A Fraction of the Whole

I’ve been listening to the audiobook of A Fraction of the Whole, with the intention of posting something about it when I’m done. However, it’s 25+ hours long (good!), and I’m not going to finish it for a while yet. And I found a review, Sue Arnold’s in The Guardian, that says it better than I could. Every word is true. I don’t doubt that the book would be a joy to read, but the readers here are so perfect that, well, you’ll see. Or hear.

(This is part of Arnold’s series on audiobook choices; I look forward to reading the others Real Soon Now.)

Five down, one to go. I’m slowly making my way through last year’s Booker shortlist and, unless Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture proves to be invincible, this extraordinary Australian debut novel about, well, everything really — families, crime, celebrity, philosophy, religion, sport, relationships, travel and above all the search for identity — will have been my winning choice. To give any of the plot away would spoil the surprises, and it’s full of wonderful surprises. The story is told alternately by Martin Dean – paranoid, intellectually brilliant, dysfunctional, achingly funny wannabe philosopher from a hick town voted the most boring in Australia — and his son Jasper, ditto. The frenetic action — prison revolts, serial killing, bush fires, exploding river barges carrying guns/drugs — swerves wildly between Poland, China, Australia, France and Thailand. Toltz’s wit is as good as Clive James’s, though maybe darker, and he can be lyrical, too: “the rhythms of the universe were perceptible in the way the boats were nodding at me.” Brilliantly read by both actors to make you mourn as much as laugh, this David Copperfield Down Under on speed with son is an epic in every sense, including length. But don’t be tempted, even if there is one, to get an abridged version. Every macabre detail, every chaotic incident, every wisecrack is an essential fraction of the whole. Heartfelt thanks to Whole Story Audio for getting this and half the other 2008 Booker shortlist out so quickly. To cut a single sentence would be criminal.

Black Friday Godblogging

From Fr Marc, via Sr Juliann.

For our money is the Lord’s, however we may have gathered it. If we provide for those in need, we shall obtain great plenty. That is why God has allowed you to have more: not for you to waste on prostitutes, drink, fancy food, expensive clothes, and all other kinds of indolence, but for you to distribute to those in need. Just as an official in the government treasury who neglects to distribute wealth as he is ordered (spending instead on his own indolence) pays the penalty and is put to death, so also the Rich Man is a kind of steward of the money which is owed for distribution to the poor. He is directed to distribute it to his fellow servants who are in want. So if he spends more on himself than his need requires, he will pay the harshest penalty hereafter. For his own goods are not his own, but belong to his fellow servants.

— Fr John Chrysostom, on Lazarus and the Rich Man

The Beaker Folk of Husborne Crawley

I need to post this before I completely forget that it was Andrew Brown who pointed the way. He calls it an “Anglican blog”. I dunno; maybe. They have an Archdruid (or is there more than one? again, I dunno).

Anyway, meet the Folk, via the 5 statements of Beaker Belief.

Brokenness
Beautiful World
True liberalism oppresses
Knowing God means challenge
Better off with tea lights?

Hard to argue with that.

If you visit their blog (when you visit their blog), remember to vote on the Moon Gibbon; as I write there are only 240 days left to vote.

Update: Anglici sunt. And there’s a gibbon up there right now, so…

They have a name for it

Semantic satiation

Semantic satiation (also semantic saturation) is a cognitive neuroscience phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who can only process the speech as repeated meaningless sounds.

Actually, a whole lot of terms. Who knew?

