A reader emailed me that perhaps health benefits to marriage result from "a sense of security" that the relationship will last. I don't dispute that the emotional stability of a lasting relationship can contribute to health in a positive way. But I also don't see how contractually binding someone to his role in our relationship is going to make him or me any healthier.

A non-contractual lasting relationship that both my partner and I freely choose each day might be stressful to either partner because of the risk involved in not having a contract. I could experience anxiety knowing that the love and support my partner freely gives today might disappear tomorrow. However, there is a flip side to that coin. If we are contractually obliged to our relationship, might'nt either of us suffer from the stress of remaining in a relationship that one or both of us no longer freely chooses? I prefer the risk that, if my partner is unhappy, he has the freedom to leave, knowing that I have that freedom as well.

Share of responsibilities in both contractual and lasting non-contractual romantic relationships definitely contributes to positive health outcomes. If I have a mortgage and children, I will most likely benefit from sharing financial and other burdens of these responsibilites with another. Married people obviously do this but you don't have to be married to buy a house or raise children with another person. To me, an unmarried couple that chooses to buy a house and have children together is making the statement: "We don't need a legal contract to define our relationship and our commitment to each other. We are adjusted enough to accept the risks of not being legally wed and embrace the fact that every day we spend together is out of choice."

Usually when a happy couple is at the point of having children and mortgages together, they just throw in the towel and sign the contract. My point is that the contract isn't the reason why they are happier and healthier than those without.

From The Winner's Curse, by Richard Thaler:

The problem seems to be that while economists have gotten increasingly sophisticated and clever, consumers have remained decidedly human. This leaves open the question of whose behavior we are trying to model. Along these lines, at an NBER conference a couple of years ago I explained the difference between my models and Rober Barro's (a well-known rationalist_ by saying that he assumes the agents in his model are as smart as he is, while I portray people as being as dumb as I am. Barro agreed with this assessment.

Just in case you wanted to fuss with the Guardian's list of books some more, Tim Sandefur and AnnikaGyrl have tallied up their scores (14 and 21, respectively). And since I know you were wondering, here's mine.

14: The Count of Monte Cristo

17: Wuthering Heights*

20: The Scarlet Letter*

27: Anna Karenina

31: Huckleberry Finn*

48: The Great Gatsby*

49: The Trial

53: Brave New World

56: The Big Sleep

59: 1984

61: Catcher in the Rye

63: Charlotte's Web

67: The Quiet American

69: Lolita

73: To Kill a Mockingbird

74: Catch-22*

76: One Hundred Years of Solitude

79: Song of Solomon

82: If on a winter's night a traveller

88: The BFG

*'ed are all the books that I "read" for school, meaning that I can't remember whether I read them in the sense of reading all of the words on their pages, or merely in the sense of reading a lot of the pages and taking quizzes on them.

Simon and Garfunkel, as y'all have probably heard, are on a reunion tour. Except for the occasional Grammy performance, they basically haven't played together in twenty years, but here they go.

Of course, their . . . strained . . . relations have been no secret. One story I read long ago said that they were working on getting back together but had some quarrels about who would get to sing the harmonies. I venture no opinion as to whether that's true.

Anyway, you can listen to/watch two clips of them at a press conference here (scroll down). I've been extremely skeptical of this reunion, but I think this is a definite improvement over, say, the Concert in Central Park.

I should explain, I think the Concert in Central Park (which is 20-odd years old) suffers because they're trying to sing like they're still in the 60s. Now (on these clips, at least) they seem to avoid that trouble. Sure, you can tell they're old, but . . . now they seem to know it, too, and that improves it a lot.

Garfunkel can still hit some high notes, but he doesn't try to hit quite as many, which helps him hit the ones he does. [At their opening concert last night ("the warm-up"), The Everly Brothers hit the stage for a little bit of an intermission. Was this a break to let two aging singers recover a little bit?]

In some sense, my tentative speculation is that an aging artist whose fame depends on the strength or dexterity of his or her voice is faced with two major options. He or she can either weather on, belting out songs with eyes clenched shut, pretending that lost youth has not fled. This is the tactic that was adopted by Maria Callas for the last ten years of her career or so. The trouble is that while this pleases die-hard fans, it's unlikely to win any new admirers. (I'm told that you could tell who really loved Callas by looking at who went to hear her sing in the last few years before she died. You wouldn't go except out of deep-seated loyalty or nostalgia.)

The other option, of course, is to acknowledge age, and make the necessary accomodations. This can be done either by adding more musical accompaniments (which I think is a little shameful) or simply by toning down the song a little bit, by clocking back the tempo, by turning youthful hymn into aging dirge. And this last is, I think, a potent tactic.

For example, though I became a Luciano Pavarotti fan during 11th grade (I had to study an old recording of him singing "Nessun Dorma") I don't like to watch him on T.V. or hear his new productions, because of the coping mechanisms he generally employs-- microphone, background noise, duet singers (though I have a completely inexplicable and shameful soft spot for his duet with Celine Dion-- "I Hate You, Then I Love You"). On the other hand, take Johnny Cash's Hurt from his last CD before his death [Incidentally, I really don't recommend listening to this CD without some bourbon handy. Blanton's simply won't do. Maker's Mark is probably the best choice because drinking Booker's while listening to the CD will pretty much inevitably result in a splitting hangover.]. The reason the video works so well is that it's written in full acknowledgment (and painful embrace) of his age. Indeed, that's true of the entire CD. It's always tempting to read death between the lines of any artist's last work, but sometimes the artist makes it impossible not to. [Thanks to Stuart Buck, you can view Cash's Hurt video here. Be careful with it.]

Now, I make no claim that my preferences about aging artists (that they acknowledge their age and the pain that this brings) are generalizable. But I do think they aren't unique to me. One example of the whole phenomenon is in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's biography of Simon Bolivar (called "The General in His Labyrinth"). A quote:

"Don't tell me you've conquered nostalgia," he said.

"On the contrary: nostalgia has conquered me," said Wilson. "I no longer put up the slightest resistance to it."

"Then do you or don't you want to go back?"

"I don't know anything anymore, General," said Wilson. "I'm at the mercy of a destiny that isn't mine."

The General looked straight into his eyes and said in amazement: "That's what I should be saying."

The poem--which seems just indiscriminately ancient to us--is written by a Christian poet about a pre-Christian world--and it's about a hero whose last, great fight is one he's too old for--so the theme of returning, of dipping in the same river twice, is at least two layers deep.

You'll strain to remember and yearn to forget.

At the age of eighteen you had grander designs,

but in toofewscore years you will hit 58--

drooling over lost loves, in search of lost time,

gumming old lemon rinds, shunning caffeinated tea,

counting sunsets and coffee spoons and staring to the west.

This month's Chicago Magazine features an article on the benefits of marriage. I know other Crescat Sententia bloggers have weighed in on this issue, so I felt it appropriate to address this in my first entry as a guest-blogger.

The article expounds associations between marriage and better health, citing the research of sociologist Linda Waite. Waite's conclusion is that marriage, in general, is good for people:

“It’s like exercise,” she says. “Studies show that, on average, people who exercise experience health benefits. The next step is to say that you should exercise.”

However, the article doesn't present any evidence of causation. Exercise improves health through explicit physiological mechanisms. The article refers to differences between the married and non-married in various health indicators: mortality, depression, health behaviors, income, and insurance status but it doesn't give any real evidence that the contract of marriage itself causes these favorable health outcomes.

It goes on to state that the benefits are unique to marriage and don't extend to cohabitors:

Meanwhile, living together, or cohabiting, “does not confer the same protection as being married,” they write. “The big health difference is between married people and the nonmarried, not between people who live alone and those who don’t.” Waite’s own research of people in their 50s and 60s showed that single adults, “whether living alone, with children, or with others, described their emotional health more negatively than did the married people.”

If you read this carefully, it isn't saying anything about marriage. Cohabitation in this instance has the quite broad meaning of living with other(s) who could be strangers, relatives, friends, or romantic partners. To better judge the value of the marriage contract, a more appropriate comparison would be exclusively with cohabitors in romantic relationships.

The article does mention that live-in couples are generally less satisfied with their sex lives and break up more than the married but it doesn't get specific. I venture to say that if you controlled for duration of relationship, the health differences between unmarried romantically involved cohabitors and the married would be insignificant (or perhaps cohabitors would be better off). I'd like to see a study of 10 year + cohabitors compared to 10 year + married couples. My guess is, your health isn't going to be any better just because you signed a contract ten years ago.

I'm not quite sure how I managed to make it through three years as a pseudo-econ major without learning the definition of "marginal rate of transformation" but at least I know it now.

It's the ratio of marginal costs of two goods (that is, the amount of capital and labor one would have to shift, a priori, to alter one's potential production between the two good by one unit). It's not, as I had embarrassingly envisioned, the amount of resources it would take a posteriori, to transform (say) a table into (say) a salmon.

Professor Bainbridge, on us: "Crescat Sententia: They aren't the Volokhs, but they're close."

Is the Volokh Conspiracy a family blog? Jacob Levy says yes, Eugene Volokh says no, but also says yes (while, mysteriously, citing his previous answer of no).

Starting today we're going to have a new guest-blogger join us for a little while. Her name is Beth Plocharczyk and she's the proprietor the Chicago-alum-blog Reg Rats, and is well known for her great assistance to this blog on the perplexing Milk Question. She's now doing a dual degree in medicine and public health at Ohio Statue.

I'm not sure what other facts are relevant so I'll let her do the rest.

[Also, feel free to send me, or her, lots of email telling me whether you like her posts.] As everybody here says, Cheers.

In this place there was a rather witless entry claiming to have deduced that Sua Sponte had transferred to Harvard. It was based on a combination of supposition and incorrect information. Chalk it up to the dangers of "sleep-blogging". Thanks to Unfashionable Observations and many readers for catching me out.

Well, if Rabin and Thaler are right, we feel our losses twice as intensely as our gains.

Hmm. That probably explains a lot about poker. In particular, that might explain why despite getting away with a few bluffs, going all in on A-A against A-7 (and winning), and going all in again on 6-6 and beating 7-7, tonight feels like a night of bad luck. It's just too hard to forget the 4-diamond flush draw that fell to a last-minute straight, or the fact that when a much-needed pair of aces came to the aid of my dwindling stack while I was sitting on the big blind, everybody at the table folded. Or the fact that I finished one hand short of a 9 quid prize.

Loss aversion in action.

