. Even the American press had Marshall to thank for an expansion of its liberties during the century.

Marshall’s lifework, then, literally defined the movement of race relations through the century. He rejected King’s peaceful protest as rhetorical fluff that accomplished no permanent change in society. And he rejected Malcolm X’s talk of violent revolution and a separate black nation as racist craziness in a multi-racial society.

The key to Marshall’s work was his conviction that integration — and only integration — would allow equal rights under the law to take hold. Once individual rights were accepted, in Marshall’s mind, then blacks and whites could rise or fall based on their own ability.

Marshall’s deep faith in the power of racial integration came out of a middle class black perspective in turn of the century Baltimore. He was the child of an activist black community that had established its own schools and fought for equal rights from the time of the Civil War. His own family, of an interracial background, had been at the forefront of demands by Baltimore blacks for equal treatment. Out of that unique family and city was born Thurgood Marshall, the architect of American race relations in the twentieth century. Marshall died in 1993.

More here.

From Edge:

The only thing that hasn’t been engineered are the living things, ourselves. Again, what’s the consequence of doing that at scale? Biotechnology is 30 years old; it’s a young adult. Most of the work is still to come, but how do we actually do it? Let’s not talk about it, let’s actually go do it, and then let’s deal with the consequences in terms of how this is going to change ourselves, how the biosecurity framework needs to recognize that it’s not going to be nation-state driven work necessarily, how an ownership sharing and innovation framework needs to be developed that moves beyond patent-based intellectual property and recognizes that the information defining the genetic material’s going to be more important than the stuff itself and so you might transition away from patents to copyright and so on and so forth.

DREW ENDY, is Assistant Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT, where he is working to enable the design and construction of large scale integrated biological systems, and to develop and improve general methods for representing cellular behavior.

More here.

Jean-Michel Basquiat. Catharsis. 1983.

Triptych; acrylic on canvas.

More on this legendary New York artist here and here.

From Time:

How she sat there, the time right, inside a place so wrong it was ready.
                                               — From Rosa, in On the Bus with Rosa Parks by Rita Dove

We know the story. One December evening, a woman left work and boarded a bus for home. She was tired; her feet ached. But this was Montgomery, Ala., in 1955, and as the bus became crowded, the woman, a black woman, was ordered to give up her seat to a white passenger. When she remained seated, that simple decision eventually led to the disintegration of institutionalized segregation in the South, ushering in a new era of the civil rights movement.

Montgomery’s segregation laws were complex: blacks were required to pay their fare to the driver, then get off and reboard through the back door. Sometimes the bus would drive off before the paid-up customers made it to the back entrance. If the white section was full and another white customer entered, blacks were required to give up their seats and move farther to the back; a black person was not even allowed to sit across the aisle from whites. These humiliations were compounded by the fact that two-thirds of the bus riders in Montgomery were black.

She was arrested on a Thursday; bail was posted by Clifford Durr, the white lawyer whose wife had employed Parks as a seamstress. That evening, after talking it over with her mother and husband, Rosa Parks agreed to challenge the constitutionality of Montgomery’s segregation laws. During a midnight meeting of the Women’s Political Council, 35,000 handbills were mimeographed for distribution to all black schools the next morning. The message was simple:

“We are…asking every Negro to stay off the buses Monday in protest of the arrest and trial… You can afford to stay out of school for one day. If you work, take a cab, or walk. But please, children and grown-ups, don’t ride the bus at all on Monday. Please stay off the buses Monday.”

The trial lasted 30 min., with the expected conviction and penalty. That afternoon, the Montgomery Improvement Association was formed. So as not to ruffle any local activists’ feathers, the members elected as their president a relative newcomer to Montgomery, the young minister of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. That evening, addressing a crowd gathered at the Holt Street Baptist Church, King declared in that sonorous, ringing voice millions the world over would soon thrill to: “There comes a time that people get tired.” When he was finished, Parks stood up so the audience could see her. She did not speak; there was no need to. Here I am, her silence said, among you.

And she has been with us ever sinceva persistent symbol of human dignity in the face of brutal authority.

More here.

…
“All wars are breath-takingly the same, fought by greenhorns with a lust for life in a dance with death, with outcomes leading inevitably to dittos.” –Raul Guerre

A Break From the Bush
Yusef Komunyakaa

The South China Sea
drives in another herd.
The volleyball’s a punching bag:
Clem’s already lost a tooth
& Johnny’s left eye is swollen shut.
Frozen airlifted steaks burn
on a wire grill, & miles away
machine guns can be heard.
Pretending we’re somewhere else,
we play harder.
Lee Otis, the point man,
high on Buddha grass,
buries himself up to his neck
in sand. “Can you see me now?
In this spot they gonna build
a Hilton. Invest in Paradise.
Bang, bozos! You’re dead.”
Frenchie’s cassette player
unravels Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.”
Snake, 17, from Daytona,
sits at the water’s edge,
the ash on his cigarette
pointing to the ground
like a crooked finger. CJ,
who in three days will trip
a fragmentation mine,
runs after the ball
into the whitecaps,
laughing

..

