Things not to say...

when you're debating a law professor who's much, much better than you are at packing a lot of information into a 90-second answer:

"All of the details need to be known."

Obama clearly had his Ayers and ACORN monologues memorized, but McCain set them up with a helluva softball straight line. "We need to hear the full extent." "All of the details need to be known."

However many minutes later, Obama looked like the opposite of someone engaged in a cover-up. Rattling off the resumes of the Annenberg Board was a nice touch.

More generally, as Matt Yglesias notes here,

McCain had some okay jabs at Obama that I think impressed some of the CNN panelists and, especially, got the conservative ones jazzed up. But he used a lot of right-wing echo-chamber jargon, never explaining what he meant about trial lawyers and scare-quote “health” and so forth.

As a result, we sometimes had the very weird dynamic of McCain sputtering out an attack that the average voter didn't understand at all, because it was all phrased in conservative-political-insider shorthand, and then Obama giving one of his dense information-packed answers in which he first had to explain to the audience what the hell McCain was talking about before rebutting it. The CNN pundits, in their down-on-Obama period before the poll results came in and told them to be up-on-Obama, kept using "professorial" as an insult. (Compare also: McCain's use during the debate of "eloquent" as an insult.) Now, I recognize all the ways in which "professorial" isn't the ideal mode for political discourse. You wouldn't want a lecture as an inaugural address. But Obama's ability to pack every sixty- or ninety-second unit full of information and explanation, compared with McCain's almost Palin-like or Bush-like repetition of the two or three keywords he had for any answer ("spread the wealth!") was professorial, and, I thought, devastatingly effective.

Canadian Conservatives and Quebec secession

I don't think I say anything that's not pretty obvious, but for what it's wort, I take part in a colloquy with Ilya Somin and others chez Volokh about why the Tories don't support the secession of a province thatseems so determined to keep them out of a governing majority.

Libertarians for Obama, continued

Dan Drezner.

If markets are supposed to let failures fail — not the trendiest idea right now, I know — then the Republicans have no right to be rewarded for their performance over the past eight years. Let the GOP have its comeuppance and come back under new management.

Blog-quotes of the day

Brad DeLong:

So what to do? We don't want to let the banking sector collapse into bankruptcy--Lehman Brothers was bad enough, and we don't want to replicate the Great Depression. But we also don't want to repeat Japan's mistakes of the 1990s, with zombie banks neither alive nor dead failing to do their job for the economy as they focused on getting back above water to create some value for shareholders and executives.

And here is my worry about the current plan to buy preferred rather than common stock of the banks. Preferred stock runs a risk of creating zombies--if shareholders and executives conclude that the preferred has all the equity value if they continue business as usual, then they will not continue business as usual but will instead start behaving like the Japanese banks of the 1990s. And we don't want that.

By mighty spells the Head Voodoo Priest Henry Paulson has raised the corpses of America's biggest banks from the graves to which the financial crisis was consigning them, but has he restored them to life, or just to zombiehood? Will they do their job for the economy, or will they begin wreaking destruction, all the while crying out: "BBRRAAIINNS! BBRRAAIINNSS!"

[NB: That's a funnier way of expressing my point below about changing forward-looking behavior. I'd rather hear that my worries are the uninformed results of undereducation in economics, but I still like hearing from Brad DeLong that I've kind of understood something relevant to the current mess correctly..]

Julian Sanchez:

And certainly it’s got to be much easier, much more comfortable, to give your self-selecting audience precisely what they want to hear and bask in their accolades. I don’t know if I’ve named it here before, but I’ve long observed a phenomenon in the blogosphere I call “audience capture,” where a once-interesting writer becomes rather dull and predictable, each post another jab at the lever, predictably rewarded with a tasty pellet.

For what it's worth, that phenomenon is one reason why I've never turned comments on. I do think that comments sections sometimes provide all the wrong kinds of feedback to a blogger.