No, not us. Unlearned Hand has decided that he needs some help maintaining a consistent output. If you read his site and want to get into the blog world, or move up in the blog world, drop him a line at unlearned at unlearnedhand dot com.

Chatterbox is making fun of Republicans for deriding the Hillary Clinton campaign:

Last month, Chatterbox pointed out that the movement to draft Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., to run for president in 2004 was unlikely to succeed because it consisted almost entirely of conservative Republicans. The right's fixation on a Hillary run reflects GOP fund-raising imperatives, a longing to unite a splintered conservative movement, and the widespread winger conviction that the Clintons are vampires who cannot be killed and will come back to haunt the GOP again and again.

Today's Quote of the Day award goes to Jim Leitzel:

The "ambivalent academic leadership" referred to in the WSJ column is ambivalent for a reason -- responsible drinking by 20-year olds is not a major concern . . .

Thanks to those readers who wrote in response to one of my previous questions. My favorite was the email titled "I come from Crooked Timber," which sounds like it could be an interesting Garth Brooks country/western song.

Against standard blogging etiquette I'm not going to name names or provide links, but I'd just like to say that listening to some people go on and on about "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance is enough to make me really hope the Justices strike it out.

The Observer has released a list of the 100 Greatest Novels of All Time. The list has a sort of British Public (meaning private) Schoolboy bias, and it's probably not worth too much time and energy to complain about it. Most of the authors I'd really hope to see represented have been.

It's inevitable, I suppose, that they'd give a place to Nabokov's Lolita and Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude rather than to their superior works-- Ada and Love in the Time of Cholera. I was pleased to see a hat-tip to Italo Calvino (for the right book nonetheless) even if they didn't manage to get Umberto Eco on the list where he belongs, or Margaret Atwood. The Quiet American is a pretty odd choice for Graham Greene (The End of the Affair? The Heart of the Matter?) Is Artist of the Floating World better than The Remains of the Day? Is The Big Sleep better than Farewell my Lovely? Is The Count of Monte Christo better than The Man In The Iron Mask? But mostly I can't comment very effectively on this list because they were the sort of books we were supposed to read in English class but I find so mind-numbing, boring, or terrible that I didn't finish them and went back to reading Shakespeare, Greene, and Perez-Reverte instead.

[So are you going to complain about your economics classes at Cambridge every day?-- ed. Nope. I don't have lectures on Fridays.]

Yesterday in the course of ranting and raving about overuse of The St. Petersburg Paradox (a paradox which isn't well enough appreciated) I also took a passing shot at the use of logarithmic utility-of-wealth functions (which are used to explain risk aversion). Today I'll explain why they're silly. Last time, I wrote:

We don't actually value all of our money the same, the argument goes. Your first million bucks might be worth a whole lot to you. Your second million bucks is important, but not nearly as important. Your thousandth million bucks is still, well, a million bucks, but you wouldn't work nearly as hard for that as you did for the first. After all, a lot of people work really hard the whole lives to eventually end up with total assets of around a million dollars. Unless you honestly enjoyed your work (and you might), if you were born with 999 million dollars, you probably wouldn't work your whole life to get to an even billion. Economists then formalize this intuition by giving you something called a "utility of wealth" function. This is often (for reasons that elude me) the natural logarithm. I guess the thinking is that since "ln" (the natural log) appears so many places in nature that you wouldn't expect it, we might as well stick it here too.

From John Trowbridge:

There is actually a good reason to use log as a utility function --- while it doesn't make much sense to assign the same marginal utility to each $1 gain, it is not totally unreasonable to do so for each 1% gain. By using log as your utility function, that is exactly what happens. If your initial wealth is x, the gain in utility from a 1% gain in wealth is:

ln(1.01 * x) - ln(x) = ln(1.01) + ln(x) - ln(x) = ln(1.01)

i.e. a constant, regardless of the value of x.

The key property we need is for this sort of thing is f(x*y)=f(x)+f(y). And, as it turns out, any continuous function f with that property is just a constant multiple of the logarithm function.

As for using the logarithm, there are two arguments. One is that any convex function should do, and natural logs are particularly easy to calculate with. The other is that it's well established in psychophysics that the perceived intensity of a stimulus is proportional to the logarithm of the physical stimulation (e.g., perceived loudness is proportional to the log of the noise intensity). Arguably, then, utility should go as the logarithm of the stimulus, i.e., money. But the psychophysical relationship was only discovered in the mid-1800s, and the logarithmic utility function goes back to Bernoulli, so my guess is that calculational convenience is the real reason for it.

(E)conomists have a simple and elegant explanation for risk aversion: It derives from expected utility maximization of a concave utility-of-wealth function . . . Suppose we know that Johnny is a risk-averse expected utility maximizer, and that he will always turn down the 50-50 gamble of losing $10 or gaining $11. What else can we say about Johnny? Specifically, can we say anything about bets Johnny will be willing to accept in which there is a 50 percent chance of losing $100 and a 50 percent chance of winning some amout $Y? Consider the following multiple-choice quiz:

From the description above, what is the biggest Y such that we know Johnny will turn down a 50-50 lose $100/win $Y bet?

a) $110

b) $221

c) $2000

d) $20,242

e) $1.1 million

f) $ 2.5 billion

g) Johnny will reject the bet no matter what Y is.

h) We can't say without more information abuot Johnny's utility function.

Before you coose an answer, we remind you that we are asking what is the highest value of Y making this statement true for all possible preferences consistent with Johnny being a risk-averse expected utility maximizer who turns down the 50/50 lose $10/gain $11 for all initial wealth levels. Make no ancillary assumptions, for instance, about the functional form of Johnny's utility function beyond the fact that it is an increasing and concave function of wealth. Stop now, and make a guess.

Did you guess a, b, or c? If so, you are wrong. Guess again. Did you guess d? Maybe you figured we wouldn't be asking if the answer werene't shocking, so you made a ridiculous guess like e, or maybe even f. If so, again you are wrong. Perhaps you guessed h, thinking that the question is impossible to answer with so little to go on. Wrong again.

The correct answer is g. Johnny will turn down any bet with a 50 percent risk of losing at least $100, no matter how high the upside risk.

Give us an expected utility maximizer who buys small-scale insurance such as internal wiring protection . . . and we'll give you a money pump you can hang your hat on. In this case, the Phone Company representative who has just sold a devout expected utility maximizer the wiring protection would go on: "While I have you on the phone, The Phone Company is willing to insure you against all of life's $55 risks. Do you realize, sir, that as we've been talking, the value of your stock market protfolio has several times swung wildly up and down by more than $55? We'll protect you! Give us $55,000 and we'll insure you against the possibility of a $50,000 loss." A true expected utility maximizer who has just bought wiring protection would jump at the offer. By contrast, myopic loss-averters would call the Better Business Bureau to report a scam.

Just when you finally start caring about the Cubs again . . . They break your heart.

Not really, but it's an entry for the category of Proving What We Already Knew. Apparently watching Fox News and having factually incorrect views about the war in Iraq are linked. The Washington Post's Harold Myerson comments on the survey, run by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, here. The survey controlled for political ideology, comparing conservative viewers of Fox with like-minded CBS and NPR/PBS folks, and amount of news watched. Controlling for the intensity of viewing led to the lovely conclusion that "'in the case of those who primarily watched Fox News, greater attention to news modestly increases the likelihood of misperceptions.'"

And just what are these people wrong about?

In a series of polls from May through September, the researchers discovered that large minorities of Americans entertained some highly fanciful beliefs about the facts of the Iraqi war. Fully 48 percent of Americans believed that the United States had uncovered evidence demonstrating a close working relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Another 22 percent thought that we had found the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And 25 percent said that most people in other countries had backed the U.S. war against Saddam Hussein. Sixty percent of all respondents entertained at least one of these bits of dubious knowledge; 8 percent believed all three.

The researchers then asked where the respondents most commonly went to get their news. The fair and balanced folks at Fox, the survey concludes, were "the news source whose viewers had the most misperceptions." Eighty percent of Fox viewers believed at least one of these un-facts; 45 percent believed all three. Over at CBS, 71 percent of viewers fell for one of these mistakes, but just 15 percent bought into the full trifecta. And in the daintier precincts of PBS viewers and NPR listeners, just 23 percent adhered to one of these misperceptions, while a scant 4 percent entertained all three.

Matthew Yglesias writes:

Insofar as taxes are (morally) objectionable, it is more objectionable for the current generation to increase taxes on future people than it is for them to increase taxes on themselves.

The New York Times is kvetching about yet another Federal Judge. This time the issue isn't ideology so much as temperament. Writes the NYT:

Since Ms. Irizarry's selection, lawyers have come forward with disturbing stories about her performance as a state court judge. She has been described as rude to lawyers who appeared before her, sometimes screaming, and throwing an object in at least one case. And critics have said she did not have a good understanding of the legal issues before her. The American Bar Association cited all of these concerns in rating her unqualified, making her only the third nominee to get that designation of the roughly 200 put forward by President Bush.

The fault here lies with the administration, which should be choosing judges with both reasonable legal views and temperaments. And the bar association should be doing more to promote both values. While commendable, the association's outspoken opposition to Ms. Irizarry is a reminder of how accepting it has been of Bush nominees who have been flawed in their ideology. Opposing civil rights, ruling reflexively for corporations and writing disparagingly about women are every bit as troubling as yelling at lawyers. We hope the bar association, having made its views known on Ms. Irizarry's temperament, will start speaking out forcefully about nominees whose views on the law make them unsuited for the bench. [Emphasis mine.]

Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride is not a romance novel, and should not be shelved with them. That is all.

Bob at the Cardinal Collective finds my standards on when rape has occured "preposterous."

To reiterate my stance briefly, I don't think a verbal "no" is the signal on which whether unwanted sex is rape turns. If there's no reason to presume that consent was acquired, or if body language has made it clear that consent was ^not^ offered, or if the body language makes it clear that any preliminary consent has been withdrawn, then it is rape.

A minority of rapes are of the 'stranger jumps out of the bushes' type. No reason to presume consent; rape whether or not the victim said a word. But I think this still would fall under Bob's category of times when a "no" wasn't required. His main disagreement comes with

The difference between taking someone's car and having sex is that it's quite reasonable to believe that someone might want to have sex with you even if they didn't explicitly utter the word 'yes.' (Do you think every husband and wife have a permission-obtaining dialogue every time they have sex? I hope not.)

