Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

George Orwell is unavoidably associated with 1984, as well he should be. And if that’s what it takes to keep the man’s reputation going through another generation, then by all means let that be his main claim to fame. Orwell should be almost as famous for Homage To Catalonia, his heartbreaking report on the Spanish Civil War. Like many Europeans and some Americans (Hemingway among them), Orwell was on the losing side, fighting the fascists and losing much of his idealism along the way.

Most of the essays in Facing Unpleasant Facts come after Homage to Catalonia, so they all have a realist and rather bleak view of the world. The message throughout is that we all know certain facts about the world, but that somehow people have just avoided saying them; hence the title of the collection. Elsewhere, in his famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell notes that the language itself has become impoverished and calcified; without someone to sandblast off the rubbish, it will be impossible to talk straightforwardly about the way the world actually is.

Orwell honors that goal in Facing Unpleasant Facts. He is the master of the common English sentence. He tells stories about British colonialism that are devastating and to the point, as in “Shooting an Elephant” — a perfect little gem of an essay, in which Orwell recounts killing the beast just so that he won’t look like a fool before his Burmese subjects. In this sort of essay, the story doesn’t spin very far from Orwell himself; he lets the audience draw its own inferences about the nature of colonialism. In others — quite a few others — he’s more impersonal but just as concise: “England, Your England” is a series of flicks of the knife directed at the British government. The acid bubbles:

And yet somehow the ruling class decayed, lost its ability, its daring, finally even its ruthlessness, until a time came when stuffed shirts like [Anthony] Eden or [Lord] Halifax could stand out as men of exceptional talent. As for [Stanley] Baldwin , one could not even dignify him with the name of stuffed shirt. He was simply a hole in the air.

Beneath it all is a visceral sadness for the suffering of mankind. Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War because he wanted to help people. In “Clink,” he gets liquored up and tries to get arrested, so that he might document the viciousness of the police. (Perhaps to his dismay, they weren’t all that vicious.) In “How The Poor Die,” he recounts a few weeks he spent recuperating in a public hospital for the poor in France; the doctors hardly noticed that the sacks of flesh they were working on were human beings. In “Such, Such Were The Joys,” we get a Roald Dahlish taste of the barbarity of British schools. Orwell sees great potential in the world, and much suffering; those further up in the hierarchy, whether deliberately or not (mostly deliberately) force those below them to suffer.

Facing Unpleasant Facts also contains some trifles not really connected to the collection’s title. For instance, there’s a little essay on how to make a proper English cup of tea. There are a few pages in defense of British food. There’s a charming essay on the return of spring; I have to imagine that essay rescued a few London moods at the height of the Blitz. A man can’t argue the virtues of socialism all the time. I think it’s safe to say, though, that socialism is where Orwell’s heart lay; the springtime merely paid the bills.

Facing Unpleasant Facts is a fun, quick read. Its staying power lies in understanding Orwell more than it lies in understanding Britain, or socialism, though it’s valuable on those as well. It’s most valuable to budding essayists, who want to study at the feet of a master.

This is the most I’ve enjoyed an economics book since Sam Bowles’s Microeconomics. Like Bowles’s book, it offers crystal-clear writing attached to non-scary mathematics. It’s less wide-ranging than Bowles’s book, but the amount of amazement per page is comparable. In the case of The Spatial Economy, the amazement comes from how much mileage they get from very simple models.

They’re trying to answer some questions that lay dormant in economics for many years, namely: why do cities form where they do? How important are first-mover advantages for cities? (I.e., what would have to happen for New York to no longer be top dog?) How do national boundaries affect the distribution of industries within a given nation? How does trade liberalization (for instance, NAFTA) change that distribution? How can the same methods used to study cities help us understand international trade?

One way to start modeling cities is to assume a built-in tension in their size: as a city grows more dense, it draws more businesses to it, but also pushes some out into the suburbs. It draws them because they want to be where the customers are (”forward linkage”) and also want to be where their suppliers are (”backward linkage”). It pushes them away because of land rents: the denser the city becomes, the higher the rent.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is that they don’t actually model land rents at all. In essence, all of their models derive from varying assumptions about transportation costs, forward linkages, and backward linkages. From these meagre beginnings, they get quite stunning results. One particularly charming chapter evolves their model through time as the population increases and companies move out into the hinterlands; cities merge and shift and grow, all from a quite simple dynamic, with a few assumptions about costs and market structure.

At every step, they go through basically the same motions. First, derive the wage at any point in the city or its suburbs, using some fairly unrealistic assumptions about zero-profit businesses. Do this for a second, nearby city as well. Deflate the wages in both cities by something akin to the Consumer Price Index; this gives you the real wage in both places. Then divide one by the other to get the ratio of real wages; if this number is not equal to 1, then employees have an incentive to move from one city to the other. Evolve the model through time until the real wage ratio equals 1 everywhere.

