Mad Social Scientist

An intriguing proposal to unleash "white hat" viruses to patch holes in the security of computers' whose owners can't or won't update their virus defenses.

Denial of service attacks are a classic collective action problem. But then, so would real viruses be to the cells of our bodies. So maybe what we need are electronic white blood cells, coordinated by an electronic immune system. (Of course, we'd also get some allergic reactions and auto-immune disorders as a side-effect...)

And 7 million people live there. As this article points out, China has 102 cities of over 1 million citizens (the US, by the NYT's count has 9; see the amazingly effective VDQI linked from the same page). Hmm. I wonder if that comparison is right. Are Chinese metropolitan statistical areas comparable to those of the US? Cause DC, Boston, San Fransisco, Detroit, Atlanta, and Miami didn't "count" for the US.

Still, the point remains that China in a generation could have a breadth of urban culture that could rival the combined developed world. Imagine that.

Bill Clinton set out to demolish the Bush-Cheney record and present Kerry as a worth successor to his own presidency, a man who can restore the peace and prosperity of the late 1990s. And boy did he knock this one out of the park. NYT has the text of the first half here. Some choice lines:

Now, since most Americans aren't that far to the right, our friends have to portray us Democrats as simply unacceptable, lacking in strength and values. In other words, they need a divided America. But we don't.

...

After 9/11, we all just wanted to be one nation. Not a single American on Sept. 12, 2001, cared who won the next presidential election. ... The president had an amazing opportunity to bring the county together under his slogan of compassionate conservatism, and to unite the world in the struggle against terror.

...

At home, the president and the Republican Congress have made equally fateful choices, which they also deeply believe in. For the first when America was on a war footing in our whole history, there were two huge tax cuts, nearly half of which went to the top 1 percent. Now, I'm in that group now for the first time in my life and you might remember that when I was in office, on occasion, the Republicans were kind of mean to me. But as soon as I got out and made money, I became part of the most important group in the world to them. It was amazing. I never thought I'd be so well-cared for by the president and the Republicans in Congress. I almost sent them a thank-you you note for my tax cuts - until I realized that the rest of you were paying the bill for it and then I thought better of it.

Now, look at the choices they made, choices they believed in. They chose to protect my tax cut at all costs, while withholding promised funding for the Leave No Child Behind Act, leaving over 2.1 million children behind. They chose to protect my tax cut while cutting 140,000 unemployed workers out of job training programs, 100,000 working families out of their child care assistance, and, worst of all, while cutting 300,000 poor children out of after-school programs when we know it keeps them off the streets, out of trouble, in school learning, going to college and having a good life.

They chose to protect my tax cuts while dramatically raising out of pocket costs of health care to our veterans and while weakening or reversing very important environmental measures that Al Gore and I put into place, everything from clean air to the protection of our forests.

Now, in this time, everyone in America had to sacrifice except the wealthiest Americans. And most of us, almost all of us, from Republicans to independents and Democrats, we wanted to be asked to do our part, too. But all they asked us to do was to expend the energy necessary to open the envelopes containing our tax cuts.

...

During the Vietnam War, many young men, including the current president, the vice president and me, could have gone to Vietnam and didn't. John Kerry came from a privileged background. He could have avoided going too, but instead, he said: Send me.

When they sent those swiftboats up the river in Vietnam and they told them their job was to draw hostile fire, to wave the American flag and bate the enemy to come out and fight, John Kerry said: Send me.

And then, on my watch, when it was time to heal the wounds of war and normalize relations with Vietnam and to demand an accounting of the POWs and MIAs we lost there, John Kerry said: Send me.

...

Their opponents will tell you we should be afraid of John Kerry and John Edwards, because they won't stand up to the terrorists. Don't you believe it. Strength and wisdom are not opposing values.

They go hand in hand.

They go hand in hand, and John Kerry has both. His first priority will be to keep America safe.

Still the best orator, shrewdest politician, and smartest policy brain in the Democratic party. If anything, he's gotten better at speeches---this one was the right length, had fewer rambling lists, and succeeded in doing what many doubted Clinton could do---build someone else up.

FYI, an interesting piece on Kerry from Oliphant

Two cultural icons have just announced sixth installments.

