Mark Blyth over at Triple Crisis:

In my first triple crisis piece I wrote about John Quiggin’s new book thesis concerning Zombie Economic ideas. Lead zombie of the moment is the idea of fiscal austerity as the way out of the crisis, despite oodles of evidence to the contrary. In short, we need to cut budgets to restore fiscal sanity, and we know that this is the way forward since small open economies in the 1980s (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark) that cut their budgets still grew. The economic (ir)rationale for this has been pointed out by Krugman, Stiglitz, and others. But for me the most interesting, and most tragic part of this story, are the distributional consequences of these policies, and the politics that they engender.

The first problem with such a policy is that if it works at all, it only works when everyone else is growing. If everyone else shrinks at the same time then what is individually rational becomes collectively disastrous, and viciously zero-sum. The second problem, the distributional one, is who pays for this debt crisis? The answer is ‘not those who made the mess in the first place’ – namely, finance. Instead, the double ‘put’ (quite literally) is on those who can afford it least, lower income taxpayers and consumers: once in the form of the bailouts, lost revenue, and lost growth, and now twice in the form of the fiscal consolidation (zombie-slashed public services) needed to pay back the debt generated from the bailout.

It is in this context that the much-anticipated budget cuts of the British government announced last week come to the fore. Britain has embarked upon a giant natural experiment to settle the stimulus versus austerity debate once and for all by plumping for austerity, and on a truly epic scale.

As Reinhardt and Rogoff remind us, approximately eighty percent of the time you have a banking crisis it will be followed by a sovereign debt crisis. As the public sector levers up to compensate for the fall in private spending, deficits are generated and new debt issues become a necessity. The UK economy was hit harder than many of its European peers when finance imploded because a full quarter of all British tax receipts came from the financial sector. This, plus the effect of the British economy’s automatic stabilizers, resulted in a budget deficit of 10.1 percent of GDP by 2011, with British government debt issues rising to 58.5 percent of GDP to plug these gaps. This ‘death spiral,’ so the argument of the British government goes, has to be reversed since ever-increasing debts will lead to ever-increasing interest payments, eventually turning Britain into Greece. To avoid this the proposed sacrifice is a $128 billion reduction in public spending over four years, which it is hoped will reduce the budget deficit from 10.1 percent of GDP to 2.1 percent by 2014. Virtue, it seems, favors the bold.

Roger Boylan reviews The Autobiography of Mark Twain: Volume I, in the Boston Review:

The posthumous career of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, has been a busy one.

According to the staff of the University of California’s Mark Twain Project, more than 5,000 previously unknown letters of Twain’s have surfaced in the last 50 years. This represents an average of two new letters per week, but still only about one-tenth of the 50,000 or so he is believed to have written. Two of his best-known works were published after his death: the iconoclastic Letters from the Earth, in which a not-yet-fallen Satan, on a fact-finding trip to Earth, analyzes the follies of the human race in a series of letters to his fellow angels (“Now my kids can learn how to be good atheists!” a friend of mine exclaimed); and the bizarre supernatural fantasy No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, set in a medieval Austria no better prepared than Twain’s America to deal with the harsh truth about humanity, as expounded by an otherworldly visitor calling himself “No. 44.” The former was released in 1962, the latter in 1982 (a fraudulent version appeared in 1916).

These repeated encores would neither have displeased nor surprised Twain, who approved of the idea of withholding publication until after death. “I will leave it behind,” he said of one of his unpublished writings, “and utter it from the grave. There is free speech there, and no harm to the family.” He said substantially the same thing about his autobiography, decreeing that it remain unpublished until a hundred years after he died:

A book that is not to be published for a century gives the writer a freedom which he could secure in no other way. In these conditions you can draw a man without prejudice exactly as you knew him and yet have no fear of hurting his feelings or those of his sons or grandsons.

Twain was also deeply fond of his own celebrity, which, by delaying publication, he sought to extend into the future. And the first volume of his Autobiography, with two more to come, is now rolling off the presses, as requested, a hundred years after the occasion when news of his death was not exaggerated. Volume I is divided into two main sections: “Preliminary Manuscripts and Dictations, 1870–1905,” consisting of autobiographical jottings and early odds and ends, and the “Autobiography” proper, starting in 1906, when Twain began to dictate his reminiscences to a stenographer. Some of the earlier pieces were published in his lifetime; in 1906 the North American Review printed excerpts, titled “Chapters from My Autobiography,” to generally favorable critical reception.

