Month: April 2011

In this little exchange with the AP reporter, the State Department spokesman cannot handle defending the treatment of Bradley Manning. With good reason:

Why are the UN Rapporteur and the International Red Cross denied access to the Wikileaks leaker? Why does the US act like, say, China when it comes to questions like this, while continuing to insist that we are a leader in the question of human rights? By the way, this is what journalism looks like. It doesn't take flim-flam for an answer (keep watching past the four minute mark when it gets feisty).

Ambers has a judicious review of the president's political prospects as he launches his campaign. I'd note this:

Obama is performing at roughly the Bill Clinton level in the comparable time period on questions about which political agent Americans trust more to handle domestic problems. (See CNN/USA Today/Gallup Trends data.) … At this point in 1995, more than 4 in 10 Democrats wanted a primary challenger for Bill Clinton; fewer than 2 in 10 do for Obama.

"As long as there is diesel fuel to power up the back-up generators that run the government's computers, they will have the money to back their own bonds," – James Galbraith, a professor of economics at the University of Texas in Austin, who formerly served as executive director of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee.

But, in the worst case scenario, those dollars will be worth a fraction of what they once were. The summary dismissal of the S&P's worry about American credit, while well-reasoned, seems a little glib to me. It rests on the assurance that a global reserve currency can never run into trouble in the global markets, the kind of pride that sometimes comes before a fall. Megan:

The problems start not when our debts become totally unsustainable and congressmen start getting into fistfights on the House floor–but when markets stop believing that we'll find some way to solve our budget problems short of inflation or default.  And "trouble" consists not of some massive capital flight, but of rising interest rates.This is why I am so steadfastly unconvinced by people who point to our low interest rates as evidence that the market thinks it's safe to borrow.  When higher real interest rates come, they will not be a timely signal of problems ahead unless we change course–they will be the problem.

Mark Kleiman has a novel idea:

Mexico should, after a public and transparent process, designate one of its dealing organizations as the most violent of the group, and Mexican and U.S. enforcement efforts should focus on destroying that organization. Once that group has been dismantled – not hard, in a competitive market – the process should be run again, with all the remaining organizations told that finishing first in the violence race will lead to destruction. If it worked, this process would force a “race to the bottom” in violence; in effect, each organization’s drug-dealing revenues would be held hostage to its self-restraint when it comes to gunfire.

Matt Yglesias is onboard. 

Christie Nicholson summarizes a recent study featured in Developmental Science. Babies between 18 and 30 months sat before a banana and an abstract made-up object:

A recorded voice said things like: I see a banana, or There is uh, um, uh a banana. When the voice stumbled, children who were more than 24 months tended to look at the made-up object more often than at the familiar object. Because children who’ve reached that age understand that uhs often precede unknowns.

A reader writes:

I am a very short guy. I appreciate anything that brings up the topic of bias against short men because I think it is widespread yet not widely acknowledged. I agree that people should not be expected to refer to non-discrimination rules in their romantic and sex lives. I have my own very superficial preferences. However, I get the impression that a woman's refusal to date short guys sometimes has little to do with actual attraction. Sometimes it is about how other people will perceive her or what she assumes are unrelated traits of short men (for example, small equipment, less masculine, Napoleon Complex). These assumptions are extremely unfair and inaccurate.

The relationship of height to characteristics such as penis size is either nonexistent or so tiny on average with such variation among individuals that it is useless on an individual basis. These are prejudices unrelated to attraction that women should at least recognize and try to overcome.

Thankfully, I've done just fine both professionally and personally, so I'm not complaining. I think the most important thing short guys can do for themselves is refuse to accept or internalize society's biases. Women and employers are still attracted to confidence.

Another writes:

I'm a short bloke. I've been bitter over getting filtered out on online dating sites, but I don't really blame anyone for it. Attraction is attraction, and I'd rather have had (now married, have kid, all done) the smaller dating pool of people who are attracted to me than the larger one which included people who felt that they "should" go out with me despite the lack of attraction. The time it sucks most was, of course, when you could tell you were be rejected for your height by someone you were attracted to, but life goes on.

I rejected signs of interest for weight and attractiveness issues as well – for the same reason: it would be cruel to get involved with someone that you "should" be involved with and then later have them find out that you weren't really attracted to them. So, that women are sometimes not into short men is just one of those "life's not fair" bits that needs to be countered with remembering the dozens of ways I am privileged, fortunate, etc.

Another:

I'm a short guy – very short, in fact: 5-5. (I've been referred to as a "Hobbit" by women who wanted to sleep with me as well as those who were poking fun.)  You'll never realize people's desires through a straightforward empirical investigation, such as asking women on the street or looking at match.com filters. There's a tension between what people will admit to liking, the mates people choose to fit in socially, and the desires people privately harbor. Based on conversations with friends and the breadth of women I've been attracted to (and yes, the prevalence of Internet pornography), I strongly believe that more men are attracted to body fat than will admit it, or are entirely indifferent to breast size, and that women's preferences are likewise varied.

Even if my theory holds, it doesn't, practically speaking, help me. If a woman is embarrassed to date a man shorter than herself, she will not do so, even if she is aroused by him, just as many men won't date fat women even if they find them attractive.