Star Wars posted a press release on starwars.com yesterday announcing Episode III's title will be "Revenge of the Sith". Hey, I'm a sucker for parallelism. Let's just hope they don't screw this one up. Here's the synopsis:

After three long years of relentless fighting, the Clone Wars are nearly at an end. The Jedi Council dispatches Obi-Wan Kenobi to bring General Grievous, the deadly leader of the Separatist droid army, to justice. Meanwhile, back on Coruscant, Chancellor Palpatine has grown in power. His sweeping political changes transform the war-weary Republic into the mighty Galactic Empire. To his closest ally, Anakin Skywalker, he reveals the true nature of power and the promised secrets of the Force in an attempt to lure him to the dark side.

George Lucas is a genius, and the Episodes IV and V rank among the best movies ever made (watch any science fiction movies from before Star Wars, and you'll know what I mean). But like most creative geniuses, he needs some constraints to produce his best work. People who can tell him "no", force him to go back to the drawing board, revise dialog/devices/characters/plots that aren't working. Episodes I and II are flawed movies that show great promise; they could have been much better.

And JK Rowling recently announced the title of Harry Potter 6, "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince". I have no complaints for her. Anyone who can escape the shadow of Tolkien to write an original, gripping fantasy series is beyond reproach, in my book.

Say, Andy?

Yeah, Rick?

Maybe we shouldn't have written out our evil scheme (TM) where anyone could see it.

I think you may be right.

It was especially dumb to sign it.

Yeah.

And initial every page.

Yeah.

And write it out longhand, so everyone can prove we wrote it personally.

Yeah.

I'm going to jail, aren't I, Andy?

Looks like it. You and me both.

How stupid do they think we are? This stupid.

Brought to you by Jon Stewart, the best damn anchor in the country. And now he's got the real media award to prove it. Even though, as Stewart points out, his show is, well, fake. But sadly, a fake news show is the most accurate and hard-hitting on TV today.

Remember the days when computer games were text only? Okay, probably not. But there were some great games back then, mostly from Infocom. Here's an archive of their classics in Applet form. I particularly liked Planetfall, though it's damn near impossible to finish.

A warning: these aren't your forgiving Nintendo style games. One false move and *splat*. Game over, start again at the beginning. Forget to pick up the Golden Widget in Room 3, and you can't get back there because a killer troll is guarding the door? Tough luck. Start over. But the narration is great; usually of a Douglas Adams style.

NB: I'm not *that* old; I just was fortunate to have a computer around when I was little.

A side-effect of blogging: I now realize there are many thousands of Renaissance men and women out there, who, besides their day jobs, have time to scour the net and write up their finds in rather nice prose. Crooked Timber is an example, but just the tip of the iceberg. So much for the idea that education is in perpetual decline. At worst its just getting more unequal, but at the high end, this generation of scientists/technologists/writers/literati is doing quite well, and probably much better for being linked together by the blogosphere.

Cool blog of the day: Majikthise, which you have to love for the name alone (I wonder if there's a Vroomfondel out there?). She notes that whatever Sandy Berger did (and it doesn't appear to be much), it pales in comparison to the usual Republican document cover up. Their modus operandi is the truck, pioneered by Kissinger, who stole thousands of public documents and hid them at the Rockefeller estate, so no one could question his history of Nixon's foreign policy. I've been waiting for someone to remember that.

And a rich page on pseudoscience, a topic of endless fascination (for me at least, but then is that a surprise). Warning, the author is a bit curmudgeonly, but he is a geologist who has to deal with creationist wackos insisting the world is only 6000 years old, so I cut him some slack. I especially like this bit on anti-intellectualism.

Remember a "uniter, not a divider", "compassionate conservatism", and "I want to change the tone in Washington"? Wampum look back at words and deeds of the man who wants to be a "war president of peace".

This one shows results from multiple polls. (What's Fox smoking? They must be weighting their sample in some, ah, unorthodox ways)

A nice paper by Drezner and Farrell, a pair of political scientist bloggers. They find that the ecology of blogs is similar to the web as a whole (a handful of key nodes that readers use to navigate/aggregate info/rate other sites, and bloggers try to get the attention of). But they also find that its a bit more democratic that they web as a whole (incoming links are not quite power law distributed, but log normal).

I wonder how important it is that the overlap between bloggers and blog readers is so great. We're all curious to find new material, so we probably search farther afield than most web users. I'd wager almost all of us are more information consumers than producers, by choice. We also start in a dozen or more places, while most web users probably frequent four sites, tops.

Well, this is my first post in a week. I've got lots of excuses (slow news week, sick over the weekend, the frustrating saga of my still-unrepaired laptop), but part of it is surely that once you stop doing something for a while, it gets harder to start up again. Weird that blogging feels like something you should be doing regularly. I guess once people starting checking your site to see what's new, you don't want to let them down!

