Safeguarding Women Bloggers from Unfair and Anti-Competitive Blogging Practices by the Live from the WTC Editorial Board
For over a month now, we have watched as certain bloggers have used predatory tactics to unfairly steal blogoshare. Rather than standing in solidarity with their fellow female bloggers and building a truly inclusive, empowering blogging community, they have instead used their outsized power to hoard more than their fair share of blog readers. We have dreamed of the possibilities of the internet where, no longer weighted down by the physicality of the "real" world, we might build a new, radically empowering space. Instead we are confronted with the intrusion of the same old patriarchal paradigms and exploitationist power structures into our precious new nest.
We can no longer stand by while this rampaging bully uses her size to trample the rights of those smaller than she is. We refer, of course, to Nataljia Radic, whose latest power-grab is too blatant to be ignored any longer. It is only an accident of history that Ms. Radic should be so abundantly endowed with natural resources, yet she not only openly flaunts her unearned wealth, but also uses her assets to seize eyeballs from her less fortunate sisters. It is clear that this situation cannot be tolerated much longer. As long as Ms. Radic misuses her power, it will be impossible for Less Developed Bloggers (LDB's) to fulfill the promise of a virtual world where biology is not destiny. I call on Ms. Radic to immediately cease this shameless exploitation of Mother Nature and instead help to develop a more sustainable blogosphere where she can peacefully co-exist with those who are less well-endowed.
However, we fear that merely calling for justice will not be enough to realize the redress to which we are entitled. While in theory, we at Live From the WTC are, of course, in favor of free markets, it is clear that in this instance there is a massive market failure in which size begets more market share -- a classic case of monopoly. The only way to stop this market malfunction is to immediately and totally forbid the publishing of pictures on weblogs.
Some will say that this is anticompetitive. This is ridiculous. We at Live From the WTC are in favor of competition, and that is why we are pursuing this ban: so that blogs can compete on the merits, rather than joining in the race to the bottom of vulgar consumerism. The playing field must be leveled. Only massive surgery will suffice. We therefore ask our fellow bloggers to join us in our quest to build a blogosphere that is free, competitive, and inclusive, so that it can meet the needs of all bloggers, rather than a fortunate few. In the bright new future of the New Economy, our children deserve nothing less.
I'm reading Paul Krugman's The Return of Depression Economics and it's reminding me why I'm so mad at him: it's a great book, and he's one of the great popular economics writers -- possibly the greatest one -- of our times. Yet he's pimping his credibility to any left-wing cause that comes down the pike, wasting his talent and our time. Of course he has a perfect right to do so -- just as I have a perfect right to take moral affront at his professional and personal laxity.
Whew! I had no idea that making fun of Wilentz would bring so much debate. That brings it up to date, I think. If more posts come on the subject, I'll update this section.
Well, there's two ways to respond to that. The first is to ask how you would feel if Oral Roberts and their ilk were the gateway to the good life for your children? Would you be happy that the only way you could get your children the most prestigious education was by sending them somwhere where the political center was around, say, the National Review -- and there were no professors in many departments with any other point of view? Would you send your children to an institution that was likely to draw blank stares when they went for job interviews so that they could get a balanced education, or would you send them off with the other kids? Would you smile when they told you that evolution actually wasn't a fact and affirmative action was dead wrong, and treated their new opinions as revealed wisdom instead of debatable ideas? Of course not. Of course if you're on the left, having a mostly left academy feels nice'n'comfy. But that's not an education, it's brainwashing. And if that's what you want for your children, I guess I'm not going to convince you it's a bad thing.
Which brings me to the second reason that it's a problem. The problem isn't the skew, per se; personally, I imagine that the distribution will be skewed to the left for quite some time. The problem is that if you drew the political distribution of the country as a normal distribution and stuck a line through the center, then plotted the distribution of most american universities, you would find almost nothing to the right of that center line. To hell with skewed; that's a political culture as monolithic as the one at those religious schools Ivy League professors like to make fun of.