Normally this wage-ratio formula is rather complicated and analytically intractable. They simplify things a great deal by coming at the problem from another direction: assume that all cities are identical at the start — in particular, that they all have identical populations. Now take the derivative of the wage ratio in the neighborhood of this “symmetric” configuration. (It took me a while to figure out that “symmetric” meant “equal everywhere”; it also took me a while to realize that when they say “linearize,” they mean “take the derivative.” Both usages make sense; I’m just slow.) If a small movement of employees from one city to another leads to a cascade, wherein a flood of people follow in pursuit of higher wages, then the symmetric equilibrium is not stable; the authors call this the “break point.” Symmetry breaking leads to the formation of a new city. Then the question becomes: is this new equilibrium with unequally sized cities sustainable, or will it also fall apart when a few employees pick up and leave? If this “asymmetric equilibrium” is stable for certain values of the parameters, then the authors label this bundle of parameters the “sustain point.”

The math is not hard, though the sheer volume of symbols is imposing. There’s some calculus — a derivative here, an integral there — but it’s mostly just a lot of algebra, and a lot of tricks for simplifying complicated expressions. The authors are good writers, so they refuse to use equations where words will say the same thing.

They’re also straightforward about the problems their models face. One of these problems is particularly intriguing to me, namely the well-known fact that the distribution of city sizes approximately follows a power law. That is, the second-largest city tends to be 1/2 the size of the largest city, the third-largest tends to be 1/3 the size, and so on. This discovery is most famously associated with Herb Simon’s paper “On A Class Of Skew Distribution Functions”. Krugman, at least, hates Simon’s presentation, as he’s said elsewhere, so The Spatial Economy recapitulates Simon’s proof in a much simpler way. The trouble for Fujita, Krugman, and Venables is that their models don’t lead to anything close to a power law in city sizes. The authors are perfectly straightforward about this rather large hole in their results.

You have to think about methodology when you’re reading a book like this. In particular: if the assumptions are extremely simplistic and wildly unrealistic, then how valuable are the conclusions that spring from those assumptions? The answer, I think, is: very valuable indeed, because the unrealistic bits don’t alter the main thrust of the argument. The stability of equilibria probably wouldn’t be changed if we got rid of the zero-profit condition, for instance. Likewise, if the wage ratio had to get really large before employees would move (call this “wage inertia”), that probably would only slow down the speed at which new cities grow; it likely wouldn’t affect the existence or location of equilibria themselves.

For a book with a few hundred equations, The Spatial Economy is remarkably readable. Anyone who’s interested in economics, urban growth, international economics, or simple evolutionary-game-theory models will find this book indispensible and charming.

I wrote something to a friend earlier today, which he seemed to think blog-worthy. Who am I to turn him down, I ask? Turning him down is not a “me thing.” Here it is, edited a little bit for style but not for content:

If I may, I think the selection of Palin is the logical conclusion — the apotheosis, if you will — of a party that believes in

1. contempt for government, and
2. pandering to the Christian Right.

Here’s your ideology, fuckers, wrapped up with a nice bow. Now go drive it off a cliff.

I don’t have much to add to David Denby’s excellent review of W. I think he nails it in all particulars. It’s hardly a movie; it’s more a collection of soundbites spoken by actors. There’s not enough time to build characters or even a story, because they’re too busy fitting in “yellowcake,” “misunderestimated,” “turd blossom,” “pooty-poot,” and 150 other little phrases that need to be squished into a two-hour movie about Bush. Had Stone waited a few years, maybe people would have forgotten those stupid little Bushisms and would only remember the catastrophe that he made of his presidency; at that point Stone could put together a story rather than a bricolage. Not yet, though.

P.S.: Not only does Stone give far more credit to Powell than Powell deserves; he gives too much credit to the elder Bush. This is the man who hired Lee Atwater. W makes Bush Sr. out to be the naïve pawn of his son’s scheming, and has his son rather than Atwater show dad the Willie Horton video. I predict that this movie will leave an enduring historical blind spot on the American public.

Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama is really moving, and I commend him for it. At the same time, I have concerns about Powell, and a question:

• More than most anyone, Powell is responsible for convincing the country to go to war in Iraq. His reputation was absolutely sterling, and until the war he could certainly have been a viable presidential candidate. Yet he stood before the United Nations and convinced much of the nation of the war’s necessity. We’ll probably never know what Powell really thought about the WMD charges; he’s standing silent, and we’ve heard for years that this has something to do with the warrior ethic. But we’ve also heard a lot recently about putting your country before yourself. If Powell believed that the charges against Iraq were bogus, then he sent hundreds of thousands of men into harm’s way for nothing. Someone who actually put his country first would have spoken out, would have resigned, would have done whatever he could to stop the bloodshed before it started.