So, to prove I'm still alive, here are some interesting things I've seen this week:

"Rational" tulipmania? This article in Slate reviews a contrarian interpretation of the famed Dutch tulip bubble, claiming it wasn't an example of irrationality after all. Because this is a treasured example of idiocy run amok, I'm reluctant to let it go. I don't see from the Daniel Gross summary how this all works (who exactly was willing to pay the inflated prices for tulips? Because if no one was, how can these options be worth what they were selling for?) But worth a read; I'm sure I'm missing something.

Big defeat for graduate student unionization. Read the story
here. A sad day.

Ever wonder what a hemi is?

The cognitive dissonance president opens his big fat mouth again.

One of the weirdest things in the universe may be less weird than imagined: a less romantic view of black holes from Stephen Hawking. Not gateways to other universes, but "lockboxes" that eventually spit out what you put in. A shame, really.

Would someone please do a study of suicide and anti-depressants that at least tries to tackle the sample selection problem?

You know what would help support the troops? Try paying them on time, and in full.

Well, that's enough for now. No mention of Iraq, because there's nothing good to say, and what's bad sounds like a broken record (our new cronies may be criminals, our soldiers are dying, our allies are being taken hostage, ordinary Iraqis are living in conditions no better than under Saddam, and maybe worse, and Iraq still isn't sovereign, since Negroponte seems to have a veto on just about everything). Whoops. I guess that's a few words after all.

A great cartoon from Mark Fiore. I'm still very steamed about the Bushies request for the power to postpone elections. Even if they have disowned it for now, it shows how far they would go to hold on to power. We got through the Civil War and WWII without interrupting democracy. I think we can handle al-Qaeda.

I miss the days when elections in the US could be presumed free and fair.

Thomas Frank has an excellent op-ed here on why the GOP fights the culture war to a standstill

Of course, as everyone pointed out, the whole enterprise was doomed to failure from the start. It didn't have to be that way; conservatives could have chosen any number of more promising avenues to challenge or limit the Massachusetts ruling. Instead they went with a constitutional amendment, the one method where failure was absolutely guaranteed — along with front-page coverage

Then again, what culture war offensive isn't doomed to failure from the start? Indeed, the inevitability of defeat seems to be a critical element of the melodrama, on issues from school prayer to evolution and even abortion.

Failure on the cultural front serves to magnify the outrage felt by conservative true believers; it mobilizes the base. Failure sharpens the distinctions between conservatives and liberals. Failure allows for endless grandstanding without any real-world consequences that might upset more moderate Republicans or the party's all-important corporate wing. You might even say that grand and garish defeat — especially if accompanied by the ridicule of the sophisticated — is the culture warrior's very object.

The issue is all-important; the issue is incapable of being won. Only when the battle is defined this way can it achieve the desired results, have its magical polarizing effect. Only with a proposed constitutional amendment could the legalistic, cavilling Democrats be counted on to vote "no," and only with an offensive so blunt and so sweeping could the universal hostility of the press be secured.

Losing is prima facie evidence that the basic conservative claim is true: that the country is run by liberals; that the world is unfair; that the majority is persecuted by a sinister elite. And that therefore you, my red-state friend, had better get out there and vote as if your civilization depended on it.

The culture war is more useful to the Republicans as a failure than a success, and they know it.

But it could be worse. The Bush administration has taken a raft of old Republican shibboleths and actually made them policy, to disastrous effect. Iraq was more usefil to Bush as a whipping boy than as an ungovernable colony; it would have been better to run against high taxes than to cut them to the bone and produce huge deficits; SDI is better a pipedream than a very expensive non-functional weapon system. Moderate Republicans are the ones who know that the wacko ideas of the right wing must be praised but never ever made law, and they're gone. It's time to face up to the wackos themselves, before they privatize social security, ignite a real civil war over abortion, gut public schools with vouchers, or provoke war with Iran, North Korea, or Syria. Because if the first term is any guide, that's what the second term will bring us. Just imagine Bush without a re-election incentive...

Sy Hersh has more allegations . He's been right so far, but of course I don't know if what he's saying is true. If it is, the administration needs to come clean. And may need to resign. But they haven't ever presented so much as a list of what went wrong at Abu Ghraib; the press have had to drag every detail out of them. No one has resigned, or taken responsibility in any real (e.g., non-insulting) way.

One day, probably soon, we will hear the real story. But I think we should hear it from Bush, and I think we should hear it before the election. We deserve to know what has been done in the name of our cuontry, and "freedom".

