Jacob Christensen

Alcove with Rousseau’s bed at Les Charmettes, originally uploaded by Chris Bertram.

I write far too little about political science and political theory literature. Perhaps because Danish and Swedish politics is too interesting these days.

Instead, here is a picture of Rousseau’s bed taken by Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber fame. The Rousseau set is here, Bertram’s Flickr photostream is here.

Go on: Procrastinate!

In the meantime I’ll be writing a post on why we never did podcasts in our courses in Umeå.

Edit: That’s Bertram, not Bartram. 

Wikipedian protester. (Via Ezra Klein)

• Richard Baldwin – Economic policy and the New Century public discourse

  But how will the internet’s role in the public discourse on economics change in the future?

  (tags: economics academic web2.0 policy research)

• Martin/Mayer/Thönig – Does globalisation pacify international relations?

  Using a large dataset of military conflicts, trade created by regional trade agreements is shown to be pacifying, but greater overall openness has the opposite effect.

  (tags: economics research trade globalisation war conflict academic)

• David Halberstam – The History Boys

  David Halberstam asserts that Bush’s “history,” like his war, is based on wishful thinking, arrogance, and a total disdain for the facts.

  (tags: usa georgewbush history government)

• Organisations and Markets – Industrial Recycling: Nothing New

  Now we learn from Pierre Desrochers and Karen Lam that industrial recycling — a key component of modern sustainable development programs — was widespread during the Gilded Age.

  (tags: environment recycling history economics research)

• NY Times – Commuting Prison Term Is Implicit Critique of Sentencing Standards

  By saying that the sentence was excessive, I wonder if he understood the ramifications of saying that,” said Ellen S. Podgor, who teaches criminal law at Stetson University in DeLand, Fla.

  (tags: usa georgewbush politics)

I’ve del.icio.us-tagged this article by Richard Baldwin but it merits a special mention as well.

Consider these quotes (you should note that the public debate, Baldwin talks about, isn’t just letters to the editor, it’s sitting in government committees and doing other kinds of public service):

Today’s brilliant young economists are much less interested in participating in the public debate in these ways. I have no empirical evidence to back up this opinion, but I think it is shared by many economists involved in economic policy issues and I had first-hand experience of it during my five years as a Managing Editor of Economic Policy. Young people need publications in good anonymously-reviewed journals; everything else is a luxury.

and

Hypotheses on why abound. My belief is that a major intensification of competition among the top US economic departments has occurred over the past two decades, and this led to an overwhelming emphasis on scholarly output that can be easily quantified – journal articles in particular. Things like sitting on Select Committees, testifying to Parliament, or writing policy-oriented books and reports have impacts that are too hard to measure, so they get excluded from the rankings. Oversimplifying to make the point, what does not matter for the rankings doesn’t matter for academic promotion, prestige or pay. While things have not yet gone this far in most of Europe, the trend is starting. Some European economics departments pay a bonus of thousands of euros to faculty whose work gets published in top journals. Writing an influential analysis of a legislative policy proposal gets a pat on the back.

Actually, it’s not just individual careers, that are judged by these criteria.

In Sweden, professors and lecturers do not have time or resources for research included in their positions and the tendency is that the limited resources available to universities and faculties are to be distributed on the basis of quality – and in political-administrative terms, quality in all disciplines today means the relative number of articles in peer-reviewed English-language journals. Not articles written in the national language, not books and definitively not work which cannot be counted as academic in the narrowest sense of the word.

The pressure on heads of departments as the lowest level of academic management is to make employees conform to these norms.

So, despite all talk about the “third goal” of universities – i.e. the obligation to “interact” with society-at-large – what Swedish (and Danish) politicians and bureaucrats really want, and are likely to get, are universities that are on the one hand more internationally oriented but on the other hand also less engaged and visible in the public policy process and society in general.