Gossip from Iraq

Chris Bray has an interesting post on Cliopatria reporting discussions with soldiers back from Iraq. Chris is a historian and reservist who's been called to active duty.

As I said in comments there, the reports evoke my time in Vietnam, but I suspect there might be some bravado in the discussions that exaggerate the reality in Iraq.

Teaching Mathematics--Kevin Drum

Kevin Drum has been researching a Diane Ravitch comparison of the indices to two math books, one from 1973 and one contemporary that were used to support an assertion that modern math courses dumb down the subject. See here. I find the comments particularly fascinating. In my youth I was good at math but a teacher with an bad accent in calculus my freshman year ended any thoughts of doing it for a living. Now I've forgotten most all of the terms and can't really follow much of the discussion. ("graphing calculator"--what's that all about?)

I have to agree with the comment by an engineer--that the experience of working something by hand, not calculator, has helped him over the years by allowing him to estimate for reasonableness of result. That's an important ability, because sometimes reporters are math illiterates and pass along incredible statistics. (For example, recently the Rolling Thunder motorcycle rally was estimated at a few hundred thousand people, but any calculation of reasonableness would make it much lower.)

I can also readily believe that modern kids have harder math than I had. That's the historic pattern, every generation does a bit more than the previous. (Read a book about numeracy in early America and the Founding Fathers were lucky if they knew arithmetic.)

Global Warming--The Compensatory Principle

Robert Samuelson recently wrote on global warming in the Post. In passing he said that global warming could do good as well as harm. For some reason, the statement irks me. Possibly there's no change from the present about which that couldn't be said, at least from certain perspectives. Suppose an unseen asteroid hit the earth tomorrow at 9:05 am and completely destroyed all life on the planet. Still, that destruction would do good--it would end the suffering of many people and prevent the doing of much evil.

But on to a more serious take. Yes, grant that global warming will change much, and some of the changes will be for the good. Some land now a desert may bloom, some untolerable environments may become subtropic resorts, inland areas will become great seashores. It's entirely true that global warming will create both winners and losers.

I know more history than economics. Henry George in the 19th century wrote a book pointing out that most increases in the value of land were due to society. He argued that was moral justification for taxing land values to take back the unearned increase.

Conservative economists (almost a redundant phrase) talk of "rent-seeking" behavior. From Wikipedia:

"The phenomenon of rent-seeking was first identified in connection with monopolies by Gordon Tullock, in a paper in 1967. It takes place when an entity seeks to extract uncompensated value from others by manipulation of the economic environment -- often including regulations or other government decisions."

I'm adopting the same moralistic attitude when I say that the winners in the global warming lottery will gain unearned value, and therefore do not deserve to keep it.

In a "rational world" (an oxymoron), we would tax the winners to compensate the losers. The people in Bangladesh, the Pacific island nations, Netherlands, Miami, New Orleans, and Wall Street would be compensated for their losses by those who gain, whoever they may be. If the Australian desert blossoms and the Midwest dries up and blows away, the Aussies would compensate the Yanks.

There's precedent for this--in time of war democracies tend to tax the profits of those who supply the armies at a higher rate--a "windfall profit tax". (That's an ancient metaphor, I assume coming from the apples that you find on the ground after a fall windstorm; no one had to climb the tree to pick the fruit.)

Honey versus Vinegar, Part II

Posted yesterday on Prof. Leiter's views on the relative merits of persuasion versus yelling in the blogosphere. Robert KC Johnstone at Cliopatria blogs on the proper role of collegiality within academia. He sees it as overrated, leading to a bunch of nice people who downplay good research for getting along. He comments on this post at Inside Higher Ed :: Collegiality -- the Tenure Track's Pandora's Box, which includes 15 steps for being collegial and getting tenure. It boils down to:

"Common sense and self-control. Exercise both. Concrete manifestations of common sense and self-control require several tactics. Here are some things to try. Most of these tips are obvious..."

Johnstone sees some of the steps as advice to suck up to those in power. I have to say I'm more with Mary McKinney, the writer at Inside Higher Ed, than with Johnstone. It's an old controversy though--there are those who modify their behavior on the basis of other people's concerns and those who don't. I'm reminded of criticism of Benjamin Franklin, who might have originated the saying: if you can fake sincerity you have it made. But William James observed that if you act as if you believe something, you often come to believe it. And George Washington studied, not how to be nice to people, but how to impress them.

To quote my mother: "be nice". To quote my father: "there's more than one way to skin a cat" [and win approbation]

Civility and the Leiter Reports

Eugene Volokh at Volokh.com cites this post: Leiter Reports: On Rhetoric, "Persuasion," and Tone...or Knowing the Difference Between Hard and Easy Questions for an interesting discussion of the pros and cons of civility in blogging. To boil down the argument, Leiter says on serious questions civil argument is appropriate, but not in the blogosphere, which he believes is not a realm for persuasion.

"What always strikes me in debates about 'tone' and 'civility' is that the critics, without fail, will abandon civility and adopt a harsh tone in the presence of the views that they deem 'beyond the pale.' Invariably, it turns out that they simply draw the line somewhere else (a good example is here--see the last paragraph, and the second comment), and that what really galls them is not the fact of my harshness and dismissiveness--they are equally capable of that when it comes to, e.g., Noam Chomsky or Ralph Nader or me--but rather that it is directed at the views they've been taught to take seriously, to think are serious, the views they've been led to believe are entitled to respect, even if one disagrees."

He has a point--certainly most of the popular blogs I've seen have a lot of heat, whether from the posts or the comments. But I'd draw the line differently, at least for myself. On the one hand you have the gibes and snarky remarks; on the other you have posts that try for reason. The former are just spray off the water; the later should aim for persuasion. We may not achieve what we aim for, but as someone said somewhere if we don't aim for it we're unlikely to achieve it.