Got catharsis? (Turn up volume)

"The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggereated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas…. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil…" John Maynard Keynes


Tyler Cowen has a list of eight economic theories he used to believe but now considers empirically falsified or uncertain. Some of these are no-brainers (monetary targeting, or the idea that privatization without the rule of law will produce a functioning market economy); others are ideas that still haunt us: the idea that increases in minimum wages necessarily cost us many low income jobs and the idea that capital mobility in developing countries will lead to macro-stabilization, for example. But the whole list is quite interesting.

Update: The Crooked Timber discussion of this post is quite interesting, if you ignore the silly scientism debate. I especially like the fuzzy generalization that many economists are coming to accept that the world works like something in between the rational expecations and Keynesian ideal types. I also like the point that the real political battle over unemployment may be a matter of income distribution.

Three links to remember for tracking the election:

1. State polls summary. Updated daily

2. Rasmussen tracking poll. Updated daily

3. Iowa winner take all market. Updated constantly.

I've never liked Clear Channel. First, they bought up hundreds of radio stations across the country, saturating markets with pre-programmed drivel. They utterly ruined radio in my hometown of Houston, for example; I just don't try to listen anymore there.

Then, I went to a concert they sponsored about 4 years ago. Ever since, they've sent me spam, and I couldn't get them to stop.

In one part of Florida, their radio market saturation went beyong the legal limit for a single station, so they just set up "separate" stations operated from their own facilities.

Then they gave hundreds of thousands to Bush, organized pro-Iraq war rallies, and censored the Dixie Chicks.

But what really burns me up is this blatant effort to censor a mild, reasonable anti-war message. They may be breaching a contract; they are certainly censoring one side of a large public debate. When a single corporation owns a large share of the nation's media markets, seeks to expand that share by lobbying for regulatory changes, and frequently takes sides by censoring one perspective and promoting another, not just in editorials but paid advertisements, we have a big problem. The freedom to speak and the freedom of press are fundamental to the wellbeing of Amercian democracy, and laissez-faire will not always get us either liberty.

Disney wanted to keep F9/11 out of theaters, where it has turned out to be a hit. Millions of Americans apparently want to see things the media downplays as "unpatriotic" or "fringe". They want the unvarnished truth about Bush, and they want a real debate about major public issues. Not the non-debate the media held over the war in 2002, when they trotted out the right and center-right hawks to admit the inevitability of war. For the mainstream media, commentators come in two flavors: right and middle. Left is just left out.

Today, the right has Rush Limbaugh broadcasting hate and deceit on Armed Forces Radio. The left has the Freeway blogger. And why not? If he wanted to pay for billboards, perhaps he'd find that the billboard owners were afraid of ruffling the wrong feathers.

I'm out of town this week, so there'll be only light posting, but here are a few random items:

A former student has an op-ed in the NYT today, which reports on some correlations between platform content (think number of pages, mentions of candidate's and opponent's names) and election outcomes. I'm a bit leery of this (there aren't many observations, and this sort of analysis is easy to push into data mining and curve fitting). But worth noting.

Ken Lay has a defense only a mother could love. And he's got history of hiring and promoting corporate criminals that is hard to ignore. Either this guy was criminally negligent, or criminally fraudulent. The latter seems far more likely. Remember, Enron wasn't a good company with a few bad seeds ruining it with hidden schemes. The whole enterprise was a fraud, based on an impossible business model and financed by sham deals and phantom partners. When it actually did make money, it was by subverting the markets it was supposed to be creating, and ripping off the weak and vulnerable. So little of Enron was on the up-and-up that Lay would have to be hermetically sealed in his office not to notice it.

Finally, this is nifty, in a high-tech retro kind of way.

A group points out that calling Bush a chimp is rather unfair. To the chimpanzees, of course.

I have always liked computers, and disdained machines. By machines, I mean anything that makes its living by moving its parts; by computers, I mean those oh so useful boxes that perform a trillion calculations for me every day, accurate in every case. Machines do one thing over and over. Computers are universal; you can program a computer to do (almost) anything. I'm always afraid of breaking machines, or of lacking the skill to use them correctly. Learning to drive was not fun. Learning to use a computer is painless---make a mistake, and no harm done. You can always start again.

But there's a catch, and I hate to admit it. Computers are machines, too. The fool us with an virtual world of logic and light, but under the hood its all silicon, wires, and motors. And it can break.