Idea systems are like ecosystems; they do better when they are diverse. The whole scientific method, in fact, is founded on the belief that ideas maintain their vitality and fitness only in the hurly burly of an intellectual marketplace where they are constantly tested and challenged.
Professors in many subjects never have their core ideas challenged in any substantive way. Reading an argument is not the same as debating a subject with a competent opponent; I'm sure we've all had the experience of reading something that disagreed with our deeply held beliefs, thinking "Well, this is clearly ridiculous," and throwing the article or book aside in irritation precisely because it challenged something we wanted to believe was self-evident. The benefit of a diverse academy is that it forces people to actively defend their beliefs, and thus refine and improve them, discarding those which cannot stand the test of competition.
Students, who pay no taxes and have rarely had to actually make something work in the real world, are naturally liberal. I don't think the job of college is to change that -- but I do think that the job of any competent university is to present multiple viewpoints and encourage debate so that the students are forced to analyze and hone the ideals they embrace. The total dominance of the left is encouraging intellectual complacency, shutting down debate in many areas, and in general creating an unhealthy atrophy in the intellectual atmosphere of many humanities departments -- just as it would be if 94% of the academy hailed from the right. Homogeneity does not breed sharp thinking in any atmosphere. That is why the best conservative writing is the writing aimed at a general audience; it assumes nothing, proves every point, and offers genuine insight instead of complaining.
Kuffner suggests I want affirmative action for conservatives. Far from it. However, I think that there is probably outright hiring bias against conservative candidates that pollutes the applicant pool, as well as the eventual makeup of the faculty. I think that this should be forcefully stopped by outraged alumni, parents, and donors. I think that it would be, if we got some proof. So that's what I want; proof. Which is why I'm pretty sure the academy will go to great lengths to make sure that I don't get it.
The patent (U.S. 4,873,662) was filed in 1976, but didn't issue until 1989. Under the law at that time, patents have a term of 17 years. The law was subsequently changed in 1995 (I believe) to a term of 20 years after filing.
The long time between filing and issuance isn't all that unusual. I recently had a patent issue 14 years after the original case was filed and I have several more that are still in prosecution 12 years after filing.
It all becomes clear. Much thanks to Mr. Hlatky, and to Steven Den Beste, who gave the short answer over there in the comments.
To prevent any Krugman-esque follies, let me say this: I am a former employee of Mr Horowitz's. I also spent six years, four in the collegiate arena and two in the professional arena, reporting and commenting on the, ah, unique political situation in academia. That experience, however, lets me say without fear that Mr Horowitz's poll is not "discovering" a new phenomenon, it is not suggesting it, it is not hinting that bias may exist in academia. For he knows -- as everyone does in their hearts -- that a fearsome political bias exists in academia.
What his poll does is take the reality everyone knows about and tries to put it into the stark, black-and-white realm of statistics.
I agree with Kepple that anyone who thinks that a rigorous poll would deliver significantly different results is sucking too hard on that bong. Nonetheless, I think it's important to try to do a rigorous poll along the lines I outlined for several reasons. The first is that however well you think you know something anectdotally, you don't know it until you can prove it. The second is that a rigorous study would give us the data to begin defining the precise scope and nature of the problem, begin analyzing possible root causes, and examine potential solutions. For example, right now there may be hiring bias, but there isn't any way to show it experimentally. On the other hand, if we could correlate the voting preferences of people extended offers with the voting preferences of the hiring faculty, that would be suggestive, particularly if the group receiving offers were different from the applicant pool. And the third reason is that there is a vast pool of people, in academia and out, who currently deny the scope of the problem. Only massive amounts of data from well designed studies will overcome their objections. I understand that the hard left will question any data, no matter how good, but there will be some towards the center who will be convinced, which is a major step towards rectifying the problem. At least, insofar as it can be rectified.