I certainly don't think most married couples have blanket permission for sex each time they're together. Three times a week seems a high estimate for the frequency (a quick google search reveals it's probably lower with one peak at around 3x/week and another at 3x/month, but I don't care to spend the time sorting through to find a more legitimate number). Whatever it is, it's significantly lower than even half. If there's blanket permission, it's not being used. But I don't believe that there's blanket permission for sex, either in marriage or out of it. "I have a headache tonight, dear" doesn't connote "I've temporarily withdrawn my general consent," it implies instead "Just so you know, I have not/am not going to/will not consent tonight;" it pre-emptively wards off any assumptions that a person is in the mood. In a well-functioning couple, that line is probably followed by acceptance, or a question of what else might be desired, or if anything can be done to change the mood. In a dysfunctional couple, well, this is where situations of marital rape start to develop. There are plenty of non-verbal ways the wife could say "no" without really saying it: trying to walk away, putting clothes back on that have been removed, turning away, refusing to be physically responsive to the husband's advances, crying, discussions at other times (ie, not in bed) of how the sex is sometimes unwanted. Body language is sufficient to communicate that consent hasn't been obtained.

But Bob objects: "it's simply preposterous to imagine that a man should go to jail for having read body language incorrectly, while the woman for some reason didn't want to say 'no.'"

I think it's not preposterous, and that even within marriages, there are situations in which a woman wouldn't want to verbalize her feelings. From Francis Fyfield's Without Consent (a mystery novel), an example of a situation when a woman didn't want to say 'no':

"All right," Aemon Connor said, in tones which combined both aggression and resignation. "That's fine. That's absolutely fine by me. You frigid little cow. Was a time you couldn't get enough of it. Don't worry about it. I can always get someone else."

Brigid whimpered in the darkness. He was refusing to hear it; he had listened long enough and conversation never cured anything. She complained it hurt; so, if it hurt, why couldn't she use her imagination. He could tell her what hurt, all right, and that was a mammoth state of arousal with nowhere to go. She was his woman, remember; his wife, even; what a joke, when she just wouldn't do it any more

UPDATE (see extended):

Bob replies to this post. I think my reply to him will be about my last on this topic (famous last words).

I am talking about the "Platonic form" of rape (leaving "ideal" off the front of that phrase). Bob gives the example of "strangers who meet in a bar: it's quite difficult to read the body language of someone you don't know, and if one person acts physically unresponsive to signal non-consent, that might be interpreted as just being on the low-desire end of normal to the other person."

You've just met this person in a bar; you barely no this person; this person has come home with you. I would say that you have sufficient evidence to conclude that this person is entertaining the idea of some physical activity, but given that this person is virtually a blank slate to you, you're going too far to presume that this person's desire is intercourse and that the mind is fully set upon that end. It would be entirely prudent to ask her for her consent.

And why would she not just say "no" if she doesn't want sex and she thinks that her clear (for examples of what I'd call clear see above) signals aren't being heeded? My guess is it's because she doesn't think the verbal would be heeded, either, and that she fears, rightfully or not in varying situations, that to object more forcefully would be unwise.

Should this come to trial, a possible defense would be "she didn't make her feelings sufficiently clear." Put it to a jury to decide if 1) evidence supports her claim that she tried to communicate her lack of consent and 2) it was sufficiently clear, but deliberately ignored.

I wouldn't be suprised if these cases are rare -- that in most instances of acquaintance rape, the victim actually did say no and was ignored. I simply want to suggest that the definition of rape should turn on whether consent was obtained, not whether "no" was spoken.

Yesterday I complained about the optimistic use of the Coase Theorem. Class today has brought a new pet peeve-- the casual dismissal of the St. Petersburg Paradox.

Now, the St. Petersburg Paradox is one of the more beautiful things I ever learned in statistics. First, two paragraphs of introduction.

Often, the first starting point when looking at the value of a lottery or a gamble is the expected value of that lottery or gamble. So when I ask you if you'd rather have $50 or a 60% chance of $100 you say to yourself, "well, .6 * 100 = $60. I'll risk it." [Two notes: In fact, many people refuse gambles like these, and economists often chalk this up to something called "risk aversion." But under the standard economic definition of "utility of wealth" functions, it's pretty clearly impossible to rationally refuse this bet.] And this is often why we think lots of lotto gamblers are silly. You have (say) a 1 one in 100,000,000 chance of winning $20,000,000 (after taxes), so we say that you're getting only 20 cents on the dollar.

Very well. What's the paradox?

Supposedly it's based off of an actual gambling game popular in St. Petersburg. Here's the deal. We start flipping a coin, and we keep going until it comes up heads. The first time we flip it, I give you a dollar. Every time we flip it again, I double it. When we stop, you take your winnings and go home. So, if we flip the coin once and get heads, you get a dollar and go home. If we flip it and get tails, we go again. If we get heads, we stop, you take two dollars and go home. If by some freak (.000007629) probability, you get 17 tails in a row before getting a heads, then you walk home with $131072. If you get 50 tails (hey, anything can happen), you walk home with $1,099,511,627,776 (that's enough money to buy the President all the Iraqi peace-keeping troops he'll want for a long time). Step right up, anybody can play.

So how much is a go at this game worth? This is where the "expected value" analysis runs into rocky waters. First a little thinking, then some math. You'd obviously be willing to pay at least a dollar to play this game, since you get a dollar, even if you get a heads on your very first try. You'd probably be willing to pay at least $1.50 to play this game, since half the time you get $1 (if you flip heads first thing), but half the time you get at least $2, and possibly much, much, more. So how much is this game "worth"? Well, here's the trouble. You've got a .5 (1/2) chance of winning $1. Then you've got a .25 (1/4) chance of winning $2. And a .125 (1/8) chance at $4. And a 1/16 chance of $8. And . . . and what happens when you add all of those up? You get:

1*1/2 + 2 * 1/4 + 4 * 1/8 + . . . + 1310172 + 1/2620344 + . . . . and so on forever.

1/2 + 1/2 + 1/2 + 1/2 + 1/2 + . . . . and so on forever.

1/2 * ln 1 + 1/4 * ln 2 + 1/8 * ln 4 + 1/16 * ln 8 . . . and so on.

0 + 1/4 * ln 2 + 1/8 * 2 ln 2 + 1/16 * 3 ln 2 + 1/32 * 4 ln 2 . . . and so on.

So those who follow this blog with some regularity will notice there's a discussion on about reality and ways of knowing it. Sara Butler has introduced the interesting question of whether or not one acquires knowledge of history through science or through some other way of knowing.

This is a topic upon which I have written at length. Here I address the claim that knowledge of history is essentially scientific, while here I consider the relation it bears to literary knowledge.

For those of you wanting the Cliffs Notes version, insofar as history deals in facts--when Henry VIII ruled, what he looked like, how many wives he had, and to what extent royal power benefitted from the appropriation and sale of church lands--history is scientific in the weak sense of emperical, but not the stong sense of experimental. But insofar as history also tries to make sense of those facts--to say that Henry's wives in some sense matter more than his hair color, or that Protestentism helped royal power by removing the Catholic church as an institutional counterbalance, or that Protestentism hurt royal power by attacking Authority in favor of individual conscience, one quickly moves into the realm of what the lit crit types call narrative.

Amy (below) rightly dumps on Robert Lowell. She also asks: "What, especially, fares well by comparison to this Elizabeth Bishop poem?" Now, I realize she was asking about Robert Lowell's poems (the answer, incidentally, is "none"), but I just thought I'd mention for my other favorite Sestina. Sure it's not as good as Bishop's, but a good Sestina is hard to find.

The Shriking Lonesome Sestina
By Miller Williams

Somewhere in everyone's head something points toward home,
a dashboard's floating compass, turning all the time
to keep from turning. It doesn't matter how we come
to be wherever we are, someplace where nothing goes
the way it went once, where nothing holds fast
to where it belongs, or what you've risen or fallen to.

What the bubble always points to,
whether we notice it or not, is home.
It may be true that if you move fast
everything fades away, that given time
and noise enough, every memory goes
into the blackness, and if new ones come-

small, mole-like memories that come
to live in the furry dark-they, too,
curl up and die. But Carol goes
to high school now. John works at home
what days he can to spend some time
with Sue and the kids. He drives too fast.

Ellen won't eat her breakfast.
Your sister was going to come
but didn't have the time.
Some mornings at one or two
or three I want you home
a lot, but then it goes.

It all goes.
Hold on fast
to thoughts of home
when they come.
They're going to
less with time.

Time
goes
too
fast.
Come
home.

Forgive me that. One time it wasn't fast.
A myth goes that when the years come
then you will, too. Me, I'll still be home.

Sara Butler doesn't seem terrifically happy with my Anti-D'Souza post. She writes:

Okay, so, what about other kinds of unobservable reality? Specifically, what about the past? The study of history, it seems to me, is an attempt to know something about an unobservable reality, and history is, on some fundamental level "unknowable." History requires the use of "imagination," for lack of a better word, as well as reason, in order to come up with plausible explanations of the world we see around us today, and the world we have historical evidence for having existed at one time. We can never be sure were are correct about the past; we have no real way of testing our hypotheses.

So, history, as a way of knowing, is imperfect, but it's better than nothing, AND it's the only way we do have to know about the human past. Science can't do it for us, except for maybe a little carbon-dating and this kind of thing.

Now remember, I wrote:

This doesn't work. There are two possibilities about this "unknowable stuff" (which D'Souza has decided opens the door to faith). Either it has ways of acting upon the humanly observable world, or it does not.
If the unobservable parts of reality have ways of acting upon the observable world, than it isn't really true that we can't observe them with our five senses. Sure, we can't observe them "directly," but science can deal with plenty of things we can't observe in the same sense that I can observe punts full of tourists floating down the river Cam. Huge advances in microbiology, astrophysics, and so on, are predicated on our ability to see things like electron emissions, gravitational effects, the bending of light, and so on. Even though we've never "seen" the edge of the universe looming outside of our kitchen window, that doesn't rob us of our ability to analyze scientifically, and it doesn't force us to act on faith when we're analyzing the structure of sub-atomic particles.

Over on Terry Teachout's , Our Girl in Chicago posts the following:

The London Review of Books (October 9 issue) prints a head-turning letter from one of its own frequent contributors. He writes:

What is disappointing, even embarrassing about the poetry of Robert Lowell in retrospect is not so much the tin ear or heavy-handedness, not the posturing and self-dramatisation, not even the straining after the important subject, the insistence on being taken as major, when, in fact, with very few exceptions, the poetry isn't really much good at all; what is, finally, so dreary about the oeuvre at this remove, the reason his enormous Collected Poems sinks like a breached tanker, are Lowell's cultural assumptions, his notion of a cultural hierarchy and his pre-eminent position in that hierarchy so tirelessly cultivated throughout his career.