But beset by doubts and chronically depressed—for good reason, having gone bankrupt or nearly bankrupt twice, and having lost a son, a daughter, and a wife over the years (the second of his three daughters, Jean, would die in 1909)—Twain continued to blow hot and cold on the whole idea of writing an autobiography

Andrew Gelman over at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science:

Nate Silver and Justin Wolfers are having a friendly blog-dispute about momentum in political polling. Nate and Justin each make good points but are also missing parts of the picture. These questions relate to my own research so I thought I'd discuss them here.

There ain't no mo'

Nate led off the discussion by writing that pundits are always talking about “momentum” in the polls:

Turn on the news or read through much of the analysis put out by some of our friends, and you're likely to hear a lot of talk about “momentum”: the term is used about 60 times per day by major media outlets in conjunction with articles about polling.

When people say a particular candidate has momentum, what they are implying is that present trends are likely to perpetuate themselves into the future. Say, for instance, that a candidate trailed by 10 points in a poll three weeks ago — and now a new poll comes out showing the candidate down by just 5 points. It will frequently be said that this candidate “has the momentum”, “is gaining ground,” “is closing his deficit,” or something similar.

Each of these phrases are in the present tense. They create the impression that — if the candidate has gone from being 10 points down to 5 points down, then by next week, he'll have closed his deficit further: perhaps he'll even be ahead!

But, as Nate points out, this ain't actually happening:

Say that a candidate has improved her position in the polls from August to September. Is her position more likely than not to improve further from September to October? . . . this is not what we see at all . . . Sometimes, a candidate who has gained ground in the polls continues to do so; otherwise, the trend reverses itself, or the race simply flatlines. . . . There is also no sign of momentum we look at the change in polling between other periods. . . . In general elections, the direction in which polls have moved is not predictive of the direction in which they will move. [italics added]

I like Nate's analysis. It's very much in the Bill James style, but with graphs.

Consider the time scale

Enter Justin Wolfers, who writes that Nate is all wrong, that there is momentum in political polling.

Justin argues that Nate made a mistake by using the same data in his “before” and “after” comparison.

“Liberal principles,” declares Milbank, “will always ensure that the rights of the individual override those of the group.” For this reason, he concludes, “liberalism cannot defend corporate religious freedom.” The neutrality liberalism proclaims “is itself entirely secular” (it brackets belief; that’s what it means by neutrality) and is therefore “unable to accord the religious perspective [the] equal protection” it rhetorically promises. Religious rights “can only be effectively defended pursuant to a specific and distinctly religious framework.” Liberal universalism, with its superficial respect for everyone (as long as everyone is superficial) and its deep respect for no one, can’t do it. If that is so, then the other contributors to this volume are whistling “Dixie,” at least with respect to the hope declared by Rawls that liberalism in some political form might be able to do justice to the strongly religious citizens of a liberal state. Milbank’s fellow essayists cannot negotiate or remove the impasse he delineates, but what they can do, and do do with considerable ingenuity and admirable tact, is find ways of blunting and perhaps muffling the conflict between secular and religious imperatives, a conflict that cannot (if Milbank is right, and I think he is) be resolved on the level of theory, but which can perhaps be kept at bay by the ad-hoc, opportunistic, local and stop-gap strategies that are at the heart of politics.

more from Stanley Fish at The Opinionater here.

The ethico-political preference for a democratic model in which parties are – formally, at least – subordinate to state mechanisms falls into the trap of the ‘democratic fiction’. It ignores the fact that, in a ‘free’ society, domination and servitude are located in the ‘apolitical’ economic sphere of property and managerial power. The Party’s distance from state apparatuses and its ability to act without legal constraint afford a unique possibility: ‘illegal’ activity can be undertaken not only in the interest of the market but – sometimes – in the interest of the workers too. For example, when the 2008 financial crisis hit China, the instinctive reaction of the Chinese banks was to follow the cautious approach of Western banks, radically cutting back on lending to companies wishing to expand. Informally (no law legitimised this), the Party simply ordered the banks to release credit, and thus succeeded – for the time being – in sustaining the growth of the Chinese economy. To take another example, Western governments complain that their industries cannot compete with the Chinese in producing green technology, since Chinese companies get financial support from their government. But what’s wrong with that? Why doesn’t the West simply follow China and do the same?

more from Slavoj Žižek at the LRB here.