This is not to criticize Horowitz. His poll was as good as any journalist's poll ever is, and better than some. It is nonetheless fatally flawed because it is a reader response poll, which almost always introduces selection bias. For example, Nader voters may have declined to sent it in because they didn't want to give Horowitz grist; conversely, they may be more ideological and hence more predisposed to send it in. We don't know unless we do a better poll. So I think that Horowitz's poll is suggestive; moreover, I think it is probably approximately right. But I won't know how right it is, or why the phenomenon occurs, or what I can do about it, until I get better data. Horowitz has window on academia; it's up to others to open the door and step through.
Despite my promises, I stil haven't posted anything about trade. I will soon -- a riveting explanation of Ricardo's Theory of Comparitive Advantage that will, I promise you, have you on the edge of your seats.
I also haven't posted anything about the great Napster debate, despite my deep interest in the subject. I'm going to, even though interest may have waned, write about the strategic aspects of the Bertelsmann/Napster deal when I get a second. It's more interesting than it sounds.
There's a big mound of email piling up in my box. Since I was raised to believe that you grow hair on your palms and go blind if you don't answer your correspondance the same day it was received, this pains me greatly. However, I am currently trying to write a business plan, write an article, find a job, and keep the job I have. I'm also trying to post at least a couple of amusing items every day so that my beloved readers don't go away and leave me. So if you've written me an email and I haven't written back or posted about it, it's not because I didn't get it, or because I don't want to respond -- you've just hit me at a time crunch. But when I'm over the hump, rest assured I will get back to you, even if you've totally forgotten that you emailed me. That's the Megan McArdle promise, the kind of quality that Megan McArdle's readers expect from Megan McArdle. Megan McArdle's readers can continue to support her at this difficult time by continuing to hit her page, thus validating what shreds of her ego remained after the New Economy was done with it.
We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.
So BT thinks it owns the patent to hyperlinks. This reminds me of the guy who patented -- I'm not making this up -- the algorithm that made your cursor blink on old DOS computers. He didn't invent it, by the way -- he just filed the patent for it. Mucho moola for zilcho work.
Here's what I don't get about the BT thing -- the patent was filed in 1976. 'Splain me, please, why it hasn't expired?
I'm sorry I'm not posting much today, but it's been a busy day. So for all of you love birds out there, I'm posting my favorite love poem instead of the usual bile and spleen:
HAD I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams
Amygdala on Robert Fisk, who thinks that Israeli overflights are the moral equivalent of Hizbollah firing large projectiles into Israeli airspace:
They have sent some splinters into the gardens of a kibbutz but it's the sound that is meant to impress. The 57mm rounds, fired from a relic of Stalingrad vintage, explode with a powerful detonation. If Israel's pilots want to rattle the windows of Beirut with their sonic booms, the Hizbollah are saying, then Israel's citizens can endure a few noisy explosions in the sky.
I invite Robert Fisk to find a garden of such a kibbutz, and stand in it, to peacefully enjoy the experience of catching such harmless "splinters." Apparently he's spent such a long time in the Arab world that he has caught that curious disease of believing that if you fire a weapon vertically, your projectile achieves escape velocity, and never falls to earth, and if it somehow should, it is harmless and naught to be concerned with
It's a dangerous game.
Yes. Just a game. The Hizbollah are such a lovable, kooky, fun-loving bunch. BOOM they like to go with their funny harmless 57mm cannon. What fun.
It's getting tiresome repeating myself, but here goes anyway: violations of your pride are not the same thing as violations of your right to continue breathing. If Hizbollah wants to conduct itself on the level of sixteen year old boys in the parking lot after the game, then we'll have to find some adults to take their place. Full stop. The sixties are now officially over, and it's time for everyone to straighten up, get a real job, and behave themselves.
Jonathan Chait's beef with Bush is that he won't consider raising taxes:
Bush and his staffers speak as if tax revenues and defense spending were somehow not fungible. Instead, the administration will only discuss trade-offs between defense, domestic spending, and deficits--never taxes.
Interesting, because even as Chait is accusing Bush of leaving important things out of the equation, he is pulling the same trick:
while his personal ratings remain stratospheric, poll after poll shows (by a wide margin) that the public would rather scale back the tax cut than run a deficit.