Even in the midst of the widespread reassessment that has followed the publication of Lowell's Collected Poems last summer, I haven't seen anything close to this emphatic a dissent from the consensus view of Lowell as a great twentieth-century poet. Is Kleinzahler's view so exceptional, or are there like-minded poetry readers out there who have been biting their tongues?

There are indeed like-minded poetry readers out there and we haven't been biting our tongues. We just haven't been invited lately to air our views in a major literary review. So for the record, Robert Lowell is seriously overrated.

Now, I haven't read much Lowell and I don't plan to read more (since I don't particularly enjoy the experience), so it's possible I've just missed all of the good Lowell poetry, but consider ths poem he dedicated to Elizabeth Bishop:

Skunk Hour

Nautilus Island's hermit
heiress still lives through winters in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her' son's a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village;
she's in her dotage.

Thirsting for the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria's century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.

The season's ill--
we've lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-know yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnet's filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler's bench and awl;
there is no money in his work,
he'd rather marry.

One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town...
My mind's not right.

A car radio bleats,
"Love, O careless Love..." I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat...
I myself am hell;
nobody's here--

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air--
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.

Now to my ear, this just isn't particularly pleasing. Certainly the proper devices are present--the alliteration, the asonance, the rhyme, the figurative language. But try reading it aloud. The aliteration trips the tongue, the line breaks chop the poem up into disjointed fragments and the rhymes seem out of place in the otherwise pedestrian flow.

Furthermore, the imagery Lowell uses doesn't particularly seem to enhance his meaning. For instance, the "love-cars" described as "hull to hull" deftly pick continue the series of maritime images in the previous stanzas, but can anyone explain why the cars are compared to boats, rather than the boats compared to cars?

Now I'm sure Lowell's defenders will talk about the brilliant evocation of dissatisfaction and alienation or some such, but honestly, what about this poem is striking, or beautiful, or memorable, or...well...poetic?

What, especially, fares well by comparison to this Elizabeth Bishop poem?

Sestina

September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to the grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,

It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac

on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers alf open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It was to be says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvellous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.

Amanda, below, asks about the curse of the Ex-Cubs. Here are two articles, for those interested.

The original 1981 article, the 2003 update. Here is collected data. I'm a little confused because the second article lists the Cubs as having 2 ex-Cubs. I'm not quite sure what mechanism they're using to count them. In any case, the Cubs don't break the combined hearts and prayers of the city of Chicago, and do make it to the World Series (odds are about 2-1 against them, I'd say), it seems to me the critical question is whether the the curse extends to current Cubs, or only applies to former Cubs.

Last week Michael Kinsey explained for me why I don't like Wesley Clark, this week William Saletan explains why I'm rooting for Dean to come out on top.

And I see below that Will agrees with me.

This may be only a rumor (or even a dated rumor, since I learned it from my mother and none of my friends with whom I was watching Game 6 had heard of it), but does anyone know if there's an element of truth behind it?

The team that loses the World Series always has more ex-Chicago Cub players on its roster than the team that wins.

Does anyone know if this is true, or even if it doesn't always hold, if there's a correlation between losing and the former Cubs players?

A baseball post.

My stateside sources tell me that the Cubs are currently winning (1-0?), but much to my dismay, I can't find a free webcast of the game anyplace on the internet. If anybody knows of one, do send it along.

Prediction: If the Cubs win, there will be rioting, but it will be nothing like what happens once the Cubs either win or lose the series.

DBC Pierre has won this year's Booker Prize (beating out some lady named Monica Ali, and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake). You wouldn't know it from the Reuters press release, but he's got a fairly interesting back story. A taste:

The reformed drug addict and gambler admitted to selling his best friend's home and pocketing the proceeds as well as working up debts of hundreds of thousands of dollars in a scheme to find Montezuma's gold in Mexico....

"I am not proud of what I have done, of all the women I've lost, and all the good people who trusted me and were burned. I have lived in dread of this for 15 years - that one day someone like you would come along," he said yesterday. "Living with it has been like waking up every morning to find that you have shit the bed. In a way, I'm relieved it's finally come out."

Vicemeister Jim Leitzel has a long post here at Vice Squad about college drinking. Here are a few anecdotal thoughts.

The legal drinking age in the UK (where I'm currently going to school) is 18, and I've had the dubious privilege of hanging out with all of the "Freshers" as they go through their orientation week. This has been something of a culture shock-- nearly every orientation mixer (all of them college-sponsored) has involved alcohol. Drinks in the Old Combination Room. Drinks in the Old Kitchen. Drinks in the Junior Combination Room. A Three-Legged Pub Crawl. Drinks at Formal Hall. Drinks in the Alheusen Room. And so on.

Furthermore, nobody cards. A substantial number of the freshers I've met here are 17, but I've only seen one person ever get charged for ID (a grad student buying a bottle of wine in the grocery store; the clerk only asked for ID because he was flirting with her). In Chicago, my underage friends couldn't even buy a pack of cigarettes half the time.

In other words, the British treatment of alcohol on campus is everything you'd expect from a liberal alcohol regime. Kids drink a whole lot of alcohol. You'd think this would be a disaster.

But it's not. Firstly, it helps that most of the drinks are school-provided, and the school never provides hard liquor. College freshman are most likely to drink whatever's free (how else can one explain the thousands of beer-swillers at American frat parties?) and here, what's free is cheap, serviceable, red wine-- nothing you'd be proud to get in a liter carafe in a Paris Cafe, but stuff you'd happily pay at least $3 a bottle for in the states. As Professor Leitzel points out, hard liquor is almost a different beast from wine and beer. Of course, some kids here do drink hard liquor-- Gin and Bitter Lemon (that's British for "flavored tonic water") is a favorite on my floor-- but a lot of them just don't like the taste.

Imagine the luxury. Being able to choose what to drink because you like the taste. One of the most annoying things about acquiring alcohol when you're underage is the terrible selection you get. Since stores often card people for merely entering, or insist on carding everybody in a single shopping group, it's hard to tag-along with your 21 but alcohol-ignorant friend to explain to him which Beaujolais you'd like to try, which Torres white wine is the best, or deliberate over the bottles of Maker's Mark and Jefferson's Reserve. Sure, if you've got a particularly close friend or parental scofflaw and a little amount of organization you can put together a shopping list, but the reality for many American undergrads is that alcohol is catch-as-catch-can.

This is bad. It's bad because it encourages a "drink it while it's here" mentality. It's bad because it means people drink more hard liquor and less wine and beer (just like during Prohibition!). It's bad because it means people drink more low-quality alcohol (and it's a lot worse to get sick on Dark Eyes than Stolichnaya). But most importantly, it's bad because the whole point of drinking is to enjoy oneself, and it's pointless and stupid to drive kids to drink bud light, MGD, and Smirnoff, when what they'd really like is a nice Guinness, or an Argentinian Malbec.

Like it or not, kids learn to drink in college. In America, they learn Jello Shots. I haven't seen one here. They're also building up their tolerance. Many of the girls here can easily drain their half of a bottle of wine at dinner, and more. If you can drink every night with food, that's still 6-20 drinks a week, but it's a whole lot healthier (and more fun) than if you have all 20 drinks during a Friday-Saturday bender at Alpha-Delt.

And some anecdotal evidence: Despite a lot of drinking (and make no mistake, British freshers drink far more than American freshmen), nobody has thrown up yet in our hall's toilet. Nobody on my floor has engaged in regretted sexual conduct. No fist fights have broken out, no cars have been crashed. Sure, there's been a little bit of joyous (off-key) singing, but the pubs close before midnight and people quiet down before one.

Before I left Chicago, Professor Leitzel asked me how I was going to handle the British drinking culture. I'll tell you, it's a hell of a lot easier to handle (and more fun) than the American one.

[Note: The author is over the age of 21, and while he admits to having had wine when in Europe and when it was legal to do so, he does not expressly admit to ever having consumed or possessed alcohol illegally in the United States. In particular, he has never in his life done a Jello Shot, and very much hopes to keep it that way.]

UPDATE: Professor Leitzel tells me that while beer consumption fell relative to hard liquor, relative wine consumption actually eventually rose. I also note the possibility that British High School drinking is much worse than American High School drinking, though I add the following observations:

1: A whole lot of people in my high school got pretty darn drunk.

2: Going from the purely informal sample of people on my floor, only one was what could be called a "serious" drinker in high school.

This may sound like a sort of silly question, but I'm just wondering-- why do so many of you guys come here from Crooked Timber? Near as I can tell, the only link from Crooked Timber to our humble blog is down in "The Splinter Group" and nobody there has posted a link to us since Brian Weatherson's 20 Questions. Nonetheless, nearly every day, half a dozen to a dozen visitors come here by clicking that link (which takes them first to our old page)

So if you're a regular reader of this blog, and you regularly get here by clicking that link (or some other link from Crooked Timber that I don't see), would you mind e-mailing me, just to satisfy my curiosity?

Steve Dillard (fka Feddie), my favorite unreconstructed southerner, has put "comments" back on Southern Appeal. In addition to making the page take forever to load (and Southern Appeal's load time is already pretty oppressive due to the wonderful, but burdensome, banner picture), they've also cluttered the blog pretty seriously. Luckily, they're only a trial run. Hopefully they'll go away soon. (Several people have posted comments about how great comments are, but I guess anti-comments folk are an underrepresented group there).

Incidentally, don't forget that Mr. Dillard was one of our first guinea pigs for our "20 Questions" feature, and his interview is here.

In Bookslut, I also came across these two columns complaining about the sex in Robert Heinlein. This seems to me more than a little beside the point, like complaining about the calories in ice cream.

[Though Ms. Crispin's complaints about the editing in Stranger in a Strange Land did strike home. The first time I read SiaSL (I think I was 11), my copy was mis-bound so it repeated a crucial 16-page section in the middle. I didn't learn what happened there for years.]

Well, the President and I now have something in common. We've both received interesting rejection letters. (His. Mine.)

[The former link via Bookslut.]

