3:59 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Ads Run Amok: One of the most disturbing things I've seen on the net recently: Burger King's new marketing venture, subservientchicken.com.

 

10:33 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Unions and Democracy: Just before leaving for Spain, though, I started flipping through Will Hutton's book The State We're In. Hutton is fiercely critical of a number of Margaret Thatcher's reforms, which he argues had yet to produce sustainable benefits for the economy as a whole. (Of course, despite Hutton's dour economic forecast, the book hit the shelves just before the boom of the late 90's, one of Britain's most impressive macroeconomic performances in history. Note to self: never make verifiable predictions in print--and if you do, make sure those predictions can't be proven wrong until long after you're dead.)

I haven't yet had the chance to analyze Hutton's arguments in detail, but while reading I noticed the following paragraph:

Beside these severe economic and social costs must be ranked the loss of civil liberties and the qualification of democratic principles entailed in the Conservative governments' version of trade union reform. The right of a majority, after a secret ballot, to require acquiescence in agreed decisions, should be a sacrosanct democratic principle--but not for British trade unions. Here the government has enshrined a higher principle: the right of the individual to work or to reach an individual arrangement with his or her employer so that majority decisions need not bind them. The right of free association has been curtailed by laws outlawing secondary picketing and sympathetic action. Important freedoms and a long-respected conception of democracy have been sacrificed--but for what?

It was interesting to read these words at a time when mail delivery in Oxford had been interrupted for a full three weeks, due to an unofficial "wildcat" strike by local postal workers. I've never been very comfortable with strikes by public-sector unions--such as postal workers, say, or the British firefighters (!) who went on an extended strike last year. A strike at a private factor primarily affects the owner of the firm (as it loses orders to its competitors), and it can be considered just part of the rough-and-tumble process of labor negotiation. But public-sector unions usually operate in industries with a government monopoly, where there are no competitors to pick up the slack. (When teachers go on strike for a month, we can't send our kids off to private schools as easily as GM can pick another steel supplier.)

But Hutton inadvertently provides another argument against public-sector strikes--that they're fundamentally antidemocratic. The public and its elected representatives, through a democratic process, decided to establish a postal system, to create public schools, and to build a network of firehouses. It did so because a majority of citizens wanted services from their government (like communication, and education, and protection from fires). This same majority also selected representatives to oversee the management of these services, and to offer certain packages of wages and benefits to those who sought employment at public expense. Why, then, shouldn't public-sector employees feel bound by this democratic decision? Why shouldn't we "require acquiescence" in this agreed decision of the majority? A strike in a non-competitive, public-sector industry affects everyone, not just the workers in the local post office. So why should those whose paychecks are drawn on the public treasury have the right to reach an "individual arrangement," especially by using as a bargaining chip three weeks' worth of other citizens' mail?

Majoritarian decisions aren't always "democratic"--or, perhaps more precisely, they're not always appropriate. It's not always clear whether the majority ought to be making the decision, and if so who that relevant majority might be. The closed shop can be a triumph of democratic decision-making, or it can be a violation of the worker's right to free association; the prohibition on sympathy strikes can be a violation of unions' free association or a triumph of the democratic institutions that prohibited them. Which interpretation is correct will depend on what line we draw between public and private affairs; the old tension between freedom and equality rears its ugly head. And the best way to resolve this tension--to make "civil liberties" compatible with "democratic principles"--isn't nearly as obvious as Hutton suggests.

 

7:57 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Back from Spain: Just returned a few days ago from a wonderful week in Andalucia. Reflections from the trip may have to wait a few days, though, due to my recent discovery of some petty annoyances known as "Oxford final exams."

 

9:12 PM :: Stephen (contact)

No Posts for a Week: On vacation in Seville; will be back next week.

 

6:11 AM :: Stephen (contact)

John Grisham He Ain't: Nowadays, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il is primarily known for his reclusive nature, his pursuit of nuclear weapons, and his tyrannical rule of a famine-ridden gulag state. But those who know him well also know him as something of a film buff. In fact, in 2001, he published a book of criticism, On the Art of Cinema, which you can buy at Amazon.com. I haven't had the pleasure of reading it yet, but here's an excerpt from the preface:

The cinema is now one of the main objects on which efforts should be concentrated in order to conduct the revolution in art and literature. The cinema occupies an important place in the overall development of art and literature. As such it is a powerful ideological weapon for the revolution and construction. Therefore, concentrating efforts on the cinema, making breakthroughs and following up success in all areas of art and literature is the basic principle that we must adhere to in revolutionizing art and literature.