That's probably true, my problems with polls aside. Now, let's present them with the following options: would you rather scale back the tax cut, cut defense spending, cut domestic spending, or run a deficit -- the exact options Chait wants on the table. Which do the voters choose then? Defense spending is off the table; Grey lady aside, no one wants to cut the money for Our Boys. In the polls, lower deficit beats lower taxes -- but lower taxes beat higher spending. So what the public really wants is spending cuts, something congress isn't going to give them unless Bush sits on them. Which is what he's doing. So explain to me again why this is a bad thing?
On a lighter note, my first year accounting professor testified on the Enron accounting disaster. He's an amazing guy, the co-author of the most widely used MBA financial accounting book, and his testimony is both intelligent and intelligible, even for a non-accountant. I highly recommend it if you want a clear explanation of why Arthur Anderson should be shaken like a dead bird in a spaniel's mouth.
It is also, more importantly, and indictment of the microregulation approach. He points out that a trend towards specific regulations for specific circumstances, rather than broad principles, allowed Enron to say, "Well there's no rule, so I guess we can do it." Dems & GOPs, take note!
Instead, he recommends, along with a return to broad principles, a strengthened audit committee and mandatory rotation of auditors every 5 years. This would put auditors on notice that every call they made would be scrutinized by first, a committee that actually knows what they're doing (Enron's clearly didn't) and second, it's competitors looking for errors. In other words, set up a system where judgement -- with stiff consequences for lapses -- replaces "Everything not compulsory is forbidden".
Whew! A great statistical argument is a joyful thing. To sum up: the sample's too small, and we need further study, but to get good data we need a better poll design. Specifically, we need polls that are not mail-in (people who bother to return polls generally aren't representative); and focus on objective criteria (who did you vote for?) rather than subjective questions (if the Democrats advocated, oh, say, killing babies, would you still vote for them?) because polls are inherently susceptible to the biases and inaccuracies of those who design them, and those who ask the questions.
It's important to look at the whole academy, but especially at humanities at elite schools, because that's where a majority of the media, especially the major media, derive their ideas, and there is data that suggests that they perceive the world to be centered considerably to the left of the country's political center, and that they tend to discount the bona fides of conservative intellectuals. Moreover, it would be better for the academy as a whole to have all sides represented in debates, so that students could develop sharper analytical skills. However, while it is important to address hiring bias, or self-selection due to perceived discrimination, it would be folly to enact remedies that lower the rigorous intellectual standards of the academy. The only caveat is that we must ensure that the existing professors don't set up the rigorous standards to exclude conservative thought.
I do want to talk a little bit about sample size and the Horowitz poll, for those who may not understand the statistical arguments. Because there are really two separate arguments: whether or not the Ivy League professors are disproportionately leftists, which is what Horowitz was studying; and whether or not there is some reason that they are disproportionately leftists, such as a propensity of current professors to only hire people who fall on the left side of the spectrum.
Now, the poll. There are plenty of problems with the poll; it's methodology was apparently, to say the least, slapdash. I was at no time trying to argue that it was definitive; only suggestive. One of my commenters points out that there are other, better studies which say the same thing about the Ivy League.
Nontheless, while the sample is small it is not quite as small as some seem to be arguing. Let's look at the purpose of the poll: it was to prove that a given population is not a representative subset of a larger population; in this case, that Ivy league professors were not representative of the voting population. The sample that we take to determine whether or not they are representative is not a sample of the voting population; it is a sample of the population of Ivy League professors. So our sample, relative to the population size we are studying, goes from .000000005% of the relevant population to 1.5%. This is important because it tells us how representative the sample is likely to be. (I estimate the population of Ivy League Arts & Sciences professors to be approximately 10,000. This is an estimate, which may overcount (Penn lumps all it's faculty together; I tried to be generous in adding separate schools, such as Cornell's, with what might construe Arts & Sciences; not all professors teach) or undercount (several schools didn't give a count for faculty and I estimated numbers based on a ratio of 8.5:; I didn't count visiting professors).
