Albrecht Dürer, Agnes Frey, 1494

Andrew Butterfield discusses this drawing in an article about Dürer in the New York Review of Books:

In the summer of 1494, soon after his engagement, Albrecht Dürer made a startlingly intimate drawing of his fiancée Agnes Frey. One might have expected a twenty-three-year-old to depict his betrothed as a source of love, or comfort or well-being, all the more since her substantial dowry would soon launch his independent career. Instead, Albrecht showed Agnes twisted up in a knot of anxious introversion. She looks withdrawn and preoccupied, and the circles under her heavy-lidded eyes may even make one think she has been crying.

In its frank portrayal of an informal moment of unguarded emotion, there had never been a drawing quite like this before. Typically portraiture was honorific and meant to represent the exemplary virtues of the person shown; Dürer instead often sought to capture the idiosyncratic and psychological characteristics of the people he portrayed. He was fascinated with the close scrutiny of dark and brooding emotion. This is especially evident in his self-portraits, many of which show him in states of melancholy, doubt, or disease.

(H/T: Morgan Meis, 3 Quarks Daily.)

Here are a few of Dürer’s self-portraits:

Albrecht Dürer, Portrait of the Artist Holding a Thistle, 1493

Dürer painted this self-portrait when he was 22, when he was living in Italy. He probably painted it to send back to his fiancée in Germany.

1. Ronald Mann at SCOTUSblog has a recap of the opinion in Bowman v. Monsanto, the patent case decided May 13, which affirmed the Federal Circuit decision and held that a farmer who purchased patented “Roundup Ready” seed from Monsanto in one year could not in subsequent years plant seeds from the harvest of the crops from the first batch of seed.

Says Mann: “The question in the case is whether a farmer who buys the seed can plant only the seed that he buys from Monsanto, or instead can also plant the produce of seeds purchased by Monsanto. If the farmer is right, he can produce many generations of Roundup-resistant soybean plants simply by buying one season’s worth of seeds. The Court agreed with Monsanto: the farmer can plant the first seeds, those he purchased. But he can’t plant newly grown seeds again and again for years to go into the future.”

And here’s a key portion from the Court’s opinion: “Were the matter otherwise, Monsanto’s patent would provide scant benefit. After inventing the Roundup Ready trait, Monsanto would, to be sure, receive its reward for the first seeds it sells. But in short order, other seed companies could reproduce the product and market it to growers, thus depriving Monsanto of its monopoly.”

2. “Indian generic giant Ranbaxy has been selling generic ‘drugs’ that didn’t actually work”: A large manufacturer of generic drugs has been behaving very, very badly. Megan McArdle links to a story by Katherine Eban (“Dirty medicine”) for Fortune and CNN Money:

On May 13, Ranbaxy pleaded guilty to seven federal criminal counts of selling adulterated drugs with intent to defraud, failing to report that its drugs didn’t meet specifications, and making intentionally false statements to the government. Ranbaxy agreed to pay $500 million in fines, forfeitures, and penalties — the most ever levied against a generic-drug company. (No current or former Ranbaxy executives were charged with crimes.)

McArdle offers comment:

Ranbaxy learned how to game this system, according to former employees. To hasten the pace of its applications, Ranbaxy sometimes skipped a crucial intermediate step. Instead of making three medium-size exhibit batches and testing those for bioequivalence and stability, as required, Ranbaxy tested earlier and much smaller research-and-development batches that were easier to control and less costly to make. In some FDA applications, it represented these as much larger exhibit batches and presented the data as proof. And then there was the ultimate shortcut: using brand-name drugs as stand-ins for its own in bioequivalence studies.

These deceptions greatly accelerated the pace of the company’s FDA applications. They were also a grave public-health breach. Once Ranbaxy got FDA approval, it leaped straight into making commercial-size batches without any meaningful dry runs. The test results on file with the FDA were meaningless, and the drugs Ranbaxy was actually selling on the U.S. market were an unknown quantity, having never been comprehensively tested before.

The worst abuses, however, were in emerging markets, where regulatory supervision was weak. But the article raises questions about how good our regulatory supervision is of these companies. It’s simply not possible to provide the kind of oversight that the FDA does to companies in the US.

3. Clark D. Asay, “Kirtsaeng and the First-Sale Doctrine’s Digital Problem”: “This Essay argues that the history and purpose of the first-sale doctrine provide good reasons to abandon the licensee/owner dichotomy as well as the formalistic approach to interpreting the doctrine’s applicability to digital transfers. Doing so, furthermore, is unlikely to undermine markets for copyrighted works, but instead will help preserve the appropriate balance between the rights of copyright holders and consumers that first-sale rights have historically helped maintain.”

4. What Not to Write to a Patent Office Examiner in a Response: Patently-O quotes from an Office Action Response from a clearly frustrated patent attorney. A taste: “Are you drunk? No, seriously…are you drinking scotch and whiskey with a side of crack cocaine while you ‘examine’ patent applications? (Heavy emphasis on the quotes.) Do you just mail merge rejection letters from your home? Is that what taxpayers are getting in exchange for your services? Have you even read the patent application? I’m curious. Because you either haven’t read the patent application or are… (I don’t want to say the ‘R’ word) ‘Special.’” It goes on from there.

1. Tyler Cowen reviews The Americans: “I am pleased to report it is one of the few TV series I like. It pretends to be about ‘two Soviet KGB officers posing as an American married couple in the suburbs of Washington D.C. in order to spy on the United States.’ But it’s actually about a) Russian mothers having to raise their children in the United States, b) what a marriage actually consists of (spoilers in that link), and c) to what are we loyal? It captures the 1980s uncannily well.”

The Americans is probably my favorite new series this year (and the only one I stuck with after a few episodes, to be honest). I previously noted a commentary on the series by Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy.