“Many other names have been used for what appears to be essentially the same process: inhibition (Herbert, 1824, in Boring, 1950), refractory phase and mental fatigue (Dodge, 1917; 1926a), lapse of meaning (Bassett and Warne, 1919), work decrement (Robinson and Bills, 1926), cortical inhibition (Pavlov, 192?), adaptation (Gibson, 1937), extinction (Hilgard and Marquis, 1940), satiation (Kohler and Wallach, 1940), reactive inhibition (Hull, 19113 [sic]), stimulus satiation (Glanzer, 1953), reminiscence (Eysenck, 1956), verbal satiation (Smith and Raygor, 1956), and verbal transformation (Warren, 1961b).” (From Leon Jakobovits James, 1962)

Midweek Godblogging

matthew1237.jpgFollowing up on my earlier Psalm 109 post with a bit of help from Fr Marc & Sr Juliann…

Juli reminded me of the term of art prooftexting. Borrowing from the Wikipedia article,

Prooftexting is the practice of using decontextualized quotations from a document (often, but not always, a book of the Bible) to establish a proposition. Critics of the technique note that often the document, when read as a whole, may not in fact support the proposition.

While the Ps 109 coffee mugs are not precisely “establishing a proposition”, they’re a good example of decontextualization and the hazards of prooftexting.

Fr Marc offers Matthew 12:36–37:

I tell you, on the day of judgment men will render account for every careless word they utter; for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.

…which loses nothing by being shorn of its context, though you’ll find the context interesting. It’s a warning that will fall on deaf ears, of course.

In one of those nice coincidences, Fr Marc also answers a question I hadn’t asked, aloud anyway. I wrote, “condemned out of their own mouths,” and then blew several minutes trying to find out where the hell the phrase came from. “Out of their own mouths shall they be condemned,” it turns out, comes from a piece of Reconstruction-era Republican campaign literature (q.G.), but obviously Matthew 12 was what I was looking for.

Is Everybody Disappointed In Obama?

M J Rosenberg asks, and answers his own question, “Yes.”

There’s a ton of comments, many of the form “McCain-Palin would have been worse” (which really isn’t the point), or asserting that our expectations shouldn’t have been high enough to be seriously disappointed. Rationally, I fall into the latter camp, but I’m disappointed not to be proven unduly pessimistic.

Yes, Sarah, There is a Media Conspiracy

I’ll give you a couple of sentences from Matt Taibbi, and then you can go read the rest for yourself.

Your average political reporter is a spineless dweeb who went to all the best schools and made it to that privileged seat inside the campaign-trail ropeline by being keenly sensitive to the editorial wishes of his social and professional superiors. … It’s the same press corps that rolled out the red carpet for someone very nearly as abjectly stupid as Sarah Palin to win not one but two terms in the White House.

Psalm 109

D59ACC36-D5C3-4864-B028-A8556449D512.jpgObama’s more bitter opponents have come up with yet another “clever” way of calling for his assassination. You’ve probably heard this part already, but bear with me. What’s this Psalm 109:8 business?

May his days be few; may another take his place of leadership.

The clever part (wink, wink) are the next verses:

May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow. May his children be wandering beggars; may they be driven from their ruined homes.

Lovely stuff, isn’t it? It’s gotten plenty of criticism, and rightly so, but there’s a bit of irony here as well, in that the clever boots that came up with this bit of nastiness apparently didn’t bother to read the whole chapter. The psalms are conventionally attributed to David, the great-great-something or other of Jesus, among others. While there’s little or no historical evidence that David ever lived, or that if he did that he wrote any of the psalms, it’s a safe bet that anyone wearing that shirt over there believes it literally.

Here’s the thing. This particular psalm is not only attributed to David, it’s attributed to King David—that is, David after he became the second king (after Saul) of Israel. So let’s go back to the beginning of Psalm 109, King David speaking:

For the director of music. Of David. A psalm.

O God, whom I praise, do not remain silent, for wicked and deceitful men have opened their mouths against me; they have spoken against me with lying tongues.

With words of hatred they surround me; they attack me without cause. In return for my friendship they accuse me, but I am a man of prayer. They repay me evil for good, and hatred for my friendship.