Matthew Yglesias, on think-tanks (responding to this NYT article):

Elections are decided by a combination of (1) broad demographic trends, (2) macroeconomic stuff, (3) incredibly random and petty things. Folks like to talk about medium-sized phenomena like "issues" and "message" and "ideas" because the folks doing the talking are people who care about issues and message and ideas. And we should keep caring, damnit, because it's important. It's just not the way you win. So think tanks -- yes, please. And cable networks -- yes, please. But don't count on them to get anyone into office. They certainly might make a difference, but it's way down on the list of good ways to win elections.

“The myth, is that we’re out there influencing policy. . . We’re not. . . This is welfare for the smart.”

UPDATE: [yes, I realize these usually come at the end of posts, but whatever] I would claim this was the problem with co-blogging, but we complained about it back when we ran separate blogs. You see an interesting article, you check to see if anyone's written on it yet, you find out that it's sufficiently undiscussed for you to write, and (curses!) while you write it, someone else also writes it. Now you appear silly and redundant.

So as not to bore ya'll readers with a second posting directing you to the Landsburg article in Slate mentioned below, I've deleted most of my original. Still, I would point out that Landsburg is the self-described happy father of a perfect girl. No word on his marital status, though.

I also don't find many of his explanations very credible (by "very" I mean strong enough of a cause to be responsible for a 5% difference in the divorce rates of parents of daughters and parents of sons). The exception is one that several of his readers pointed out: mothers of daughters may be more shy of marriage for fear of exposing their daughters to a potentially predatory step-father.

(Keeping up with my Instapundit-style posting): Steven Landsburg fires back on the issue of why daughters cause divorce. [See previous Crescat commentary here, see Landsburg's previous article here.]

Could daughters be to Landsburg what "selling babies" once was to Judge Posner? Doubtful, only because Landsburg's already convinced lots of people he's a kook (he's not) and because he isn't making any normative claims here, just wacky positive speculation.

Just in case you haven't found The Curmudgeonly Clerk's post (and my exhausting post which Scott charitably characterizes as meandering) enough, Scott of Life, Law, Libido has a very nice addition to the topic.

UPDATE: But the Curmudgeonly Clerk has a pretty sound (and Curmudgeonly) rejoinder. Damn he's going to be a good lawyer.

William Saletan makes a very good case.

UPDATE: Hum, so does Julian Sanchez. Retorts, anybody?

Oh, I miss the Ladybugs (and the Lady-impersonators)...

If you read this blog, it probably isn't your only source of news, so you've probably already heard that the Supreme Court has granted cert. in Elk Grove v. Newdow. This is the controversial (to say the least) Ninth Circuit ruling that the Pledge of Allegiance (with the phrase "Under God") may not be recited in schools.

Howard Bashman has commentary and links here, so I won't try to duplicate him. A few things to think about:

Even with Justice Scalia recused, it will be hard to get votes in favor of Newdow. Judging from the court's assorted dicta, the case certainly does look dead in the water. On the other hand, an argument in favor of Newdow is plausible that at the very least it's time to ask the court to explain what the heck it's talking about. After all:

The Supreme Court has also ruled that student's can't be forced to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, but that the school may lead them in a voluntary recitation.

But, that was the old Pledge; the words "under God," were later added (probably out of anti-communist fervor).

The Supreme Court has already ruled (Lee v. Weisman) that convocations and the like can't lead students in prayer.

At some level, the question is whether the "under God" reference is really religious or just some mindless platitude. If Newdow's counsel is savvy, there's an argument to be made that there really was religious motivation behind adding the two words, a desire to prove that we were a religious people onlike those communist heathens across the sea. (And if the furor at the Ninth Circuit's decisions by Christian organizations were admissible evidence, Newdow's case that this wasn't just secular platitudinizing would be all the stronger).

And me? On the one hand, it's hard for somebody with strong Originalist/Formalist sympathies to see any intellectually honest grounds on which to strike down the two words. On the other hand, there are stare decisis concerns. With school prayer's unconstitutionality given, the case becomes a lot harder. If all of your classmates stand up around you reciting phrases, led by the teacher, announcing themselves to be "under God," isn't that prayer in some non-trivial sense? Of course, many of the conservatives who support "under God" here probably support school prayer too, so they may let their desires to turn back the clock get involved in their opinion writing here (we'll see). Kennedy's vote (and O'Connor's) (and opinion, assuming he has one) will be interesting to watch, as Kennedy's the one that wrote Lee, which said that psychological coercion was enough to trigger an Establishment Clause hammer. Will Newdow be able to convince the Court that psychological coercion is at work here too? Should that be the test? Should be fun.

(Or The Court could pull a Nike v. Kasky and duck out on procedural grounds without getting to the meat of the case. That would be sad.)

UPDATE: And here's Eugene Volokh, commenting on the merits.

DOUBLE UPDATE: And I have a tentative prediction, I suppose, which doesn't strike me as terribly likely but rather an interesting possibility. Could we see a Planned Parenthood v. Casey-style 3-Justice Per Curiam opinion from Justices Kennedy, O'Connor, and Breyer, saying (on the one hand) that the Pledge is generally constitutional, but reinforcing, on the other hand, the rule that graduation prayers, the Ten Commandments, and all the rest are not? The issue of government endorsement of God isn't as much of a mess as abortion law is, but it's still pretty messy, and Kennedy and co., who have generally favored the Establishment rollback, might be eager not to see their work in earlier cases undone.

In other words, this could be an interesting time for the Court to try to deal with the Slippery Slope problem, by issuing a broadly worded opinion purporting to lay to rest the "jurisprudence of doubt" in which "liberty can find no refuge." [Of course, such attempts to Tell Things As They Are are sometimes laughable (as Justice Scalia has argued Casey to be), but I think there's a non-trivial case that those three Justices might see this as the chance to make a cogent case for the middle course that they've long been trying to steer.]

And a note: Even when Eugene Volokh comments on the merits, he doesn't really comment on the merits. He's made a good Stoppard-esque case for each side, and the slippery slope arguments that might induce one to switch from the side one would otherwise believe in, without discussing where that actually leaves him. Which is, I suppose, very much his style.

(Via Southern Appeal) Far be it from me to resurrect the "Naturalist Ethics" debate that got everybody so worked up a while ago, but there are right ways to criticize "brights" and there are wrong ways. Dinesh D'Souza has stumbled across one of the wrong ways.

He writes:

The Fallacy of the Enlightenment is the glib assumption that there is only one limit to what human beings can know, and that limit is reality itself. In this view, widely held by atheists, agnostics and other self-styled rationalists, human beings can continually find out more and more until eventually there is nothing more to discover. The Enlightenment Fallacy holds that human reason and science can, in principle, unmask the whole of reality.

In his "Critique of Pure Reason," Kant showed that this premise is false. In fact, he argued, there is a much greater limit to what human beings can know. The only way that we apprehend reality is through our five senses. But why should we believe, Kant asked, that our five-mode instrument for apprehending reality is sufficient for capturing all of reality? What makes us think that there is no reality that goes beyond, one that simply cannot be apprehended by our five senses?...
Kant isn't arguing against the validity of perception or science or reason. He is simply showing their significant limits. These limits cannot be erased by the passage of time or by further investigation and experimentation. Rather, the limits on reason are intrinsic to the kind of beings that humans are, and to the kind of apparatus that we possess for perceiving reality. The implication of Kant's argument is that reality as a whole is, in principle, inaccessible to human beings. Put another way, there is a great deal that human beings simply will never know.

Notice that Kant's argument is entirely secular: It does not employ any religious vocabulary, nor does it rely on any kind of faith. But in showing the limits of reason, Kant's philosophy "opens the door to faith," as the philosopher himself noted.

Suppose I say "There's a 'Drogulus' over there," and you say, "What?" and I say "Drogulus" and you say "What's a drogulus?" Well, I say, "I can't describe what a drogulus is, because it's not the sort of thing you can see or touch, it has no physical effects of any kind, but it's a disembodied being." And you say, "Well how am I to tell if it's there or not?" and I say "There's no way of telling. Everything's just the same is it's there or it's not there. But the fact is it's there. There's a drogulus there standing just behind you, spiritually behind you." Does that make sense?

[This post may not be entirely of interest to non-economists. In fact, it may not be of entire interest at all.]

Ronald Coase is often cited for a proposition called "The Coase Theorem," which arose out of an article he wrote in the '60s called The Problem of Social Cost. Very roughly speaking, this Coase Theorem says that if property rights are fully defined and enforceable, and if transaction costs are zero, then the initial distribution of property or rights makes no difference to how they will finally be allocated. [For a much better explanation of the standard Coase Theorem, see Lawrence Solum's entry in The Legal Theory Lexicon.]

So what's the problem? The problem is that transaction costs often aren't zero. As Solum says "this is where the action is." In fact, in many cases there can exist mutually exploitable gains from trade, but two actors will be unable to reach an efficient bargaining simply because of what's called a "standoff equilibrium." This happens when each side refuses to compromise its position because each person is sure that the other person will compromise his position first. And if either player compromises just a little bit, the other person rightly takes that as a sign of weakness, and will stand all the more fast.

[In a world of asymmetric information, these transaction costs are often impossible to eliminate.] My pet peeve is seeing Coase cited in support of the optimistic version of this theorem. Last Spring he gave a lecture at The University of Chicago, and said that the point he had always been trying to make was that the assumption of zero transaction costs was a critical one, and often not realized.

So it's annoying to have one's professor going on and on about asymmetric bargaining games (involving the exploitation of the tragedy of the commons) and then cite the simplified version of the Coase Theorem, as if no game theoretic problems existed there. This is all the more annoying when the class is a large lecture where you aren't supposed to talk back to the professor.

In other words, yes, zero-transaction costs and strong property rights imply efficient outcomes, but acheiving zero-transaction costs is a Nobel-winning battle in and of itself, and in many cases, it simply can't be done without symmetrizing the information available to both parties. (Because there's no incentive compatible mechanism to force people to reveal their own demand functions that has a 100% probability of successful trade).

UPDATE: Many thanks to Professors Bainbridge and Solum for the attention turned to this post. And Dr. Lewis, if by some freak chance you are reading this, I don't mean the complaint personally.

I agree with Will that "The trouble with rape law isn't that it's too hard for men to figure out when a woman is consenting. The trouble is that it's too hard for the parties to prove what was said."

But I do disagree with Will, in his second posting: here.

If somebody I subjectively consider dangerous proposes an activity in which I don't wish to engage, a sound legal rule should simply require me to make my non-consent verbally clear. Even if this person hasn't physically threatened me, once he physically does something to me that I've non-consented to, that should be that. I shouldn't have to start a fight.

