Archive for January 11th, 2008
Cry Wolf
Social Democratic MP Helen Pettersson thinks life would be much easier without large predators. And the Green Party.
Word of the day: Hunter-friendly.
Earlier posts on this fascinating and explosive subject: Let sleeping bears lie and The Bear Has Been Shot – The Big Wolf Is Not So Bad.
Social Science
“What is social science good for?” Robin Hanson speculates:
Why then do so many people think otherwise? Many say it is because social scientists are stupid, or the social world is too complex or uncontrollable. Better answers are that social expertize conflicts with our overconfidence about familiar experience, or with our democratic ideology that everyone’s political opinions should get equal weight. But the best answer, I think is that most public talk by social experts reflects little social science. That is, what social experts say in legal or congressional testimony, or in newspapers or magazines, mostly reflects what they and we want and expect to hear, instead of what expert evidence reveals.
Andrew Gelman has this:
Rather than comparing social science to physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering, a more useful comparison might be to history. Historians know lots, both about specific things like what products were made by people in city X in century Y, or who signed treaty Z, and also about bigger trends in national and world events. But historians haven’t given us any useful products. History has value in itself–interesting stories–and helps us understand our world, although not always in a direct way. Once people start trying to organize their historical knowledge, this leads into political science.
And here is John Sides at the Monkey Cage:
All that is to say, while average people may not be so self-reflexive as to continually analyze their own behavior in light of social scientific theories, many do want to know how people really think and act and why they do so. Such topics are much closer to our daily lives than string theory or even Ziploc bags. In this way, social scientists have a tremendous advantage, one that Blink and Freakonomics and similar books have capitalized on.
Money
Geoffrey Wheatcroft gets mediaeval on Tony Blair after the latter lands a nice and very well-paid part-time job at JP Morgan:
Funnily enough, however overt Blair’s fascination with money may seem, it explains why the left always misunderstood him. Thinking instinctively and incorrigibly in ideological terms, the left saw Blair as a cuckoo who had taken over the nest, capturing the Labour party in order to move it hard to the right. In one sense that was of course true, but it missed a deeper truth. New Labour wasn’t ideologically leftwing or rightwing, it had no ideological content at all.
links for 2008-01-11
Hangovers
Swedish retailers had a disappointing December and so did their US counterparts, but the Christmas trade beat all records in Denmark.
On the other hand, the Danish housing market seems to be running out of steam. Is a Wile E Coyote moment due?
Oh, and Sweden’s monopolist alcohol retailer Systembolaget also noted record sales in December.
What the Critics Meant Was…
Arn the Movie: They hate it. No, they think it’s okay.
Peanuts
Visual gag: may contain traces of peanuts. (Via Madsenblog.)
Brother Can You Spare 10 Million Dimes…?
The Department of Chemistry in Lund has a problem.
Basically, the department has a projected deficit of 10 Mill. SEK per year for the coming seven years. According to media reports this means that one in three employees would have to leave their jobs.
What is a bit unusual in this case, though, is that the deficit seems to be due to bad economic management rather than declining numbers of students or missing research grants.