Now there's another reason that sample size is important, and that is that the smaller the sample, the more likely it is to be influenced by discreet events. So if I say that the three women in my office now are a representative sample of the United States, I can argue that 1/3 of the people in the US are libertarians. This is way off the mark. But if I define the relevant population as, say, the trailer I'm working in, I'll be closer to right; the sample will be, probably, more representative.
That's why sample size matters, but not as much as my interlocutors argue. Small samples are bad -- my stats professor at one point advised throwing away any sample smaller than 50 events -- but people aren't bacteria, so we have to make do. 150 is still too likely to be influenced by random chance. But it is more likely to be represenative than some are saying.
Now, if we get a hold on how likely the sample is to represent its population (the Ivy League professors), and we determine that the population is, in fact, probably biased to the left -- bear with me, my rosy friends, we're speaking hypothetically -- then the next thing we want to do is to determine whether or not the difference between the population and the larger population of American residents and citizens is due to chance, or caused by some factor we can identify.
It certainly could be due to chance. The famous example of this is cancer clusters. This is when people think "six people on my block have cancer. That's not the normal distribution in the population. Therefore, something must be causing the cancer." The fallacy lies in assuming that the distribution in the larger population will be mirrored by any smaller subset of that population. If you checked that same block you'd get all sorts of clusters of things occurring at a much higher rate than in the US as a whole: people named Ralph, dachsunds, Toyota corollas in the driveway. One of the first things statisticians do is look at the sample size and try to figure out the probability of this happening at random.
If it isn't due to chance, we look for a reason. The hypothesis of the article is that there is a causal link between the political distribution of professors, and the political distribution of the people those professors hire. Alternative hypothesis: the causal link runs the other way, and that all these people are professors because only left-wing types want to be professors. Second alternative: There's some other factor we'll call X, which is correlated with the politics of both professors, and the people they hire; but there is no causal link, in either direction, between the politics of current and incoming professors. Since incoming professors immediately turn into current professors as soon as they in come, this third seems unlikely. My personal opinion is that the two things to some extent reinforce each other. However, the allegation of hiring bias is the most troubling, and therefore demands the closest scrutiny - which is to say, the highest level of proof. It also demands, if true, the most draconian remedy.
The most worrisome aspect of this is that we are unlikely to get that proof. Who should sponsor the studies into whether or not faculty are making politically motivated hiring decisions? The Universities. And who determines whether or not to undertake such studies? The possibly politically motivated faculty, who categorically deny that there's a problem. Well, I'm all for more data. But when the people decrying the lack of data are the same people blocking all attempts to get it, I get mad.
Sophismata criticizes my earlier post for, among other things, generalizing from too small a sample size. In keeping with my committment to let my readers know when I'm wrong, as well as my opponents, I post his response and my explanation.
Both of them haven't figured out what correlation means. Correlation "is a measure of the degree of linear relationship between two variables." For instance, when the price of oil goes up, the price of food also goes up. We say that oil prices and food prices are positively correlated. Similarly, when oil prices goes up, the sales of SUVs goes down; these two variables are negatively correlated. The price of oil affects transportation costs, which in turn affect the price of food. The price of oil also affects the cost of owning a vehicle. Thus, in this case, correlation is also causation. However, one can show that crime rate in certain cities is highly correlated to bubble gum sales. (I had to do this in junior statistics.) But you would be wrong to conclude that bubble gum is the cause of crime. Rather the population of this city increased over time, which affect both gum sales and crime. Comparing the voting pattern of two groups has nothing to do with correlation.
I wasn't comparing the voting patterns of two groups; I was theorizing about the correlation between the political makeup of the current staff, and the political makeup of the staff they hired, that being the subject of the article. I do know what correlation means, I do, I do!
But I may have confused people. The data, of course, refers only to the makeup of the current staff, so there is no way to run a regression showing the actual correlation. I got mixed up with Wilentz's words. I should have said that the deviation from the norm is massive, which it is.
Is the difference in voting patterns material? This takes us the the wonderful world of hypothesis testing. I think this is where Live from WTC was going, but how she is able to deduce that this is a three or four sigma event escapes me.