Kamila Shamsie in The Guardian:

There can be few experiences more disquieting than that of reading the opening pages of Benazir Bhutto’s Reconciliation, with its description of her homecoming on October 18 2007 – the jubilation followed by carnage. The details of the suicide attack are horrific enough within their own context, but when read as precursor to the attack that killed Bhutto 10 weeks later they acquire an even more chilling resonance. There is the sense of reading two texts: the first might well have been published during the early months of Bhutto’s premiership, its words a yardstick against which we would measure the effectiveness of her government; the second stands as the final testament of an extraordinary woman whose death added urgency to the already-urgent arguments of the book.

Bhutto lays out her own blueprint for the defeat of extremism by concerted efforts involving both Muslims and the west. Some of those ideas seem unrealistic. In particular, her suggestion that the oil-producing Gulf states “jump-start economic and intellectual development” in the rest of the Muslim world via a Muslim Investment Fund contradicts her own argument that states act in self-interest rather than as part of a pan-national religious community, and also ignores the dismal record of many oil-producing nations in promoting intellectual development within their own borders. She ends the book by acknowledging that her proposals “may seem daunting and even impossible. I make these recommendations because the times demand something more than business as usual . . . It is a time for creativity. It is a time for bold commitment. . . There has been enough pain. It is time for reconciliation.”

It may be tempting to think her death undermines her belief in what was yet possible, but it seems more in keeping with the spirit of Reconciliation to say that there are ways to counter those who use violence to further their ends. We just can’t wait until tomorrow to do it.

More here.

Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times Magazine:

On a drizzly Tuesday night in late January, 200 people came out to hear a psychiatrist talk rhapsodically about play — not just the intense, joyous play of children, but play for all people, at all ages, at all times. (All species too; the lecture featured touching photos of a polar bear and a husky engaging playfully at a snowy outpost in northern Canada.) Stuart Brown, president of the National Institute for Play, was speaking at the New York Public Library’s main branch on 42nd Street. He created the institute in 1996, after more than 20 years of psychiatric practice and research persuaded him of the dangerous long-term consequences of play deprivation. In a sold-out talk at the library, he and Krista Tippett, host of the public-radio program ‘‘Speaking of Faith,’’ discussed the biological and spiritual underpinnings of play. Brown called play part of the ‘‘developmental sequencing of becoming a human primate. If you look at what produces learning and memory and well-being, play is as fundamental as any other aspect of life, including sleep and dreams.’’

More here.

Danielle Trussoni in the New York Times Book Review:

If you believe you are by now immune to gory novels, here’s one with enough malevolence to give even the most hardened readers nightmares. “The Seven Days of Peter Crumb,” a chronicle of the final week in a psychopath’s life by the British actor and writer Jonny Glynn, is gruesome, obscene and utterly disturbing. It is also absorbing and well written. Reading it, I fought the urge to throw up. Needless to say, I was transfixed.

Mixed reactions are inevitable in the presence of one of the more repulsive characters in recent memory. Peter Crumb spends his days bludgeoning, raping and dismembering. He gets cranked on opium and horse tranquilizers and has a scatological obsession that requires him to give detailed descriptions of his bowel movements. In addition, his first-person account is interrupted by a second personality, egging him on. Crumb has little control over where his mind (and thus the novel) will veer at any given point. The result is an elegant contrapuntal stream of consciousness so brutally spiky and internal that the reader (like Crumb’s victims) wants to plead for reprieve.

More here.

Denise Grady in the New York Times:

If you have to come down with a strange disease, this town of 23,000 on the wide-open prairie in southeastern Minnesota is a pretty good place to be. The Mayo Clinic, famous for diagnosing exotic ailments, owns the local medical center and shares some staff with it. Mayo itself is just 40 miles east in Rochester. And when it comes to investigating mysterious outbreaks, Minnesota has one of the strongest health departments and best-equipped laboratories in the country.

And the disease that confronted doctors at the Austin Medical Center here last fall was strange indeed. Three patients had the same highly unusual set of symptoms: fatigue, pain, weakness, numbness and tingling in the legs and feet.

The patients had something else in common, too: all worked at Quality Pork Processors, a local meatpacking plant.

More here.  [Thanks to Daupo.]

From the Tate Modern website:

Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth is the first work to intervene directly in the fabric of the Turbine Hall. Rather than fill this iconic space with a conventional sculpture or installation, Salcedo has created a subterranean chasm that stretches the length of the Turbine Hall. The concrete walls of the crevice are ruptured by a steel mesh fence, creating a tension between these elements that resist yet depend on one another. By making the floor the principal focus of her project, Salcedo dramatically shifts our perception of the Turbine Hall’s architecture, subtly subverting its claims to monumentality and grandeur. Shibboleth asks questions about the interaction of sculpture and space, about architecture and the values it enshrines, and about the shaky ideological foundations on which Western notions of modernity are built.

In particular, Salcedo is addressing a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world. A ‘shibboleth’ is a custom, phrase or use of language that acts as a test of belonging to a particular social group or class. By definition, it is used to exclude those deemed unsuitable to join this group.

