Year: 2013

Tom Chivers counters Dawkins’ tweet:

It might be true that Islam is holding back scientific and other achievement among Muslims. I actually wouldn’t be surprised if it were. But you don’t get to simply assert it, because there are far too many other variables. Islamic countries are themselves usually poorer than Western ones (and far poorer than the average Trinity alumnus). Their standards of public health are lower, nutrition, education, everything. Does the average Muslim do worse in the Nobel prize stakes than the average similarly deprived Christian or atheist or Hindu? I don’t know. You need to do proper analysis, statistical regression, to work that out. What’s worse, Dawkins knows that.

Nelson Jones thinks Dawkins makes a weak case:

The reason for this isn’t an international conspiracy and it’s ridiculous to view it as some sort of failure on the part of Islam. Rather, it shows that modern science (by which I mean academic, research-intensive science) has been and remains an overwhelmingly Western phenomenon. To ask “where are all the Muslims?” as Dawkins does is to miss the point. One might as well ask, Where are all the Chinese? China has just eight native-born Nobel winners, and all but two of them are affiliated with Western universities, mostly in the United States.

Dan Murphy adds:

When the Nobel Prize was founded in 1901, the vast majority of the world’s Muslims lived in countries ruled by foreign powers, and for much of the 20th century Muslims did not have much access to great centers of learning like Cambridge.

Owen Jones thinks Dawkins makes atheists look bad:

As a non-believer, I want the atheist case to be made. I want religious belief to be scrutinised and challenged. I want Britain to be a genuinely secular nation, where religious belief is protected and defended as a private matter of conscience. But I feel prevented from doing so because atheism in public life has become so dominated by a particular breed that ends up dressing up bigotry as non-belief.

And Nesrine Malik rolls her eyes at Dawkins:

To wearily engage with his logic briefly: Yes, it is technically true that fewer Muslims (10) than Trinity College Cambridge members (32) have won Nobel prizes. But insert pretty much any other group of people instead of “Muslims”, and the statement would be true. You are comparing a specialized academic institution to an arbitrarily chosen group of people. Go on. Try it. All the world’s Chinese, all the world’s Indians, all the world’s lefthanded people, all the world’s cyclists.

Dawkins responds to that argument:

[F]air point. Somebody mentioned redheads (neither he nor I have figures on redheaded scientific achievement but we get the point). I myself tweeted that Trinity Cambridge has more Nobel Prizes than any single country in the world except the USA, Britain (tautologically), Germany and France. You could well think there was something gratuitous in my picking on Muslims, were it not for the ubiquity of the two positive boasts with which I began [There are 1.6 billion Muslims, nearly a quarter of the world’s population, and we are growing fast” and “Islamic science deserves enormous respect.” Redheads (and the other hypothetical categories we might mention) don’t boast of their large populations and don’t boast of their prowess in science.

Pat Garofalo calls lottery tickets “a tax on those who can least afford it”:

Study after study has shown that lottery tickets are disproportionately purchased by low-income, less-educated people, and that lottery purchases go up when the economy and the unemployment rate gets worse. (22 state lotteries set sales records during the height of the Great Recession.)

James Gibney suggests a solution to this problem:

The research also shows, however, that the bigger the jackpot, the more affluent the ticket buyers.

One 2004 study by Emily Oster, now an economist at the University of Chicago, actually projected (with the usual academic caveats) a jackpot size at which Powerball becomes progressive: around $806 million.

Oster looked at buyers of Connecticut state lottery tickets by zip code and found that as the size of the jackpot grew, sales increased in richer areas: in fact, “at the highest jackpot levels the poorest 20% contribute only about 19% [of state sales] and the richest contribute close to 32%.” She suggested that “fewer games, with longer odds and higher jackpots, could allay some fears about regressivity.”

Nobel Prize-winning writer Orhan Pamuk responds to the suggestion that the growth of countries like India, China, and Turkey will “breathe new life” into the novel:

The novel is a middle-class art. And we see the proliferation of middle classes in India, China, definitely in Turkey, so everyone is writing novels. If you want to predict the future, I can predict that in Europe, in the West, the importance of literary novels will decrease, while in China, India, popular literature will continue. Innovation will come from there, because the populations are large, there will be a lot of production.

In a 2005 Paris Review interview, Pamuk ruminated on the complications of own identity as a “Turkish” novelist:

First, I’m a born Turk. I’m happy with that. Internationally, I am perceived to be more Turkish than I actually see myself. I am known as a Turkish author. When Proust writes about love, he is seen as someone talking about universal love. Especially at the beginning, when I wrote about love, people would say that I was writing about Turkish love. When my work began to be translated, Turks were proud of it. They claimed me as their own. I was more of a Turk for them. Once you get to be internationally known, your Turkishness is underlined internationally, then your Turkishness is underlined by Turks themselves, who reclaim you. Your sense of national identity becomes something that others manipulate. It is imposed by other people. Now they are more worried about the international representation of Turkey than about my art. This causes more and more problems in my country. Through what they read in the popular press, a lot of people who don’t know my books are beginning to worry about what I say to the outside world about Turkey. Literature is made of good and bad, demons and angels, and more and more they are only worried about my demons.

For a helpful list of essays by and about Pamuk, go here.

The New Jersey governor is more popular with liberals than conservatives. Allahpundit wonders whether the far right would rally around Christie should he become the nominee:

I keep thinking that, for all the slobber over his “electability,” he might be so widely and deeply disliked by a small but significant minority of righties that they end up staying home if he’s nominee and costing him the election. To be “electable” with a few percentage points’ worth of conservatives sitting out, he’d have to offset them by grabbing more centrist Democrats than expected from the Democratic nominee. How likely is that if Hillary’s the pick and Bill Clinton’s out there every day for her on the trail?

Pareene argues that Christie is more extreme than he’s given credit for:

The ironic thing about this conservative distrust is that Christie actually would be a very conservative president.

He’s an anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage staunch Catholic who believes in low taxes and no regulations and all the rest of the important, eternally unchanging policies on the checklist. Christie’s branding is designed to make him attractive to moderates in the Northeast — this is how the press fell in love with him, obviously — but it’s just that: branding. On the issues, he’s a man solidly of the right.

Barro thinks Christie is counting on these kinds of criticisms:

If Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) wants to win the presidency in 2016, he needs to look conservative enough to be the Republican nominee and moderate enough to be president. He’s successfully executing one part of a strategy to do this: Convincing liberal commentators that he’s an unreconstructed conservative given too much credit for moderation. When he draws their fire, he convinces conservatives that he’s one of them.

Bernstein’s view:

Christie is a viable candidate, but probably starts off with more things to overcome than do some of the others chomping at the bit. I’m afraid that’s about as much as you can say about nomination candidates in a wide-open field at this early point in the race.