Summaries of important research
Edited By Iain Murray
CULTURE AND SOCIETY
Student Power?
Matthew Crawford, “The Computerized Academy,” The New Atlantis, Summer 2005 (thenewatlantis.com)
The information revolution has changed academia. This change is evident not just in the omnipresence of laptops in the classroom or even in the way students do research. As writer and former think tank director Matthew Crawford notes, the Internet has had a
more profound effect on the relationship between student and teacher than anyone imagined.
In addition to encouraging cut-and-paste scholarship, information technology gives students more power. Communications with professors by e-mail are less deferential and make professors more accessible to “various small demands, from requests for lecture notes after missing a class to arguments about a grade.”
This goes further with the advent of Web sites that rank and compare teachers based on student reviews. Crawford concentrates on RateMyProfessors.com (RMP), which allows pupils to pass judgment on their professors according to four criteria: easiness, helpfulness, clarity, and “whether they are hot or not” (“hot” professors get a chili pepper next to their names). “Typical positive comments on RMP are ‘really helpful outside of class’ and ‘she’s really fun!’ Typical negative comments are ‘I had to work really hard
and only got a B’ and ‘booooooring.’ At least one professor is praised for performing magic tricks for students.”
The trouble is that outfits like RMP are guided by “the invisible hands of fools,” Crawford says. He notes that RMP rates professors not by the teaching-related criteria of proper student evaluations, but as performers. The rating system also dismisses the possibility that the student might be expected to contribute to the success of the class.
Crawford cites a pertinent example of how the new academic market operates: “One professor I spoke to was offering a seminar on the Peloponnesian War in which the students were to read primary sources, while one of his department colleagues offered a seminar on the history of sex in the cinema, with no written work required until the final.
Perhaps making matters worse, the first professor’s ratings on RateMyProfessors.com all emphasized how demanding he was. Only two people registered for his course, and it was canceled.”
Making Crime Cost
Charles Murray, “Simple Justice,” Civitas: Institute for the Study of Civil Society in association with The Sunday Times, June 27, 2005 (civitas.org.uk)
AEI scholar Charles Murray has for many years paid visits to the United Kingdom under the auspices of The Sunday Times to assess what the world can learn from Britain’s seemingly unstoppable crime problem. In January 2004, he wrote two essays for the paper suggesting that modern approaches to justice had lost sight of the punitive object
of justice. The British think tank Civitas has republished these essays together with a new series of commentaries on them from experts on the left and right.
Murray’s thesis is that sentences without a punitive element, such as approaches that leave the perpetrator free, mean that criminals are treated more leniently than they deserve. “Members of the public live in a world where civic life in their own neighborhoods is deteriorating, where they must spend inordinate time and money protecting their property, and where they fear going to places they didn’t used to fear to go.”
The remedy Murray proposes is to return to punitive, retributive conceptions of justice. He advocates drawing a distinction between citizens and outlaws, and proposes a system of more severe punishments for more serious offenses, where all evidence about an offender is made available at the trial, and where the trial judges are limited in how far they can deviate from the prescribed penalty. Murray points out that this was the system
practiced in Britain until 1954, and it produced one of the most peaceful, law-abiding
societies the world has ever seen.
Most of the commentators disagree with Murray’s approach to some extent. Cambridge professor Christie Davies, author of The Strange Death of Moral Britain, while endorsing Murray’s “citizens and outlaws” policy, argues that admitting evidence of past alleged
offenses without the opportunity to cross-examine those who made the allegations, risks a miscarriage of justice.
Philosopher Tom Sorrell disagrees with Murray’s suggestion that victims of violent or serious crime who kill their persecutor should be considered to have done nothing wrong. He argues that courts should have the ability to excuse such deeds, but that society should
neither condone nor permit such acts routinely. Another philosopher, John Cottingham, agrees, arguing that there is a need to distinguish between justified retaliation by society against convicted criminals, and unjustified acts of revenge undertaken privately by victims.
