let's call the calling off off?

[There] are many... cases where competition does not restrain monopoly as it is supposed to, but comforts and bolsters it by unburdening it of its more troublesome customers. As a result, one can define an important and too little noticed type of monopoly-tyranny: a limited type, an oppression of the weak by the incompetent and an exploitation of the poor by the lazy which is the more durable and stifling as it is both unambitious and escapable.

More generally, the performance of near-monopolistic service providers may be worse than that which would prevail if monopoly power were absolute. This has enormous and wide-ranging implications. The poor performance of a national railway system might persist indefinitely if the most demanding customers also have recourse to road transportation. Public schools might deliver worse learning outcomes if private or parochial options are available to the most quality conscious parents. A small decline in neighborhood quality could turn into a precipitous collapse if those most affected by it simply move elsewhere. And the ease with which common stock can be sold implies that the most vigilant shareholders will liquidate their holdings rather than attempt to improve the performance of management.

Rajiv Sethi on Albert Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, via Andrew Gelman

town and country

The Tories won’t have forgotten one of the most amazing facts about the 2005 election. In England they actually beat Labour by 57,000 votes – but ended up with 93 fewer seats. That isn’t especially fair, but it should make things interesting.

John Lanchester, LRB blog, on constituency distribution, 'votes in the country worth less than votes in the city', the rest here.

talking points

This kind of interviewing, in my view, is broken. Apart from the pointless rudeness, Kinnock can’t possibly answer the question by saying a. proposed tax rises did me in (because Labour today are offering tax rises), b. 1992 was a long time ago, so who cares? and c. I was perceived as a Welsh windbag, which is a different thing from a Scottish miserabilist. Because he can’t say those things – which would immediately take on a life of their own and derail the election launch – he has to cling to his talking points. Utility and informativeness of the exchange: zero.

John Lanchester on John Humphrys' interviewing style, on the LRB blog, the rest here.

i don't want a holiday in the sun

Video clip on the Guardian of Tim Jonze talking about Malcolm McLaren, former manager of the Sex Pistols.

Jonze says he once interviewed McLaren, thinking it would be a 15-minute telephone conversation. About an hour in he thought it might be a good idea to try to put his second question.

I happened to deal with McLaren while clearing permissions for The Last Samurai. One of my few good memories, actually, of the business of seeing the book into print.

St T

I think something short-circuits inside a kid when his parents abandon him to a whole lot of other kids.

Rupert Everett, interviewed by Carole Cadwaller in the Observer (Nov 2009)

ego glue

For many years I have worked with children and their families as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist. Before that however, I worked in the psychiatry of adulthood where the core disorder upon which the chronic hospital wards were established was schizophrenia. It was 'first philosophy* in psychiatry. Beneath its multifarious and often alarming presentations a central feature was though to inhere - a disturbance of the sense of self. Somehow, the self of the schizophrenic had become fragmented, porous and permeable to the selves of others, its secret thoughts available to the mind-reading abilities of the neighbours and its bony vault a useless barrier to the infestation of other people's thoughts. Indeed, the antipsychotic medications used in those days were rather scurrilously referred to as 'ego-glue* by some practitioners, insofar as they stuck the self together again or built up the boundary between oneself and another. Nowadays we are less vulgar with our terminology, but the self remains a critical venture for psychiatrists, psychologists and psychotherapists

Deleuze and Ricoeur: Disavowed Affinities and the Narrative Self
Declan Sheerin

at aaaarg, courtesy wood s lot (free registration required)

possible worlds

While in Boston I had dinner with a friend who teaches philosophy.

My friend had told me a long time ago that she had taught her children to spell their names in Greek. She liked The Last Samurai for other reasons, but one thing that appealed to her was the presentation of the teaching of Greek to a small child.

For those who haven't read the book, the method was to start by spelling very short English words in Greek letters. So, even if you've never contemplated learning Greek, you can probably see that this looks pretty manageable:

ατ βατ ιτ βιτ οατ βοατ ουτ αβουτ

Greek diphthongs are quite different from English diphthongs, so there's a certain amount of fudging, but you do realise that, how can I put it, you can actually read some recognisable words in a form you're not used to - and the first hurdle, the squiggly alphabet, is often the one at which many people fall. Most of us have learnt one alphabet by the age of 6, so you'd think a slightly different alphabet would not present problems - but the fact is, for English speakers, learning the protocol for representing spoken language in written letters is traumatic, and to the extent that we become literate we repress the trauma.

There was more Greek in the book, but this was the starting point. My thought was that we couldn't really know how exceptional Ludo was, and readers needed to see that there was no way of knowing. There's no doubt that every reader of the book could have learnt Greek from an early age if it had been properly presented; we have no way of knowing how many would have wanted to do so, or how far they could have taken it, but it mattered that something that looks daunting should be revealed as approachable if the first steps made use of things the reader already knew and had mastered by the age of 6.

My friend, anyway, said that her daughter had read the book and had wanted to learn Greek and had been told she could learn Greek when she started college. This is perfectly comprehensible to anyone who knows what it takes to make a career as a professional academic. My friend also said that her daughter, who was in her first year at university and had taken Greek, had refused to take her final exam in Greek because this seemed false to what study of the language was about. My feeling was not that my friend had let her daughter down - that she could have magicked time out of thin air to teach her daughter Greek. My feeling was that the publishers of the book had let them down, as they had let down other readers of the book who responded to this element of the book. The book could have been useful, among other things, as a starting point for readers who wanted to pursue this path, if additional materials had been available on a website. For this to be put in place, someone -- presumably the author -- would have needed to spend extra time preparing materials. A publisher committed to the concerns of the book might certainly have made all sorts of resources available, but this was not necessary. The crucial thing was that the publisher should have set value on the author's time.

I've seen a new discussion online of an old post on this blog, the post on copy-editing (Cormac McCarthy and the Semi-colon). As so often, there is no understanding of the concept of opportunity cost. If the editor is 8 weeks late with comments, if the lawyer refuses to clear permissions, if the copy-editor makes hundreds of gratuitous changes and reinstates them, against authorial veto before sending the book to press, they use time that could be spent finishing other books. A year is spent getting The Last Samurai into print, destroying all other books in the process. If that time had to be spent on Samurai, it might better have been spent, for example, preparing additional materials to assist the kind of reader who wanted to learn Greek. By comparison, months spent wrangling over whether numbers under 100 should be spelt out don't strike the author, at any rate, as a particularly good use of time.