Taken perfectly literally, how would a mute person make non-consent perfectly clear?

Words do have the advantage in clarity over non-verbal communication, but I don't think a verbal "no" is required to make a lack of consent apparent. If the more passive party has not communicated either a "yes" or a "no" (and by 'yes' I don't mean only that word, or even only verbalizations found in the OED), then it's the burden of the more aggressive party to not push any further without obtaining definate permission (henceforth "woman" and "man").

A while back (perhaps a year?), there was a discussion of campus sex codes. Some college wanted its students to obtain verbal permission for each step: may I kiss you? may I remove your right shoe and then your sock? This, we agreed, was fairly ridiculous: permission is commonly granted or denied by body language, by a turn of the head to advance or retreat. Without any words being exchanged, women daily either consent or deny consent, in ways that are perfectly understandable (and if a hesitant man thinks she said "no" when she meant "yes," that's a mistake easily rectified).

But a lack of a 'No" does not prevent it from being rape. To continue Dahlia's example, I don't have to say "no" to keep you from taking my car (although once I do, you shouldn't take it); until I, in some explicit means, say yes, it's presumed you don't have my consent. Why should I be required to be more pro-active in the more heinous crime? Why should a woman have to say "no", a response that she could reasonably believe might antagonize her attacker? If he shows sufficient disergard for her person and thoughts to rape her, then a fear that he'd hit her is quite reasonable (for hitting is generally considered a lesser crime than rape, perhaps it's more frequent or requires less provocation). This is a continuation of Will's rationale: "I shouldn't have to pick a fight."

Yes, this is hard to prove in court: instead of claims "I said no" being argued against "she never said no," it becomes "My body language made my lack of consent clear, but I was afraid to actually say no" against "She never said no, so I thought she meant yes." But rape cases are always a he-said/she-said with the bar for "beyond reasonable doubt" set high (as it should be); I'm not sure if this is anymore or less obtuse than the standards of proof currently out there.

This is, anyway, my conception of what the law should be, more closely approximated by Wisconsin and Washington than by Texas, as the Curmudgeonly Clerk's research reveals.

[Then again, these are the thoughts of someone who, if she's having a bad day and is asked for the cause, would really rather have the person guess, on the basis of facial expressions and other clues, what the cause might be; it's a laborious process that's prone to getting causations wrong, but that something's wrong is clear without me speaking. I realize it's infuriating, but it does a good job of signaling out the people to whom I figure I might reveal the the troubles (if you can't figure out a minimal amount on the basis of what I'm not saying, then, quite frankly, I don't want to say anything at all). Don't make me speak.]

Grocery shopping here in Santa Barbara has become quite an adventure since clerks at the three main grocery chains went on strike, and shoppers have flooded the remaining independent stores. But what caught my eye about the story is this (from a USA Today article):

Clerks at Kroger's Ralphs, Safeway's Vons and Albertsons grocery stores went on strike late Saturday after negotiations between union representatives and store officials broke off, with health care coverage a key sticking point.

The companies operate about 900 stores from San Diego to Santa Barbara and control 60% of the Southern California market.

Officials with the United Food and Commercial Workers union initially said strikers would only target Vons stores and urged the companies not to lock out workers from the others.

The supermarkets, however, said a strike against one company would be considered a strike against all three. In a joint statement, they said Albertsons and Ralphs would lock out employees during the dispute.

So why are stores allowed to do this? Doesn't this violate some sort of antitrust rule? Perhaps someone who knows more about labor law than I do (which wouldn't be very dificult) could explain this to me.

In our never-ending role as footnotes to the Volokh Conspiracy...

Randy Barnett has a smart post today about John Lott. He also discusses the comparative merits of peer reviewed journals and student-run ones:

Second, while many academics claim the superiority of peer-reviewed journals over student-edited law reviews, this incident should give us pause. Lott's initial figures were originally published in a peer-reviewed journal. So was Michael Bellesiles' original probate survey that was subsequently debunked only when it was included in his high-profile book.

In my experience, both types of journals have their advantages and disadvantages. The peer review process tends to eliminate articles not within the mainstream of the profession or articles that lack sufficient originality. This bias tends to suppress rather than encourage diversity of views. And while this screening serves to eliminate some articles containing errors, I doubt most reviewers "run the numbers" or check citations for themselves, unless they happen to run against their own preconceptions. Nor do the editors of peer reviewed journals.

If you're in Chicago and into that sort of thing, eminent poet Mark Strand will be giving a poetry reading on Thursday October 16, at 5:30 P.M. On Friday October 17 at 1:00 P.M., he will be delivering a lecture on "A Case from the Annals of Translation." Both of these will be in the Classics Building, Room 10.

Mark Strand's a smart guy, and he has great taste in poetry (even if I haven't cared for most of his verse myself), so this could be quite worthwhile.

Oh yeah, and he was one of George HW Bush's Poets Laureate, and has a Pulitzer Prize.

Ox-blogger, Rhodes Scholar, and neo-con-at-large, Josh Chafetz is this week's 20 Questions subject. Please read on as he holds forth on liberal democracy, the history of Oxblog, fiction, and Matthew Yglesias's girlfriend.

1: What made you decide to start blogging?

The summer before I came to Oxford, I'd interned at The New Republic, where a substantial part of my day was devoted to reading as many news sources as I could. And that habit carried over when I got here -- I'd spend several hours a day reading news (I got here less than 20 days after 9/11, so there was a lot of news to read), and I would frequently email links to interesting articles to friends and family. I've always loved writing, and at some point it occurred to me that I could spare my friends' email boxes if I started a blog. I really wasn't sure if anyone would read it, or how long it would last. But it's been a lot of fun, so I've kept at it.

2: OxBlog originally consisted of the triumvirate of you, David Adesnik, and Daniel Urman. Now Mr. Urman almost never posts, and his email address is gone from the site, but Patrick Belton has arrived as a reliable contributor. How did you find Mr. Belton and what happened to Mr. Urman?

Actually, OxBlog was originally Dan Urman (a friend from Oxford who's now at Harvard Law), Anand Giridharadas (who interned with me at TNR and then spent his junior year at Oxford; he now works for McKinsey in Bombay), and me. For a brief while, Arielle Simon (who was spending part of her junior year in Oxford and was, at the time, the girlfriend of a well-known blogger) wrote for us, as well. Anand and Arielle stopped writing for OxBlog when they left Oxford at the end of their junior year, and Dan gradually tapered off in his contributions.

I'd known David for a while, but he'd never read OxBlog. And then in early September 2002, we were both in New Haven for the wedding of two kids named Patrick Belton and Rachel Kleinfeld, and we started talking about it. After the wedding, David checked out OxBlog, decided he liked it, asked if he could join, and I said sure. So that's how he came on board.

I'd met Patrick at a dinner party the summer before I came to Oxford (which was the summer after his first year at Oxford). We'd been good friends for quite a while when he mentioned that he'd be interested in writing for OxBlog, so he joined in March.

3: Are group blogs "the wave of the future?" What is the ideal size for a group blog?

I don't think group blogging is the wave of the future in the sense that it will crowd out individual blogging. Some people clearly have the time, interest, and inclination to write enough on a daily basis that they can develop an audience. But group blogging certainly offers a lot of benefits. For one thing, you can debate amongst yourselves, which is fun and interesting if done occasionally (but can cross the line into self-obsessed naval-gazing if done too frequently). For another, it brings a diversity of interests to the blog, which is very nice. And, of course, it takes the pressure off any one blogger to post frequently enough to keep the readers coming back. From the beginning, I wanted partners, because I didn't want to have to wake up and think, "Okay, what am I going to blog about today?" Instead, I wake up, have my coffee, read the news, and, if something strikes me as blog-worthy, I write about it. If not, I don't. Between the three of us, we always seem to put enough stuff up that we don't lose our audience.

As for the ideal size, well, you want it to be big enough to take advantage of the benefits above. And that depends, not just on numbers, but also on how much they write. Four bloggers (Dan, Anand, Arielle, and I) were sometimes too few, since there were weeks when the other three wrote little or nothing. But the three bloggers we have now are plenty, because we all write a fair amount. On the other end, you don't want to get so big that individual voices get lost or that you're putting up so much text that people give up on reading it all.

4: Which is more important for a re-developing nation (like Iraq): democracy or liberty? That is, should we support a democratic process even in nations that use that process to create a tyrannical theocracy or something similar (after all, even constitutional rights can be amended)?

What we should be supporting is liberal democracy. But it's not really an either/or choice -- liberalism and democracy stand in a mutually reinforcing dialectic. This isn't to say that you can't have one without the other -- of course, you can, and we can all think of examples. But those examples tend to be transient. If a society is liberal but not democratic, then people will use their free speech and their free press and their free association to criticize the government at some point. And at that point, the ruler will have a choice: he can either crack down on civil liberties, or he can surrender power. If he does neither, public pressure will keep growing until, at some point, the choice is forced. Similarly, a society that is democratic but not liberal is ripe for either a coup or a civil war, and there is almost always someone around willing to lead one.

Liberal democracy, on the other hand, is stable, because liberal norms of protecting minorities and settling issues through persuasion and open procedures reinforce the strength of the democratic institutions, and the democratic institutions underline the importance of accompanying liberal norms. This is why it's foolish to try and rush elections in Iraq -- unless the groundwork has been properly laid, unless Iraqis have had some time to get accustomed to arguing peacefully about politics, unless they've had time to understand that they can trust a free press in ways that they couldn't trust the Saddam-controlled press, etc., then elections will produce, at best, an unstable democracy.

I think it's important that the Iraqi Constitution be written in such a way that it would be hard to amend it so as to make it either illiberal or undemocratic. Requiring a supermajority for a constitutional amendment is a good idea. Assuming we don't rush the transition, I find it unlikely that a supermajority would vote for changes that turned Iraq -- or any country -- from a liberal democracy into a theocratic tyranny. (And, the truth is, if a supermajority somehow did want that, no mere "parchment barrier" (to borrow a line from Madison) would stand in their way.)

5: Along with one of your co-bloggers, you're a founder of OxDem, which was founded to "to publicize the importance of democracy". What made you decide to create OxDem and what exactly does it do?

We decided to create it because we didn't think that both sides of the debate over the Middle East were being heard on campus. Those who saw imperialist greed in every action that the US takes in the region were monopolizing public discussion. And we thought there were other questions that needed to be raised, but weren't.