2. What hard-to-adapt novels should filmmakers attempt to adapt next? “Something is clearly changing, at least for adventurous auteurs, raising the question of whether any books still remain off-limits. The same daredevil spirit has informed many an apparently insane film or TV version over the past decade, which has seen adaptations of literary novels (Cloud Atlas, Life of Pi, Midnight’s Children, Tristram Shandy) and epic fantasy works (The Lord of the Rings, A Song of Ice and Fire, AKA A Game of Thrones) that would previously have been written off as impossible. Vast classic novels or sequences – A la recherche du temps perdu (on French TV), Parade’s End, Les Misérables – have all been ticked off. With adapters no longer inhibited or intimidated, works totalling over 1,000 pages are tamed by gleefully drastic slashing and/or exploiting the ampler air-time available in TV series. CGI technology means that magical happenings, supernatural beings, wild creatures or crowd scenes have ceased to be either avoided or introduced nervously. Taboos – against adapting short story collections, or first-person novels, or multi-stranded narratives – have been defied.”

3. Mad Men review by Hanna Rosin, “Don Draper turns into Christian Grey.” (I know, this is over a week old by now–but still worth posting, I think.)

4. “Game of Thrones: NFL Style.”

5. Why Twilight Sucks: A Comprehensive Analysis.

1. This past week, Matt Yglesias managed to start a conversation about the Star Trek franchise with this article in Slate. Yglesias offers characterizations and post-mortems (post-mortes?) of all five television series (the Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise); he discusses some of the movies, but mainly as a way of setting up the transition between the Original Series and TNG:

Granted, when you judge it purely as television, the Original Series is a bit weak. (There aren’t many 45-year-old television dramas that hold up well.) Continuity is a mess; the sets look cheap; the acting is hammy. The show was a commercial failure and died after three seasons. But it was resurrected in cinematic form, first with Star Trek: The Motion Picture—which was forgettable, really, but made enough money to spawn an excellent sequel and two solid follow-ups after that.

The films showed the world that bigger production budgets and better special effects could make a dramatic difference. The new-look Klingons, with real alien makeup instead of silly goatees and bronzer, were a huge step up. Star Trek II reprised the Original Series’ best villain, and the light-comedy time-travel caper Star Trek IV showed that the franchise’s signature political concerns could be updated for the 1980s. (Kirk and company voyage to the late 20th century to try to forestall a future disaster caused by the extinction of Earth’s whale population.) Having demonstrated to Paramount that there was a lucrative market for quality Trek content, the studio then began to work on the best and most successful Trek of all, Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Yglesias discusses some of the particular strengths and weaknesses of each series (e.g., the holodeck in TNG, an “entertainment device that manages to risk the ship’s destruction with surprising frequency and that proves a dangerous tool in the hands of lazy writers”). He also positions the various components of the Trek franchise within the evolution of television. For example, here he discusses Deep Space Nine and Voyager:

DS9 is the most narratively ambitious Trek of all; it even managed to pull off a good holodeck episode (“It’s Only a Paper Moon”). Voyager, on the other hand, was a deliberate and somewhat perverse effort to recapture the spirit of the (lest we forget) ultimately unsuccessful Original Series. Except this time, the characters were less interesting.

And both shows suffer for having been filmed during the awkward teenage years of television drama. Modern TV features a fairly sharp divide between shows structured around long plot arcs (Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones) and those built as a series of one-offs (CSI). But in the late ’90s, things were different. DS9, like Buffy and The X-Files, flits back and forth between a big-picture story and alien-of-the-week one-shots. This makes for disconcerting binge-watching. The sustained 10-episode narrative that concludes the series is the best run of Trek that’s ever been made. But it comes after years’ worth of television in which the grand clash between the Federation and the Dominion is regularly interrupted. Some of these one-offs—those set in the Mirror Universe especially—are fun. But others are dreadful (Sisko has to train his crew to beat a bunch of arrogant Vulcans at baseball) or simply bizarre (Sisko fights racism in the sci-fi industry of the 1950s).

Rather than build on the most promising elements of DS9’s narrative ambition, Voyager essentially retreats from them. The location in the Delta Quadrant allowed the writers to dream up brand-new alien races. Even better than that, the Borg—Trek fandom’s favorite rarely seen foe—lived in the Delta Quadrant and could be featured frequently. But the plotting is very much alien-of-the-week. Over the course of its seven-season run, the ship never feels like it’s actually making progress. By the penultimate episode, the crew is still stuck decades from home—then it’s rescued in the finale by a deus ex machina. That both those episodes are actually quite good only underscores the larger tragedy of the series: Thought through a bit better, it could have been excellent.

Finally, Yglesias notes throughout his article that all of the Trek series are pervaded with a certain optimism and, to be honest, a progressive political vision of the future. This is particularly significant when you consider the ascendancy of post-apocalyptic and dystopian stories in modern sci-fi, especially in film and television. Consider:

Trek has a very particular take on what it means to be human. Part of what it means, the franchise teaches us, is participating in an ongoing progressive project of building a utopian society. Even though the bulk of Trek comes from the ’90s, the franchise launched in the mid-’60s, and the now-anachronistic spirit of midcentury optimism has remained at the heart of the franchise throughout. It’s a big part of what makes Trek great.

…

Typically, Picard and the Enterprise-D face problems—Wesley’s been sentenced to death, Riker is held prisoner on a pre-warp planet, Troi’s mom is coming to visit, Tasha Yar is being pressed into a forced marriage—that could be easily solved by photon torpedoes or a commando squad, and the real dilemma is how to get out of the jam without resorting to violence.* We also see the practical operation of a post-scarcity socialist economy. Picard explains in Star Trek: First Contact that “money doesn’t exist in the 24th century,” when “the acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives.” Instead, “we work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.”