Sentences that scare me

“The needs of our economy require that our financial institutions not take this new capital to hoard it, but to deploy it,” Mr. Paulson said, who offered some details of the plan along with the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, and the chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Sheila C. Bair. [sic-- should be "said Mr. Paulson, who..."]

If the bailout were working properly, no exhortation or bully pulpit would be required-- right? The banks would think that it was again in their interest to make short-term commercial loans. This has been one of my worries for a while now-- that we were deploying backward-looking tools to solve a problem of forward-looking incentives. If the banks say, "thanks for the new funds; they'll look lovely on our balance sheet!" then nothing productive has happened; the taxpayers have just propped up the stock price of financial firms.

I'm enjoying...

the tributes to new Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman from libertarian and libertarianish economists. Some sharply distinguish the pre-NYT real economics Krugman did from the post-NYT public commentary. Others count Krugman's ability to explain things to a lay audience as one of his virtues-- which is of course appropriate given that they remember it as one of Milton Friedman's virtues, too.

See: Arnold Kling, Bryan Caplan, Alex Tabarrok, and of course Tyler Cowen. Note that the plaudits for Krugman's new trade theory/ economic geography contributions themselves have to be based on a genuine admiration for their intellectual importance, since those contributions were traditionally taken as being unfriendly to free trade, insofar as they showed at least the theoretical possibility of productivity-enhancing protectionism. (Krugman understands the difference between that possibility result and any likelihood that actually-adopted protectionism would be of the right sort.)

Autumn in Montreal

Being my very first experiment in multimedia on this here blog; but I hear that the interwebs are now capable of handling things that aren't even text. (In my day, we browsed the interwebs on lynx in UNIX and read e-mail on Pine and we liked it!)

Anyway: two previous autumns in Montreal and 21 in New England and I've still never seen anything like this year's color.

Brettschneider reading group at Public Reason

Following up on last year's very successful Estlund reading group, Public Reason is hosting a reading group on Corey Brettschneider's Democratic Rights.

On the other hand...

I've linked (approvingly) to several posts elsewhere about why libertarians and classical liberals ought to be supporting Obama, however reluctantly, this election. And I've by and large failed to link to stuff (including by my friend Todd Seavey on the other side. But I do feel compelled to point to this Ilya Somin post.

My core reasons for preferring any Democrat to any Republican this election are backward-looking. After the catastrophic (in policy terms and in moral terms) Bush Administration, the Republican Party needs to go to the penalty box, for its health and for the health of American democracy. A party must not be able to run eight years of policy-failing, power-grabbing, deficit-ballooning, separation-of-powers-shredding, torturing, detaining-without-charge government without consequence or punishment-- and, since presidents are term-limited out, the punishment must be partisan.

But I am deeply worried, in a forward-looking way, about the new historical moment the financial crisis brings about, and Ilya hits some important forward-looking worries. I've never been persuaded by the scare-tactic view that says Obama is, deep in his heart, some kind of nutty socialist. But that's not what Ilya stresses-- it's that a Democratic President, an expanded majority Democratic Congreess, and an economic crisis coinciding could lead to much longer-term damage to economic liberalism than libertarians-for-Obama like me are comfortable admitting.

I'm not changing my mind-- but I'm also not denying that I share some of his worries.

Federalism, parties, and institutional support for decentralization

I've had occasion to argue that federalism provides an institutional weight to decentralization in a polity, and that Canadian federalism in particular is well-anchored by the dynamic of Quebec seeking greater decentralization, then other provinces seeking to keep up with Quebec. This helps prevent the dynamic of one or another party of the ethnocultural majority being unrelentingly centralist-- even anti-Quebec animus gets channeled into the protection of other provinces rather than into support for a stronger center. The entrenched character of federalism, the way in which it creates provincial-level sites for politics and parties, gives decentralization an institutional weight that helps to stabilize a constitutional order.