‘The history of racism’, Salcedo writes, ‘runs parallel to the history of modernity, and is its untold dark side’. For hundreds of years, Western ideas of progress and prosperity have been underpinned by colonial exploitation and the withdrawal of basic rights from others.

More here.

Black Americans made the songs, but not the myth of romantic ‘authenticity.’ If white tastes and obsessions distorted their music, can we ever hear each other?

David Gates in Newsweek:

Forbes’s book is a biography of Broadway’s first black star, for whom Dunbar once co-wrote songs: in context, the poem inevitably evokes an image of Williams, a light-skinned Bahamian who always performed (often to whites-only audiences) in a grinning mask of burnt cork. Hamilton, a University of London historian, argues that the blues as whites have imagined it—a pure and primal musical utterance originating in the deep backcountry of the South—is less a creation of black musicians than of white esthetes. Folklorists and record collectors, she suggests, preferred blues performers to be downtrodden, decrepit and obscure—much as Broadway audiences needed Bert Williams to black up and talk in plantation dialect. Hamilton’s reference to Dunbar suggests a barely suppressed resentment of white condescension; she quotes the singer-guitarist Lonnie Johnson, who asked an interviewer in the 1960s, “Are you another one of those guys who wants to put crutches under my ass?”

More here.  [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

Fuchsia Dunlop, author of my new and beloved cookbook Land of Plenty, in the FT:

I had always believed that it would be easy to seduce a man with my cooking. My childhood role model was Zeralda, the heroine of a picture book by Tomi Ungerer, who saves a town from the menaces of an ogre by showing him that there are more delicious things to eat than children. From the age of seven I gazed at pictures of Zeralda devising recipes in her father’s kitchen, roasting suckling pigs, or icing a cake in a kitchen hung with hare and pheasants, and I longed to be like her. Especially because in the end she marries the ogre, who shaves his shaggy beard to reveal a handsome face, and they live happily ever after.

My own attempts to win men over with my cooking have been disastrous. It all began, I think, with the anorexic boyfriend at university. He was strikingly beautiful and great company but he had an uneasy relationship with food. He treated it like something dangerous, which he had to counter with long hours in the gym. Young and ignorant, I didn’t understand at the time why our dinners together always reminded me of those of Jack Sprat and his wife.

Later, while working in London, I cooked for another man I was beginning to like very much: a roast chicken, anointed with lemon juice and fine olive oil, sprinkled with herbs. It was one of the best roast fowl I’d ever cooked. But he, too, was neurotic about his weight, so he peeled off the crisp, golden skin, the most exquisite part of the bird, and left it at the side of his plate, where it slowly congealed. I think my feelings for him dimmed from that moment on.

Is Barak Obama turning into the liberal’s Bob Avakian? I kid of course, but a few friends have made  comments that are similar to an emerging “meme” in the blogosphere. There is a clear and rising chorus on the left-liberal side of the spectrum that expresses worry about a cult of personality around Barak Obama.  I’ve only ever really been a poputchik with any movement and personality, so I’ve never had to “recover” from anything. But I am intrigued by the fact of a chorus about this. Dahlia Lithwick in Slate:

I know this is going to sound strange, but it’s not you, Barack, it’s me. Really it always was me, but now it’s really, really about me. I don’t know when we started to feel weird supporting you, but: My friend Hanna thinks it started with that “Yes We Can,” video. I mean, last week I was totally crying watching it. Now just thinking about how choked up I got gives me the creeps. I think I felt something at the time, but even if I did, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to feel it anymore. Feeling inspired is soooo early-February.

Or maybe it started when everyone began madly posting last week about how you are not the Messiah. And that got me thinking. Then, when commentators started accusing me of being a venomous drone in a “cult of personality,” I just needed to get out. I mean cults are soooo 1970s. And cults of personality? So totally first century.

Cult or no cult, this week I just started getting really confused about you. I mean, when people start to say that your strengths are actually weaknesses? That just makes sense, if you really think about it. I mean, what’s the point of being such an inspirational speaker if all you can do is give inspirational speeches? Do better, Barack. I mean, do worse!

In Prospect (UK), a profile of Charles Taylor:

Charles Taylor’s new book A Secular Age is well timed. Begun long ago, it is now published in the middle of intense public discussion about religion. But though the book reads like an argument with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, it won’t be joining theirs at the front of the bookshops.

That is a pity, as Taylor is arguably the most interesting and important philosopher writing in English today. It is also in some respects surprising. For Taylor has most of the attributes that the public look for in a philosopher. His work addresses the big issues. He is politically engaged—indeed, he is a leading public figure in his Canadian homeland. He writes appreciatively about thinkers—including Hegel, the French existentialists and Heidegger—whom most anglophone philosophers view as suspect, but whom many students and non-philosophers find attractive. He addresses himself not just to academics but to educated readers. Tall and handsome, he is a confident and charming public speaker. It has to be said, however, that at 850 pages, A Secular Age is not the Taylor book one would recommend to a novice.

What makes Taylor so important?