Last night I was fiddling with my 1.5 year old laptop, optimizing some setting in my latex configuration, thinking how I'd never been so happy with a PC as with this neat, orderly, reliable notebook, which had never had a significant problem of any kind. So naturally, five minutes later, the motherboard died.

Yes, just like an automobile, or a house, or the creatures of the wilds, or a human being, a computer is just a machine that will inevitably decay, break down, and pass away. So which is the scarier thought: that we're all doomed to be dust, or that my dissertation, and all the data, programs, and calculations that go into it, is trapped in an ephemeral world that could crumble without warning? Having heard of academics who lost their lives' work in house fires, I'm pretty sure I know the answer.

I was reading up on spatial statistics for a friend today, and I finally understand why spatial correlation is not the "same" as time series correlation (or even the same as 2d time series): There is an arrow of time, but there is no arrow of space. That is, time always flows forwards. But spatial effects can mixed back and forth and every-which-way. In studying time series, the present can depend on the past, even every past period, but it can never depend on the future, nor can a chain of temporal causation lead back around to the present through other time periods. But in spatial statistics, there's no reason the spatial correlation can't lead anywhere, including back to "square one".

In the (extremely off) chance that someone is reading this who studies spatial statistics, does anyone know of a good article on the properties of spatial models with space-time lags. E.g., every step away in space is combine with a step back in time, so you never return to the same "place"?

I think Kerry made the right choice in Edwards, for a lot of reasons. Edwards is an exciting speaker, and he balances out Kerry in ways that make the character assassination the media did to Gore a bit harder to sustain this time around.

I was also relieved, because the decision showed wisdom on Kerry's part. If he had chosen Gephardt (for comfort) or McCain (for gimickry and a quick poll boost), I would have worried about the quality of his decisionmaking (and who didn't worry about the choices of Bush I, Bush II, and Perot, to take just a few examples from recent elections). Will Saletan agrees with me:

That's where wisdom had to intervene. Kerry had to recognize that the decision wasn't strictly his to make. Look again at those exit polls. Most Democrats who voted for Kerry weren't in love with him. They saw him as a vehicle to get rid of Bush. Some initially preferred the candidate who vowed to stand up to Bush, or the candidate who preached optimism, or the candidate who accused Republicans of a war against working people, or the candidate who promised to take back our government from the special interests. Kerry absorbed all the votes by absorbing all the messages. He became the optimistic guy who would stand up against Bush's war on work and fight the special interests. More clearly than any Democratic presidential nominee in 20 years, Kerry was chosen not to represent himself but to represent his party. And what Democrats wanted, as polls and crowds made clear, was Edwards—because they like him, and because they want to win.

That's the most important thing Kerry revealed today: He understands that the election is about more than what he wants. Sometimes the biggest thing you can do is to accept what's bigger than you.

EJ Dionne has an interesting counterfactual on what the Republicans would be saying if Edwards wasn't the pick.

For other reactions, check the Iowa Electronic Markets. I have previously mentioned my skepticism about these markets; despite their good performance in the week before the election (as documented most recently by an article in this month's Journal of Economic Perspectives by a former colleague), I don't think they perform well far in advance of elections. Or to put it another way, I'm not sure what the quantity they supposedly estimate is in July (the expected outcome in November? What would happen if the election was today? or, as I think is more likely, some average of what people expect will happen in November, combined with some effects at manipulation/wishful thinking). In a large enough market, these effects should wash out, leaving us with a good aggregation of what informed people expect. I just don't think it's large enough yet.

Despite the long caveat, it is at least interesting that in the hours after the Edwards announcement, the IEM went from favoring Bush by about 4% in the winner-take-all-market to dead-even (I don't think the vote share market is worth watching).

Finally, Bush's reaction: Edwards is too inexperienced to be vice-president. Let's parse that. Edwards total public experience is a single term as Senator. Bush's total public experience, prior to being *president* is a term and a half as governor in a state were the position is ceremonial, and subordinate in every meaningful way to the lieutenant governor. Prior to that, Bush had cushy jobs obtained by family connections, and a history of aimless boozing. Edwards was a plaintiff's attorney. It's not just the pot calling the kettle black---Edwards is only running for *vice*-president. If he gets there, he'd have loads more "experience" than Bush if he ever gets to be president.

Another laugher:

Bush had cordially welcomed the freshman senator to the race hours after Kerry announced his running mate, but snapped when asked here how Edwards would stack up against Vice President Cheney.

"Dick Cheney can be president. Next?" he said pivoting away from his questioner and toward the next one.

Uh, George---he already *is* president.