We wanted to bring democracy promotion to the foreground, both because we think that people have a right to live in a liberal democracy, and also because liberal democracies don't produce terrorism, and they don't go to war with each other. Those are amazing facts, and they're worth bringing up.

Although the Middle East was our starting point, and remains a strong interest, we also wanted to make sure that we didn't limit ourselves to just that region. There are plenty of tyrannies out there, and, while there is no one-size-fits-all policy solution, they are all worth talking about, and it is worth thinking hard about what we can do to promote democracy in all of them.

Last year, before the war, we co-sponsored a panel discussion on Iraq with several other groups. The turnout was great -- we filled a pretty big lecture hall, and had people standing in the aisles -- and a lot of people came up to us afterwards and said that we'd raised issues they hadn't thought about before. That's what we're trying to do. Our goal is to do it through a combination of writing, bringing in speakers, and putting together panels. (And, if anyone else has good ideas, I'd love to hear them, too!)

6: What about living in the United Kingdom have you found the most difficult to adjust to?

The general foreignness of it. When I've gone to countries where I don't speak the language, I've always felt very foreign at first, but then come to feel more comfortable. It's the opposite here -- I stepped off the plane and things felt pretty much the same. But after a month or two, the little differences add up and I felt less and less at home. Of course, after a while, the process reversed itself and I began feeling more comfortable again, but I can still go to an American city that I've never been to before and feel more at home there than I do in Oxford.

It's hard to even put my finger on the differences, and a lot of them seem really petty when I put them into words -- differences in how stores treat their customers, differences in how people on the street react to strangers -- but they do add up. (I should add that some of the little things I find better than the US equivalent and others I find worse. But, in both cases, they take some adjusting -- which is not necessarily a bad thing, either.)

7: What, if any, difference do you perceive between Oxford and the other place?

To tell you the truth, I don't know Cambridge all that well. Certainly, Cambridge feels more like a college town, while Oxford feels more like a city -- Oxford used to have an industrial base, whereas I don't think Cambridge has ever had much besides the university. And obviously, the different universities have different strengths. But I'm not sure there's a whole lot of difference in how things are run or what the undergrad experience would be like. As I said, though, I'm really not very qualified to compare them.

8: If a Democrat manages to unseat President Bush in 2004, who would be his (or her) best choice for Secretary of State?

Wow, that's a tough one. I don't really know the foreign policy establishment all that well -- Patrick or David would be much better qualified to answer this one (as, of course, would Dan Drezner). Not that this is at all controversial, but it ought to be someone with a good understanding of the Middle East, preferably someone who speaks Arabic.

9: What do you want to be when you, well, grow up? That is, what sort of career path do you plan to follow?

I want to be a law professor, focusing on American constitutional law. I also want to keep writing for the popular press on the side.

10: You're the recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship, a great honor. What advice do you have for the hundreds to thousands of college students trying to win one?

First, a general note: There are 32 American Rhodes Scholars per year, 40 Marshall Scholars, and 10 UK Fulbrights. There are hundreds of students across the US who are every bit as qualified as the 82 people who actually get those fellowships. If you're in that group of hundreds, a lot of it is luck from there. Some more specific advice:

(1) Don't think about them at all until late in your junior year. I've actually gotten emails from people who were just starting their freshman year asking what they could do to increase their odds. That's absurd. College is an amazing experience -- enjoy it and do what you love doing. As I said above, no matter how good you are, odds are that you're not going to win one of the major fellowships, so don't waste four years doing things just because you think they'll give you an edge.

(2) Before you apply, make sure you really do want to go to graduate school at Oxford (or, for the Marshall or Fulbright, in the UK generally). The fellowships are honors, sure, but they're also scholarships to go to graduate school, and if you don't want to be in grad school, you're not going to enjoy your time here.

(3) If you get an interview, enjoy it! You get the chance to talk to all these amazing people -- both your fellow applicants and the committee members. Treat it like a conversation with really smart people, rather than a high-pressure interview. It helps if you're pretty sure that you're not going to win. (My Marshall interviews went very, very badly, which convinced me that I didn't have a shot at winning the Rhodes, either, so I was much more relaxed in the interview, and it went much better.)

11: You chose Yale not only for your undergraduate education but also for Law School. Why Yale?

It's hard to say why I picked it as an undergrad. I didn't know all that much about it -- in fact, I never saw the campus until move-in day of my freshman year. But when I found out where I got in, it just seemed like the best fit. And, in retrospect, I think it was the best fit, not only of the places I got into, but of all the places I applied. I love the unabashed intellectualism and intellectual diversity of the campus; I love the focus on the arts; and I love New Haven. I really just enjoyed everything about my four years there.

And while I was there, I worked as a research assistant for Akhil Reed Amar, a constitutional law expert at Yale Law. Working with him not only confirmed for me that I wanted to do constitutional scholarship, but it also gave me a chance to see the Yale Law community up close, and I really liked what I saw. Law school is, of course, a professional school, but Yale Law is uniquely focused on scholarship -- it's as close to a liberal arts education as you can get in professional school, and closer to it than you get in a lot of graduate programs. For someone who wants to be a law professor, it's really no contest. And the community at Yale Law seemed incredibly friendly and open.

I should note that, after Yale, my next choice for both undergrad and law school was the University of Chicago. From what I can tell, Chicago seems like an amazing place, and I would love to spend some time there at some point.

12: If you were put in charge of a diplomatic peace mission to Israel-Palestine, what would you do?

Beg to be put in charge of something else!

I think I would start by sitting down with the Israeli PM and saying something to the effect of, "Look, the United States is on your side. You're a democratic government; the PA is not. You don't sponsor or breed terrorism; the PA does. We're on your side because we're pro-democracy and anti-terrorism. We're on your side because you're on the right side, and because you're on the right side, it's unfair to ask you to make the first move. But life is unfair, so suck it up.

Institute a real freeze on settlement building. Dismantle settlements in the West Bank -- not settlements consisting of a couple of tents, but real settlements, with real buildings. Offer compensation to the uprooted settlers, but move them, by force if necessary." Then I would go to the Palestinian PM and say something to the effect of, "The United States is out of patience with you. You have a choice, and you have to make that choice now. You can choose to fight and win a civil war against Hamas, Islamic Jihad, et al., and thereby begin providing a real state and a real way of life for your people. If you do that, the United States will assist you in whatever way you would like us to -- we will fund you, we will train your security officers, and we will do it secretly so you don't lose face. And once you show us some results -- once you show us that you are capable of policing the territories and preventing attacks on Israel -- then we will pressure Israel to pull out of the territories and to start final negotiations on Palestinian statehood. We know you cannot end all terrorism, just as no government can end all crime. But you must make a serious, sustained, bona fide effort. That's one choice. The other choice is to do nothing, to go on as you are now. If you do that, then here is what you can expect from the United States: the PA will not receive a dime from us. The State Department will begin considering whether there is enough evidence to list the PA itself as a terrorist organization. The United States will do its best to covertly find, train, and fund democratic opposition to the PA within the territories. The United States will begin broadcasting Radio Free Palestine, which will report on corruption within the PA and on how the PA abuses the trust of the Palestinian people. Finally, I leave you with this warning: Many Americans visit Israel. Americans have died in terrorist attacks in Israel before. If you do not crack down on terrorist groups, and if another terrorist attack kills an American citizen, we reserve the right to consider that an act of war."

I would also tell the State Department that, for God's sake, please do not publicly say that the Palestinian PM is "someone we can work with." There seems to be no faster way of discrediting him in the eyes of the Palestinian population.

Do I think that would work? I have no earthly idea. (And as I write this, I see that yet another Palestinian PM has bitten the dust. That's not a good sign.)

13: OxBlog has been accused before of being written by Straussians. What does it mean to be a Straussian? Are you a Straussian?

Oy ve. I have to say, I find the surge of Strauss-based conspiracy theories fascinating. I should start by saying that my knowledge of Strauss is limited -- I've read Natural Right and History, Thoughts on Machiavelli, about half of the essays collected in An Introduction to Political Philosophy, and the introductory essay to Persecution and the Art of Writing, and that's it. So I'm by no means an expert. That said, neither are 95% of the people writing/spreading the Straussian conspiracy meme, so ... Look, Strauss is an interesting character. His attack on historicism in Natural Right and History is worth reading, although ultimately I think that Gadamer's attack on historicism in Truth and Method is fuller and more appealing. Strauss was a democrat, but a cautious one. He thought that the ideal was a democracy that was a "universal aristocracy" -- that is, one in which everyone had a liberal education which allowed them to think deeply about the important questions of self-governance (see his essay "What Is Liberal Education?" reprinted in An Introduction to Political Philosophy).

But mostly, his critics seem to go after him for his esotericism. Briefly, Strauss wrote that most people usually don't like hearing what philosophers have to say, and therefore, the philosopher, if he is to avoid Socrates' fate, must "write between the lines." The result, then, is that the most profound teachings of the philosophers are "addressed, not to all readers, but to trustworthy and intelligent readers only." (Those quotes are from Persecution and the Art of Writing.) This gets caricatured thus: "According to Strauss, texts have secret meanings that only he and his disciples can understand." That caricature is easy to mock, of course. And mock people do.

But an honest critic of Strauss (of which, let me rush to say, there are many) would look at how Strauss actually reads texts. His readings don't rest on an ipse dixit -- he does very close readings and gives very detailed reasons. Now, some of his readings are preposterous. Others strike me as quite plausible. But they're not based on what Strauss' secret decoder ring told him ...

In other words, Strauss is rather misunderstood, and I suspect the people who've called OxBlog Straussian were laboring under some of those misconceptions. The truth is, I don't know what it means to be called a Straussian. Does it mean that you think that a text's meaning is sometimes intentionally hidden? Then most literature scholars are Straussians. Does it mean that you're anti-historicist? Then, again, many of us are Straussians. Does it mean that you think democracy is flawed, but better than the available alternatives? Then, yet again, many of us are Straussians. Does it mean that you agree with all of his textual analysis? Then none of us are Straussians.

Given all that, my answer to the question of whether I'm a Straussian would have to be, "I don't think so. But can you be a little more specific, please?"

14: How would you describe your political leanings?

Neoconservative on foreign policy; somewhere between neoliberal and neoconservative on domestic policy.

15: You've written for both the Weekly Standard and The New Republic-- an interesting combination. Do those publications make strange bedfellows? Why the Weekly Standard but not the National Review?

Actually, you'd be surprised how incestuous a world it is. Fred Barnes was a senior editor and the White House correspondent for The New Republic for ten years. People like Charles Krauthammer and Peter Berkowitz routinely write for both. So it's not actually so surprising.

