FOREIGN SOCK POLICY
Wonder what Sandy Berger thinks about this story...
Update: For serious comments on the Bush administration's latest trade travesty, see the posts at Marginal Revolution.
Dynamist Blog
SOLVING THE SAUDI PROBLEM, STEP 1
Reason's man in the Middle East, Michael Young, considers the Saudi problem:
The real difficulty with Saudi Arabia is that it poses a problem with no solution, at least in the short term: The despotism, brutality and corruption of the Al-Saud has reinforced domestic Islamists, many of whom sympathize with Osama bin Laden and detest the United States; yet democratic elections could well bring these people to power. At the same time, if the Al-Saud crush Al-Qaeda in their midst, this would allow the royal family to ward off real change, generating new forms of violent opposition.
That said, the idea of domestic Saudi reform is laughable. The Saudi royal family will never transform itself into something more enlightened--not, for example, when so much state funding goes to paying lavish salaries to the kingdom's estimated 7,000-8,000 princes and princesses. (In 1995, Jean-Michel Foulquier, a pseudonym for a French diplomat who had worked in the kingdom, wrote a prescient book on Saudi Arabia's woes, where he estimated the monthly allowance at between $15,000-20,000, not including myriad other subsidies.) Nor can a nation of institutions peacefully replace a kingdom that is named for, and mostly run as a private domain, by a single family. For the near future, nothing short of enforced change, internal or external, will alter power relations in Saudi Arabia.
No doubt to the consternation of some of his U.S.-based Reason compadres, Young suggests that the answer may start with "deriving advantages from democratization in Iraq. This may be a long shot given the ambient (and utterly mistaken) perception of failure there. But as Americans consciously turn their attention away from the grand ambitions that accompanied the war in Iraq and embrace a more urgent desire to head for the country's exits, they might want to recall that one of the inherent aims of the Bush administration's campaign was to protect the U.S. against the dangerous vicissitudes of Saudi politics."
CLINICAL TRIALS
The Faster Cures email newsletter contains this interesting bit of info:
Did you know ... several mainstream publications such as The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal carry online clinical trial information? The Post carries a database run by CenterWatch that lists hundreds of trials across the country as well as information about the clinical trial process, including the risks and benefits involved with participation. The Wall Street Journal posts a list of drugs currently in the development stages for various medical conditions. This database is primarily intended to highlight drug development competition, the potential financial impact and where they are in the Food and Drug Administration approval process. Updates to this database are published every other Tuesday in Online Journal's Health Industry Edition.
GRADUAL REVOLUTIONS
For a Liberty Fund conference on the economics of knowledge, I've been rereading Joel Mokyr's Gifts of Athena, about which I wrote a Times column. It's a brilliant book, full of important insights and distinctions. Here's a selection, from a chapter titled "The Industrial Revolution and Beyond":
Terms like "revolution" tend to be overused and abused by historians. They draw attention. They sell books. But do they have historical content? In economic history especially, melodramatic terms have a bad name, because the field tends to be relatively undramatic. Most of the elements that drive modern economic growth work gradually, slowly, and almost imperceptibly: the dissemination of technological ideas, the accumulation of capital, even the changes in economic institutions were rarely very spectacular. Whenever a genuinely dramatic general-purpose invention occurred, its impact on the productivity of the economy as a whole took many years to be felt. The first Industrial Revolution used to be regarded as the watershed event in the economic history of mankind since the invention of agriculture and has often been mentioned in one breath with the dream-laden contemporaneous French Revolution. It has now been shown to have had only modest effects on economic growth before 1815 and practically none on real wages and living standards before 1840, more than a century after the appearance of the first steam engine. The second Industrial Revolution, similarly, was slow in manifesting its full impact on the economies in question and took much of the twentieth century to work out its effects fully. The paragon of the putative third Industrial Revolution, the computer, has still apparently not wholly lived up to the hopes and expectations regarding productivity and output.
Few scholars nowadays think of the Industrial Revolution as a series of events that abruptly and significantly raised the rate of sustained economic growth. Most of the effects on income per capita or economic welfare were slow in coming and spread out over long periods. All the same, even though the dynamic relation between technological progress and per capita growth is hard to pin down and measure, it is the central feature of modern economic history. We are uncertain how to identify the technology-driven component of growth, but we can be reasonably sure that the unprecedented (and to a large extent unmeasured) growth in income in the twentieth century would not have taken place without technological changes. It seems therefore more useful to measure "industrial revolutions" against the technological capabilities of a society based on the knowledge it possesses and the institutional rules by which its economy operates. These technological capabilities must include the potential to produce more goods and services, but they could equally affect aspects that are poorly measured by our standard measures of economic performance, such as the ability to prevent disease, to educate the young, to move and process information, and to coordinate production in large units. By those standards, it is hard to deny that the 1990s witnessed an industrial revolution, but we need to assess it in terms of those capabilities, with the macroeconomic consequences following eventually but often much later.
Update: Thanks to David Young, who helped proof TSOS, for correcting my typos. If you're in need of a professional copy editor/proofreader, I recommend him. (Email me for contact info.)