Whether or not multiple parentage gains wider legal and social acceptance, the fact that it’s being debated — and, in a few cases, allowed — suggests the flexibility that the concept of parenthood has taken on today, not only among scholars, but among adults doing the work of actually raising children in sometimes unorthodox situations. It’s part of a broader reexamination of what it means to have a family, a conversation that is itself only a chapter in a story that has unfolded over hundreds of years. That constant push and pull has been shaped by religion and law, custom and economics, and its inflection points are not only changes like the abolition of illegitimacy, but the revision of adoption laws, the relaxation of divorce requirements, the movement in some states to legalize same-sex marriage, and even the debate, in places as different as late 19th-century Mormon Utah and the contemporary Netherlands, over the permissibility of polygamy. Some of those changes remain deeply controversial, of course. And yet there are other aspects of the contemporary family that, while they would strike people of an earlier era as deeply unnatural, today go all but unremarked: the fact, for example, that it’s common for grandparents to live not with their children and grandchildren but instead hundreds of miles away. The family of the future may look similarly unfamiliar to us, and in ways we’re only beginning to discern.

more from Drake Bennett at the Boston Globe here.

From The Telegraph:

Eleven years ago, I read books for Jonathon Green, who I’d heard was researching a slang dictionary. A fun-sounding project turned out to be the compilation of an enormous computer database, with citations for printed usage, over the last 500 years – the most complete record of its kind. This voracious abstraction, to which I fed titbits for a couple of years, is now about to be published in three large, and appropriately green, hardback volumes. Training began with a pile of early PG Wodehouse novels. These related the adventures of Psmith, the man about town who revelled in such phrases as “last night’s rannygazoo” several years before Bertie Wooster began to bounce them off the silver-plated English of Jeeves.

Rannygazoo (“nonsense; irrelevant, irritating activity”) was an easy spot. And because Wodehouse is full of such exuberance, marking up the books seemed a breeze. I remember my disappointment when I learnt that I was regularly missing useful citations. When you begin to study it, much more familiar language reveals itself as slang. A few pages on in the new dictionary, for example, Wodehouse yields a citation for the “coarse, dismissive, jeering noise” that most people would call a “raspberry”. As the definition indicates, it doesn’t have another name – I had always dimly thought of it as a more fruity sort of “rasp”. But it actually derives from rhyming slang, where phrases are often shortened to exclude the rhyme that reveals the word intended – and, in this case, the thing imitated (“raspberry tart”).

More here.

From The New York Times:

“Having a Sister Makes You Happier”: that was the headline on a recent article about a study finding that adolescents who have a sister are less likely to report such feelings as “I am unhappy, sad or depressed” and “I feel like no one loves me.” These findings are no fluke; other studies have come to similar conclusions. But why would having a sister make you happier? The usual answer — that girls and women are more likely than boys and men to talk about emotions — is somehow unsatisfying, especially to a researcher like me. Much of my work over the years has developed the premise that women’s styles of friendship and conversation aren’t inherently better than men’s, simply different. A man once told me that he had spent a day with a friend who was going through a divorce. When he returned home, his wife asked how his friend was coping. He replied: “I don’t know. We didn’t talk about it.” His wife chastised him. Obviously, she said, the friend needed to talk about what he was going through.

This made the man feel bad. So he was relieved to read in my book “You Just Don’t Understand” (Ballantine, 1990) that doing things together can be a comfort in itself, another way to show caring. Asking about the divorce might have made his friend feel worse by reminding him of it, and expressing concern could have come across as condescending. The man who told me this was himself comforted to be reassured that his instincts hadn’t been wrong and he hadn’t let his friend down. But if talking about problems isn’t necessary for comfort, then having sisters shouldn’t make men happier than having brothers. Yet the recent study — by Laura Padilla-Walker and her colleagues at Brigham Young University — is supported by others.