  So I can only hope that Powell really, truly believed that Iraq posed a threat to the United States, and that sending our military in was the only way to stop that threat.

• Why did Powell wait until just a few weeks before the election to endorse Senator Obama? Might it be that he’s angling for a position in an Obama cabinet, and that the writing seems to be on the wall for the McCain campaign?

  The first bullet, it seems to me, is closely tied to this one. Before Senator Obama names Powell to any position in his government, I think he owes it to the American people to learn exactly what Powell knew and when he knew it. If Obama gives a position of responsibility to General Powell, even after learning that Powell sent men needlessly to their deaths, then he is dishonoring the graves of American soldiers and furthering the careers of men who deserve to be cast out of respectable American political life.

I am as puzzled by John McCain’s performance at the third presidential debate as were the fine folks at Explananda. Purely as rhetoric, I thought it didn’t make any sense. You want to keep your opponent back on his heels, spending so much time responding to your points that he doesn’t have time to make his own. (This is a variant on Joel Spolsky’s Fire-and-Motion idea.) McCain kept lobbing nonsense at Obama that would have almost been considered softballs if they had come from the media. “[H]e voted against a ban on partial-birth abortion” says McCain. Surely the man knows why Obama did this, so surely he knows that Obama will come back with the only retort that’s necessary: “I am completely supportive of a ban on late-term abortions, partial-birth or otherwise, as long as there’s an exception for the mother’s health and life, and this did not contain that exception.” Obama then returns to his argument. People can label him the Teflon don if they want, but I think it’s more sensible to say that McCain just doesn’t know how to throw things that stick.

Rhetoric isn’t just about packaging, though. This is a point that my dear friend Chris Rugen has made time and again in the context of design. Designing a product well doesn’t mean putting pretty wrapping on a box of shit. The product simply cannot be designed well if it’s poorly made. John McCain’s fundamental weakness is not “merely” rhetorical; his fundamental weakness is that he is a poor candidate. We can spend some time mulling over why that might be — that the “maverick” label was always nonsense; that nominating Sarah Palin shows a distinct lack of judgment; that his advisors have turned him into something ugly — but I think it’s pretty inescapable that the Republicans should have nominated someone different. Maybe this just wasn’t a year when they could have advanced a solid candidate.

Being a bad candidate, and being fundamentally a loser on issues that matter, McCain has had no choice but to go negative on nonsensical matters. ACORN, for instance. As everyone who’s been paying attention knows by now, ACORN is not a case of vote fraud; it is at best a case of registration fraud which at no point could have undermined American democracy. Yet McCain had the gall to bring it up during the debate. Whatever would stick, McCain would throw.

It’s the strategy of charlatans everywhere: since the truth is not on their side, lies are all that they have left.

(Attention conservation notice: 1100 words about an excellent, readable book that will change the way you think about property rights.)

The subtitle here, as is so often the case, is provocative but misleading as to the book’s contents. You’d think, based on the subtitle, that The Gridlock Economy is either in the Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace line, or (if you’re not familiar with that tradition) that it’s socialist in some way. In fact, without looking at the 17 other Amazon reviews that are up there right now, I’d bet $10 that a few of them are written by disciples of Ayn Rand or Murray Rothbard, screaming that “CENTRALIZATION FAILED! FREE MARKETS 4 ALL!” They insert themselves everywhere.

Fortunately (?), Randians have nothing to fear. Michael Heller’s book might be better subtitled “How To Do Free Markets Right.”

The idealized free market can be framed in a number of ways, but the Coase Theorem is one of its more intuitive pillars. The idea is that, under certain well-specified conditions, property lands in the hands of those who value it most, regardless of who gets that property at the beginning. Now you need to specify those conditions. One is that it’s costless for sellers to find buyers, and costless for them to carry out the sale. Under these conditions, I sell my property to person A, who sells it to person B, and so on until it finds the person who values it the most. (The mathematicians would say that this is an “if” rather than an “only if”: there may be other conditions under which property finds the right home, but at least we know that it does so under the given conditions.)

The trouble is that in the real world, transaction costs are nontrivial. To sell a piece of property, you need to engage the services of a lawyer to draw up the contract and need to pay various fees to various government agencies to maintain the records of who owns what. This isn’t just “bureaucratic friction”; it’s essential to the system’s functioning.

So the Coase Theorem doesn’t apply in the real world. To his credit, Coase understood this; his work is where much of the economic study of institutions starts. Humans establish institutions, goes the story, when their own uncoordinated actions would lead to manifest market failures. In a world with positive transaction costs, institutions spring up to bring us somewhat closer to the world predicted by the Coase Theorem. The Gridlock Economy is, in part, an exploration of these institutions. And it’s a fun read.