Yglesias, I gather, found this pervading theme of progressive optimism inspiring; I for one found it cloying and preachy. The first two seasons or so of TNG are especially bad in this regard; just about every episode includes a veiled or not-so-veiled critique of capitalism and 20th Century free market societies. After season 2, TNG appears to have toned down this particular theme, in my opinion, although I’m sure it remained (e.g., it survived to resurface in First Contact).

Anyway, on the whole there’s lots of good stuff in the Yglesias piece–lots of though-provoking stuff–and it’s worth reading in full. Steve Saideman (who is more concise than I and less prone to block quoting) offers some of his thoughts here.

As Prof. Saideman says, Yglesias’s points in the main article are “not terribly controversial.” Yglesias followed up his 3,400-word article with a list ranking the Trek movies and TV shows from best to worst, and this list is far more controversial. Prof. Saideman offers his critique here:

He has Next Generation > Deep Space Nine > Voyager > Original Series > Enterprise. Really? Voyager is better than Classic Trek? I dare anyone to name an episode of Voyager that they can remember by name or even by description. City on The Edge of Forever, Let that be Your Final Battlefield (a standard for my ethnic conflict classes), Naked Time, Trouble with Tribbles, Devil in the Dark, Amok Time, Omega Glory, and so on. Sure, there was heaps of cheese and some truly awful (Spock’s Brain), but many thoughtful, interesting, challenging episodes. What do I remember about Voyager? That it was damned annoying. Next Generation had better acting and effects than the Original Trek, but its length meant that it had uneven parts, like whenever the writers got lazy and had a holodeck adventure.

And Tyler Cowen also defends the Original Series:

I think he undervalues the first series. Characters and script were excellent in about sixty percent of the original episodes. It is also noteworthy that the original characters have entered popular culture for an enduring period of time and we are still making movies about them forty-five years later. It’s not absurd to think of someone saying “Beam me up, Scotty” fifty years from now. I don’t see Data or any other later character receiving the same treatment, nor do I think that any of the later installments would have, on their own, generated an entire franchise of installments, spin-offs, sequels, and the like…

Indeed. (I think “sixty percent” is a high estimate, but that’s a minor detail.)

Along with Prof. Saideman, I would rank ST IV (the one with the whales) above ST VI; after ST II (Khan), ST IV was the best of the movies (so far).

2. In his article, Yglesias also attempts to rationalize Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a post-money, post-scarcity, post-capitalist society:

Picard explains in Star Trek: First Contact that “money doesn’t exist in the 24th century,” when “the acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives.” Instead, “we work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.”

And it could hardly be otherwise. Consider the miraculous technology of the replicator—a machine that can seemingly create anything out of thin air, based on rudimentary raw materials plus energy. When computers and energy can substitute for productive human labor, either the energy supply will be controlled democratically for Federation-style liberal socialism, or else it will fall into the hands of some narrow clique and give us the fascistic authoritarianism of the Klingons, the Romulans, or the Cardassians. Under the circumstances, nothing resembling capitalism as we know it could survive. As Marx wrote in his Critique of the Gotha Program, the material prosperity made possible by ever-better technology is the necessary precursor to an economic system ruled by the principle, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” And that’s the principle the Federation lives by.

Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy criticizes this part of the Yglesias article:

I have a much more critical perspective than Yglesias on Star Trek’s mostly left-wing politics… I like Deep Space Nine better than the other series in part because it is more willing to question the Federation’s values, though it ultimately does still endorse them. I also disagree with Yglesias’ view that the economy of Star Trek is post-scarcity, thereby making socialism workable (and indeed the only feasible economic system). As I discuss here, many important goods and services are still limited in the Star Trek universe, including the energy sources that power starships, planetary real estate, a variety of personal services, and – most importantly – replicators. The replicator – the very technology that supposedly eliminates scarcity – is itself scarce; the Federation and its various rivals apparently cannot replicate a replicator.

Even if scarcity were more fully eliminated than in the Star Trek universe, I don’t think it follows that socialism is the only viable response, or that the knowledge and incentive problems that make socialism a menace in our world would suddenly disappear. So long as there are any important scarce goods at all, a government monopoly over them would still be a terrible danger, even if the government were democratic.

Somin has addressed this issue before, for example in this post.

On the whole, I would say that Star Trek (and especially the early seasons of TNG) include an expression of Roddenberry’s socialist dream, but the economics of this futuristic socialism are not often very well thought-out. As a general matter, Trek writers tended to mangle economics. (See, e.g., this post on the crazy and inconsistent prices in DS9, where a pair of pajamas or a cadet’s uniform might cost the equivalent of several months’ wages for an hourly worker.) This is a problem not unique to Star Trek. For example, the economics of the Harry Potter universe are not terribly consistent or convincing (fortunately, one can read those excellent novels without thinking about that aspect much at all). Nevertheless, Star Trek posits a socialist utopia as a given, without too much explanation of how it works or how it came into being. (One of the reasons that I like the reimagined Battlestar Galactica series is that it does seriously and thoughtfully explore economic issues, including problems of scarcity, the emergence of black markets, etc. But that is a topic for a different post.)

3. As I said above, Star Trek offers few details about how the post-scarcity, post-capitalist society depicted in TNG came about (although there are hints in First Contact and elsewhere). This Cracked.com article does look at the evidence that we do have, and the picture is pretty horrifying:

Roughly 90 percent of the time anyone in Star Trek mentions how wonderful the Federation is, they make some offhand reference to one of three major incidents in Star Trek canonical history: the Eugenics Wars, the Third World War, and the Post-Atomic Horror.

During this stunning trifecta of apocalyptic shame, every major city on Earth was destroyed, millions were killed in a nuclear war, and millions more, infected by radiation, were executed to prevent their damaged genes being passed on to future generations. We even get to see this period a couple times — Q, a recurring character on The Next Generation with godlike powers, recreates a trial from the Post-Atomic Horror on the bridge of the Enterprise, and it’s goddamn horrifying.