More here.

Sughra Raza. Flying over Bingham Canyon Mine, Utah. May, 2010.

Digital photograph.

This copper mine is the largest man-made crater on the planet ; it is visible from space.

More here.

Tom Rowley and Alistair Walker in The Independent:

Josh Timonen was one of a small coterie of young protégés around Richard Dawkins, sharing his boss's zealous atheism. But now he and the evolutionary theorist have fallen out spectacularly. Professor Dawkins's charity has accused Mr Timonen of embezzling hundreds of thousands of pounds.

The two atheists had become close in recent years, with Dawkins, the best-selling author and Emeritus Professor of Biology at Oxford University, even dedicating his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, to him. But Mr Timonen and the Dawkins foundation are now preparing for a legal wrangle.

The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, has filed four lawsuits in a Californian court alleging that Mr Timonen, who ran its online operation in America, stole $375,000 (£239,000) over three years. It is claiming $950,000 in damages, while Mr Dawkins is suing him for $14,000 owed to him personally. Mr Timonen strongly denies the allegations.

In the 18-page complaint filed in a Los Angeles court, the foundation claims that Mr Timonen said the website he was running was just “squeaking by,” making only $30,000 in three years, when in fact it was grossing 10 times that sum. The charity alleges that Mr Timonen pocketed 92 per cent of the money generated by the store, with his girlfriend spending $100,000 of the charity's money on upgrading her home before putting it on the market.

More here. [Thanks to John Ballard.]

Glenn Greenwald over at Salon:

I'm still not quite over the most disgusting part of the Juan Williams spectacle yesterday: watching the very same people (on the Right and in the media) who remained silent about or vocally cheered on the viewpoint-based firings of Octavia Nasr, Helen Thomas, Rick Sanchez, Eason Jordan, Peter Arnett, Phil Donahue, Ashleigh Banfield, Bill Maher, Ward Churchill, Chas Freeman, Van Jones and so many others, spend all day yesterday wrapping themselves in the flag of “free expression!!!” and screeching about the perils and evils of firing journalists for expressing certain viewpoints. Even for someone who expects huge doses of principle-free hypocrisy — as I do — that behavior is really something to behold. And anyone doubting that there is a double standard when it comes to anti-Muslim speech should just compare the wailing backlash from most quarters over Williams' firing to the muted acquiescence or widespread approval of those other firings.

But there's one point from all of this I really want to highlight. The principal reason the Williams firing resonated so much and provoked so much fury is that it threatens the preservation of one of the most important American mythologies: that Muslims are a Serious Threat to America and Americans. That fact is illustrated by a Washington Post Op-Ed today from Reuel Marc Gerecht, who is as standard and pure a neocon as exists: an Israel-centric, Iran-threatening, Weekly Standard and TNR writer, former CIA Middle East analyst, former American Enterprise Institute and current Defense of Democracies “scholar,” torture advocate, etc. etc. Gerecht hails Williams as a courageous “dissident” for expressing this “truth”:

[W]hile his manner may have been clumsy, Williams was right to suggest that there is a troubling nexus between the modern Islamic identity and the embrace of terrorism as a holy act.

Above all else, this fear-generating “nexus” is what must be protected at all costs. This is the “troubling” connection — between Muslims and terrorism — that Williams lent his “liberal,” NPR-sanctioned voice to legitimizing. And it is this fear-sustaining, anti-Muslim slander that NPR's firing of Williams threatened to delegitimize. That is why NPR's firing of Williams must be attacked with such force: because if it were allowed to stand, it would be an important step toward stigmatizing anti-Muslim animus in the same way that other forms of bigotry are now off-limits, and that, above all else, is what cannot happen, because anti-Muslim animus is too important to too many factions to allow it to be delegitimized.

Jonah Lehrer in Wired (via Delong):

Suppose somebody offered you a choice between two different vacations. Vacation number one gives you a 50 percent chance of winning a three-week tour of England, France and Italy. Vacation number two offers you a one-week tour of England for sure.