There are cases in which Coase breaks down rather viciously; these are the cases that Professor Heller tackles in The Gridlock Economy. Not all private property is created equal. Sometimes land is unavoidably split and cannot be put back together without political changes — as, for instance, with the Rumaila oil field shared by Iraq and Kuwait. In these cases a prisoner’s dilemma can develop: without coordination, and enforceable penalties for violation, both Iraq and Kuwait will extract as much oil as they can, as quickly as possible, from the ground beneath them. If they don’t, they know that the other guy will.

This story of competing for a resource when property rights are split, leads to the longest and most fascinating story in The Gridlock Economy, about the fight between Virginia and Maryland over oyster-harvesting rights. The fight lasted 300 years, led to untold deaths, and was a real-world example of how property rights matter.

The general theme is that often property rights are divided in such a way that they prevent optimal use of a resource. Too many people with divergent interests need to be coordinated before the whole mass of them can move. Heller’s clearest and most entertaining example in this direction (what Daniel Dennett would call an “intuition pump”) is the Quaker Oats Klondike Big Inch, whereby those who bought Quaker products 40-some years ago each got a deed on a single square inch of Alaskan land. It was all very clever at the time, but what happens to that land when someone wants to develop on it years later? Any potential developer needs to track down every last “big inch” owner and buy up his land. Quaker didn’t, of course, register all of those who owned big inches, so the costs even of finding those owners are prohibitive, not to mention contracting with them.

Imagine, instead, that those big inch owners were regularly in contact with one another (they’ve all established a Big Inch Alumni Club, say). Word starts getting around that a developer is buying up their inches. Pretty soon owners stop selling, or they jack up the prices at which they’ll sell. The developers must, of course, realize that this will happen before they even start buying. So smart developers will either buy up the land slowly — as big-inch owners die, say — or they’ll establish many front companies to convince owners that the buying effort is uncoordinated. This obviously imposes huge transaction costs. These transaction costs are as high as they are because each big-inch owner has something akin to monopoly power: one owner out of a million can block the entire transaction. It’s private property like any other, but it’s private property done wrong.

Cities normally use eminent domain to get around this monopoly problem: forcibly buy land at fair market value, then hand it over to a private developer. But eminent domain is pretty ugly, and isn’t voter-friendly. (As it happens, eminent domain is exactly how Alaska got around the big-inch problem with this bit of land.)

The endorsement on the cover from Larry Lessig suggests to potential buyers that we’ll be encountering gridlock in the copyright and patent domains, and indeed we do. As Lessig and many others have pointed out, the new “mashup economy” can’t work if every mashup artist needs to contact the source of every song he’s sampling. Songs go unproduced. Here’s where Heller asks us to add a word to our vocabulary: rather than just thinking about “overuse,” which the tragedy of the commons forces us to consider, Heller’s tragedy of the anticommons makes us think about underuse — for instance, underuse of music samples that could otherwise be put to profitable use, or big inches laying fallow in Alaska.

For a sub-200-page book, The Gridlock Economy is highly enlightening. I know of few other books which capture patent, copyright, real-estate law and transaction costs under a single simple, readable framework. In a just world, Heller’s book will change the way we think about markets and property. By the time it’s finished, Heller sees gridlock everywhere, and so do we.

I was smiling all day at the news that Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize in economics (technically “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel,” but “nobody cares, you know”). Krugman’s work on the economics of location — why cities and firms and other bundles of stuff appear where they do — is outstanding. His writing is the height of lucidity; someone — can’t remember who — described him as the best economics writer since Keynes, which is saying a lot.

And of course it thrills me that the pre-eminent voice for American liberals, a man who’s been unfailingly right about the Bush administration for eight years, would be honored in this way. His Conscience of a Liberal is a must-read for all Americans who might have forgotten what 20th century American politics were about. In short: there’s always been a vicious, reactionary side of American society just waiting for the opportunity to devour the rest of us. Teddy Roosevelt called them the “malefactors of great wealth.” FDR called them out — “the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.” (Listen to that speech the whole way through. It’ll give you chills.) Krugman redraws this arc, whose lines grow fuzzy as the years go by. He reminds us why we’re liberals, and that the enemies haven’t changed.

He’s done more than anyone since J.K. Galbraith, perhaps, to de-romanticize economics and explain it — intelligently but simply — to a lay audience. Take, for instance, Krugman’s essay Who Was Milton Friedman? It’s not only a brilliant takedown of capitalism’s avatar; it’s also a pretty darned good intro to Keynesian macroeconomics. As Daniel Davies put it in the Crooked Timber link above, Krugman is “the public voice of mainstream sensible Keynesianism”.