As for why the Standard but not National Review ... the Standard is definitely closer to my own political views. (While there are a number of issues on which I disagree with the Standard, I can't think of any issues on which I disagree with them but agree with National Review.) That said, I would consider writing for NR. I have, in fact, pitched them stuff in the past and been ignored, which doesn't exactly make me excited to pitch them stuff again in the future.

16: What suggestions do you have for other students who want to break into print media? How hard is it to start writing for a magazine like TNR?

Intern somewhere. I interned at TNR, which gave me the opportunity to publish my first piece there, plus the opportunity to get to know everyone who worked there. And the first time I pitched a piece to the Weekly Standard, I could tell them in my email, "I worked at and have been published in TNR ... ," which at least makes it more likely that they'll read your pitch. The hardest part is getting your foot in the door, and internships, although the pay is crummy, are a great way to do that.

I also should note that interning at TNR was an incredible, incredible amount of fun.

17: What is the doctrine of Parliamentary Privilege and why should we care about it?

As you know, I'm currently working on the 300-page answer, but I'll try to keep it brief.

Parliamentary privilege consists of those special rights and powers that individual Members or Houses of Parliament enjoy. Examples include the right of MPs to speak freely on the floor of Parliament without fear of being held legally to account for their words in any other place (as guaranteed in Article 9 of the 1689 Bill of Rights, and later incorporated into Article I of the US Constitution), and the right of each House to hold both Members and non-Members in contempt of Parliament.

Consequently, privilege plays a huge role in determining how the various institutions of British political life interact with one another. It is crucial in determining how courts and the House of Commons interact, and, in bygone days, in determining how the Crown and the House interact. Equally importantly, it affects the interaction between the House and the public.

A few of the interesting questions that privilege raises, then, are: If the House finds someone in contempt and throws him into the Tower of London, can a petition for writ of habeas corpus be brought in a common law court? Are an MP's communications with or on behalf of his constituents afforded any level of privilege? If the franchise is a common law right (which it was generally held to be) and if a right implies a remedy (which it is generally held to do) and if the House of Commons has exclusive jurisdiction over electoral disputes (which, until the late-nineteenth century, it did) and if the House cannot award monetary damages (which it can't), then what was to be done when someone was illegally deprived of his right to vote?

All of these questions get at something deeper, which is this: what is the nature of democracy in the British Constitution? Under an ancient view of constitutions, the constitution is balanced between the democratic, the aristocratic, and the monarchical elements. Under this view, the House of Commons is the repository of democracy in Britain, and therefore the function of privilege is to protect the House from any external attacks, whether those attacks are by other institutions or by British subjects. But a more modern view of democratic constitutionalism holds that the entire Constitution is characterized as democratic, and the various elements work together to reinforce the overall democratic character of the system. On this view, privilege protects the overall democratic character of the system, which sometimes means limiting the ways in which a self-dealing House of Commons can thwart the popular will.

My argument, then, is that privilege provides a window onto changing understandings of democracy in the British Constitution. (I'm also tracing these ideas as they were incorporated into the American Constitution, but I've only just started working on that part of my dissertation.)

18: You've guest-blogged several times on the Volokh Conspiracy. How did you come into this gig?

Eugene emailed and asked. It seemed like a fun opportunity, both to interact more directly with the excellent people at the Volokh Conspiracy and to reach a larger audience. And we had a lot of fun doing it the first time, so when he asked again, we said sure. And I'm sure we'd do the same were he to ask again.

19: What sort of future do you see for OxBlog? How long do you intend to maintain it? Could you see yourself abandoning it for a major-media-blog, as Matthew Yglesias and Julian Sanchez have done?

I certainly have no intention of shutting OxBlog down anytime soon. As long as we're enjoying writing it, we'll keep at it. It's funny, people keep asking me if we'll keep it going after next year, when none of us will be in Oxford anymore. I see no reason why we shouldn't. If it gets to the point where it's not fun anymore, then I'll rethink it. But for now, it's still a lot of fun.

As for abandoning OxBlog for a major-media blog, yeah, I'd consider it.
(Note to Jonathan Last: if you're considering starting a Weekly Standard blog, give me a call. ;-) )

20: Do you read fiction? If so, what sort of fiction do you read?

Of course I read fiction! What kind of person doesn't? My tastes are fairly varied -- I hardly know where to begin. At the beginning, I suppose: I think the Odyssey is probably the greatest story ever told, and Paradise Lost is probably the greatest ever telling of a story. I enjoy Dante and Cervantes, and, as I mentioned a little while ago on OxBlog, I'm in the process of reading/re-reading all of Shakespeare.

As for more modern stuff, among novelists, I enjoy Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, and Arturo Perez-Reverte. Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated was fantastic, and I can't wait for his second novel. I like Faulkner, but I have to be in the right mood.

I love Douglas Adams -- he is to writing what the Simpsons is to television: there's a Hitchhiker's Guide reference for any situation. For modern poetry, I most enjoy Seamus Heaney and Philip Larkin, although some of Wallace Stevens' work is amazing, and I suppose I can't leave out Eliot. I enjoy what Yehuda Amichai I've read, although that's not nearly enough. For drama, my absolute favorite modern is Stoppard, but I also love Wilde and Shaw and Arthur Miller and Eugene O'Neill.

And I'm leaving out so many ... Ah, well. Most of them are dead, and I suspect the rest won't be offended, anyway. I try to alternate my pleasure reading between fiction and non-fiction. It never ceases to amaze me that some people claim to be too busy for fiction -- as if only non-fiction can teach you things, and fiction is a frivolous diversion that can be dispensed with at any time without serious loss.

That's bunk. Ricoeur has a fantastic essay, "Imagination in Discourse and in Action" (it's in his From Text to Action), in which he talks about the crucial importance of imagination for both making sense of the world ("what certain fictions redescribe is, precisely, human action itself. Or, to say the same thing the other way around, the first way human beings attempt to understand and to master the 'manifold' of the practical field is to give themselves a fictive representation of it.") and for acting in it ("imagination is involved in the very process of motivation. It is imagination that provides the milieu, the luminous clearing, in which we can compare and evaluate motives as diverse as desires and ethical obligations, themselves as disparate as professional rules, social customs, or intensely personal values.")

Okay, I'll stop quoting hermeneutic theory now (you really should read the essay, though), but you get the point: imagination, and therefore fiction, is essential to who and what we are. As far as we know, we're the only species for which the idea of a text exists. A text (as Ricoeur understands it -- and I don't think someone like Gadamer would fundamentally disagree, although he would phrase it very differently) projects a world -- it allows us to imagine things as they are not, but could be. Idealism, utopianism, and therefore fiction, is intimately bound up with motivation for human action. But the capacity to present things as they are not is also bound up with human understanding -- from the banal (for those of us who could never get our brains around the concept of dimensions other than the four to which we have intuitive access (or, at least, access via the forms of intuition, to borrow Kantian language), Edwin Abbott's Flatland is invaluable, because it provides us with a metaphor by which extra dimensions become at least partly conceivable) to the sublime (Shakespeare, more than anyone else, has shaped how we think and feel about love -- this is part of what Harold Bloom means by his assertion that Shakespeare invented the human, and it's part of what Allan Bloom meant when he wrote that you can't have great sex without great books). Not having time for fiction means not having time to be fully human, and that's unfortunate, to say the least.

Probably didn't think I'd give that long an answer to a question asking what fiction I read, didja?

Kathleen's right that Sansbury's Diet Lemonade is a very delicious staple (and tastes sort of like Sprite without the additives), but I caution everybody to stay away from Sansbury's Diet Cloudy Lemonade, which is just terrible.

Never content to let me have any fun, the Curmudgeonly Clerk has reared his Curmudgeonly Head.

At issue is the "no means no" battle between Dahlia Lithwick and Gregg Easterbrook. Easterbrook argues that since "no" no longer means "no" we need a new phrase (he suggests "this is rape.") Lithwick responds that "this is rape" might work for a while, but that the same social forces that cause "no" to cease meaning "no" will cause "this is rape" to cease meaning "no" as well:

It didn't lose its social meaning because the word "no" is ambiguous. (If someone asks to borrow my Honda and I say "no," it's clear I haven't consented.) The word "no" has lost meaning because in this situation we choose to ignore its directive to desist

[Originally an illustrative dialogue deleted in the interests of taste.]

In other words, Baude seems to be arguing that sex that occurs after a "no" ought to be rape absent intervening verbal reconsideration. Baude is arguing for a substantial change in the law.

I have recently indicated my very firm belief that individuals have an absolute right to be free from unwanted contact. This is where I believe Baude goes astray. In ambiguous rape cases, as opposed from the paradigm instance of forced sex, whether the contact was, in fact, unwanted is the issue to be decided in court. We cannot possibly build a rule of law on the effect of words alone, because words alone do not provide the whole picture. As the women surveyed in the Texas study cited near the beginning of my original post indicates, "no" uttered with certain body language may have a radically different meaning from the dictionary definition of the term. Baude's bright-line language rule would have the advantage of clarity, but it's a clarity gained only by refusing to take cognizance of circumstances that might bear upon the meaning of the words.

Neither argument is grounded in a plausible account. The criticism of Lithwick that sometimes people do not mean what they say is pretty close to silly. It is obvious that people do not always mean what they say or say what they mean. As true in sexual activity as it is in financial activity. Are we to infer that because sometimes people do not mean it when they assent to financial transactions that there are no reliable standards for consent or withholding of consent? Another way to the same conclusion: you suggest in sex a force standard for rape. But that works only by defining force to be whatever happens without consent. (A tells B not to do X, so when B does X there is force.) But aside from being unnecessary, it creates even worse evidentiary and analytic problems. Is resting a hand on someone's shoulder use of force? Why go into these kinds of problems. We have a well-developed set of standards on determining consent in a wide range of social situations. Why not carry them over? In other words, why treat consent to sex differently from consent to other social interactions?

What the law does require is consent to be absent. This must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Unfortunately, we human beings do not always mean what we say or say what we mean. Hence, while spoken words undoubtedly have an evidentiary value they are hardly conclusive. It is neither unreasonable nor dangerous to require persons to effectively communicate lack of consent. See People v. Warren, 446 N.E.2d 591, 594 (Ill. App. Ct. 1983) ("We do not mean to suggest, however, that the complainant did in fact consent; however, she must communicate in some objective manner her lack of consent.")