Nice Krugman column today explaining a simple economic point, which is that economic performance this year is subpar, despite the rhetoric coming out of the Bush administration. As usual, its a story of low employment, and widening inequality, and as Krugman explains, a different administration, with better priorities and policies, would have produced different outcomes:

If you want a single number that tells the story, it's the percentage of adults who have jobs. When Mr. Bush took office, that number stood at 64.4. By last August it had fallen to 62.2 percent. In June, the number was 62.3. That is, during Mr. Bush's first 30 months, the job situation deteriorated drastically. Last summer it stabilized, and since then it may have improved slightly. But jobs are still very scarce, with little relief in sight.

Bush campaign ads boast that 1.5 million jobs were added in the last 10 months, as if that were a remarkable achievement. It isn't. During the Clinton years, the economy added 236,000 jobs in an average month. Those 1.5 million jobs were barely enough to keep up with a growing working-age population.

...

And economic growth is passing working Americans by. The average weekly earnings of nonsupervisory workers rose only 1.7 percent over the past year, lagging behind inflation. The president of Aetna, one of the biggest health insurers, recently told investors, "It's fair to say that a lot of the jobs being created may not be the jobs that come with benefits." Where is the growth going? No mystery: after-tax corporate profits as a share of G.D.P. have reached a level not seen since 1929.

What should we be doing differently? For three years many economists have argued that the most effective job-creating policies would be increased aid to state and local governments, extended unemployment insurance and tax rebates for lower- and middle-income families. The Bush administration paid no attention — it never even gave New York all the aid Mr. Bush promised after 9/11, and it allowed extended unemployment insurance to lapse. Instead, it focused on tax cuts for the affluent, ignoring warnings that these would do little to create jobs.

After good job growth in March and April, the administration declared its approach vindicated. That was premature, to say the least. Whatever boost the economy got from the tax cuts is now behind us, and given the size of the budget deficit, another big tax cut is out of the question. It's time to change the policy mix — to rescind some of those upper-income cuts and pursue the policies we should have been following all along.

Let me second two points: the president's policies do affect the economy, including how growth gets distributed to rich and poor, and, more subtly, just having a president with a brain and some concern for the working man would make a difference---he doesn't need a secret plan to save the economy; he just needs to be the right sort of administrator to make choices as they come up.

WaPo is reporting that the half-hearted reconstruction of Iraq has so far been financed by $20,000 million in Iraqi funds, but only $366 million in American funds.

Of course, very little of this spending seems to be going to benefit Iraqis:

Of $3.2 billion earmarked for security and law enforcement, a key U.S. goal in Iraq, only $194 million has been spent. Another central objective of the aid program was to reduce the 30 percent unemployment rate, but money has been spent to hire only about 15,000 Iraqis, despite U.S. promises that 250,000 jobs would be created by now, U.S. officials familiar with the aid program said.
...
Fewer than 140 of the 2,300 reconstruction projects that were to be funded with the U.S. aid package are underway, the officials said.

Of course, it didn't help that the US was so slow to get started with reconstruction, due to a total lack of planning for the post-war, no consideration of the obvious security problems that would arise, and the most incompetent staffing in the history of the American nation. And now the insurgency makes standing still quite a challenge.

We owe Iraq, big time, for a decade of sanctions and bombing, for invading under false pretenses and occupying their country, and for allowing that country to sink into lawlessness and violence. It wasn't a paradise before the first Gulf War---Saddam was a brutal dictator, and the war with Iran was a catastrophe worse than anything we're seeing today---but we've been involved in Iraq longer than that, and never to help the Iraqi people (we were helping Saddam back in the 1980s, when he committed all his worst atrocities).

Let's hope the $20 billion earmarked for Iraqi reconstruction really goes to help the Iraqi people, and not to enrich Halliburton or produce photo-ops for the Bush campaign.

Nowadays, if you have an affiliation to a good university, you can get almost any journal you want online, in full text (and text searchable). It's like having a world class library in your house, office, or anywhere you take your laptop. Except. There are precious few books online, Amazon's look inside the book notwithstanding.

But imagine you scanned the entire Harvard library into a database, and made in text searchable. Your university could "subscribe" to Harvard Library, and give you everything in the Widener stacks right to your desktop in Omaha, Nome, or Ulan Bataar.

And that's just the start. Now suppose you know some perl, and you can run text extraction code on the Harvard library. As a whole, or in any subset of books you choose. Suddenly, a fusion of programming skills and quantitative history could yield more social science than you could shake a very big stick at.