These are the wicked and deceitful men who would kill the King (or perhaps just wear T-shirts slyly proposing the deed). Later in the psalm, David concludes:

Help me, O Lord my God; save me in accordance with your love. Let them know that it is your hand, that you, O Lord, have done it. They may curse, but you will bless; when they attack they will be put to shame, but your servant will rejoice. My accusers will be clothed with disgrace and wrapped in shame as in a cloak.

With my mouth I will greatly extol the Lord; in the great throng I will praise him. For he stands at the right hand of the needy one, to save his life from those who condemn him.

I needn’t belabor the irony here; condemned out of their own mouths…

(Thanks to Father Marc for pointing this out.)

R: ACORN stole the election

Via TPM. Puts Steve Jobs’s reality distortion field to shame.

Poll: Majority Of Republicans Think Obama Didn’t Actually Win 2008 Election — ACORN Stole It!

The new national poll from Public Policy Polling (D) has an astonishing number about paranoia among the GOP base: Republicans do not think President Obama actually won the 2008 election — instead, ACORN stole it.

This number goes a long way towards explaining the anger of the Tea Party crowd. They not only think Obama’s agenda is against America, but they don’t think he was actually the choice of the American people at all! Interestingly, NY-23 Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman is now accusing ACORN of stealing his race, and Fox News personalities have often speculated about ACORN stealing the 2008 Minnesota Senate race for Al Franken.

The poll asked this question: “Do you think that Barack Obama legitimately won the Presidential election last year, or do you think that ACORN stole it for him?” The overall top-line is legitimately won 62%, ACORN stole it 26%.

Among Republicans, however, only 27% say Obama actually won the race, with 52% — an outright majority — saying that ACORN stole it, and 21% are undecided. Among McCain voters, the breakdown is 31%-49%-20%. By comparison, independents weigh in at 72%-18%-10%, and Democrats are 86%-9%-4%.

…

Olive oil in California

The water-policy debate in California, more often than not, ignores the fact that the lion’s share of water (hmm, that doesn’t really make sense, but…) goes to agriculture, and in particular to crops such as rice and cotton that really shouldn’t be grown in an arid state.

This is a good move, though the acreage is minuscule compared to major crops (a quick check shows more than half a million acres of rice in California in 2004).

New olive planting method prompts Calif. oil boom

An oil boom is underway in the state’s agricultural heartland, as evolving tastes and a trend toward healthy fare have transformed a profession as old as civilization: olive production for the extra virgin market.

Gnarly trees picked by hand are being supplanted. This year California’s olive oil production will top 1 million gallons for the first time, the lion’s share from 8-foot trees planted in hedgerows and mechanically harvested, then pressed into oil within 90 minutes.

Growers have invested millions laying the groundwork to become a player in the global olive oil market, now controlled by Spain, Italy and Greece.

In the past 10 years, roughly 7.5 million trees have been tightly planted on 12,500 acres, an experiment growers hope will make California olive oil cheaper and fresher than that of their competitors. State officials estimate that in another decade there will be 100,000 acres of hedgerow trees producing 20 million gallons of oil to help sate Americans’ 75 million gallons-a-year thirst — 99.99 percent of it now imported.

…

Get Surly

(I’ve flagged this post Local Interest (for the Minneapolis/St Paul area) and Arts for the obvious reason.)

I’m packing to go home after a week in the Twin Cities area. Like California (and no doubt lots of other places), Minnesota has some great craft breweries. The big one is Summit, and I’m always happy to resample their IPA (or in a pinch, as at Broadway Pizza, a mandatory stop, EPA (though they were tapped out the other evening)).

furious.jpgThis time, though, my sister introduced me to Surly Brewing, and in particular to their Furious, which I’d describe (lamely) as an aromatic IPA. Their words:

Furious — A tempest on the tongue, or a moment of pure hop bliss? Brewed with a dazzling blend of American hops and Scottish malt, this crimson-hued ale delivers waves of citrus, pine and caramel-toffee. For those who favor flavor, Furious has the hop-fire your taste buds have been screeching for.