Fourth of July Legends

Humans almost always idealize their group and their bigshots. One example of that is our urge to glorify the Founding Fathers. Snopes.com has a good analysis of a recurrent urban legend here.

Exclusion and Inclusion

Lots of commentary on the Supreme Court's Ten Commandments decisions. I won't go there directly but will instead pick up from a line in George Will's column this morning--observing that Quaker, Anglican, Methodist and Baptist clergymen officiated (where, he's not clear--it may have been over Congress, or just over religious ceremonies held in the Capitol in the early 1800's).

I think we have always had a four-way divide: first there's the one true religion (which is the one I believe); second there are other religions believed by people who are good at heart, even though misguided in views on theology, organization, or other points of religious belief; third are the unbelievers, those who don't believe; and finally the believers in false religions.

Over the years Americans have come to include more and more religions/denominations/sects in the second category. It shows when we have public ceremonies, like inaugurations or funerals of bigshots or the services after 9/11. It does vary by time--Catholicism was a false religion, the whore of Babylon for the Puritans, got acceptable in the revolution, then lost that status as Catholic immigrants came in during the 19th century, and finally regained it by 1960 with JFK. Jews have made it into the other category, but Islam hasn't (witness Franklin Graham) quite yet. But we're getting close to the point where people say "we all worship the same God" (even though named Jehovah or Allah).

That leaves out the non-monotheistic religions. Will we say: "many paths to enlightenment" as the new euphemism? When will we have a Wiccan officiate at some national ceremony? (I suspect the rule is you have to have 2 percent or more of the electorate to qualify. But that should mean that Mormons are overdue for representation.)

As for the third category--unbelievers--I think some people, like Madalyn Murray O'Hair or Robert Ingersoll (famous agnostic circa 1890) probably are seen more as category 4, but many people tolerate them. Not that any representative of unbelief will ever appear on a national stage.

Tierney Disses Bureaucrats

John Tierney, the new conservative columnist at the NYTimes, shows that he's no slouch at dissing bureaucrats in today's column. This is the second column on the West, channeling the writings of Terry Anderson (see below for links). Apparently the Indians were in good shape making treaties with civilians until 1840's, when we got a standing army after the Mexican War. (This would be news to Generals Anthony Wayne and William Harrison (who got to be President based on his fame as an Indian fighter.) Then the Bureau of Indian Affairs (their predecessor agency) came along and really put the kibosh on them. The Times requires registration but here's a quote:

"They were consigned to reservations and ostensibly given land, but it was administered by another bureaucracy, the agency that would grow into what's now the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The agency, in addition to giving some of the best land away to whites, allotted parcels to individual Indians with the goal of gradually transferring all the land and ending federal supervision. But what self-respecting bureaucrats work themselves out of a job?

As the land under their control dwindled, they presumed that Indians were not 'competent' to own land outright. It had to be placed under the agency's own enlightened trusteeship. They kept allotting parcels of this 'trust land' to individual Indians, but an Indian couldn't sell or lease his parcel without permission from the Bureau of Indian Affairs."

I hold no brief for either the Indian policy of the British, the Founding Fathers, or the U.S. government nor for the BIA as an effective organization. But the BIA doesn't set policy, Congress does that based on input from citizens. The Dawes Act of 1887 was based on the best thinking of the time--make Indians property owners and good things would follow. See this PBS page. The "competence" test was not an invention of BIA--it was in the law. Granted that BIA screwed up, we can't blame the agency for the failure of the policy, nor for the failure of the libertarian/conservative economics embodied in the law.

References appended to Tierney's column.

The Wealth of Indian Nations: Economic Performance and Institutions on Reservations by Terry L. Anderson and Dominic P. Parker, June 2004, 42 pp., working paper. [Note--based on a quick skim, this paper isn't a good support for Tierney's thesis, at least as I understand it. The paper looks at recent economic performance, not history.]

The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier by Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill, Stanford University Press, 256 pp., May 2004.

Property Rights: Cooperation, Conflict, and Law edited by Terry L. Anderson and Fred S. McChesney, Princeton University Press, 448 pp., 2002.

For more information, go to: www.perc.org.

Sign of the Time--Bigger Miata

Warren Brown in the Post writes on Mazda's redesign of their Miata:

"There were two seemingly contradictory needs in the Miata's redevelopment. The car had to be bigger. That is because people have gotten bigger, especially in America, the global automotive industry's most lucrative market, which also is the home of McDonald's, Wendy's and Burger King."

(He doesn't say whether they had to add more cup holders.) Bigger houses, bigger clothes, bigger cars--the world is going to pot says this old bureaucrat.

Idea--Variable Pricing for Events

If I recall, pricewatch.com introduced the idea of selling airline seats and hotel reservations on-line. The idea was the airline or hotel would gain from selling otherwise vacant seats or renting rooms.

This weekend I ran into three different scenarios where the idea might be applicable. In the Post magazine they ran an article on the Washington Nationals, which included a comment on some empty seats that might be filled by charity. My wife and I went to Wolf Trap Saturday for the NSO concert, again some empty seats. Then Sunday night we went to Kennedy Center for the Suzanne Farrell Ballet (the performance was better than the review led me to expect), also empty seats. I know DC has (or had) a half-price day of performance outlet down on F Street. But why not line up some membership organizations--the Scouts, PTA's, etc. to buy tickets on short notice for real low prices. One thing ballet, classical music, and the Nats share is an interest in building their audience. Maybe they'd attract a return buyer for each 10 tickets they sell.?