That's not mad social science, though. It's the future, and we'll see it, surely within 20 years; maybe much sooner.

Follow up: It would also be good to set up the data in the natural web structure provided by bibliographies. E.g., it should be very easy to get from a book to its sources, or to create source-citation maps. A sort of Science Citation Index for the whole card catalog, finding hyper-text links where we thought we only had bound sheets of dead tree matter.

I finally understand the American religious right. And it was sitting there, all along, in the Book of Bluke

In Giblets's opinion, there's nothin' like that old time religion. Witch-hunts, cross-burnings, fatwas, an inquisition or two - that's some sexy theology there. So Giblets was pretty excited to see that aspiring Christian Ayatollah James Dobson sent out a mass email to his supporters publishing Michael Moore's home address and urging them to "let Moore know exactly what they think" at Moore's home.

Giblets can see why Christians like Dobson would be pretty hot to stick it to Moore. After all, he is, as Dobson says, "so quick to criticize capitalism," and if Giblets remembers his New Testament correctly, capitalism is one of the chief virtues mentioned in the Sermon on the Mount:

Blessed are the rich, for they will receive enormous tax cuts, the benefits of which may eventually trickle-down to the middle- and lower-class. (Shmark 3:16)

And of course there was Jesus's words of wisdom regarding the rich in Heaven:

It is as easy for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God as it is for a poor man to be trampled by his camel. (Bluke 12:21)

'Course, Dobson might also be hitting back at Moore for his last movie's bashing of the NRA. Giblets also understands that Jesus was a huge gun nut.

Now some people seem to think that targeting Moore at his house where his wife and kids sleep is "un-Christian," that Jesus would tell Dobson to "love thy enemies" and "turn the other cheek" and "not be a hateful prick." Well, Giblets thinks Jesus can shove it. Modern Christians need modern leadership for modern times, and if Jesus don't got the cajones to turn a rabid culture-war-inflamed mob on a political opponent's home, he should get out of the soul-saving business and leave it to the professionals. That Prince of Peace shtick was getting old anyway.

WWGD, my friends, WWGD.

This classic article on the markets of POW camps was linked by Crooked Timber today. I'd heard of it, and always wanted to read it. Some highlights:

We reached a transit camp in Italy about a fortnight after capture and received ¼ of a Red Cross food parcel each a week later. At once exchanges, already established, multiplied in volume. Starting with simple direct barter, such as a non-smoker giving a smoker friend his cigarette issue in exchange for a chocolate ration, more complex exchanges soon became an accepted custom. Stories circulated of a padre who started off round the camp with a tin of cheese and five cigarettes and returned to his bed with a complete parcel in addition to his original cheese and cigarettes; the market was not yet perfect. Within a week or two, as the volume of trade grew, rough scales of exchange values came into existence. Sikhs, who had at first exchanged tinned beef for practically any other foodstuff, began to insist on jam and margarine. It was realised that a tin of jam was worth ½ bound of margarine plus something else; that a cigarette issue was worth several chocolate issues, and a tin of diced carrots was worth practically nothing.

In this camp we did not visit other bungalows very much and prices varied from place to place; hence the germ of truth in the story of the itinerant priest. By the end of a month, when we reached our permanent camp, there was a lively trade in all commodities and their relative values were well known, and expressed not in terms of one another—one didn’t quote bully in terms of sugar—but in terms of cigarettes. The cigarette became the standard of value. In the permanent camp people started by wandering through the bungalows calling their offers—"cheese for seven" (cigarettes)—and the hours after parcel issue were Bedlam. The inconveniences of this system soon led to its replacement by an Exchange and Mart notice board in every bungalow, where under the headings "name", "room number", "wanted" and "offered" sales and wants were advertised. When a deal went through, it was crossed off the board. The public and semi-permanent records of transactions led to cigarette prices being well known and thus tending to equality throughout the camp, although there were always opportunities for an astute trader to make a profit from arbitrage. With this development everyone, including non-smokers, was willing to sell for cigarettes, using them to buy at another time and place. Cigarettes became the normal currency, though, of course, barter was never extinguished.

...