From today's Globe & Mail:

ANDREW STEELE

Globe and Mail Update

October 7, 2008 at 11:27 PM EDT

Miles' Law states that "where you stand depends on where you sit."

Nothing could be truer for Canada's premiers. Each is grappling with the federal election based on their local political dynamic, rather than partisan labels. And those individual political calculations will have a profound impact on the next federal government, regardless of who wins.

Let's start in the West.

Facing the voters in eight months and tied in the polls, B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell has kept his powder dry.

While the Liberal label of his party might make one think he should support Stephane Dion automatically, the B.C. Liberals in fact draw support from both the federal Tories and Grits. Getting into a scuffle with either federal party's leader would divide Mr. Campbell's own house.[...]

Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach has been playing defence. He feels a re-elected Conservative government is best for his jurisdiction, but also wants to avoid a Ralph Klein-style interjection that helps the Liberals with their "hidden agenda" attacks on Mr. Harper.

Mr. Stelmach took a swing at NDP leader Jack Layton when the tar sands came under direct attack, but mostly he is leaving it to others to do the heavy lifting. [...]

Ontario's Dalton McGuinty is playing a careful game. Despite his own brother running for re-election as a federal Liberal MP, Mr. McGuinty has avoided any endorsement of the Mr. Dion's Liberals.[...]

Despite the brand name, Jean Charest's Quebec Liberal Party is made up of supporters of every federalist party: Conservative, Liberal, NDP, Green. Attacking one at the expense of another only divides his coalition and diminishes his chances in an election that could be held on a moment's notice. Instead, he has played a more traditional role for a Quebec premier, attacking policy elements that threaten to intrude on the province's jurisdiction.[...]

Then there is Danny Williams of Newfoundland and Labrador - a Conservative who legally registered his "Anyone But Conservative" campaign with Elections Canada, calls the Conservative Prime Minister "intolerant" and predicts a "dark age" if the Conservatives get a majority.

Degenerate federalism happens when the provinces are captured by the center and become local sites for patronage and corruption-- pillars of the majority at the center rather than potential bulwarks against it. (Mexico for most of the 20the century or Moscow under Putin, for example.) Canada is about as far from that outcome as it's plausible to be.

Too clever by 31%

Canadian Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper won enactment of a bill moving Canada to a fixed term for Parliament, unless the Prime Minister loses a vote of confidence. This ostensibly limited the Prime Minister's ability to call an election just to grab a favorable moment on the political calendar.

Then he called an election for this fall, explaining that the restriction didn't apply to minority governments, which is what he has. (Explanation for Americans: Harper's party has a plurality but not a majority of seats in the House. This means that all of his proposals require at least the acquiescence if not the active support of at least one opposition party in order to become law.) He was widely thought to have timed this both to grab a moment of personal popularity and to come before the U.S. election, lest pro-Obama, pro-left, pro-"change" sentiment spread north of the border and doom him in two years' time. At the beginning of the abbreviated campaign, he seemed likely to finally get his wish and be re-elected with a parliamentary majority.

Now: Not so much. As Matt Yglesias has been discussing, an economic crisis has a funny tendency to sweep all the bums (of whatever political complexion) out of office, and perhaps to entrench a prejudice in favor of the other party just because it's there when things return to normal. Yglesias quotes Larry Bartels:

Considering America’s Depression-era politics in comparative perspective reinforces the impression that there may have been a good deal less real policy content to “throwing the bums out” than meets the eye. In the U.S., voters replaced Republicans with Democrats and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Britain and Australia, voters replaced Labor governments with conservatives and the economy improved. In Sweden, voters replaced Conservatives with Liberals, then with Social Democrats, and the economy improved. In the Canadian agricultural province of Saskatchewan, voters replaced Conservatives with Socialists and the economy improved. In the adjacent agricultural province of Alberta, voters replaced a socialist party with a right-leaning funny-money party created from scratch by a charismatic radio preacher, and the economy improved. In Weimar Germany, where economic distress was deeper and longer-lasting, voters rejected all of the mainstream parties, the Nazis seized power, and the economy improved. In every case, the party that happened to be in power when the Depression eased dominated politics for a decade or more thereafter.