Star Trek implies that the human race needed to go through this dark era of near extinction in order to achieve the utopia that is the Federation. In an episode of Enterprise, one character (we’d specify which one, but let’s face it, nobody watched that show) says that after the Horror ended, it took only two generations to completely end poverty, disease, and war. Therefore, the only thing holding us back from a divine future is everything about contemporary society and culture. Our current way of life has to completely dissolve if we ever hope to zip around the galaxy in awesome spaceships with holographic sex chambers.

1. “Dear Mom: Please don’t write to foreign leaders without letting me know ahead of time”: Doug Mataconis has posted a letter that presidential historian Michael Beschloss posted on his Twitter feed the day after Mother’s Day. The letter is from President Kennedy, to his mother, dated November 1962, and concerns “a photograph of Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev that she had previously sent to the Soviet leader asking him to autograph it as well.” It does seem that JFK was a little nervous about the idea of his mother conducting her own diplomacy with the the leaders of other nuclear powers. Here’s the text of the letter:

Dear Mother:

I signed today the pictures from Krushchev.

Would you be sure to let me know in the future any contacts you have with heads of state, etc. concerning requests for pictures, signatures, etc. Requests of this nature are subject to interpretations and therefore I would like to have you clear them before they are sent.

Needless to say the picture is most interesting and will be highly regarded.

Love,

Jack

(I can totally see my mother doing something like this.) As Doug Mataconis points out, “Keep in mind that Kennedy sent this letter mere days after the Cuban Missile Crisis had ended.” (H/T: Anderson, who aptly notes, “Moms will be moms.”)

2. Investing in Women: Chris Blattman has a post discussing recent studies of female entrepreneurship in the developing world:

There is a lot of talk about “investing in poor women”. They will grow businesses, get richer, be empowered, and invest in children. So give them a cow or a grant or a microloan.

It’s been a very effective marketing message for aid agencies, but it’s not clear it’s true. …

This article talks about how established female entrepreneurs don’t have the same returns to cash as men. This one discusses the weak effects of microloans on business growth. This book on how conditional cash transfers do many good things, but starting female enterprises and empowering women is not among them. There’s some evidence giving poor women cows helps, but a host of similar trials (not quite out) are suggesting more tepid results.

Before you get upset or pessimistic, read on.

He goes on to provide more nuance and to note some possible problems with the research projects linked to above:

These programs don’t necessarily do the simplest thing for the most needy people: find very poor women who don’t already have a business, give them cash, and let them decide what they want to do themselves. Get rid of the conditions and the cows and the ridiculous microloan interest rates and let them do their thing.

Now things start looking up. That’s what I and several coauthors did with AVSI Uganda, working with some of the poorest women in the world. Here is the policy report and brief.

The short story: in 18 months, they become petty traders, incomes double, with a big boost to savings and poverty reduction. (Did I mention that income doubles?)

…

Why did this intervention build new female businesses where others have seen tepid results? Hard to say. It’s a different country than the others, and women in northern Uganda may be further behind, and more constrained. So perhaps we should expect more potent results. The more coiled the spring, the bigger the bounce on release.

My hunch, though, is that it mattered that these women weren’t already entrepreneurs, that they were given cash, and that they weren’t confined to cows or tailoring training or other things we think are good for them.

Do read the whole thing.

Woman with her cow, Sirajganj, Rajshahi, Bangladesh. Note that the cow lacks a cowbell. Needs more cowbell. And maybe a different form of aid.

3. Prof. “Thoreau” talks to an undergrad student who is planning to get a PhD in mathematics (emphasis added):

He is thinking about pure math, is hoping to get a tenure-track faculty job at a school that’s in a nice place to live, and wants to go directly into that job after grad school rather than doing a postdoc, visiting faculty gig, adjunct gig, etc.

Please note that this student is not going to be studying math at Princeton.

I gave him a few facts of life, particularly concerning the number of people who apply for jobs teaching pure math and the number of people who wind up in adjunct jobs because they were wedded to staying in academia. A person with a mindset more progressive than mine (which is to say, any person) tried to moderate the message, but we converged on the advice that he do applied math, attend as many industry-oriented and networking events as possible in grad school, and give serious thought to getting a job in the private sector after getting an MS. That last part may or may not be the right course of action, but taking a careful look at the job market halfway through grad school would at least be a good thing to do while planning out one’s research.

All of this makes me a very bad person. I gave a 22 year-old advice that would give him more options for his career, rather than advice that serves the interests of The Pipeline.

Also check out this post by Noah Smith, “If you get a PhD, get an economics PhD.”

4. “Private Schools in Developing Countries”: Alex Tabarrok points to a piece by Tina Rosenberg: “In the United States, private school is generally a privilege of the rich. But in poorer nations, particularly in Africa and South Asia, families of all social classes send their children to private school…”

5. The highest paid public employee in your state is probably a football coach or basketball coach at a public university. (Map at the link.)

Steve Saideman thinks this is a bad state of affairs, to put it mildly:

This is just awful on a stick. Especially since bigtime college sports do not make money for the rest of the university. It may sometimes pay for the big time college sports and sometimes it may pay for the smaller sports, but it does not lead to universities having more money for research and teaching and whatever else. And, of course, the money does not really go to the student athletes as we well know.

So, if I had the power to enact one incredibly anti-market law in the US, aside from perhaps limiting the pay that execs get, it might be this: allow universities to collude to manage the salaries of coaches. Perhaps set their wages to be no more than match the highest prof’s salary. Allow them to still make money on merch and the lame tv/radio shows, but limit how much money comes out of the universities’ revenues (athletic and otherwise) to pay these folks. There are limited spots in the NBA and NFL for coaches so you will get mighty fine coaches on less salary.