Since I am a non-modest person, I’ll also link here to what I’ve written about Krugman before, in case it inspires one or two of you to read his non-political work:

• The Return of Depression Economics: tries to understand why economies throughout the world were collapsing or threatening to collapse in the 90’s, when the world’s technocrats were thought to have mastered the tools of macroeconomic control.
• Development, Geography, and Economic Theory: explains the economics of location, the work that made Krugman famous within economics. (It’s safe to say that without an MIT and Princeton pedigree in economics, Krugman would never have gotten a job writing for the New York Times, and would thereby never have established himself as the standard-bearer for American liberalism.)
• The Self-Organizing Economy: a light version of Development, Geography, and Economic Theory. The repetition is fine, because both are excellently written and short. Development is a bit more technical and inward-looking than The Self-Organizing Economy.
• Pop Internationalism, about the (Thomas Friedman-style) economic bollocks that passes for discussion of globalization. (Daniel Davies calls it Globollocks.) I couldn’t let discussion of this book pass without linking to Cosma Shalizi’s review, which is a terrific piece of work.

The culmination of all Krugman’s work in location theory is The Spatial Economy, with Fujita and Venables. I’ve meant to read it for a while, so I ordered a used copy today off Amazon. If anyone’s interested in reading it along with me, let me know.

Oh, I should thank Cosma here for pointing me to basically every one of these Krugman works. Without him, I’d only have known Krugman for his columns and his political works. The more purely economic works pay great dividends.

(Attention conservation notice: 300 words about an iPhone application. You probably have better things to do, like scratch yourself or yawn.)

…was pretty disappointing. I don’t recall running directly through the Charles River, though maybe I did; I definitely blacked out for a quarter mile or so. No wait, that didn’t happen. Maybe I’m blacking out my blackouts.

It tells me I ran 11-minute miles. I find that really hard to believe, given that I ran 9.1-minute miles during a 5K a few weeks back. And if anything, I felt faster this time (especially after about mile 2). Assuming that the stopwatch feature works properly and that the GPS is to blame, then you can assume I ran for 46:54. And if you more accurately map my route, it’s closer to 4.5 miles. That’s still 10.4-minute miles, which again is just not believable.

My best guess is that locking the iPhone (by pressing the button at the top) puts the CPU to sleep, such that it doesn’t wake up very often to check its current GPS location or increment the stopwatch. The RunKeeper FAQ says something about that:

Do I need to disable the iPhone auto-lock to use RunKeeper?

While auto-lock does need to be disabled for the GPS to track your activity uninterrupted, RunKeeper handles this automatically, including re-enabling the auto-lock once you are done using RunKeeper. Make sure not to lock the phone via the top lock button on the device during your run, as this has the same effect as auto-lock.

Next time I run, I’ll leave the phone unlocked the whole time and see if that improves things.

I just need to make a quick observation: in the midst of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, the President is nowhere to be seen. He has offloaded all responsibility for this crisis onto Henry Paulson.

The man is ending his atrocious tenure in style. Comparisons to Herbert Hoover are inevitable here. I imagine Bush, like Hoover, receding into his office, talking to fewer and fewer people, bitter at the world for not understanding his genius.

…for me, anyway. ‘Twas a loop from my house down to the river, across the MIT Bridge, along the Esplanade, over to the Longfellow Bridge, and up Main Street back to my place. I felt relaxed and easy the whole time. The only trouble was that I hadn’t eaten enough, so I had a stomach cramp that would periodically work its way up to my chest. I just kept telling myself that if I intend to run in a marathon one of these days — which I do — I’ll experience far worse pain, and need to learn to work through it. Also if I intend to give birth to a child. More still if I intend to give birth to a mountain lion.

I felt like I was running fast the whole time, but I didn’t have any kind of timekeeping device on me. This is a reminder to myself to get one of those armbands, wherewith to carry my iPhone and leave the stopwatch running. (A realization I just had: the iPhone has a GPS built in. … And a stopwatch. If there isn’t some iPhone app to track your route and measure your pace, including splits, then the world is a dumb place.)

Incidentally, the intersection near Charles/MGH station is, without a doubt, the least pedestrian-friendly place in the greater Boston area. Just stare at that thing. I think I nearly got run over half a dozen times.

P.S.: There is such an app! It is called RunKeeper.

I make it a policy not to spend money on iPhone apps, but I think I may need to violate that policy for this one.

I guess this shouldn’t come as a shock to me, but John McCain is doing anything he can to get elected. The Bill Ayers thing is the latest, and it’s the best example. Here’s conservative columnist David Frum:

But Bill Ayers? Does anybody really seriously believe that Barack Obama is a secret left-wing radical? And if not, then what is this fuss and fury supposed to show? It’s like Ronald Reagan’s opponents trying to beat him by pointing out that Birchers once supported him.

