Chase Madar in the London Review of Books blog:

When asked by Jim Lehrer, the host of Newshour on PBS, if Hosni Mubarak was a dictator, the US vice president, Joseph Biden, said: ‘Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things and he’s been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interests in the region, Middle East peace efforts, the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalising the relationship with Israel… I would not refer to him as a dictator.’

Here are some excerpts from the rest of Lehrer’s interview with Biden, containing more of the VP’s candid assessments.

On Darth Vader: Look, I know Darth fairly well, and Jim, I just want to mention that Darth has overcome asthma, some serious, serious asthma, and it’s just a really inspiring story, he’s written a children’s book about it, I gave a signed copy to my granddaughter for Christmas. Anyway our position is that before Darth blows up the planet Alderaan with his so-called Death Star, which is really just a large weather satellite with a few dual-use components, Darth should, you know, take some of that planet’s concerns into account. He should take their concerns seriously, and it should be a peaceful process. They have a right to protest against their planet getting blown up. But Jim, it’s a two-way street, and Alderaan shouldn’t be vandalising the Death Star’s weapon systems, which, of course, not that they exist. There’s been a concern that some of the more radical elements, you know, the Wookie Street, might try to do this. So no, we don’t think Darth Vader should resign. But if he does – if he does – we can find the recent appointment of Darth Maul as his acolyte Dark Lord of the Sith to be really, really encouraging from a human rights perspective. Just remember, the Empire is a fragile beacon of democracy in a turbulent universe.

More here.

John Allen Paulos in his Who's Counting column at ABC News:

A claim of prejudicial treatment is the basis for many news stories. The percentage of African-American students at elite universities, the ratio of Hispanic representatives in legislatures, and, just recently, the proportion of women among Wikipedia contributors have all been written about extensively.

Oddly enough, the shape of normal bell-shaped (and other) statistical curves sometimes has unexpected consequences for such situations. This is because even a small divergence between the averages of different population groups is accentuated at the extreme ends of these curves, and these extremes, as a result, often receive a lot of attention.

There are policy inferences, most of them wrong-headed, that have been drawn from this fact, but I certainly don't want to delve into questionable claims. I merely want to clarify a couple of mathematical points. To illustrate one such point, assume two population groups vary along some dimension – height, for example. Let's also assume that the two groups' heights vary in a normal or bell- shaped manner. Then even if the average height of one group is only slightly greater than the average height of the other, people from the taller group will make up a large majority of the very tall.

Likewise, people from the shorter group will make up a large majority of the very short. This is true even though the bulk of the people from both groups are of roughly average stature. So if group A has a mean height of 5'8″ and group B a mean height of 5'7″, then (depending on the variability of the heights) perhaps 90% or more of those over 6'3″ will be from group A. In general, any differences between two groups will always be greatly accentuated at the extremes.

More here.

Sughra Raza. Waiting. Karachi, March, 2010.

Digital photograph.

Robert Springborg in Foreign Policy:

The threat to the military's control of the Egyptian political system is passing. Millions of demonstrators in the street have not broken the chain of command over which President Mubarak presides. Paradoxically the popular uprising has even ensured that the presidential succession will not only be engineered by the military, but that an officer will succeed Mubarak. The only possible civilian candidate, Gamal Mubarak, has been chased into exile, thereby clearing the path for the new vice president, Gen. Omar Suleiman. The military high command, which under no circumstances would submit to rule by civilians rooted in a representative system, can now breathe much more easily than a few days ago. It can neutralize any further political pressure from below by organizing Hosni Mubarak's exile, but that may well be unnecessary.

The president and the military, have, in sum, outsmarted the opposition and, for that matter, the Obama administration. They skillfully retained the acceptability and even popularity of the Army, while instilling widespread fear and anxiety in the population and an accompanying longing for a return to normalcy. When it became clear last week that the Ministry of Interior's crowd-control forces were adding to rather than containing the popular upsurge, they were suddenly and mysteriously removed from the street. Simultaneously, by releasing a symbolic few prisoners from jail; by having plainclothes Ministry of Interior thugs engage in some vandalism and looting (probably including that in the Egyptian National Museum); and by extensively portraying on government television an alleged widespread breakdown of law and order, the regime cleverly elicited the population's desire for security. While some of that desire was filled by vigilante action, it remained clear that the military was looked to as the real protector of personal security and the nation as a whole. Army units in the streets were under clear orders to show their sympathy with the people.

Corey Robin reviews Greg Grandin's The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War in the LRB:

On 5 December 1982, Ronald Reagan met the Guatemalan president, Efraín Ríos Montt, in Honduras. It was a useful meeting for Reagan. ‘Well, I learned a lot,’ he told reporters on Air Force One. ‘You’d be surprised. They’re all individual countries.’ It was also a useful meeting for Ríos Montt. Reagan declared him ‘a man of great personal integrity . . . totally dedicated to democracy’, and claimed that the Guatemalan strongman was getting ‘a bum rap’ from human rights organisations for his military’s campaign against leftist guerrillas. The next day, one of Guatemala’s elite platoons entered a jungle village called Las Dos Erres and killed 162 of its inhabitants, 67 of them children. Soldiers grabbed babies and toddlers by their legs, swung them in the air, and smashed their heads against a wall. Older children and adults were forced to kneel at the edge of a well, where a single blow from a sledgehammer sent them plummeting below. The platoon then raped a selection of women and girls it had saved for last, pummelling their stomachs in order to force the pregnant among them to miscarry. They tossed the women into the well and filled it with dirt, burying an unlucky few alive. The only traces of the bodies later visitors would find were blood on the walls and placentas and umbilical cords on the ground.