Ilya Somin provides a note of mitigation:

As Fischer-Baum notes, this state of affairs is not quite as egregious as it may at first seem. Many of these Division I football and basketball programs generate a lot of revenue for their state universities, and the coaches are often paid out of that revenue rather than taxpayer funds. I would also add that NCAA coaches are among the very few state employees who face a serious risk of being fired for poor performance. Most Division I football and basketball coaches get fired within a few years of starting a new job.

On the other hand, as Fischer-Baum also points out, many of the coaches are paid far more than is justified by their marginal contribution to their universities’ revenue streams, even as the NCAA – supported by state and federal governments – continues to operate a cartel that tries to prevent all financial compensation for the players.

And says Tyler Cowen: “what have Montana, Alaska, and Delaware done wrong? (No wonder those states have so few people!) And New Hampshire is beyond the pale.”

Image Credits: (1) JFK Library via Michael Beschloss.
(2) Cow at a wedding, Orchha, Madhya Pradesh, India. photo by Marla Showfer ["california cowgirl1"], October 2009, and used under a CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license. Source: Flickr.
(3) Woman with her cow, Sirajganj, Rajshahi, Bangladesh. Photo from the WorldFish Center, November 2011, and used under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license. Source: Flickr.

1. “Catholic soldier says her Muslim-sounding name made her a target for harassment in US Army”: the Washington Post has the story of a Farsi linguist: “Sgt. 1st Class Naida Hosan is not a Muslim — she’s a Catholic. But her name sounded Islamic to fellow U.S. soldiers in Iraq, and they would taunt her, calling her ‘Sgt. Hussein’ and asking what God she prayed to. So before deploying to Afghanistan last year for her second war tour, she legally changed her name — to Naida Christian Nova. This did not solve her problems. … Nova complained to her superiors about constant anti-Muslim slurs and jokes. She says they responded with a series of reprisals intended to drive her out of the Army… . A Farsi linguist who works in military intelligence, Nova’s multicultural background exemplifies the kind of soldier Army recruiters prize — U.S. citizens with ethnic ties to a part of the world many Americans can’t find on a map. Nova’s father, Roy Hosein, was born into a Muslim family on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, where his parents had emigrated from India. He converted to Christianity after meeting Nova’s mother, a Catholic from the Philippines, and became a U.S. citizen shortly after his daughter was born in New York.” (H/T: Rodger Payne.)

2. Rod Dreher points to an essay by Andrew Doran in The American Conservative about how various US policies in Middle East have had the effect of enabling and aggravating the persecution or harassment of native Christian populations in the region. (H/T: Professor Bainbridge.) This is a bipartisan failure, implicating the Bush and Obama administrations. Trouble began after the US invasion in 2003:

Amid the chaos and sectarian violence that followed, Iraq’s Christians suffered severe persecution. Neither the military nor the State Department took action to protect them. In October 2003, human rights expert Nina Shea noted that religious freedom and a pluralistic Iraq were not high priorities for the administration, concluding that its “diffidence on religious freedom suggests Washington’s relative indifference to this basic human right.”

Over the following decade, terrorists especially targeted Christian clergy, including Paulos Rahho, the Chaldean Catholic Archbishop of Mosul.

During this campaign of systematic violence, the U.S. military provided no protection to the already vulnerable Christian community. In some instances, the clergy went to local American military units to beg to for protection. None was given. As Shea noted two weeks later, the administration and the State Department—whose record on Christian minorities and religious freedom leaves much to be desired—still refused to “acknowledge that the Christians and other defenseless minorities are persecuted for reasons of religion.”

…

Rosie Malek-Yonan, an Assyrian Christian who testified before Congress, would call the Bush administration a “silent accomplice” to “incipient genocide.” Anglican Canon Andrew White of Baghdad’s Ecumenical Congregation captured the reality with blunt precision: “All of my leadership were taken and killed—all dead.”

The denialism by the American executive branch also has had consequences for Iraqi Christians who seek asylum in the United States (emphasis added):

Those Iraqi Christians who fled to America would fare little better in seeking asylum. Many Chaldeans and Assyrians were detained, until their cases were heard, in what an attorney familiar with Chaldean-asylum cases describes as “prisons,” adding that she “never worked on a case where a Chaldean was granted asylum, but I heard that it happened.” Throughout these deportation proceedings, the administration and the State Department steadfastly refused to recognize the conditions–which the U.S. had helped to bring about–as “persecution.” In consequence, most were deported.

This is depressing stuff. It would be embarrassing for the American government to admit that the new Arab democracy it helped establish in Iraq had made life worse for Iraq’s religious minorities. As noted previously, the fall of Mubarak’s authoritarian regime in Egypt has exposed that country’s Christian minority to persecution from a segment of their Muslim neighbors. It is small wonder that Syria’s Christians, on the whole, have continued to back Assad during the Syrian Civil War.

On the general subject of Syria, Marc Lynch has an article, “How Syria Ruined the Arab Spring.” Writes Lynch: “the Syrian nightmare has destroyed the spirit of fun, hope, and positive change of the early Arab uprisings. The promise of the Arab Spring has given way to Syria’s highly visible and protracted violence, divisive identity politics, focus on international intervention, crushing of expectations, fragmentation of the media landscape, state failure, and strategic proxy warfare.”

Dan Drezner has a response to Lynch’s article, and so does Kellie Strøm. Writes Strøm:

In thinking of what is likely, we shouldn’t forget how unlikely, or at least unusual, the events of 2011 were. It would be wrong to think of cascading revolutions as a new normal that was interrupted by an abnormal war in Syria. It’s easier to point to regional precedents for Syria’s war than precedents for 2011’s multiplicity of revolutions.