I didn't deduce it. As I said in my post, this was a wild-ass guess. For non statistics people (of whom I am almost one), "sigma" is a technical term referring to the standard deviation from the mean. I'm not even going to try to explain how this works, but basically, it refers to the probability of a given event being in a certain range in the distribution. A 3 or 4 sigma event is one that is highly improbable, like, say, getting either a 1550 or a 150 on your SAT's -- it happens to a very small percentage of the population being studied. So I was guessing that if you plotted the political makeup of academia, as a profession, against other professions, you would find them at the very far left of your spectrum, just as you would probably find, say, Southern Baptist ministers pretty far over there on the right. But it would be damn hard to design a study that would give you the data to plot, so this is, and will remain, a guess.
From the comments to the post, I think the poll only had 150 respondents. If 6% of the professors voted for Bush, then only 9 people in the survey voted for Bush. If you drew 150 people randomly from a population that voted for Bush 49% of the time, the odds of getting a group that had only 9 Bush voters is 5.9 x 10^(-42); that is pretty much zero. However, and this is a big HOWEVER, you are on very shaky ground to extropolate any information from a poll this small.
Yup, the sample's small. Certainly not definitive. Either that's not in the article, or I missed it. Mea culpa.
Nonetheless, Wilentz's reaction is wacky. When you criticize study design, you suggest a better study. You don't say, "well the sample's too small, so the effect isn't real, case closed." Wilentz looked at a suggestive study that was too small to be definitve, and said flat out "it's not true."
But I think that my post was a little jumbled and unclear about what I was saying, since the very clever Mr. Ramachandran couldn't make it out. So I apologize for any confusion that may have arisen, and urge everyone to go to Sophismata often to enjoy the fine mathematical and statistical insights to be gained there.
I usually don't write on affirmative action, but this little item really grabbed me: an article in The Daily Princetonian talking about whether or not there was institutional bias. One of the interviewees, Princeton professor Sean Wilentz, displays a staggering arrogance in dismissing the Horowitz survey, not to mention a staggering ignorance of statistics:
Sean Wilentz, a liberal University professor of history, disagreed with Horowitz's claim. "[Horowitz is] finding causation in what may only be a spurious correlation. This isn't social science, this is right-wing political agitation." He said that Horowitz's claim of systematic bias was just wrong and "certainly not true at Princeton."
Correlation is not causation; I totally agree. But his certainty is awe inspiring. This correlation is massive. 49% of America voted for George Bush. 6% of academia did. I don't know how the hell you'd get a standard deviation, but I bet if you did this would be at least a three or four sigma event. When an observed event, such as the ongoing skew of academia to the left, is that improbable, you assume that there is some sort of a causal link; form a hypothesis; and then test three theories: 1) The hypothesis is right 2) The causal link runs the other way 3) Some other, unidentified factor, which is tightly correlated with the factor you theorize is causal, is causing this.
The hypothesis: there is hiring bias in academia. 1) There is hiring bias in academia 2) The causal link runs the other way: academia is currently skewed to the left because only left-wing people want to be academics, since only left wing people currently are academics. 3) There is some other unidentified factor that has nothing to do with the current composition of academia.
I live in the Columbia zone of Manhattan, and once dreamed of being an academic, and my (non-statistically significant) experience is that most academics choose explanation 3. Their causal theory is usually that smarter people are naturally more liberal. Several of the same professors who told me this with a straight face also told me that no special talent was required to run a Fortune 500 company. They could do it, if they weren't so busy analyzing the poetic structure of Canto I of the Faerie Queen.
I would imagine that there is some combination of 1 and 2, plus maybe, hell, a dose of 3 (personal experience tells me that people who make it all the way through an English PhD often, perhaps usually, can't do enough math to rationally discuss economics. They also tend to argue anecdotally, and to mistake bon-mots for logic, verbal adeptness for intelligence -- hence their infatuation with Al Gore, whose book, if it proved nothing else, proved that he was certainly no brighter than his opponent. This often makes their policy ideas rather shallow, especially as they rarely experience dissent on core ideas.)