It’s great stuff; don’t miss it.

Surly sells their beers in 16-oz cans. Not a bad idea, but you may want to find a bigger glass. The cans come in four-packs, which stopped me (this time) from trying their Coffee Bender for breakfast. Next visit, maybe.

Coffee Bender refreshes like an iced-coffee, is aromatic as a bag of whole beans as satisfies like your favorite beer. Utilizing the latest technology, the Surly brew team has developed a cold extraction process that results in intense coffee aromatics and flavor — bringing together two of our favorite beverages. Your only dilemma will be whether to finish your day or start it with a Coffee Bender.

Your source for breast cancer advice

It’s why you come to Pragmatos, after all, and we don’t disappoint. We’re relatively ignorant on the subject, but we do know who to ask, and in case you don’t, we’re glad to be of service. Go to Breast Cancer Action, who for a variety of reasons are the go-to folks on these questions.

USPSTF Releases New Screening Guidelines

Mammography screening is in the news again. The US Prevention Services Task Force has announced new guidelines for breast cancer screening that would mean women get fewer mammograms. This is good news.

Read BCA’s analysis of the new recommendations here. On the issue of prevention, click here for information on why words matter.

Bonus: the Washington Post makes a useful point relating this bit of news to health care generally.

The reversal of the seven-year-old guidelines, and the resulting uproar, demonstrate why reducing medical costs will be challenging even with a well-designed health-care reform bill. Ideally, medical practice should follow the evidence. When drugs or procedures are proven to do more harm than good, or to do no more good than safer or less costly alternatives, incentives should be used to discourage them. In practice, though, as new studies overtake old research and new advice contradicts previous guidelines, the result can be confusion and even cynicism — and political pressure to ignore the results.

Late update: Sarah Palin says it’s death panels!

Condorcet cellphone paradox

The Condorcet voting paradox, in voting theory, says that it’s possible to have (for example) three candidates A, S & V such that the voters collectively prefer A to S, S to V and V to A. It sounds impossible, but that’s why it’s called a paradox.

There seems to be something like that for cellphone service providers. Sprint is bad. AT&T is worse than Sprint. Verizon is worse than AT&T. And Sprint is worse than Verizon. Follow that?

Sprint has the worst coverage by far, though I use it because it happens to cover my house in the boonies. iPhone lovers hate AT&T, and many iPhone prospects won’t buy one until it show up on another network. So that leaves Verizon, right? Not so fast, says David Pogue.

… The more Verizon gouges, the worse it looks. Every single day, I get e-mail from people saying they’re switching at the first opportunity, or would if they could. In time, the only people who will stay with Verizon are people who have no coverage with any other carrier.

Every company’s dream, right? A base of miserable customers who stick with you only because they have no choice. …

Each provider is worse than all the others. That’s Condorcet’s paradox applied to cellphones. As Pogue asks,

Why wouldn’t it be a hugely profitable move to start pitching yourself as the GOOD cell company, the one that actually LIKES its customers?

That, of course, is crazy talk. Next thing you know he’ll be suggesting that there could be a GOOD airline company, and we’ll have to call the men in the white coats.

SuperFreaking Climate Change

I doubt that you’ve missed the flap about Chapter 5 of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s latest book, SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance (pause for breath). If you have, it’s the “global cooling” chapter, and it’s something of a mess.

There’s plenty to read on the subject, but let me point you to two of the best pieces. The first is Elizabeth Kolbert’s review in The New Yorker. Best line first:

Neither Levitt, an economist, nor Dubner, a journalist, has any training in climate science—or, for that matter, in science of any kind.