The revolutions were the exception, and while the post-revolutionary normal will hopefully be better than the pre-revolutionary normal, it is to be expected that it will in a fundamental respect resemble it more than it will resemble the revolutionary period, namely that after the revolutions daily politics will mostly be the business of an elite of practised politicians and not the populace. Most people don’t want to spend their lives on political struggle. They will only take part in exceptional circumstances, and if they do take part, most hope to finish their part as soon as possible…

The common failure of foresight pre-2011 was in not appreciating the vulnerability of long-established regimes to disruption by loosely organised popular movements. Nonetheless, common to all the 2011 Arab revolutions has been the further lesson that established well-organised and disciplined political groups are still more effective over the long term than less experienced loosely organised political groups. None of this is new, but we get to learn the old lessons again.

3. International Relations scholar Kenneth Waltz passed away earlier this week. Dan Nexon at the Duck of Minerva has a nice obituary, which includes this: “Waltz was a giant in the field. His two most important works – Man, The State, and War and Theory of International Politics – provided the framework within, and against, international-relations scholars have argued for much of the post-WWII period.”

Robert Farley, Michael C. Desch, and Rajesh Rajagopalan all have tributes to Waltz. (Hat tip to Dan Nexon for those last three links.) Stephen Walt has a touching tribute to Waltz as a teacher (all italics in original):

The first time I laid eyes on Ken was the orientation meeting for new grad students at Berkeley in 1977. Ken was director of graduate studies that year and had to give the welcoming speech. I don’t remember most of what he said, except that he emphasized that grad school took too damn long and that we should all plan on finishing in four years … or at most five. His message was simple: “Get your coursework done, write your MA paper, pass your qualifying exams … then write the thesis … four years! Why wait?” The average at Berkeley in those days was more like seven or eight years, so he was raising the bar from the very start.

I also remember my first day in Poli Sci 223, his graduate seminar in IR theory. I was already convinced that everyone else in the room knew more than I did, and Ken began by setting out his basic ideas about the field and about theory. At one point he made some critical remarks about two professors I had studied with as an undergraduate — nothing overly disparaging, just some critical comments on their conception of theory — which immediately made me think that not only did I know less than every one else in the room, everything I had learned up till then was wrong. The real lesson, however, was that grad school was not about learning what other people thought, it was about learning to think for yourself. And Ken gave us the freedom to do that. He never tried to force his students to agree with his views or to write books and articles designed to reinforce his own work or burnish his own reputation.

LFC has some reflections at his blog, including a few paragraphs on Waltz’s two major books. Steve Saideman also discusses those two books in this post:

He produced two of the most important books in the business. One of the ways you can tell someone was truly terrific is how the ideas seem so much like common sense after the person wrote them but not so much before. Man, The State, and War was a simple book that made a simple point–that we can look at different levels of analysis and see very different causes of war. He gamed the book, of course, favoring the third level of analysis–the systemic level–setting the stage for the second book. MSW was and still remains assigned in heaps of intro to IR classes, as it is quite readable, refers to heaps of political theory that students read for other reasons in other classes, and just gets one primed to think about IR.

The second book, Theory of International Politics, shaped the field ever since. It is still relevant more than thirty years later, casting a huge shadow on all subsequent IR theory. I think only Wendt’s Social Theory has a similar level of ambition and impact. Keohane and Nye’s Power and Interdependence is almost as influential but not nearly as ambitious in terms of making us think differently about the world.

I realized in grad school when I did a supplementary reading course that Waltz was not creating stuff out of thin air but building on John Herz and others. Still, Waltz’s TIP is simply THE book that IR scholars must read if they want to be IR scholars. I can think of many over-rated books that one can skip or just read the article version. But you have to read TIP or read most of it as it appears in Neo-Realism and Its Critics.

Prof. Saideman also includes this tid-bit: “I had dinner with Ken Waltz when he visited Montreal for a talk at Concordia (I think). All I remember was that he was very kind and very engaged. If I can be half as engaged at 80+, I will be most happy.”

Kenneth N. Waltz, 1924-2013. RIP.

4. Chris Blattman: “Dani Rodrik on seeing like an economist.”

5. “UN urges people to eat insects to fight world hunger”: “Eating more insects could help fight world hunger, according to a new UN report. The report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization says that eating insects could help boost nutrition and reduce pollution. It notes than over 2 billion people worldwide already supplement their diet with insects. However it admits that ‘consumer disgust’ remains a large barrier in many Western countries. … Most edible insects are gathered in forests and serve niche markets, the report states. It calls for improved regulation and production for using insects as feed.” Yeah. Good luck with that. (Via Anderson.)

The Colbert Report had a segment about this story on Wednesday.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been getting some positive notice in the English-language blogosphere. Abe has been in office since last December. In that time, his government has purusued a number of policies to roust the Japanese economy out of the doldrums; measures include monetary stimulus and the reversal of a tax hike implemented by the previous administration. Abe fired the president of the Bank of Japan and replaced him with a president who is comitted to printing money and buying bonds.

Six months into Abe’s tenure, Japan’s stock market index is up more than 36%. The yen has fallen about 12% since the beginning of 2013, which makes it easier for Japanese companies to export products to overseas markets and to compete with other Asian exporters like South Korea, China, and Taiwan.

Matt Yglesias has an article on the seeming success of “Abenomics,” which Yglesias characterizes as a “posture of bold, persistent experimentation.” (H/T: Robert E. Kelly.) Says Yglesias:

What’s the secret to its success? Mostly determination. Japan was marooned in a sea of macroeconomic despair. Short-term interest rates were at zero, the dread lower bound. But years of slow growth and failed fiscal stimulus programs had also saddled the country with the highest debt-to-GDP ratio on the planet. Conventional monetary policy was out of ammo, and running an even larger budget deficit with so much debt already on the books seemed insane. Abe decided, essentially, that when the macroeconomy gives you lemons, you make lemonade.

