Daily Archives: June 11, 2009

Schadenfreude: the new black

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At lunch in College today we had an interesting discussion with a visiting Iranian journalist about the hypocrisy of Western countries trying to deny to some countries (e.g. Iran) the right to developments that the Western democracies take for granted for themselves. And then I came home and found this riveting piece by Joseph Stiglitz. One passage in particular caught my eye:

Among critics of American-style capitalism in the Third World, the way that America has responded to the current economic crisis has been the last straw. During the East Asia crisis, just a decade ago, America and the I.M.F. demanded that the affected countries cut their deficits by cutting back expenditures—even if, as in Thailand, this contributed to a resurgence of the aids epidemic, or even if, as in Indonesia, this meant curtailing food subsidies for the starving. America and the I.M.F. forced countries to raise interest rates, in some cases to more than 50 percent. They lectured Indonesia about being tough on its banks—and demanded that the government not bail them out. What a terrible precedent this would set, they said, and what a terrible intervention in the Swiss-clock mechanisms of the free market.

The contrast between the handling of the East Asia crisis and the American crisis is stark and has not gone unnoticed. To pull America out of the hole, we are now witnessing massive increases in spending and massive deficits, even as interest rates have been brought down to zero. Banks are being bailed out right and left. Some of the same officials in Washington who dealt with the East Asia crisis are now managing the response to the American crisis. Why, people in the Third World ask, is the United States administering different medicine to itself?

Many in the developing world still smart from the hectoring they received for so many years: they should adopt American institutions, follow our policies, engage in deregulation, open up their markets to American banks so they could learn “good” banking practices, and (not coincidentally) sell their firms and banks to Americans, especially at fire-sale prices during crises. Yes, Washington said, it will be painful, but in the end you will be better for it. America sent its Treasury secretaries (from both parties) around the planet to spread the word. In the eyes of many throughout the developing world, the revolving door, which allows American financial leaders to move seamlessly from Wall Street to Washington and back to Wall Street, gave them even more credibility; these men seemed to combine the power of money and the power of politics. American financial leaders were correct in believing that what was good for America or the world was good for financial markets, but they were incorrect in thinking the converse, that what was good for Wall Street was good for America and the world…

This kind of double-thinking hypocrisy pervades all areas of our public life now. Think of Tory MPs claiming for moats and duck houses while taking a stern line on public-sector pay increases. A particularly vivid example is provided by a prominent Irish banker who was eventually shown to be ‘warehousing’ huge (€80 million plus) loans extended to him by the bank of which he was CEO and (later) Chairman. And then some enterprising journalist found a recording of a radio interview this guy had given a few months before being exposed, in which he sternly talked about the need for working people to accept the need to live within their incomes. The whole system stinks.

There’s a nice cartoon accompanying the Stiglitz article. It lists the Four Horsemen of the financial apocalypse: mendacity, stupidity, arrogance and greed.

Huffington, puffington

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Lovely acerbic piece in The New Republic about the Huffpost’s proprietor. Sample:

Arianna Stassinopoulos is now Arianna Huffington, and she is best known as the proprietor of The Huffington Post, and as a personification of the hyperactive up-to-the-nanosecond news-and-opinion universe of the web. Her fame now approaches her immodest ambitions. And more than Huffington’s name has changed since she wrote those early premonitory words. She is now a steely–“bleeding heart” somehow does not fit–liberal, rather than a politically incorrect conservative. She has been, as Americans like to say, on a journey. Her historical timing has always been exquisite. If she is herself some sort of institution, she is an exceedingly adaptable one. (Click here for a slideshow that tracks Huffington’s many public makeovers.)

Now comes her twelfth book, lyrically entitled Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe (And What You Need To Know To End The Madness). It is only the most recent example of Huffington’s tireless ability to inhabit different places on the political spectrum. In the early 1970s, she made herself a star by rubbing outrageously against the liberal grain. A well-turned-out young woman in articulate recoil from feminism, a woman disputing the reigning ideologies and dogmas of her day–or at least the reigning ideologies and dogmas of college and university students–was ideally suited for the role of right-wing contrarian. But that may have been the last time she moved against the wind. Now “progressivism” reigns supreme in cyberspace and in the Beltway, and noisily progressive she is. No courageous heterodoxy this time around. Now she is a “player.” A look at Huffington’s career reveals someone uncannily–no, cannily–adept at recognizing and navigating the social and political currents, a zeitgeist artist, even though she has written nothing that requires her to be taken seriously as a thinker.

Huffington’s work is not intellectually consistent, but there are two strains that run through much of what she has written. The first is her limp spirituality, which never moves beyond fatuities and banalities. (“Our purpose is to make religion a continuous living experience, to lead us toward a resurrection not of the dead but of the living who are dead to their own truth. “) The second is her frequent and caustic criticism of the Fourth Estate.

I remember her well. Our times as students in Cambridge overlapped. She was Arianna Stassinopolous then — a noisy, wealthy (daughter of a rich Greek family) and brass-necked hussy who became president of the Union (not to be confused with the — socialist — students’ union). Later she took up with Bernard Levin, who was once Britain’s best newspaper columnist, but went into sad decline for reasons unconnected with Ms S.

Student challenges prof, wins right to post source code

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Fascinating Boing Boing post by Cory Doctorow about a student’s fight to publish code that he wrote for an assignment.

Kyle’s a student at San Jose State University who was threatened with a failing grade for posting the code he wrote for the course — he wanted to make it available in the spirit of academic knowledge-sharing, and as code for potential future employers to review — and when he refused, his prof flew into a fury and promised that in future, he would make a prohibition on posting your work (even after the course was finished) a condition of taking his course.

Kyle appealed it to the department head, who took it up with the Office of Student Conduct and Ethical Development and the Judicial Affairs Officer of SJSU, who ruled that, "what you [Kyle] have done does not in any way constitute a violation of the University Academic Integrity Policy, and that Dr. Beeson cannot claim otherwise."

There’s a lot of meat on the bones of this story. The most important lesson from it for me is that students want to produce meaningful output from their course-assignments, things that have intrinsic value apart from their usefulness for assessing their progress in the course. Profs — including me, at times — fall into the lazy trap of wanting to assign rotework that can be endlessly recycled as work for new students, a model that fails when the students treat their work as useful in and of itself and therefore worthy of making public for their peers and other interested parties who find them through search results, links, etc.

Kyle’s blog post has lots more detail — including copies of the correspondence with his Prof and the university administration.

Thanks to Glyn Moody for Tweeting it.

The Internet at 40

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From ‘Hot News’ on the Apple site this morning:

The Internet turns 40, June 9, 2009

You’re so used to paying bills, getting your news and weather, and doing more and more of your purchasing online, you probably think the Internet has been around forever. But it hasn’t. As you’ll learn from this program on Open University, the Internet turns 40 this year. How did it get started? Where is it taking us next? Find out by listening to these Internet pioneers on iTunes U…

It seems that the recording of my interview is #4 in the top 100 downloads.