INTIMIDATING RESEARCH
U.S. scientists may grouse about the influence of the religious right on issues like stem-cell research, but that's just a matter of government funding. Real fanatics get stuff shut down altogether--and a large portion of British society has long made a religion of animal rights. Now, according to this article in The Scientist, animal rights activists have intimidated a construction company into backing out of its contract to build a lab at Oxford:
The UK government has been urged to take emergency action to combat animal rights extremists after Walter Lilly, a subsidiary of the Montpellier Group, pulled out of an £18 million (USD $33.3 million) contract to build a new center for animal research at Oxford University. The decision was widely attributed to intimidation by animal rights extremists, although Montpellier would only say that the decision was reached by mutual consent with Oxford University.
Scientists were in little doubt that the decision has brought to a head the long-standing battle between the research community and the antivivisection campaign, with Oxford taking over from the Cambridge area as the focus of activity. The move by Montpellier comes 6 months after Cambridge University decided to abandon plans to build a primate research center.
Researchers consider the Oxford case to be more serious because it involves a large, broad-based animal laboratory where 98% of the work would be on rodents, rather than a specialist primate center, where antivivisectionists are more likely to gain public support. "Unlike Cambridge, where it was just a relatively small laboratory, this is the center for all animal research at Oxford," noted Mark Matfield, director of the pro-animal research Research Defence Society, in a statement.
The Montpellier decision should at last get the government to wake up and enact emergency legislation, according to Ian Gibson, chairman of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. "We want action now, but I've no confidence it will be taken at the moment," Gibson said. "I don't think the government realizes the severity of the situation even now." Gibson wanted action along the lines taken to combat soccer hooliganism. "If you can stop football thugs from going across to Europe, why can't they pick these people up? I can't believe they don't know who they are."
The threat posed by such extremists was not just to animal research, but to the whole UK science base, according to Simon Festing of the Association of Medical Research Charities. "Unless we see urgent action from the government, the prize of the UK staying a world leader in developing new medicines could slip through its fingers," he said in a statement.
For the rest of the link-rich article, go here. I'd like to hear what Andrew Sullivan has to say on this matter.
UPDATE: Brian L. O'Connor has been all over this story, and related issues, at Animal Crackers.
THE POWER OF WORD CHOICE
The original A.P. report said, "Berger and Breuer [his lawyer] said Monday night that Berger knowingly removed the handwritten notes by placing them in his jacket and pants and that he also inadvertently took copies of actual classified documents in a leather portfolio." Reading with Occam's Razor in mind, I decided that probably meant his pants and jacket pockets, which makes the act no less illegal but a lot less weird and suspicious--an example of absent-mindedness or poor judgment, not Fawn Hall-style sneakiness.
Sure enough, the NYT report contains this sentence: "Mr. Berger also put in his jacket and pants pockets handwritten notes that he had made during his review of the documents, Mr. Breuer said."
I'm an odd defender of Berger, who used to make me wince at his incompetence when he was national security adviser. He's a good argument against the return of the not-very-deep Democratic foreign policy team--but not because of purloined notes. Partisans (and reporters) make fools of themselves, and their causes, when they turn this sort of story into a Very Big Deal. Argue the issues, folks.
In related news, Lileks writes about how the evolving precision of the Berger story made his column writing hell. See, he's not just a blogger--he has editors!
IRAQ'S PUTIN
In TNR, Robert Lane Greene makes a point Professor Postrel has made many times in our living room: Iraqis want a tough-guy Putin, not a nice-guy democrat, and Allawi fits the bill. Both Putin and Allawi, notes Greene, are former security agents, and, as time goes on, Allawi's strongman tendencies could raise problems for the rule of law.
DESIGNER MOUSE
No, it's not a genetic engineering project. Microsoft is selling a new optical mouse, designed by Philippe Starck. I'm not a huge Starck fan, but at least from the photo, this design looks gorgeous. Thanks for reader Joshua Mandell for the heads-up.
BUMBLING BERGER
I'm willing to believe that Sandy Berger had no nefarious motives when he walked out of a secure reading room with "highly classified terrorism documents and handwritten notes" on the Clinton administration's handling of al Qaeda threats, as the A.P. is reporting. But could we please hear a little less about how the Bush administration's foreign policy advisers are incompetent? This guy was National Security Adviser. Yikes.
I, ROBOT
Steve and I went to see I, Robot last night and enjoyed it very much--much more than I expected. Not only is Will Smith as charming as always, but the script is tightly written and the design creates an immersive experience.
The way the movie simultaneously remains faithful to and subverts Asimov's technocratic rationalism put me in mind of this essay by Greg Benford, who has done his own reworking of Asimov.
Even early sf presumed that elites should rule and that information should flow downward, enlightening the shadowed many. Sf's Shakespeare, H. G. Wells, was welcomed to speak by the Petrograd Soviet, the Reichstag, Stalin and both Roosevelt presidents. This company never doubted their managerist agendas, and Wells had his own.
Today, such mechanistic self-confidence seems quaintly smug. The genre looks to more vibrant metaphors, while cocking a wary eye at our many looming problems.
Sf writers are less interested in predicting and thus determining the future. They see themselves more as conceptual gardeners, planting for fruitful growth, rather than engineers designing eternal, gray social machines.