…

When Abenomics enthusiasm began to hit the economic blogosphere months ago, many longtime Japan watchers urged caution. Abe, they warned, was little more than a crude nationalist interested in using short-term stimulus to hide the need for real reforms. And a crude nationalist he may well be. Massive, expectations-jarring stimulus isn’t the kind of thing that countries undertake lightly. One plausible account of why the Japanese elite were finally spurred to action was alarm at the extent to which China was overtaking Japan. A firm nationalist perspective and a deeper commitment to foreign policy issues than economic ones may be exactly what it took for Abe to roust Japanese leaders out of their complacency.

Another frequent critique of Abenomics is that short-term thinking merely distracts from the need for deeper structural reform. But this is a false choice, whether in Japan or Italy or the United States. Governments can walk and chew gum at the same time. And in early April, Abe’s government announced a major overhaul of the electrical power sector in Japan. In many ways, a time of stimulus is an ideal moment to pursue reforms. The risk of all this yen-printing is that you’ll break the back of deflation only to immiserate middle-class Japan with rising consumer prices and stagnant wages. Things like reforms to bring more competition and lower prices to the electricity market become the best cure for the downsides of stimulative policy. …

At A Fistful of Euros, Edward Hugh also has some thoughts on Abenomics.

Sticking with Japan, Toru Hashimoto, Mayor of Osaka and a leader of the Japan Restoration Party, defended the Imperial Japanese Army’s practice of keeping “comfort women” (read: coerced sex slaves) for the troops; he called the comfort women “necessary” because they gave Japanese soldiers a chance “to rest.” Wow. (This is similar to the times when some retrograde political figure or fringe pundit in the US says “on the whole, slavery wasn’t so bad” or “on balance, the slaves benefited from slavery in the long term“; a key difference is that there are no more pre-Civil War American slaves still living, while many of the comfort women from WWII are still very much alive.)

A tip of the hat for this story goes to Nob Akimoto at the League, who describes Hashimoto’s statement as“one of the most morally repugnant and repulsive things said by a politician in recent memory.” Hard to argue with that.

At the Duck of Minerva, Robert Kelly has an excellent post that masterfully builds to a rhetorical crescendo (emphasis added):

One of the traditional responsibilities of sane conservative parties is to write-out of respectability and legitimacy the scary, nut-job right-wing fringe. There can’t be a ‘no-enemies-on-the-right’ strategy, or you wind up with anti-Semites, racists, and black-helicopter guys grabbing all the media attention and delegitimizing wider conservative goals. In the US, Bill Buckley explicitly intended the National Review to screen out the John Birch Society and the American Mercury. In Germany, the CDU/CSU keeps the nationalist/neo-Nazi fringe at bay. (I worked for both GOP and CSU legislators in the past, so I’ve actually seen this in action. …

…

If you’ve ever read this blog before, you know I try to avoid the details of the Korea-Japan tussle. It gets so emotional so fast. Like most Americans, I want Japan and Korea to reconcile so they can work together on the larger, more important issues of North Korea and China. …

Since Abe came into office, I have been defending him in Korea, which is fairly thankless and annoying to lots of people here. He’s made regrettable and obnoxious noises about revising the Kono Declaration. His cabinet is filled with righties, some of them genuinely unnerving. Catering to domestic right-wing attitudes on the war isn’t really what his PM-ship should be about anyway, but my Japanese colleagues say it’s all just cosmetic or needed baggage to push through necessary economic changes. …

Hence, I defended the Abe government early on in Korean media. That didn’t win me any friends here, but I thought it necessary to give him a chance. …

But the comfort women denialism of the last few days is just too much. Jesus Christ. Do we really have to go through why sexual slavery is god-awful and should be apologized for? … This is a real WTF moment after months of creepy talk from the corners of the Abe coalition. This endless re-writing of the Pacific War in Japan really needs to stop. Abe needs to say something. The respectable right in Japan needs to contain the revanchists, as it does in Germany.

Please do read the whole thing.

1. Jessica Minier Mabe: What Hollywood Doesn’t Get About Jane Eyre.

2. Steve Saideman has some more thoughts on Game of Thrones and IR theory. (spoilers at the link)

3. Scott Eric Kaufman at Lawyers, Guns & Money has a post about the May 5 episode of Mad Men, with an amusing summary. (spoilers at the link) (mildly NSFW)

4. Katie Renee: the work romance is the most overrated romance, but it plays an outsized role in television drama. (She makes reference to a couple of PBS Masterpiece series, including Mr. Selfridge and Downton Abbey.)

5. Harry Brighouse: when is copying not plagiarism?

1. Henry Farrell has a somewhat depressing piece in Aeon about “post-democratic government” in Europe, with a special focus on recent developments in Italy. See also his follow-up post here.

On that same general topic, see this post at A Fistful of Euros.

2. Tyler Cowen points to a paper that looks at this question: does less income mean less representation? “We show: (i) The opinions of high- and low-income voters are highly correlated; the legislator’s vote often reflects the desire of both. (ii) What differences in representation by income exist vary by legislator party. Republicans more often vote the will of their higher income over their lower income constituents; Democratic legislators do the reverse. (iii) Differences in representation by income are largely explained by the correlation between constituent income and party affiliation.” The authors are Eric Brunner, Stephen L. Ross, and Ebonya Washington.

3. Megan McArdle: Why is Amazon Supporting an Internet Sales Tax? “Amazon’s competitive advantage no longer derives from its tax-free status. Amazon is the cost leader on most products even before you add in sales tax. They’re a marketplace killer because their giant warehouses are vastly more efficient than even a big box store.” Also: “The jewelers and other small retailers who wrote to me complaining that they couldn’t compete unless Amazon was forced to charge sales tax are going to be sorely disappionted; they’ll never be cost competitive with Amazon no matter what they do. The internet sales tax isn’t going to level the playing field between Amazon and local retailers. It’s just going to move Amazon closer to the end zone.”