Ouch. More:

But what’s most troubling about “SuperFreakonomics” isn’t the authors’ many blunders; it’s the whole spirit of the enterprise. Though climate change is a grave problem, Levitt and Dubner treat it mainly as an opportunity to show how clever they are. Leaving aside the question of whether geoengineering, as it is known in scientific circles, is even possible—have you ever tried sending an eighteen-mile-long hose into the stratosphere?—their analysis is terrifyingly cavalier. A world whose atmosphere is loaded with carbon dioxide, on the one hand, and sulfur dioxide, on the other, would be a fundamentally different place from the earth as we know it. Among the many likely consequences of shooting SO2 above the clouds would be new regional weather patterns (after major volcanic eruptions, Asia and Africa have a nasty tendency to experience drought), ozone depletion, and increased acid rain. Meanwhile, as long as the concentration of atmospheric CO2 continued to rise, more and more sulfur dioxide would have to be pumped into the air to counteract it. The amount of direct sunlight reaching the earth would fall, even as the oceans became increasingly acidic. There are eminent scientists—among them the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen—who argue that geoengineering should be seriously studied, but only with the understanding that it represents a risky, last-ditch attempt to avert catastrophe.

…

To be skeptical of climate models and credulous about things like carbon-eating trees and cloudmaking machinery and hoses that shoot sulfur into the sky is to replace a faith in science with a belief in science fiction. This is the turn that “SuperFreakonomics” takes, even as its authors repeatedly extoll their hard-headedness. All of which goes to show that, while some forms of horseshit are no longer a problem, others will always be with us.

Kolbert in turn points to An open letter to Steve Levitt, posted by Raymond Pierrehumbert, professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago.

Dear Mr. Levitt,

The problem of global warming is so big that solving it will require creative thinking from many disciplines. Economists have much to contribute to this effort, particularly with regard to the question of how various means of putting a price on carbon emissions may alter human behavior. Some of the lines of thinking in your first book, Freakonomics, could well have had a bearing on this issue, if brought to bear on the carbon emissions problem. I have very much enjoyed and benefited from the growing collaborations between Geosciences and the Economics department here at the University of Chicago, and had hoped someday to have the pleasure of making your acquaintance. It is more in disappointment than anger that I am writing to you now.

I am addressing this to you rather than your journalist-coauthor because one has become all too accustomed to tendentious screeds from media personalities (think Glenn Beck) with a reckless disregard for the truth. However, if it has come to pass that we can’t expect the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor (and Clark Medalist to boot) at a top-rated department of a respected university to think clearly and honestly with numbers, we are indeed in a sad way.

By now there have been many detailed dissections of everything that is wrong with the treatment of climate in Superfreakonomics, but what has been lost amidst all that extensive discussion is how really simple it would have been to get this stuff right. The problem wasn’t necessarily that you talked to the wrong experts or talked to too few of them. The problem was that you failed to do the most elementary thinking needed to see if what they were saying (or what you thought they were saying) in fact made any sense. If you were stupid, it wouldn’t be so bad to have messed up such elementary reasoning, but I don’t by any means think you are stupid. That makes the failure to do the thinking all the more disappointing. …

A fascinating lesson ensues. Go read.

Conservative health care reform

Or not, at any rate, liberal. Digby concludes:

…

Health care reform is extremely likely to pass in some form. But let’s not kid ourselves that it’s passing because the Democrats and the public have seen the light and understand that we need to be a more decent society. It’s passing because medical industry has been greedy to the point where it’s now unsustainable. That presented an opening for liberals to enact some policies they have believed in for a long time. But they didn’t do it by making the liberal arguments straight up and have created some kind of strange hybrid system for which the best argument is that it might lead to opportunities for more reform. It’s better than nothing. But it isn’t liberal and it wasn’t designed to be. And just in case, the powers-that-be stuck it to the pro-choicers to make sure nobody got the idea that it was.

Sunday Godblogging: Thank God for Atheists

Christopher Lydon hosted a conversation with Harvey Cox, Mary Gordon and Cornell West at the Boston Book Festival last month, and the conversation showed up on Lydon’s Open Source Radio’s podcast. A little Lydon goes a long way, and there’s never just a little West, so I don’t necessarily recommend that you go listen to it. But toward the end (around 38:07), Cox quoted Tillich so:

Atheism is always the shadow of some understanding of God.