On one hand, it's of course not Harper's fault that the financial systems of the world are in a tailspin-- and indeed Canada has yet to be hit hard by the results (notwithstanding a very rapid decline in the value of the loonie as currency traders indulge the perverse 'flight to safety' that means rushing into the US dollar even when it's the US that's leading the way off the cliff). On the other hand, it certainly is his fault that he's standing for re-election right now. If he'd waited until the election due date prescribed in his own legislation, he wouldn't be fighting to save even his minority government against the headwinds of [what we can only hope will turn out to be] a Schumpeterian "gale of creative destruction." Now, with less than a week before the election, he's at 31% in the polls and falling, with the Liberals at 27% and rising. So much for cleverly gaming the system...

The financial crisis and secession

Since 1990, the world has seen something of a proliferation of new independent states: 15 from the old Soviet Union, 2 from Czechoslovakia, 6 or so from Yugoslavia, plus Eritrea and East Timor. This has not ben caused by, but has certainly been aided by, a sense that the minimum size for state viability wasn't very large in an era of peace and free trade. The Baltics couldn't militarily survive the late 30s/ early 40s, but that's not our world anymore; the Czech and Slovak Republics had no economic need to stay unwillingly joined if they could trade across an international boundary almost as easily as within a common one. Regional defense organizations and regional trade unions-- prominently NATO and the EU-- made a huge difference here.

The Russia-Georgia war perhaps marks the end of the "peace" described above. Being in line for NATO membership someday is nice and all, but it's not remotely the same as being part of a great power that protects you as part of its own territory.

And the financial crisis may-- may-- mean that minimum viable state size ratchets back up on the economic side as well. Being Singapore or Switzerland or Luxembourg or a banking haven in the Caribbean has been a pretty good deal in an age of easy trade in goods and easy capital mobility. But now: Iceland gets caught in the financial crisis having to bail out a bank with assets many times its GDP, and without the deep capital or foreign currency reserves that a place like the US or Germany or Japan or Britain has.

This suggests great trouble for Quebec nationalism as a project, maybe somewhat less for Scottish or Catalan-- Iceland has a separate currency that's taking a beating; Scotland and Catalonia would be in the EU and probably in the euro zone. But the lack of capital depth would have hit Iceland now even if it were inside the EU and the euro zone.

Small-country wealth within free trade has been one of the virtues of the broadly liberal era we've been living through. When states are dominant economic actors, it's far more important what state (and how strong a state, and how big a state) you live in.

The new Times Higher Education Supplement world university rankings...

have been released. McGill at #20 is the highest ranked in Canada and the second-highest (behind Michigan) public university in North America.

Update:
McGill ranked 14th in the world in social sciences, as well as 13th in humanities.

Dynamic Amazon ads...

sometimes freak me out.

If I'm at Chris' Invincible Super-blog, it's just weird to see a sidebar ad trying to get me to buy:

Is Democracy Possible Here?
Ronald Dworkin

Roman Law: an Historical Introduction
Hans Julius Wolff

Roman Law in European History
Peter Stein

The Constitution of Equality
Thomas Christiano

I go there for a few minutes of escapism, not to be reminded of my to-do list-- but Amazon doesn't know that, it just reads the Amazon cookies in my cache and responds appropriately.

I'msurprised...
that the NYT adopts the dour attitude of the principals in this article about a possible split in the ANC. Democratic consolidation in South Africa requires the possibility of genuinely contested elections and viable bi- or multi-partyism-- and, a decade and a half after the end of apartheid, it remains clear that only the ANC itself can generate enough support to win elections, so for there to be two parties that could win, they'd both have to be ANC descendants. (I'll bet the smaller parties start merging with one or another ANC descendant very quickly.) The possible fissure is good news. It would have done Mbeki good to have a serious opposition watching over him, it's certainly desirable that Zuma have one, and it will be a sight worth seeing when a majority-elected government in South Africa peacefully surrenders power to a rival majority elected-government.