In my experience I've had the best luck with women I meet in a more close-knit setting – through a friend, at a class, or a job. The allows the woman to interact with me without having to make a split-second decision about whether she would want to date me or hook up. It seems in these more casual situations that the woman simply doesn't notice my height, or notices my other qualities more.

Joshua Tucker asks:

Can anyone make a compelling argument that we should be taking Trump's candidacy seriously from a political science perspective?

My gut instinct is to go with the pack on this one [and dismiss Trump], but on the other hand since I'm throwing out the question let me at least put one fact out there: celebrities do win elections in the United States. Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger were both elected governor of California. Fred Thompson and Al Franken were elected to the Senate. Sonny Bono served in the House. Clint Eastwood was a mayor. The idea that Americans could vote for a celebrity for an important political office can not just be dismissed out of hand as an impossibility. 

Jonathan Bernstein doesn't consider Trump a threat:

[T]raditional reporters really, really, overrate the presidential chances of very wealthy people and New Yorkers. And therefore Trump benefits from a systematic bias. Now, note that hardly anyone does take Trump seriously, as it is, with that bias, so just realize how silly taking him seriously sounds after you apply appropriate discounts.

Philip Davis is studying how Shakespeare's creativity with words affects your brain. Shakespeare often changed the parts of speech so that phrases like "thick my blood" and "the cruellest she alive" keep us engaged:

As Davis's experiments have shown, instead of rejecting these "syntactic violations," the brain accepts them, and is excited by the "grammatical oddities" it is experiencing. …

For Davis, we need creative language "to keep the brain alive." He points out that so much of our language today, written in bullet points or simple sentences, fall into predictability. "You can often tell what someone is going to say before they finish their sentence" he says. "This represents a gradual deadening of the brain."

Alexis Madrigal excavated a gem of an essay, "The City That Has Fallen" by William Marion Reedy, about the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906:

Will Frisco stay fallen? No. A new Frisco shall up–rear itself and laugh at the sea, and when old Atlas again shifts the globe a little on his shoulders–it will laugh and dance and fight and drink and make love as before and be proud that among its other claims to greatness is that of having met and conquered a calamity that stilled and chilled the whole world's heart for a day.

(Photo of a refugee camp, from the California Historical Society)

A reader writes:

There's a very good reason why franchising out Harvard, or even expanding it significantly, works against its success.  A large part of the Harvard educational experience for students is the relatively high intellectual and academic quality of one’s fellow students.  A major expansion of the institution risks diluting the quality of the student body and, therefore, the quality of the academic and social networking experience.

Another writes:

In response to Peter Thiel, Harvard has been franchised. They just go by different names:

Yale (the strict Calvinist’s Harvard years ago), Princeton (the Presbyterian Harvard) … every Ivy league institution is a variation on the Harvard theme. The University of Chicago was conceived as a Midwestern answer to Harvard, Stanford the West Coast answer to Yale (which was an answer to Harvard), Georgetown was the Jesuit version of Harvard (a corrective to Harvard’s Protestantism and, later, “secularism”), and a litany of highly competitive, prestigious liberal arts colleges all across the country are mock-ups of the Harvard undergraduate liberal arts experience – everything down to the aesthetically appealing quads. And not surprisingly, a disproportionate number of America's most influential, wealthy, and noteworthy citizens have degrees from one of these franchises.

Thiel’s right that college expenses are outrageous. He's right that the system is built on elitism. And he's right that plenty of people don't need such an elite education to be successful. But he seems to be missing an important point: The difference between Harvard and its highly selective (i.e., wealthy) franchises from the rest of the colleges rests not with their undergraduate educational model but with the motivations and accomplishments of their students. Plenty of perfectly bright kids don’t work very hard in high school. And even some that do, and do well, go to colleges that don’t challenge them. And to round out those kids, there are plenty who didn’t have the opportunities to cultivate their intelligence, coupled with some kids who just aren’t that bright.

His bizarre solution to this is to "prove" his point by giving $100,000 to the top kids at already elite institutions and show the world that they can succeed without finishing a degree. No shit.

Another:

Thiel's understanding of why Harvard is considered a "better" education is misguided. Perhaps the "status" of Harvard plays a disproportionately important role in employers' hiring practices, but he refers to "scarcity" like it's some sort of unnatural, engineered quality.

I've discussed this with a friend who actually went to Harvard, and we decided the biggest difference in difficulty between his school and mine was the difficulty in getting in. We studied virtually the same things. Granted, my alma mater is considered a "public ivy" (University of Washington). But the real difference, and the difference that results from a very real form of scarcity, is that when I studied International Relations it was taught by a bright individual no one knows about. He was taught by Stephen Walt, a man on the cutting edge of IR theory. My professor was certainly capable, but his professor is a regularly published academic at the forefront of his field. You can't do 100 Harvards, and it's not because the "established elite" is trying to keep you down through manufactured "scarcity".

By the way, it's pretty disgusting that someone would say that value of education is based on others failing. Maybe the monetized value of education. But the ability to perform and to be a well-rounded individual ought to be worth something, as well.