I don’t recall exactly what point Cox was trying to make; you can go listen for yourself, I guess. But I was curious about the context of the Tillich line, but I couldn’t track it down online—perhaps Cox was paraphrasing enough that Google couldn’t make the connection. While I was searching, I found this from Sri Aurobindo (Thoughts and Aphorisms, Bhakti, 538):

Atheism is the shadow or dark side of the highest perception of God. Every formula we frame about God, though always true as a symbol, becomes false when we accept it as a sufficient formula. The Atheist and Agnostic come to remind us of our error.

(Sri Aurobindo and Paul Tillich were more or less contemporaries. Is there more of a connection between them than that? I have no idea, but it seems likely. Frederic Spiegelberg is a likely bridge, and Google gives us some 1700 hits on the two names together.)

Too many clocks

Some future civilization is going to look back and find our obsession with time and clocks mighty peculiar.

It’s time to reset the clocks again, now that we’re no longer saving daylight. I lost count this morning, but I can reconstruct some of it.

  • Three setback thermostats. OK, these are justified; they need to know the time, and in return I save a surprising amount of energy.
  • Various computers. They’re considerate enough to change time on their own, and to pass it on to an iPod and printer/fax. The printer wants to timestamp faxes. I’m not sure why the iPod wants to know what time it is; I guess it assumes that it might be my only timepiece. Ha.
  • I’m happy that answering machines timestamp messages, so I can’t complain.
  • Car clocks. Traditional, I guess, but…
  • Cameras. I like having my photos timestamped, so I’m not complaining.
  • Our kitchen radio is a recycled bedroom alarm clock. I don’t need the time from it, but if I don’t set it, it blinks at me.
  • Water softener. This one uses its clock to do its regeneration cycles in the wee hours of the morning. OK.
  • Cellphones do themselves.
  • A small collection of wristwatches, alarm clocks and one wall clock. Dedicated to telling time, so you can’t blame them, but why do I bother to wear a watch?
  • Kitchen oven and microwave. They seem to have a fantasy that I’m going to prepare some elaborate dinner ahead, put it in the cold oven, and program it to cook it later. No chance.

That’s not all of them, but I’m tired of making the list. I long ago got rid of a coffee maker with a clock in it. I will say this: electronic clocks have gotten considerably easier to set over the years. None of the clocks I set this morning presented more than a few seconds puzzlement over how to accomplish the required task.

Still. Two people. Well over 30 clocks. Crazy.

Andrew Brown: The Queen of Fairies caught me

So, it’s Hallowe’en (and Samhain). Let’s give Andrew Brown the floor.

The Queen of Fairies caught me

Halloween was once a night of real fright, when the dead and the fairies walked close to us. How did that work?

And pleasant is the fairy land,
But, an eerie tale to tell,
Ay at the end of seven years,
We pay a tiend to hell,
I am sae fair and fu o flesh,
I’m feard it be mysel.

But the night is Halloween, lady,
The morn is Hallowday,
Then win me, win me, an ye will,
For weel I wat ye may.

Just at the mirk and midnight hour
The fairy folk will ride,
And they that wad their true-love win,
At Miles Cross they maun bide.”

This from the ballad of Tam Lin, which, if you don’t know, you should go and listen to now. Now while the song is running, there is no trouble believing the story, or at least in suspending disbelief. The defiance of Janet to her father is more vivid to me than almost anything any living woman has said. But at the same time I find that modern hallowe’en, the children’s festival with dressing up and sweets, not all of them poisoned, is wholly impossible to take seriously.

So why are witches and fairies real within the confines of the song, and absurd when children play at them? It seems to be an example of a more general question: why is the absurdity of other people’s beliefs immediately apparent to us and yet entirely invisible to them? (We ourselves, of course, hold no absurd beliefs, whoever we are. Anyone who thinks otherwise is dangerously deranged.)