Wilentzes reliance on the possibility that it's a spurious correlation is extremely odd for a professor of History at an Ivy League institution. Aren't they supposed to have at least a passing familiarity with statistics? Then he delivered the coup de grace:
Wilentz said he believed that most academics are not politically impassioned, particularly those in the sciences. Having a faculty member for every political view is not essential and should not come at the cost of academic quality, Wilentz argued. "Even outside the classroom, not everybody is a red-diaper baby who is trying to, as far as I can see, overcome his own political guilt," he said of Horowitz. He said he felt that Princeton was relatively balanced in outspoken faculty, with he and George being the most public of the academic commentators at the University.
Let's put this under the microscope.
First of all, I don't think anyone's worried about the science faculty slipping Lysenkoism into the curriculum; the debate is about the humanities faculty skewing the education. So the science bit is irrelevant data, as Wilentz should know.
Second sentence is a goddamn beaut, isn't it? Let's think about this. I think we can safely assume that Wilentz is in favor of affirmative action. Which means that he believes that while it's important to have as many skin colors on campus as possible, it is not important to have a diversity of political ideas. This from a history professor. What if we formed a religion department consisting only of followers of the Reverend Jerry Falwell?
But it is the last bit that I truly love. The member of the majority sees no evidence of discrimination, and doesn't understand why the minority complains about being excluded, saying essentially that it is all in his head. The minority member feels excluded, sees others leaving his part of the American story out of their lectures, and states that there is open discrimination against his kind in hiring and promotion.
If that minority member were black, whom would Wilentz believe?
Shannon Okey over at Bitter Girl has a great new collection of daily affirmations that I'm going to try just as soon as I crawl out of the dark abyss of my spam-driven depression.
Today's Wall Street Journal has the best synopsis I've seen of the Argentinian crisis:
As the Japanese example demonstrated, the appearance that an economy is well run doesn't always mean that it is. The Argentine peso looked quite healthy after the Argentine congress passed a "convertibility" law a decade ago, pegging it to the dollar. Investors liked the convertibility law so well that they failed to notice that it was business as usual in the profligate Argentine national and state governments. Argentine politicians used up the proceeds from privatizations of state enterprises and then piled up debts to creditors abroad. When ultimately they were unable to service or reschedule these debts, the peso and the national government collapsed.
I think this points to the same thing my last post talked about: investors were fighting the last war. They were so focused on inflation that it blinded them to sovereign risk: the extra risk carried by government debt because governments, unlike companies, can't be sold at auction if they default on their debts.
It is often said of generals and admirals that they are always fighting the last war. Thus, on the eve of World War II, the Navy continued to view the battleship as its backbone, even though many analysts (especially in Japan) saw aircraft carriers as the weapon of the future. Indeed, many historians believe that the loss of our battleships at Pearl Harbor was a blessing in disguise, because it forced the Navy to turn more toward carriers.
Economists are the same, in that they tend to view each new recession as a replay of the last one. This often leads to the adoption of inappropriate policies that can sow the seeds of future recessions, or at least prolong the current recession beyond what better policies could have achieved.
Democrats are betting that the current recession will be a carbon copy of the last recession, which officially began in July 1990 and ended in March 1991. That was actually one of the mildest on record. Real gross domestic product only fell 1.5% from peak to trough. By contrast, real GDP fell 3.4% during the 1973-75 recession. Bill Clinton's claim during the 1992 campaign that the U.S. economy was the worst in 50 years was always total nonsense.
Bartlett points out that the '90-91recession was unusual in that the employment decline was slow, and the recovery equally slow, leading to a public perception that the economy was stagnating, even though GDP had already recovered. So the Dems had an issue to browbeat the Republicans with at election time. Bartlett thinks that we'll see a more typical recovery this time, which would mean that we should see employment picking up by summer.
I agree with Bartlett that the Dems are relying too heavily on the economy. Flailing against Bush's teflon popularity, they seem to have adopted a strategy of sniping at Bush and hoping that the economy still stucks next fall. This is at best pretty risky.