Not surprisingly, the vast majority of people (typically over 80 percent) prefer the one-week tour of England. We almost always choose certainty over risk, and are willing to trade two weeks of vacation for the guarantee of a one-week vacation. A sure thing just seems better than a gamble that might leave us with nothing. But how about this wager:

Vacation number one offers you a 5 percent chance of winning a three week tour of England, France and Italy. Vacation number two gives you a 10 percent chance of winning a one week tour of England.

In this case, most people choose the three-week trip. We figure both vacations are unlikely to happen, so we might as well go for broke on the grand European tour. (People act the same way with lotteries: we typically buy the ticket for the biggest possible prize, regardless of the odds.)

Allais presciently realized that this very popular set of decisions – almost everybody made them – violated the rational assumptions of economics. Instead of making decisions that could be predicted by a few mathematical equations, people acted with frustrating inconsistency. After all, both questions involve 50 percent reductions in probability (from 100 percent to 50 percent, and from 10 percent to 5 percent), and yet generated completely opposite responses. Our choices seemed incoherent.

The Allais paradox was mostly ignored for the next two decades. But then, in the early 1970s, two Israeli psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, read about the paradox and were instantly intrigued: they wanted to know why people didn’t respond to probabilities in a linear manner. Based upon their conversations with each other, it seemed obvious that people perceived a smaller difference between probabilities of 1 percent and 2 percent than between 0 percent and 1 percent, or between 99 percent and 100 percent. In other words, all changes in risk are not created equal. As Allais had observed decades before, we value complete certainty an inordinate amount.

But why was certainty so attractive?

Corey Robin in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

This year is the 60th anniversary of the publication of The Authoritarian Personality. Once this was the most famous of Theodor Adorno's works. Today it's largely forgotten. With one exception: its indelible portrait of the “pseudo-conservative.” Although Richard Hofstadter is often credited with the term—his essay “The Pseudo-Conservative Revolt” appeared in 1955—it was Adorno and his three co-authors who first identified the type: that vengeful and violent citizen who avows his faith in calm and restraint while agitating for policies that “would abolish the very institutions with which he appears to identify himself.” The pseudo-conservative, in other words, is no conservative at all. Prone to “violence, anarchic impulses, and chaotic destructiveness,” he loves war and longs for bedlam in the streets. He has “little in common,” in Hofstadter's words, “with the temperate and compromising spirit of true conservatism.”

Musing on those passages last June, Andrew Sullivan wrote on his blog, “It all sounds weirdly familiar, doesn't it?” He was talking about the predatory revanchism that has stalked the Republican Party since 9/11 and now consumes it. “The Bush-Cheney presidency,” wrote Sullivan, was “the perfect pseudo-conservative administration.” The White House and its neoconservative enablers celebrated war and torture, shredded the Constitution, and bankrupted the nation. “Throughout all this,” Sullivan pointed out, “the Tea Partiers supported them.”

More here.

Sara Reardon in Symmetry Breaking:

In 2008, Fermilab particle astrophysicist Craig Hogan made waves with a mind-boggling proposition: The 3D universe in which we appear to live is no more than a hologram.

Now he is building the most precise clock of all time to directly measure whether our reality is an illusion.

The idea that spacetime may not be entirely smooth – like a digital image that becomes increasingly pixelated as you zoom in – had been previously proposed by Stephen Hawking and others. Possible evidence for this model appeared last year in the unaccountable “noise” plaguing the GEO600 experiment in Germany, which searches for gravitational waves from black holes. To Hogan, the jitteriness suggested that the experiment had stumbled upon the lower limit of the spacetime pixels’ resolution.

Black hole physics, in which space and time become compressed, provides a basis for math showing that the third dimension may not exist at all. In this two-dimensional cartoon of a universe, what we perceive as a third dimension would actually be a projection of time intertwined with depth. If this is true, the illusion can only be maintained until equipment becomes sensitive enough to find its limits.

“You can’t perceive it because nothing ever travels faster than light,” says Hogan. “This holographic view is how the universe would look if you sat on a photon.”