4. One used to hear that a Confucian cultural milieu was an impediment to democracy. The experience of democratic governments in Taiwan and South Korea over the past 30 years or so has done some damage to that theory. Now, apparently, Daniel Altman is predicting that China’s Confucian cultural traits will inhibit that country’s ability to catch up with the West in terms of GDP and such. Noah Smith has a pretty good takedown of Altman’s essay. Smith looks in particular at Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, comparing them to “countries of similar population sizes and resource endowments,” such as Germany and France. “As you can see, Confucianism has not stopped these countries from rivaling Western ones in wealth. Taiwan, in particular, is populated by people of the exact same cultural heritage as mainland China, and yet has managed to overtake both the UK and France in GDP. Singapore, a city-state populated mostly by Chinese people, is even richer, rivaling the small countries of North Europe.”

Oh, and here is a conversation with Salman Rushdie about Chinese censorship.

1. Alex Tabarrok has a post about apple diversity in North America (“Apple Diversity has Grown”), which points to a 2012 paper by Paul Heald and Susannah Chapman, “Veggie Tales: Pernicious Myths About Patents, Innovation, and Crop Diversity in the Twentieth Century” (pdf). An excerpt:

Seventy-five percent of the apples we identified in 1900 and 1905 nurserymen’s catalogs were available in the same kind of catalogs inventoried in the Fruit, Berry, and Nut Inventory for 2000. The news is even better regarding apples from the 1800s identified by W.H. Ragan in Nomenclature of the Apple. Of the apple varieties offered by commercial nursery catalogs in 2000, 435 were listed by Ragan. In addition, the Fruit, Berry, and Nut Inventory for 2000 also describes as ‘old-timer’ or ‘heirloom’ 44 additional varieties not listed by Ragan. An additional 102 different Ragan varieties are available in the USDA orchard facility in Geneva, New York, where the public can obtain grafting scions for free. Since our upper estimate of the total number of commercially available varieties in 1905 is only 420, it seems quite clear that more historic varieties (approximately 581) are commercially available now than a hundred years ago.

(2012 Univ. of Ill. L. Rev. 1071) (citations omitted). In his post, Prof. Tabarrok goes on to make some points about the difference between geographic diversity and consumption diversity (or option availability), and about how trade can diminish absolute product diversity but still enhance overall welfare.

2. Janai S. Nelson, “The First amendment, Equal Protection and Felon Disenfranchisement: A New Viewpoint”: “felon disenfranchisement is…a legislative judgment as to which citizen‘s ideas are worthy of inclusion in the electorate. Relying on a series of cases involving state interests in protecting the ballot and promoting its intelligent use, this Article demonstrates that felon disenfranchisement is open to attack under the Supreme Court‘s fundamental rights jurisprudence when it is motivated by a desire to limit political expression based on its perceived content; in other words, when felon disenfranchisement is motivated by viewpoint discrimination.” I’m skeptical, but it’s an argument worth engaging. H/T to Rick Hasen at Election Law Blog. See also this post: “Prison-Based Gerrymandering.”

3. Are kissing cousins bad for democracy? “The data suggest that where consanguineous kinship networks are numerically predominant and have been made to share a common statehood, democracy is unlikely to develop. Possible explanations for these findings include the idea that restricted gene flow arising from consanguineous marriage facilitates a rigid collectivism that is inimical to individualism and the recognition of individual rights, which are key elements of the democratic ethos. Furthermore, high levels of within-group genetic similarity may discourage cooperation between different large-scale kin groupings sharing the same nation, inhibiting democracy. Finally, genetic similarity stemming from consanguinity may encourage resource predation by members of socially elite kinship networks as an inclusive fitness enhancing behavior.” The authors are Michael Woodley and Edward Bell. H/T to Chris Blattman. See also this post by Joshua Keating at Foreign Policy (which includes a Game of Thrones tie-in). (As Keating notes, Iceland is a bit of an exception, or perhaps a piece of evidence against Woodley and Bell’s thesis.)

4. “China’s Development Finance to Africa: A Media-Based Approach to Data Collection”: “China’s presence in Africa is, beyond dispute, large in both trade and what can be called official finance to Africa. But how large, exactly? A new database from the College of William and Mary brings additional resources to help answer the question. AidData’s Chinese Official Finance to Africa Dataset, Version 1.0 compiles media reports on 1,673 Chinese-backed projects across 51 African countries from 2000 to 2011 and offers a new tool set for researchers, policymakers, journalists, and civil-society organizations working to understand China’s growing role in Africa.” The authors are Austin Strange, Bradley C. Parks, Michael J. Tierney, Andreas Fuchs, Axel Dreher, and Vijaya Ramachandran. H/T: Erik Voeten at The Monkey Cage.

Oh, and by the way, China is apparently building a 1,400-seat opera house in Algeria. As a “symbol of Chinese-Algerian friendship.” A $40 million symbol. H/T: Marginal Revolution.

5. “An Equilibrium Model of the African HIV/AIDS Epidemic”: “Eleven percent of the Malawian population is HIV infected. Eighteen percent of sexual encounters are casual. A condom is used one quarter of the time. A choice-theoretic general equilibrium search model is constructed to analyze the Malawian epidemic. In the developed framework, people select between different sexual practices while knowing the inherent risk. The analysis suggests that the efficacy of public policy depends upon the induced behavioral changes and general equilibrium effects that are typically absent in epidemiological studies and small-scale field experiments. For some interventions (some forms of promoting condoms or marriage), the quantitative exercise suggests that these effects may increase HIV prevalence, while for others (such as male circumcision or increased incomes) they strengthen the effectiveness of the intervention.” The authors are Jeremy Greenwood, Philipp Kircher, Cezar Santos, and Michèle Tertilt. H/T: Chris Blattman.

Image Credit: Photo by ngader, September 2006, and used under a Creative Commons CC BY 2.0 license. Source: Flickr.