At the same time, the Republicans are aggressively positioning on the economy with all of these doofus microinitiatives. They won't do anything for the economy, of course, but they may well help the Republicans retake the Senate. Which is a good thing if only because it will offer such a dramatic comeuppance to Jim Jeffords. Not that I have anything against the man personally, you understand -- it's just that I think that anyone who writes a book called "My Declaration of Independance" deserves what he gets.
Dear William Galt, As a supporter of the Democratic National Committee, we would like to keep you updated on our work to secure Democratic victories in 2002. In the future, we would like to communicate with you via email and send you important information as we Countdown to Victory in 2002! The DNC is presently seeking your permission to keep you informed electronically via email. If you do not wish to have the DNC contact you by email, or you have received this communication in error, please type "REMOVE" in the Subject Line and reply to this email and your name will be deleted from our emailing list immediately.
Thank you for your support of the Democratic Party.
Sincerely,
Your friends at the Democratic National Committee
If this is their idea of campaigning, I think Jim Jeffords had better start practicing his grovel.
In its legal brief, Microsoft said Glueck's role in the states' remedy proposal is evident in documents already turned over by Oracle and the states.
Microsoft's attorneys said the company has subpoenaed other documents from Oracle, along with a deposition from the company's chief corporate architect, Edward Screven, who was tentatively slated to testify as a witness for the states.
"When Microsoft pressed Oracle to comply with the document subpoena, Oracle abruptly announced that the non-settling states would not be calling Screven as a witness after all, which according to Oracle meant that Microsoft was no longer entitled to any Oracle documents".
Let's take a look at the remedy proposed:
The dissenting states want U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly to require Microsoft to offer a cheaper, stripped-down version of the company's Windows operating system.
In addition, these states say it would close loopholes in the Justice Department's settlement deal and do more to ensure Microsoft discloses key Windows code to other software makers.
Seems fair, right? It offers consumers an alternative to bundling, and levels the playing field, right?
Not quite. The reason is that the economics of the software business don't work that way.
Software has a very high fixed cost: the cost of developing the product, and the minimum physical and administrative overhead needed to run the business. It has a very low marginal cost: the cost of producing each extra unit of product. Unlike, say, a basket of groceries, Microsoft saves no money on the stripped down product, because the main cost, development, is a sunk cost: money already spent that can't be recovered. In fact, the remedy increases Microsoft's costs, by forcing the company to develop the same product twice. So profit margins will be squeezed at both ends.
Now ask yourself this: why does Oracle care? Oracle doesn't make web browsers or desktop software; Oracle makes big corporate databases. So why is Oracle penning this remedy? Because Microsoft is writing increasingly good database software, that's why; software that's considerably cheaper to purchase and operate than Oracle's.
Oracle benefits from this proposal in two ways: it forces Microsoft to divert corporate resources to developing the stripped down platform; and it lowers the profit margins from which Microsoft draws the money it uses to develop good database software. It might benefit consumers; but then, they seem to be happy with what they've got.
All Microsoft's competitors benefit a third way: they get Microsoft to unveil key pieces of intellectual property, aka its source code. There are two schools of thought on this, both of which have some validity: the first says that this helps consumers by forcing Microsoft to help its third-party software vendors write code that works as well under Windows as code written by Microsoft itself; the second says that this allows Microsoft competitors to help consumers in the same way as those guys on Eighth Avenue*.
At any rate, while I don't approve of some of Microsoft's predatory practices, it seems to me to be fundamentally unhealthy for the government to get into the business of taking one company's side against the other. This latest just points out how deep the rot goes.
* The stuff they sell is stolen; that's why it's so cheap
Evil Princetonian Dave Tepper has an outstanding post on how voting works that provided much fodder for thought, such as these morsels:
We are electing candidates we know nothing about, to vote on issues that affect us day-to-day that they, mostly, know nothing about. And they can't ever know much about even 5% of the bills that come up. Take a peek at what's on Congress's plate sometime, a