Here’s Ross Douthat:

I’m pretty sure that’s a losing message. And unless there’s some way I haven’t thought of to link the Weather Underground to the global stock market, or the subprime mess, or the cost of health care, or anything else that’s actually high on the voting public’s list of priorities, this “gloves off, dammit!” strategy will only serve to confirm the public’s perception that John McCain – and the ticket he heads, and the party he leads – are completely, utterly, and hopelessly out of touch.

(Both links via George Packer.)

McCain can’t possibly believe that Obama is a bomb-throwing radical. There’s simply no way that he can think Ayers is relevant to Obama’s candidacy. You just have to conclude that he’ll say whatever he needs to say to get elected. I imagine him giving Obama a pat on the back after the campaign is all over, shrugging and saying, “It’s just business.”

Tonight he threw another item against the wall to see if it would stick: that Obama was in the pocket of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:

Meanwhile, they were getting all kinds of money in campaign contributions. Sen. Obama was the second highest recipient of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac money in history — in history.

The “second highest” bit appears to be true. But McCain must know that Fannie and Freddie had basically nothing to do with the subprime crisis:

[T]hey didn’t do any subprime lending, because they can’t: the definition of a subprime loan is precisely a loan that doesn’t meet the requirement, imposed by law, that Fannie and Freddie buy only mortgages issued to borrowers who made substantial down payments and carefully documented their income.

So it’s saying whatever he can to get elected. Whatever sucks about my guy, I think I can confidently say that he’s not that much of a bastard. It’s the sign of a discredited, intellectually bankrupt party that this is the only game they still know how to play.

I love my iPhone. It’s better to think of it as a small computer that happens to make phone calls than as a telephone that, say, happens to send email and browse the web. It’s the first phone that I know of which brings a computer-company sensibility to the horribly defective phone industry. It’s really going to change things.

But the iPhone itself may well end up like the Mac: a high-end niche product. It suffers from the same defects as the Mac, only at a much higher level. The quick way to summarize Apple’s philosophy with the iPhone is: Everything Through iTunes. If you want to get your data out of the iPhone, you have to do it through iTunes. To get your contacts out of the phone, first sync them with iTunes. Then iTunes will sync them with any of a few applications on disk with which it can talk. Under Windows the least-common-denominator choice for contact syncing is Outlook Express. To get your photos out, Apple expects you to use iPhoto; I’m not sure what you’d use under Windows to get your photos out, but there’s probably something.

It’s a smart strategy on Apple’s part, at least up to a point. I believe one part of their strategy is to let you get all your data out — so long as you sign up for their MobileMe service. This much is a continuation in spirit of the phone industry: you can pay a few dollars here for text messages, a few dollars here for a data plan, a few more dollars for voice…pretty soon it adds up to real money.

Meanwhile, if you like Firefox better than the inferior Mobile Safari, you’re out of luck: Apple has control over which applications will go on the device. If one day Google comes up with a MobileMe competitor — a place “in the cloud” where all your data can sit, like a hard drive in the sky — Apple will wait as long as is strategically feasible before deigning to speak with it.

This is all so at odds with the rest of the computer revolution that it could only have come from the direction of the phone industry. Apple has surely made an important stride out of the industry’s dark ages, but it’s not making the full jump into the revolution of the 1980’s. Maybe that will be Android’s job. Apple is a computer company that never really understood the full import of the computer revolution; Google is a company born right in the middle of the Internet revolution. Their worldviews are facially similar but really couldn’t be more different. Google open-sources a lot of high-quality software every year; Google’s hundreds of thousands of commodity computers all run on Linux. It’s always dangerous to trust any corporation to do the right thing, but Google somehow seems to have learned the virtues of openness for building a market and thereby growing its own business.

Which isn’t to say that Apple is necessarily dead in the water. Under pressure from Google — assuming people defect from the iPhone — Apple may well start opening up its App Store and allowing more data to pass freely out of the iPhone. Apple is clearly opening the doors only as wide as it needs to. Someday soon it may be forced to remove them entirely.

Below, a letter sent just now to the New York Times’s Public Editor. Now that I reread it, I realize that I probably meant “libel” rather than “slander.” Drat.

Date: Sat, 4 Oct 2008 15:08:54 -0400
From: Stephen R Laniel <steve@stevereads.com>
To: Public Editor <public@nytimes.com>
Subject: Is it really newsworthy that Obama is not connected to the Weathermen?

To the editor,

Yale law professor Jack Balkin lets us know [1] that with John McCain running behind in the polls with only a month to go until the election, his campaign will pull out all the stops to win. So is it any coincidence that the New York Times ran a front-page article [2] in which Obama is rumored to be connected to the radical Weathermen?

I hope I’m wrong. What I infer is that the Times has been played, yet again, by the nation’s smear merchants. We have to wait until the sixth paragraph of that article to read that at the very worst, there is a tenuous connection between Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers. Clearly if this is on the front page of the New York Times, it must have some electoral relevance; it surely isn’t just errant gossip of the sort one finds in a tabloid.