Amid the hagiography surrounding Reagan’s death in June, it was probably too much to expect the media to mention his meeting with Ríos Montt. After all, it wasn’t Reykjavik. But Reykjavik’s shadow – or that cast by Reagan speaking in front of the Berlin Wall – does not entirely explain the silence about this encounter between presidents. While it’s tempting to ascribe the omission to American amnesia, a more likely cause is the deep misconception about the Cold War under which most Americans labour. To the casual observer, the Cold War was a struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, fought and won through stylish jousting at Berlin, antiseptic arguments over nuclear stockpiles, and the savvy brinkmanship of American leaders. Latin America seldom figures in popular or even academic discussion of the Cold War, and to the extent that it does, it is Cuba, Chile and Nicaragua rather than Guatemala that earn most of the attention.

But, as Greg Grandin shows in The Last Colonial Massacre, Latin America was as much a battleground of the Cold War as Europe, and Guatemala was its front line.

Johann Hari over at his blog:

The great Czech dissident Vaclav Havel outlined the “as if principle”. He said people trapped under a dictatorship need to act “as if they are free.” They need to act as if the dictator has no power over them. They need to act as if they have their human rights. Havel rode that principle to the death of Soviet tyranny and to the Presidential Palace of a free society.

The Egyptians are trying the same – and however many of them Mubarak murders on his way out the door, the direction in which fear flows has been successfully reversed. The tyrant has become terrified of “his” people – and dictators everywhere are watching the live-feed from Liberation Square pale-faced and panicked.

Of course, there is a danger that what follows will be worse. My family lived for a time under the torturing tyranny of the Shah of Iran, and cheered the revolution in 1979 – yet he was replaced by the even more vicious Ayatollahs. But this is not the only model, nor the most likely. The events in Egypt look more like the Indonesian revolution, where in 1998 a popular uprising toppled a US-backed, US-armed tyrant after 32 years of oppression – and went on to build the largest and most plural democracy in the Muslim world.

But the discussion here in the West should focus on the factor we are responsible for and we can influence – the role our governments have played in suppressing the Egyptian people. Your taxes have been used to arm, fund and fuel this dictatorship. You have unwittingly helped to keep these people down. The tear gas canisters fired at pro-democracy protesters have ‘Made in America’ stamped on them, with British machine guns and grenade launchers held in the background.

Very few British people would praise a murderer and sell him weapons. Very few British people would beat up a poor person in order to get cheaper petrol. But our governments do this abroad all the time. Of the three worst human rights abusers in the Middle East – Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Iran – two are our governments’ closest friends, showered with money, arms and praise. Why?

Over at the Economist's Democracy in America:

MIKE Konczal writes:

One of the more curious behavioral responses is that people hate unemployment. They hate not being part of their productive community, they hate not contributing, they hate the loss of identity that one gets as someone who works. To an economist that’s b-a-n-a-n-a-s. Unemployment should be a pleasant vacation! But, last time I checked, it wasn’t (is that consistent with the latest frontiers in happiness research?).

Mr Konczal is contributing to a discussion that's kicked up recently over a paper written by libertarian economists Bryan Caplan and Scott Beaulier, arguing that behavioural economics provides a basis for critiquing government welfare policies. Karl Smith highlighted Mr Caplan's paper as a serious challenge to his neo-classical economic belief structure; other commentors replied that the paper had no data and no mathematical models; Mr Smith responded that often simple, data-free models can be extremely helpful in posing problems and presenting complex ideas intuitively, and cited the example of Paul Krugman's famous essay on the babysitting co-op with its crystal-clear workaday picture of how a Keynesian liquidity trap works; Mr Krugman jumped in with his favourite simple, low-on-data papers, including David Hume's thought experiment “Of the Balance of Trade” and Evsey Domar's paper grounding slavery and serfdom in land surpluses and labour shortages. (I love this stuff. Blogs are the greatest thing to happen to intellectual life in the early 21st century; one day we'll look back on them as a latter-day Bloomsbury.)

Mr Caplan is taking up a problem for conservative critics of the welfare state who take a neo-classical economic perspective. From a neo-classical perspective, he says, giving people more choices (by giving them money, preference in university admissions, health care and so on) always makes them better off. So how can welfare hurt the poor? He thinks behavioural economics, which shows us how people often (usually, even) make decisions that are irrational from a classical economic perspective, can provide the answer:

A simple numerical example can illustrate the link between helping the poor and harming them. Suppose that in the absence of government assistance, the true net benefit of having a child out-of-wedlock is -$25,000, but a teenage girl with self-serving bias [unrealistically optimistic and overconfident] believes it is only -$5000. Since she still sees the net benefits as negative she chooses to wait. But suppose the government offers $10,000 in assistance to unwed mothers. Then the perceived benefits rise to $5000, the teenage girl opts to have the baby, and ex post experiences a net benefit of -$25,000 + $10,000 = -$15,000.

Mr Konczal responds that the fact that people are economically irrational shows us precisely why government safety-net programmes are necessary.