The best answer that occurs to me is that the difference is made by participation – if you like, by playing along. Children believe in the particular game they happen to be playing. Of course, they understand, as we do, that the world could be otherwise, and the game might stop. Hence the delicious thrill of a game that breaks that rule, and becomes real. But the point that the world might be otherwise, and that the game might end, actually testifies to its reality while it lasts.

Giles Fraser once said to me, in an entirely different context, that all sorts of people who can’t bring themselves to say the creeds will sing them happily enough. He’s right. The two activities are profoundly different. The song is not the same as the lyrics read out loud, and this is true even if it has no accompaniment. Choral or just collective singing is different again – a point that’s obvious if we look at the completely secular activity of football chanting: on Saturdays the terraces of North London are full of otherwise respectable men singing things about opposing players that they would find literally unspeakable at work on Monday morning.

So the way to understand the spread of Halloween is not as a spread of beliefs, but of a set of games, or little dramas, if you will. To get hung up on the apparent content of the game is to make a kind of category mistake: year after year, a certain kind of evangelical will announce that Halloween is a festival of evil; year after year, they fail to understand that the child who plays at being a witch is much closer to becoming a Christian or to understanding any kind of religion than the one who never plays at anything at all.

But it’s not just evangelicals who get this kind of thing wrong. I do it myself all the time, most recently when mocking the Anglo-Catholics; for the answer to the question “How can they believe these ludicrous things?” is that they act them out. They feel their beliefs are true because they are embedded in a structure of ritual, both inside and outside church. Their words are given content by their actions. Without the actions, the words mean nothing. This sounds like a vaguely moral exhortation but it is just a plain fact. Without action, we couldn’t understand the meaning of any words at all.

When the Christian says they believe in order to understand, this sounds to the atheist like an abdication of responsibility. But in fact is is a recognition of necessity. There is a sense in which we can’t understand the beliefs we don’t act on. That’s why playing is so important. By pretending to act, we gain a sort of understanding — which is why I believe that Queen of Fairies will look at Tam Lin tonight and say “Had I known, Tam Lin, what this night I did see. I would have plucked out both your ey’en and put in two of tree” — at least I will believe it while the music plays.

(Tiend is tithe.)

More bogus numbers

John Schmitt, via Dean Baker. This seems of a piece with my previous Meg Whitman post.

Here we go:

Casey Mulligan Swings and Misses

University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan has a post today at the New York Times Economix blog where he seems to argue that the current push for statutory paid sick days in the United States is ignoring the role of economic incentives. According to Mulligan, workers in countries with generous paid sick day policies stay home because of “incentives, and not the flu”.

I don’t think Mulligan has been following the U.S. debate on paid sick days very closely. The U.S. debate is very serious about incentives. The current system — which does not require employers to provide paid sick days and leaves upwards of 50 million workers without paid sick days — gives strong incentives to workers to go to work sick, lowering productivity and potentially spreading illness.

Of course, offering paid sick days also gives workers incentives to take time off when they are not sick. But, there is nothing in Mulligan’s post that says where we should set the optimal level. He doesn’t even make a case that the most generous systems in Europe are too generous, just that they lead to more sickness absences in some cases. For all we know, after we factor in the cost of contagious diseases, the most generous European systems might still be too stingy.

To make his point about the effect of incentives, Mulligan features the following graph from a recent IMF paper:

MulliganSickDays.jpg

Mulligan, however, has made very selective use of the original IMF graph:

IMFsickdays.png

In the original, Denmark, Germany, and seven other countries with more generous statutory paid sick days policies all have lower sickness absence rates than the United States. A really interesting question is: how is it that these countries are able to provide both guaranteed paid sick days and lower sickness absence rates? (And why didn’t Mulligan include these countries in his graph?)