As a political scientist living under minority governments in both Quebec and Canada...

I feel like a physicist watching Wile E. Coyote running on air. Seems like someone should point out to them that our predictions say such things aren't possible, but also it's also kind of fascinating to watch the damn things stubbornly stay in the air anyway. Looks like we're headed for another one at the federal level, as the Tories have stalled out in Quebec, where they'd hoped to pick up seats.

(Duceppe rules out coalition, Montreal Gazette, today.)

Steven Pinker on the coming turn to regulation

here.

Many leftist commentators have gleefully interpreted the financial crisis as proof of the failure of free-market capitalism. Libertarianism and laissez-faire will be out; regulatory command-and-control will be in. Everyone agrees that targeted regulation is needed in the domains of finance that brought us to this disaster, where a mad incentive structure and poorly understood dynamics combined to produce a catastrophic outcome. It is less clear that a general philosophy that "regulation is good" will be helpful across the board. The past decade has shown us that unplanned, bottom-up, productive activity can lead to huge advances in social well-being, such as Linux, Wikipedia, YouTube, and the rest of Web 2.0. And many segments of the old-fashioned economy are still distorted by excessive regulation, like the artificial scarcity created by government-rationed taxi medallions. But the winds of change are clearly blowing in the direction of increased regulation, and I suspect that not all of the effects will be good.

If so, libertarians and economic conservatives will have themselves to blame. In recent decades they have turned the benefits of deregulation and tax-cutting into a religious dogma--less is always better--rather than a consideration that has to be weighed against other goods and submitted to evidence-based evaluation. Worse, they have allied themselves with (or at least failed to distance themselves from) the know-nothing conservatism represented by Dan Quayle, George W. Bush, and Sarah Palin. Libertarianism and moderate intellectual conservatism have discredited themselves with this disastrous alliance, and whatever contributions they have to offer the national conversation will be blown off. There's some rough justice in this, but it would be a shame if the result is a pro-regulation monoculture.

I'd say that the blame is less with turning "the benefits of deregulation and tax-cutting into a religious dogma" and more with a failure to distance those benefits firmly, at every turn, from corrupt and regressive corporatism. "Deregulation" and "letting the corporations write the regulations" are not synonyms. Neither are "cutting spending" and "increasing spending on wealthy special interests." There's been a thoroughly baleful and stupid path that went something like this:

The apparently morally- and intellectually-powerful cases for regulation or greater spending come from the left.
We wish to resist regulation and greater spending.
Therefore obviously-indefensible regulation and spending coming from the right is the lesser of two evils (even if greater in magnitude!), because it's unprincipled and so can be written off as a temporary aberration.

The fact that *any* libertarians or market-oriented conservatives supported George W. Bush for re-election, after his first term had made clear what his governance was like, is an embarrassment. And now it's not just a personal embarrassment; it's a damaging embarrassment to market-liberal ideas.

Does the free market corrode moral character?

Amon those writing essays for a Templeton Foundation "Big Questions" symposium on this topic: Michael Walzer, Jagdish Bhagwati, Tyler Cowen, Garry Kasparov, BHL, Michael Novak, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, John Gray. The responses are just two pages each, which means that they don't allow for the kind of depth and seriousness some of these writers are known for, but still: worth a look.

McGill political science finding of the day

Ethnic conflict stoked by government economic intervention, not globalization: McGill researchers

Economic globalization and liberalization have been blamed for numerous social ills over the last two decades, including a sharp rise in interethnic violence in countries all over the world. Not so, say the results of a study conducted by researchers from McGill University and published in the current issue of the journal International Studies Quarterly.