Unfortunately, On the Art of Cinema hasn't sold very well thus far, with a disappointing sales rank of #455,145. Kim's other critical work, Kim Jong Il on the Art of Opera: Talk to Creative Workers in the Field of Art and Literature September 4-6, 1974, ranks even lower at #789,855. And his real potboiler, Our Socialism Centered on the Masses Shall Not Perish, reached only a paltry #1,060,827.

What kind of showing is that for the absolute leader of a totalitarian state? Where are the mass purchases, the sycophantic reader reviews? Which faceless apparatchik has fallen asleep at the wheel? (I was tempted to buy a few copies, just to help the poor guy out, but decided that I could find better uses for my money than supporting the concentration camps.)

In a strange twist of fate, Kim's literary success has now been eclipsed by that of UCLA professor Eugene Volokh, whose Academic Legal Writing (which I purchased in the course of revising my thesis) now ranks at a healthy #2,118.

Which should just go to show you: in the fight between the friends and enemies of freedom, the bloggers will always win.


UPDATE: Tim Worstall writes in with his own experiences handling Kim Jong Il's prose...

 

5:46 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Feeling Our Pain: For us Americans in Europe, these aren't easy times. From this week's Onion:

Dollar Losing Value Against The Quarter

NEW YORK—After falling 6 percent in the past three weeks, the U.S. dollar hit a 208-year low against the U.S. quarter, which had been valued at exactly 0.25 dollars since its introduction in 1796. "The dollar continues to slide against most major currencies," Morgan Stanley analyst Richard Jemison said. "At the end of the day Tuesday, the quarter was trading at .267 yen, .203 euros, and US$0.28. But what we're really seeing here is not just a dollar weakened by a sluggish economy, but an exceptionally resilient quarter-dollar." Jemison was quick to point out that the dollar remains very strong against the nickel.

 

2:50 PM :: Stephen (contact)

Privacy, Shmivacy: Defenders of civil liberties have found another intrusive government program to worry about: looking for people who cheat on their taxes, and actually catching them. According to the AP:

State revenue agencies across the nation are hunting for tax evaders with new high-tech tools: computer programs that mine an increasing number of databases for clues on the finances of people and businesses.

...

In Massachusetts, for example, the state tax agency can scan a U.S. Customs and Border Protection database of people who paid duties on big-ticket items entering the country - so anyone who fails to pay the state the required 5-percent "use tax" gets flagged.

The state also has tried comparing motor-vehicle registration data with tax returns, looking for people who might be driving Rolls Royces or Jaguars but declaring only a small income, Revenue Commissioner Alan LeBovidge said.

Of course, an eminently sensible policy can't be without its detractors:

The new tools have reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in increased tax collections, officials say. But the government's growing sophistication at collecting and scrutinizing data about taxpayers is sounding alarms among privacy advocates.

Perhaps I'm an authoritarian at heart, but I just don't see this as an invasion of privacy. The system also allows officials to find tax cheats who stop paying taxes after they change addresses, or who receive professional licenses. To my mind, the greater outrage is that a government-licensed doctor or lawyer might get away with not filing a tax return. Most middle-income Americans have their taxes withheld, and never get the chance to cheat; why should we be so forgiving to the wealthier Americans who fail to pay their due? For "privacy advocates," however,

such methods can violate a fundamental privacy principle: data collected for one purpose shouldn't be used for another without a person's permission.

I don't get it. The government has legitimate access to my tax records, and to my vehicle registration data; putting two and two together is simply good police work. If the FBI were trying to indict Al Capone on tax evasion charges, would we be upset if they looked up the car he drives? It's also not as if any of this information is personally sensitive (like medical information or juvenile criminal records). Anyone who wants to find out about a member of the Missouri Bar can simply check the website; why shouldn't the Missouri Department of Revenue be entitled to do the same?

The worst thing about such Chicken-Little scares is that they distract attention from real privacy threats, like these:

WASHINGTON - New light-scanning technology borrowed from the slaughterhouse promises to help hospital workers, restaurant employees — one day, even kids — make sure that hand washing zaps some germs that can carry deadly illnesses.

A device the size of an electric hand dryer detects fecal contamination and pinpoints on a digital display where on a person's hands more scrubbing is needed.

eMerge Interactive Inc., a struggling technology company in Sebastian, Fla., is hoping to tweak light scanners it already sells to beef plants to detect the same kinds of nasty germs on humans.

...