What could its electoral relevance be? Correct me if I’m wrong, but it can only be relevant as part of the continuing “story,” which the right wing has tried to plant for months, suggesting that Mr. Obama is a crypto-radical. When the “radical Muslim” label failed, they fell back to “radical anti-American” (Reverend Wright), and now “radical hippie.” This despite the fact that the Weathermen fell apart in the early seventies, when Obama wasn’t yet in his teens.

Please try to convince me that the Times didn’t just plant an electorally irrelevant piece of near-slander on its front page at the behest of the right wing.

Regards,
Steve Laniel

I’ll be posting this letter on my blog, at http://stevereads.com/ .

[1] – http://tinyurl.com/3u2cuc
[2] – http://tinyurl.com/44kphj

–
Stephen R. Laniel
steve@stevereads.com
Cell: +(617) 308-5571
http://stevereads.com/
PGP key: http://stevereads.com/slaniel.key

Years ago, James Gleick’s website had a recording of Richard Feynman telling us “I don’t have to know an answer; I don’t have … I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things … by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose — which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly … it doesn’t frighten me” in his charming Brooklyn accent. The Wayback Machine tells me that Gleick linked to that sound file 10 years ago (he deleted it long ago for some reason, and didn’t reply when I asked him about it years back), but it was still fresh in my memory. So I just googled for it, and up came the video of Feynman saying all this. You have to love YouTube.

If anyone can figure out, by the way, how to download that video and extract just the sound part, I’d love to get your help. I can download the FLV and transcode it to MP3, but somehow none of my various tools can play the video or the audio — even mplayer, the very tool that saved off the WAV file.

Today so far:

• Ran a 5K
• Brunch at Toscanini’s.
• Really an awful lot of walking — circumnavigating East Cambridge, I guess.

The rest of today:

• Me, on the couch, everything I need within arm’s reach.

On the front page of the New York Times right now: an article about Obama downplaying his connections with the founder of the Weathermen. At the same time, Jack Balkin writes

McCain is about to throw yet another Hail Mary pass: he is going all out with negative campaigning. Since this election has basically been about whether voters trust Obama enough to make him President, and since he seems to have passed the test of basic trustworthiness following the first debate, McCain’s goal must now be to destroy that sense of comfort. He must now do everything in his power to so tarnish Obama that voters will find him alien, radical, and downright scary.

If this is McCain’s endgame strategy, and the evidence suggests that it is, the press must pay attention not only to what McCain says, but also his surrogates and coordinated supporters are saying. McCain is behind in most of the swing states and he has to win almost all of them to become President. At this point McCain really has nothing to lose.

It is true that McCain’s own reputation may be in tatters by the end for engaging in such a scorched-earth strategy, but he doesn’t have to be admired and respected to win. He just has to be loathed less than his opponent.

Coincidence? I think not. Let’s try again with the Obama Is A Scary Muslim Radical angle. Let’s foist this story on a pliant press. Even if there’s no truth to it, the headline will be “No Truth To Radicalism Story, Says Obama Campaign.”

According to the Wikipedia entry on the Weathermen, “The Weathermen largely disintegrated shortly after the US reached a peace accord in Vietnam in 1973.” Barack Obama was born in 1961. So when the Weathermen disintegrated, Obama was 12.

Now then. Could anything possibly be less interesting than Obama’s relationship with a founder of an organization that stopped being relevant 20 years before Obama took office?

32 days until the election…

I like it when books make clear that there’s a paradox in the everyday way we discuss things. In Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, the paradox is as follows: rich people vote Republican, but rich states vote Democrat. Why is that?

Isn’t that a lovely little problem? The answer is just as interesting: partisanship is much more important in poor states than it is in rich states. The poor in Texas and Mississippi are Democrat, while the rich are Republican. The poor and the rich in Connecticut — the canonical other end of the wealth spectrum — are about equally Democratic. Ohio, which is halfway between Mississippi and Connecticut on the income, is also divided in its party affiliation.

A host of questions fall out of this, among them: why, then, is Connecticut uniformly Democrat? To put it more precisely: why are the wealthy in Connecticut Democrats, where elsewhere they would be Republicans? Why are the wealthy Republicans? Why are the poor Democrats? And why does this partisan divide appear more in poor states than in wealthy ones?

The answers Gelman comes up with are quite interesting, but I’m not sure I’d recommend that you read this book to get them. Instead I might point you to Gelman’s earlier paper, “Rich State, Poor State, Red State, Blue State: What’s the Matter with Connecticut?”. (The title is a hat tip to Thomas Frank’s What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America.) The paper is a quicker read, and as such doesn’t feel quite as repetitive as the book.