Cigarettes were also subject to the workings of Gresham’s Law. Certain brands were more popular than others as smokes, but for currency purposes a cigarette was a cigarette. Consequently buyers used the poorer qualities and the Shop rarely saw the more popular brands: cigarettes such as Churchman’s No. 1 were rarely used for trading. At one time cigarettes hand-rolled from pipe tobacco began to circulate. Pipe tobacco was issued in lieu of cigarettes by the Red Cross at a rate of 25 cigarettes to the ounce and this rate was standard in exchanges, but an ounce would produce 30 home made cigarettes. Naturally, people with machine-made cigarettes broke them down and re-rolled the tobacco, and the real cigarette virtually disappeared from the market. Hand-rolled cigarettes were not homogeneous and prices could no longer be quoted in them with safety: each cigarette was examined before it was accepted and thin ones were rejected, or extra demanded as a make-weight. For a time we suffered all the inconveniences of a debased currency.

Machine-made cigarettes were always universally acceptable, both for what they would buy and for themselves. It was this intrinsic value which gave rise to their principal disadvantage as currency, a disadvantage which exists, but to a far smaller extent, in the case of metallic currency; —that is, a strong demand for non-monetary purposes. Consequently our economy was repeatedly subject to deflation and to periods of monetary stringency. While the Read Cross issue of 50 or 25 cigarettes per main per week came in regularly, and while there were fair stocks held, the cigarette currency suited its purpose admirably. But when the issue was interrupted, stocks soon ran out, prices fell, trading declined in volume and become increasingly a matter of barter. This deflationary tendency was periodically offset by the sudden injection of new currency. Private cigarette parcels arrived in a trickle throughout the year, but the big numbers came in quarterly when the Red Cross received its allocation of transport. Several hundred thousand cigarettes might arrive in the space of a fortnight. Prices soared, and then began to fall, slowly at first but with increasing rapidity as stocks ran out, until the next delivery. Most of our economic troubles could be attributed to this fundamental instability.

But the whole thing is worth reading.

Saddam's jailers have some interesting anecdotes:

But Mr. Hussein would occasionally provide startling comments and observations, they said, as when he spoke about his reasons for invading Kuwait in 1990, and precipitated the first gulf war.

Mr. Hussein told his interrogator on one occasion that a principal reason for invading was his belief that he needed to keep his army occupied.

Saddam solution for instability: invade a major oil producer in an unstable region of the world. Brilliant. (On a serious note, it does support the story that Saddam's weakpoint was always his military chain of command, which failed to keep him informed in 2003 about pretty much everything)

From his partial answers to questions about the recent war, intelligence officials said they came to believe that Mr. Hussein was surprised when the United States began its invasion in March 2003.

One official said that Mr. Hussein had implied that ambiguity over whether his government possessed illegal weapons "would keep the neighbors at bay, while the U.S. would be hung up in interminable debate at the U.N."

Looks like the Maxwell Smart defense strategy didn't work out. (Don't move, I have biological weapons. Okay, would you believe that I have hydrogen balloon trucks?)

Saddam really needed to follow Evil Overlord rule 61:

If my advisors ask "Why are you risking everything on such a mad scheme?", I will not proceed until I have a response that satisfies them.

Instead, he didn't trust any advisers, and probably would have killed someone who pointed this out.

But it's really Saddam the parent that shines:

And in one curious session, an official said, he related how his son Uday had beaten to death someone who had annoyed him by playing music too loudly.

Mr. Hussein said that after the beating, he had Uday imprisoned in solitary confinement for a time to teach him a lesson.

Bad dictator's son! No dessert for you! But I suppose, as long as Uday is doing well, Saddam did his job as a father. Oh, wait...

As I was getting my haircut, I overheard an ad on the radio promising amnesty to Blockbuster patrons carrying balances from late fees; all you have to do is show up at a store. Presumably, some people rent a video, turn it in late at the drop-box, and then avoid renting a new video because they'd have to pay a late fee (the marginal price of rental is, in this case, perhaps $20!). Blockbuster wants to be able to rent these customers new videos at the market price (or in fact, any price above marginal cost), and in some cases may be willing to give up the late fee to get them back.

An interesting problem, an interesting solution, and my mind is warped enough that the first thing I thought was "oh, that's a time inconsistent solution!" Because if Blockbuster gets in the habit of issuing amnesties, a person carrying a big late fee balance may wait for the next one, rather than paying.

The executive who pushed this idea may have promised it was a one-time revenue enhancer, but if it works, they'll be tempted to do it again.

Or maybe I've just been reading too much monetary economics today...

Brad DeLong has a nice exposition on why we shouldn't think that maximizing society's wealth is the same thing as maximizing society's utility (nor should we think the former is easier to calculate in a meaningful way). Question for readers who've studied law and economics: does Posner have a good justification for why judges should care about wealth maximization rather than utility maximization?