Cottingham also argues that, in addition to punishing offenders, society must ensure that non-offenders are not punished by wrongful convictions. Murray’s prescriptions, in Cottingham’s view, threaten protections designed to prevent such miscarriages of justice.
In addition to severe criticisms from liberal prison reform activists Baroness Stern and Rob Allen, the volume also contains commentary by libertarian philosopher J. C. Lester. He suggests that convicted offenders should be required to pay full restitution of the damage they have caused rather than just receive a prison sentence. This amount would be multiplied by a “risk factor” based on the frequency at which the crime in question goes unpunished, thereby reducing the attractiveness of crimes where perpetrators are rarely caught.
NATIONAL SECURITY
Beware the Basket Cases
The Fund for Peace, “The Failed States Index,” Foreign Policy, July/August 2005
(foreignpolicy.com)
The U.S. National Security Strategy concluded in 2002 that “America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones.” To assess where this threat lies, the Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine have conducted a global ranking of weak and failing states that encompasses 60 nations.
The methodology uses 12 indicators of instability: demographic pressures, refugees and displaced persons, group grievances, human flight, uneven development, economic decline, delegitimization of the state, public services, human rights, security apparatus, factionalized elites, and external intervention. Scores were distributed after analysis of tens of thousands of international and local media sources during the last six months
of 2004. In their results, the researchers conclude that 2 billion people live in insecure states.
The ten countries most at risk already show clear signs of state failure. Ivory Coast tops the list; cut in half by civil war, it is “the most vulnerable to disintegration.” It is followed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Iraq, Somalia, Sierra Leone, Chad, Yemen, Liberia, and Haiti.
Countries that are less widely recognized as having problems that could cause them to crumble include Bangladesh, Guatemala, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. The geographical spread of nations at risk suggests that while Africa and the Middle East are a genuine “arc of instability,” there are also countries at risk on most of the other continents.
The authors suggest that “electoral democracy appears to have had only a modest impact on the stability of states such as Iraq, Rwanda, Kenya, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Indonesia. Ukraine ranks as highly vulnerable in large part because of last year’s disputed election.”
Of the 12 criteria used in the study, the factors that appear to be most harmful to stability are uneven development and the delegitimization of the state. When certain groups are privileged above others, and “when state institutions are regarded as corrupt, illegal,
or ineffective,” citizens can shift their allegiances away from national leaders to more parochial sources.
SCIENCE AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Is Only Government Science Good Science?
Iain Murray, “The Nationalization of Science.” OnPoint, July 21, 2005, Competitive Enterprise Institute (cei.org)
Draconian new ethics rules threaten to forbid researchers at the National Institutes of Health from having ties with industry. Former editors of the New England Journal of Medicine allege that the pharmaceutical industry is tainting official science. The American Journal of Public Health publishes a special supplement on the supposed legal
and judicial biases in favor of industry science. All of these attacks ignore the real danger: If government isolates basic science from industry to “protect” it, science will only be damaged.
Attempts to separate government-funded research from private exploration often underappreciate the massive investments that industry makes in science. From 1953 to 1980, government funded most of America’s research and development investment, but since 1980, industry has spent so heavily on American science that it now provides two thirds of all U.S. scientific expenditure. Even if one separates off basic, academic research (as opposed to applied research and development), government still provides only about 50 percent of the national funding.
So, if industry-funded basic science is quarantined off from government science by ethics rules or legal requirements, the larger scientific research effort will suffer badly. Attempts to put such for-profit science in a box will obstruct researchers, discourage companies from investing for the future, and diminish the cross-fertilizing benefits of science for all people.
Moreover, the distinctions between government and corporate science, and between basic and applied science, are themselves artificial. These categories were promoted by government bureaucrats starting around World War II to make the case for more government funding of science, but they do not reflect lab realities. The interplays between research, development, technology, production, and so forth are by no means linear. There actually appears to be more justification for private funding of basic science than for government efforts in this area.