Using a specific light wavelength, the scanners cause a fluorescence in even minuscule amounts of fecal contamination that could carry dangerous bacteria like E. coli; it shows up on a built-in display as a bright red spot on a person's dirty hand.

Can an Orwellian future be far behind? As usual, Gary Larson predicted it long ago:

 

8:13 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Rare Books: Daniel Drezner recently described an encounter in L.A., in which he asked a television actor for an autograph

on the only blank piece of paper I had -- the back cover to Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate....

So I now own the ultimate academic geek artifact -- a copy of The Blank Slate autographed by a Buffy the Vampire Slayer cast member.

His post reminded me how many years ago, under similarly inadvertent circumstances, I came to possess Earth's only copy of Madame Bovary autographed by folk singer Arlo Guthrie. He was playing Duluth, and a group of Camp Nebagamon staffers decided to bring their campers on a field trip. I had never heard of him before, but hey, he was giving autographs, and it was the only paper I had.

How much could I get for it on eBay? Doesn't matter; I'm not selling.


UPDATE: Actor Van Heflin, who played Charles Bovary in the 1949 movie version, was born on Dec. 13, 1910. "Alice's Restaurant," the famous hit by Arlo Guthrie, was released on Dec. 13, 1969. Coincidence? I think not.

UPDATE #2: The longest gap on the Nixon Watergate tapes was 18 1/2 minutes long. The 1969 recording of "Alice's Restaurant" was 18 1/2 minutes long. Coincidence? I think not. (As Arlo told us in Duluth, "Music can bring down governments!")

 

10:25 AM :: Stephen (contact)

Back in Town: A few days ago, I arrived back in Oxford after eleven days in Russia -- just about evenly split between St. Petersburg and Moscow. Though the trip had its ups and downs (I may post more on the downs later), I had a wonderful time. I can't boil down eleven days into a single blog post, but I came away with at least three lasting impressions:

• First, this is a country that has been misruled for a very, very long time. When we first arrived in St. Petersburg, there was a very obvious contrast between the beautiful Italian baroque architecture of Peter the Great and the vast and soulless concrete boxes erected under the Soviets. (We had a 15-minute walk to our metro stop, and 10 of them were spent passing a single apartment building.) Our hotel in Moscow, one of the largest in Europe, had 6,000 beds. It was hard not to feel repulsed by the megalomania of central planning -- the idea that everyone would live in the same kind of apartment, would eat in the same kind of office cafeteria, would wear the same clothes, and would hold the same fundamental beliefs -- and, most of all, that this system drawn up by all-powerful bureaucracies would work. It requires an incredible amount of arrogance to think that a relatively small number of fallible human beings, sitting in their GOSPLAN offices, can possibly be wise and well-informed enough to micromanage an entire society. This may be the judgment of hindsight, but I find it difficult to understand the doctrine that one way of life is best for everyone, and moreover that it involves substantial amounts of poured concrete. (But isn't this, one participant in the trip asked me -- apparently without irony -- exactly what the U.S. is doing in Iraq?)
  
  Of course, the problems with Russian society didn't start in 1917. It takes a certain kind of authoritarian regime to be able to declare the building of a new capital and to watch it become a great city in a single lifetime. Looking at the treasures assembled in the Hermitage, the Kremlin armory, and the palace of Catherine the Great at Tsarskoye Selo, it was clear that the days of empire had poured the resources of a continent into the hands of a small aristocracy. (Which seems to have happened all over again in the 1990s.) So there isn't much of a pre-Soviet tradition of good governance to draw on.
  
  What this means is that although there are many beautiful things and places in Russia, they seem to have survived despite, rather than because of, the terrors of the last century. Today's Russia, though perhaps better off than it was a few years ago, still faces a declining population and terrifying health statistics. (Whatever one's political views, a society in which 60 percent of pregnancies end in abortion is not one whose people have much hope for the future.)



• Second, Russia seems to have genuine difficulties in accepting its history. The Great Patriotic War is remembered everywhere, of course -- especially in St. Petersburg, a city which suffered in World War II as have few others. (How would the U.S. remember a conflict in which 20 million Americans had died? The Civil War was a minor skirmish in comparison.)
  
  But there seems to be nothing even approaching a consensus on the greater question, how to remember the 80-year experience of communism. The most common response seems to be a bizarre syncretism: the curtain at the main stage of the Bolshoi Theatre bears the imperial double-eagle on its top half, and the hammer-and-sickle on the bottom. The Kremlin still bears the red stars on its towers, and Lenin's tomb still stands proudly in Red Square -- across from the GUM department store, and yet other symbols of capitalism.
  