If you needed a perfect example of what’s wrong with the media, the coverage of Sarah Palin is for you. Let’s be clear on something: she lost last night. Badly. She proved that she can only recite the talking points that are in front of her, and it’s clear to anyone who was watching that she is not competent to be the president of the United States. (Unless, that is, you think that someone who is no more intelligent than you or your neighbor should have her finger on the nuclear button.) This is rather important when the GOP presidential candidate has at least a 1 in 7 probability of dying within the next four years.

So the question from the debate should be whether she’s prepared to stand in for the president. Clearly she’s not. The best that anyone can say about her is that she is “charming” and “middle-class” and “just folks” and so forth. None of this has any bearing on whether she’s fit to be the president. I’ve heard no one even try to argue that she is.

Instead, somehow, the framing had been established before the debate even began: if Palin avoids making an ass of herself, she’s won — or at least not lost. If Biden isn’t condescending, he’s won — or at least not lost. Obama has recently been in the lead; therefore if neither Biden nor Palin make any major gaffes, this helps Obama — or at least doesn’t harm him.

But wait. No. The question is: do they both demonstrate command of the issues, and leadership? Of course they don’t; only Biden did. But we’re asked to evaluate them both on “charm.” Why? Well, presumably because that’s what the electorate cares about. But the electorate only cares about it because that’s the narrative that the media chose to write — that they chose to write, in fact, even before the debate began. We come to believe that we should care about that; we learned in 2000 that we were supposed to care about which candidate would make a better drinking buddy. (For the record, I would much rather have a beer with Obama than with McCain. It’s likewise a Biden rout.)

So now that Palin has turned on the “charm” and the “folksiness” again, we get the standard litany of stories — such as the New York Times telling us that Palin is revitalized after not absolutely messing up last night. This is the new narrative: she now has a head of steam. She’s a leader who’s breaking glass ceilings and saying “No, sir!” to McCain. Yes indeedy (as she might say), things are really changing now for Palin … Oh, what’s that you say? All her assertiveness still isn’t putting the campaign back in Michigan? Oh, I see. Glass ceiling still quite intact? Ah ha. Thanks, then.

It’s absurd. And I think the American people see that it’s absurd. We watch her on Katie Couric, and we know that she just isn’t qualified at all. You can’t put the YouTube back in the bottle, as it were. Undecided voters thought Biden won the debate by a 2:1 margin.

Yet here I will venture a bold prediction: the coverage will continue to be about Palin’s image. As opposed to her leadership ability, or her knowledge of … anything at all (other than her apparent mastery of resource allocation, being a wholly-owned subsidiary of the oil industry).

One month and one day until the election. May the day soon come when we no longer have to see this nonsensical clown.

P.S.: Hendrik Hertzberg says it better, of course.

Because I haven’t mentioned it in a few months, I should also point here to my favorite newspaper article ever: Jonathan Lebed: Stock Manipulator, S.E.C. Nemesis — and 15 whence this quote that might as well be applied to the soft news coverage of low expectations:

Xerox and AT&T and the rest needed to put the right spin on their quarterly earnings. The goal at the end of every quarter was for the newspapers and the cable television shows and the rest to announce that they had “exceeded analysts’ expectations.” The easiest way to exceed analysts’ expectations was to have the analysts lower them.

I’ll be quick. Just scanning the front page of the New York Times website:

Summary of the first blurb there: “Here’s a preview of what the media will be watching for. Here we, the media, are telling you what we, the media, think you’ll want to be watching for.” Once again I’m reminded of the Keynesian beauty contest:

It is not a case of choosing those [faces] which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practise the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.

As for that second blurb: can we just stop with the more-middle-class-than-thou nonsense? Both of the presidential candidates, and both the vice-presidential ones, are above the middle class. Biden’s house is a 6,800-square-foot custom-built colonial … on four lakefront acres, a property worth close to $3 million. Palin and her husband last year had a combined income of a quarter-million dollars. Obama made plenty of money from his bestselling books. McCain married a beer heiress.

Am I alone in thinking that none of this matters? At other times it hasn’t mattered at all to the public discourse: I don’t recall anyone saying that Perot was “out of touch with ordinary Americans” because he’s a billionaire; if anything, this was supposed to give him greater cred: his success at business is supposed to be an indication of his managerial prowess, not to mention his hardworking puritan virtue.

If I care at all about my candidates’ wholesomeness, it’s that I want them to have come by their money honestly. A Horatio Alger story is worth something: up from their bootstraps, given nothing, they made it to the nation’s highest elected office. There’s something nice in that. If Sarah Palin and her husband work hard for their money, then I wish them the best of luck. Congratulations to Senator Obama for writing books that people want to read. Nice job, Senator McCain, for finding a trophy wife. Wait, scratch that last one.