In fact, according to Dr. Stephen Saideman and his former McGill Master’s student David Steinberg – now pursuing his doctorate at Northwestern University – the more government intervention there is in the local economy, the more likely interethnic violence and rebellion becomes. Conversely, the more economically open a society is, the less likely such violence becomes.

“Our study counters the idea that a liberalized economy is worse for ethnic groups. Minorities are more likely to be on the outside of the political system,” explained Saideman, associate professor and associate director of graduate studies in the Department of Political Science, and Canada Research Chair in International Security and Ethnic Conflict. “So, if the government is involved in the economy, minorities are more likely to be affected by the whims of the state than by the whims of the market.”

Utilizing their own original research, along with the Minorities at Risk dataset compiled by their colleagues at the University of Maryland, Steinberg and Saideman’s results show that government intervention in the economy leads to a spiral of political competition among groups to gain control of the state and the economic spoils it distributes.

“Thus groups on the outs feel threatened because they have no control, which can lead to open rebellion,” Saideman said, “while those who are in power become terrified of losing control, as occurred in Serbia. Before the war the Serbs controlled a large hunk of the Yugoslav political system and it was their fear of losing it that led to war.”

Moreover, the researchers said, their results were reasonably consistent in virtually every society they studied, regardless of political system.

“We’re not just talking about command economies like the old Soviet Union or Yugoslavia,” he said. “We control for regime type, so whether a country is a democracy or not, statistically and probabilistically, the more government involvement there is in the economy, the more likely ethnic conflict is.”

Though interethnic violence is somewhat more likely to occur in less-developed economies, Saideman said, similar interventions even in the industrialized world have the potential to sow serious intergroup tensions.

“Ironically, look at how the government of the United States is now in the process of buying up a large hunk of the economy to bail out Wall Street,” he said. “In the future this will give people who are denied loans or who have other economic grievances an incentive to blame the government. They won’t consider factors like oil shocks and housing bubbles, it will all be laid on the government’s doorstep.”

Title of the day

"But Mom, Crop-Tops Are Cute!": Social Knowledge, Social Structure and Ideology Critique

(by Sally Haslanger, Philosophical Issues, Volume 17 Issue 1

Fellowship Announcement: Post-Docs at Stanford

Stanford University: 2009-10 Post-Doctoral Fellowships

The McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society and the Program in Global Justice at Stanford University seek five post-doctoral fellows for 2009-10. We welcome candidates with substantial normative research interests from diverse backgrounds including philosophy, the social sciences, environmental studies, and professional schools. One of the fellowships will be housed entirely in the Program in Global Justice, and one will be jointly sponsored by the Center and Program: candidates for these positions should additionally have research interests in international topics. Three fellowships will be housed entirely within the Center for Ethics in Society. Fellows will teach one class (typically a seminar), participate in the Political Theory and/or Global Justice Workshops, and help in developing an interdisciplinary ethics community across the campus. Salary is competitive. Appointment is for one year, but may be renewed for an additional year.

Applications will be accepted between November 15, 2008 and January 10, 2009.

Applicants should send a cover letter, CV, three letters of recommendation, and a short writing sample (about 25 pages) to:

Post-doctoral Fellowship Committee
Bowen H. McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society
482 Galvez Street
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6079

Stanford is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer.

Best thing I've read today

Sha-na-na and the invention of the Fifties. (h/t)

Tocqueville the humorist, on the influence of Rousseau

If you're enough like me that that title catches your eye or makes you smile, go read this quick and fun Nick Troester post. Guaranteed 100% free of financial meltdown commentary or Sarah Palin jokes.

Now in the sidebar:

An ongoing google calendar of workshops, seminars, and conferences at McGill or around Montreal in political theory and related fields. A calendar-view can be found at http://profs-polisci.mcgill.ca/calendar.html.

Separately noted this morning:

" John McCain secures his own daughter’s endorsement" and "Sarah Palin gets crucial endorsement from... her parents.