Not everyone agrees with this idea. Its foundation is formed with math rather than hard data, as is common in theoretical physics. And although a holographic universe would answer many questions about black hole physics and other paradoxes, it clashes with classical geometry, which demands a universe of smooth, continuous paths in space and time.

“So we want to build a machine which will be the most sensitive measurement ever made of spacetime itself,” says Hogan. “That’s the holometer.”

More here.

From The Independent:

Back in 1985, when I was seven, my family moved to England from Bombay. My father was a research scientist. He was going to teach at Warwick University. In his first week, a colleague offered to take him to the cafeteria at the campus arts centre. There were sandwiches, salads, baked potatoes, and something else, which the colleague indicated: “Have you tried these? They're called samosas. They're rather good.”

When we moved, I had never been to England, or anywhere outside India except for a sabbatical year my father had taken at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh when I was a toddler. I was, however, confident about what England would entail. I had been reading. There would be a village, and a fat village policeman; I would have friends, five or seven of them, and a dog; my friends and I would sit in a garden shed, go on picnics, or sleep in gorse bushes, and feast on boiled eggs (which I hated) and delicious-sounding tongue sandwiches. Some recalibration was required; I realised that England was no longer in the 1930s and, perhaps, even then, had not resembled life in the works of Enid Blyton, which I'd eagerly read from our local library in Bombay.

More here.

From The Paris Review (1960):

Among serious novelists, Aldous Huxley is surely the wittiest and most irreverent. Ever since the early twenties, his name has been a byword for a particular kind of social satire; in fact, he has immortalized in satire a whole period and a way of life. In addition to his ten novels, Huxley has written, during the course of an extremely prolific career, poetry, drama, essays, travel, biography, and history. Descended from two of the most eminent Victorian families, he inherited science and letters from his grandfather T. H. Huxley and his great-uncle Matthew Arnold respectively. He absorbed both strains in an erudition so unlikely that it has sometimes been regarded as a kind of literary gamesmanship. (In conversation his learning comes out spontaneously, without the slightest hint of premeditation; if someone raises the topic of Victorian gastronomy, for example, Huxley will recite a typical daily menu of Prince Edward, meal by meal, course by course, down to the last crumb.) The plain fact is that Aldous Huxley is one of the most prodigiously learned writers not merely of this century but of all time.

After Eton and Balliol, he became a member of the postwar intellectual upper crust, the society he set out to vivisect and anatomize. He first made his name with such brilliant satires as Antic Hay and Point Counter Point, writing in the process part of the social history of the twenties. In the thirties he wrote his most influential novel, Brave New World, combining satire and science fiction in the most successful of futuristic utopias. Since 1937, when he settled in Southern California, he has written fewer novels and turned his attention more to philosophy, history, and mysticism. Although remembered best for his early satires, he is still productive and provocative as ever. It is rather odd to find Aldous Huxley in a suburb of Los Angeles called Hollywoodland. He lives in an unpretentious hilltop house that suggests the Tudor period of American real-estate history. On a clear day he can look out across miles of cluttered, sprawling city at a broad sweep of the Pacific. Behind him dry brown hills rise to a monstrous sign that dominates the horizon, proclaiming hollywoodland in aluminum letters twenty feet high.

More here.

Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian:

Even if you deliberately set out to try to dream up the least probable superhero ever, it's unlikely that you'd manage to come up with a character as far-fetched as Batina the Hidden. Forget Wonder Worm, or a man born with the powers of a newt, Batina is a superhero of a kind the world hasn't until now seen. It's not just that she's a Muslim woman, from a country best known for harbouring al-Qaida operatives – Yemen – but that she wears an altogether new kind of super-person costume: a burqa.

She, along with her fellow crime-fighters, a vast team of characters from around the world, including Jabbar the Powerful from Saudi Arabia and Hadya the Guide from London, collectively known as “The 99”, are the world's first Islam-inspired superheroes. And this week, in what is perhaps the ultimate comic-book accolade, they will join forces with Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. DC Comics, the US publishing giant, will publish the first of six special crossover issues in which The 99 will be fighting crime alongside the Justice League of America, the fictional superhero team that includes Superman and Batman.

More here. [Thanks to Yousaf Hyat.]

The Boys of Summer