  
  
  More curiously, Stalin's headstone is still located just behind the tomb, along with those of several former leaders (but not Kruschev). In fact, the day we visited, Stalin had more flowers than anyone except Yuri Gagarin. It's hard to know what to think when faced with the tombstone of a man who's on the short list for Worst Human Being Ever. How should one regard a monument to someone responsible for the murder of tens of millions? It made me wonder what would have happened if Hitler had died in a jail cell rather than committing suicide, or if his ashes had not been scattered and lost. Would the Allies have allowed him a tombstone and a marked grave? Would we have allowed it to become a shrine, with sympathizers leaving flowers? Or would we have sought to erase him from memory -- would he have become a modern version of Tiberius Gracchus, whose body was thrown into the Tiber to prevent his followers from obtaining relics?
  
  (I hadn't know this before I went, but along with many prominent figures in the October Revolution rest the remains of Westerners such as John Reed and William "Big Bill" Haywood. Perhaps this is an example of American triumphalism, but I can think of few better ways than being buried in Red Square to place yourself on the wrong side of history.)
  
  A visit to the museum of the KGB (oh, sorry, it's "FSB" now) drove home the contradictions. The representative of the agency was as unreconstructed a communist as one can be and still feel unwavering support for President Vladimir Putin (himself an old KGB man). To this official, the ideal of socialism was still unblemished; it was only the personal flaws in Russia's previous leaders which had sent it into decline. Again, it was unclear how to feel in a museum commemorating past intelligence "successes," most of which had served to extend and deepen the power of a corrupt and oppressive regime. I knew kids in my elementary school who were the children of a defector; she had been pursued by the KGB throughout Europe and was convinced that they were still looking for her in the United States. While at the museum, only one member of our tour group, whose family was persecuted during the revolution (some managed to flee, others died in prison), had the temerity to ask about the KGB's less savory actions in the past. The answers were less than enlightening.
  
  The problem of confronting the past certainly isn't unique to Russia -- other countries, such as Germany and South Africa, may have even deeper problems. Without any consensus on the past, though, it's hard to know what Russians will be looking for in a future government. One of our guides in Moscow was convinced that Putin would become a dictator in the next 15 years -- not because of any specific policy, but because the schools and government press had begun to lay groundwork for a cult of personality. Putin had been a good son, an admirable student, a dutiful public servant; everything that schoolchildren had once been taught about Lenin. The idea of a nuclear-armed autocracy on Europe's border is, well, almost as scary as it was the last time -- and perhaps more so, given Russia's extreme weakness in non-military fields. Just as many people sought a scapegoat after the rise of Mao, I wonder whether, in a few years, we'll start debating "Who Lost Russia?"
  
  (Unrelated observation: two of my female friends here have repeatedly expressed the belief that Putin, in addition to controlling the world's largest stock of nuclear weapons, is an intensely attractive man. One even went so far as to obtain two framed pictures of him while in Russia, which are now displayed in her room just as prominently as pictures of her boyfriend.* Personally, I don't know what they see in him--but perhaps women often fall for guys with raw animal charisma, darling blue eyes, and increasingly authoritarian styles of governance...)



• Third, and on a much lighter note, I wish to take this opportunity to express my lasting friendship for the people of the Republic of Georgia, who have produced a cuisine deserving of worldwide fame. I'd never gone to a Georgian restaurant before, but having had spectacular meals at two of them ("Cheburychnya" by Vassilevskaya metro in St. Petersburg, and the "Restoran Dioskyuria" off Novy Arbat in Moscow), I'm hoping that I'll be able to find them back in the U.S. We also had a good experience at Caravan Sarai, an Uzbek restaurant in St. Petersburg, from the appetizers (Uzbek horse-meat sausages) to the desserts (memorably mistranslated on the English menu as "Eastern Sweetness"). I know that Georgia and Uzbekistan have more to worry about right now than their cuisine; but it's always fun to discover new aspects of cultures you barely knew existed. The world is a various and beautiful place.

CORRECTION: The pictures of Putin in my friend's room are not, in fact, displayed as prominently as those of her boyfriend. In fact, the photograph of Putin on her desk (wearing a white sweater and bearing a kindly expression) is further from her chair than the seven pictures of her boyfriend on the bulletin board. Moreover, the painted portrait of Putin in a suit, radiating power and authority, is on a small table apparently ill-positioned for viewing elsewhere in the room, while a remaining picture of her boyfriend is on her nighttable. I stand corrected.