Moreover, there is scant harm in most supposed “conflicts of interest” in science (which are the justification for today’s budding new ethics rules). Public choice theory suggests that all interested parties, including government employees, experience conflicts of
interest. To single out industry-funded scientists as uniquely afflicted ignores much evidence. Science simply needs to recognize and accept the various personal and economic interests involved in research, and strengthen its own well-established self-correcting mechanisms of peer review and replication in order to counter any problems that vested interest may bring to the laboratory.
Science is Fallible, Too
John Ioannidis, M.D., “Contradicted and Initially Stronger Effects in Highly
Cited Clinical Research,” Journal of the American Medical Association, July 13, 2005 (jama.ama-assn.org)
Science progresses in steps. Experimentation leads to publication of results in scientific journals, which ensure quality control by means of peer review. Publication is only the first step, however, as the most important question in science is whether others can reproduce the results. There have been suggestions that too much weight is currently placed on publication, and that not enough work is being done to test published findings.
This is especially important when public policy is based on scientific results.
Medical science, because of the life and death issues involved, is one scientific area where testing and replication is routine. Yet even here, the scientific method turns out to be quite imperfect. To assess the reliability of published results, Dr. John Ioannidis of Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston examined 49 medical studies from three major journals that were cited over 1,000 times in the medical literature.
He discovered that about a third of the studies were contradicted when tested by third parties. Sixteen percent were directly contradicted (i.e., they came up with results that could not be duplicated in subsequent studies). Another 16 percent presented stronger findings than could subsequently be justified.
Dr. Ioannidis suggests that medical journals may be biased in favor of publishing studies with striking findings, a significant portion of which have trouble being replicated.
OTHER COUNTRIES
Goodbye Swedish Model
Mauricio Rojas, Sweden After the Swedish Model: From Tutorial State to Enabling State, Timbro, June 21, 2005 (timbro.com)
For decades, self-styled progressives and leftists have hailed the “Swedish model” as a working example of a social arrangement whereby a nation can achieve economic success and high living standards while maintaining a massive welfare state. Few, however, have noticed that Sweden itself has abandoned the Swedish model. Lund
University professor Mauricio Rojas explains the rise and fall of the Swedish model in a book published by the Swedish think tank Timbro.
The Swedish word for the Swedish model is folkhemmet—a conflation of folk (people) and hem (home). It began, Rojas says, many years ago as Sweden’s failed agrarian state industrialized. Rojas calls the model a “tutorial” which envisions government as a noble “ruling power…that both creates the preconditions for a good life and guides the citizens
towards it.” From its flowering in the mid 1930s until the middle of the 1970s, this Swedish arrangement provided low unemployment, high growth, and the famous social welfare system. Rojas suggests that “its main power lay in its ability to intertwine the past with the future…to preserve Sweden’s distinctive traditions while exploiting the material prosperity of the industrial era.”
Yet most of this system’s overseas fans failed to notice that by the early 1990s Sweden faced an economic crisis that was only averted by significant reforms steered through by Prime Minister Carl Bildt between 1991 and 1994. He privatized public services and capped public spending, reforms which liberal successor governments have not seriously
challenged. “Sweden has abandoned” Rojas states, the “maximalist welfare state model.”
Despite the reforms, Sweden still directs over half of its GDP toward taxation—the highest tax burden in Europe. And the old statist model still has its fans, because the “crisis of folkhemmet and Social Democracy represented more than simply the failure of a particular political project. It has had a profound effect on Sweden’s national identity, on our most deeply rooted traditions and dreams, and on the heritage of centuries.”
But the Swedes have had to face reality. Rojas says Sweden’s old economic statism
is incompatible with the development of a prosperous modern society, and “belongs
in the world of myths and memories.” Carl Bildt’s reforms and subsequent developments
represent the search for a new “Swedish model,” one that will result in a fair and prosperous society without obliterating individual freedom.
