Mitch Townsend

Khatami at Harvard

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The informal monthly meeting of knuckle-dragging Neanderthal New England bloggers was held in Cambridge MA today. The unusual venue was chosen to take advantage of former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami’s visit to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. We did not attempt to get tickets for the lecture, which was to feature the fruits of Ayatollah Khatami’s lucubrations on Tolerance. Perhaps when Madonna comes to lecture on personal modesty, or Donald Trump on humility, or Bernie Ebbers on business ethics, we will try harder.

The protest against Khatami’s visit was remarkable. It was a revolt of the reasonable, and the participants seemed to be trying hard to avoid inconveniencing anyone. They did not block the entrance; instead, they assembled farther down the street where the sidewalk widened into a little brick-laid park, right next to the semi-organic farm stand. There was a cordon of Cambridge policemen (no women) in their special black uniforms, but they were quite unnecessary. The speaker used a bullhorn, but the volume was set so low that it was impossible to hear her 20 feet away.

Pictures and a little commentary on the extended link. Flickr is having issues, so check back for more pictures later.

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Kelo Update

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It’s over.

The state of Connecticut has come up with an extra $2.1 million for the last holdouts in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood in New London, including Suzette Kelo. The town also decided to drop claims of $1.1 million of back rent from the people who refused to turn over their property. The Kelo house will apparently be jacked up and moved.

The intended beneficiary of this project is the Pfizer company. They are only a couple of hundred yards from the Kelo house, right on the water next to Ft. Trumbull (the Kelo house is directly behind Ft. Trubull). There is supposed to be a hotel, a small convention center, and the usual luxury condos. They had better hurry – Pfizer’s patent on Viagra expires in seven years, and there are no blockbusters in development.

I drove through the redevelopment area last week, and the situation was largely unchanged since I took these pictures (2 views of the Kelo house, the Pfizer campus, office space for lease, and Fort Trumbull from the ferry) last year. All the “Not for Sale” signs are down. There is an office park (with lots of space for sale or lease) on the north side of the area, but it looks like it is the result of the adjoining redevelopment of Shaw’s Cove. There is a lot of raw land. Even with clear title to most of the area, it does not look like an Oklahoma-style land rush is in process.

Virtue is not just its own Reward

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I ran into something rather puzzling when I was looking into some of the things that determine the success or failure of countries. I know Fukuyama did a whole book on the subject, but it was not especially satisfying. It seemed to back into its conclusions without offering much empirical support.

I do think that Fukuyama was onto something, though. There is a paper, available online, by Bo Rothstein that approaches issues of trust from the direction of game theory. Start with the famous “prisoner’s dilemma,” in which two prisoners are being interrogated separately. If both remain silent, there will not be enough evidence to convict either, and they will both go free. However, the one who confesses first will receive a light sentence and the other will bear the greater punishment. This problem has two equilibrium points: one confesses and takes the intermediate reward (or less punishment), or neither confesses and both collect the reward of going free. In essence, countries can reach several equilibrium points in how the citizens of each country treat each other. Rothstein points out that we often act against our rational self-interest. For example, we refrain from stealing even when there is no chance of being detected. We will even give up some value for the opportunity to punish someone who we feel has cheated us, which makes no monetary sense. If we expect that we will be cheated, however, we will take the opportunity to cheat ourselves. We can reach a stable equilibrium of either trusting and acting on trust, or mistrusting and acting on that mistrust.

Measuring trust is not an easy thing, so I chose a close substitute. I figured that the index of perceived corruption by Transparency International was a reasonable estimate of trustworthiness. This assumes that the perception is accurate, and gives an idea of the degree of trust in that society. In Transparency’s corruption index, 10 is angelic and anything below 5 indicates a problem. As a measure of prosperity, I used per capita GDP, according to the CIA Factbook.

The correlation? 90%! You can’t get a much tighter correlation in real life.
The figures and more thoughts are on the jump page.

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The Lost Constitution

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[Update: I have been working on this for quite a while, but after having posted it, I was disturbed to see that I had bumped down Lex’s post about the horrible bombings in Mumbai. I have friends from there, and they have people they love there. I can only hope they were spared. God bless India. May St. Thomas watch over the people he loved.]

I am still trying to organize what I’m finding out about early Anglospheric political thought, and while I’m more confused than when I started, I came across some early evidence of republican social contract thinking in America. In 1638, John Locke was only five years old. In May of that year, Rev. Thomas Hooker preached a sermon at the town he and others had recently founded: Hartford, Connecticut. The text of the sermon has been lost. The only surviving record is the notes taken by Henry Wolcott:

text Deuteronomy I 13 choose you wise men and understanding and known among your tribes and I will make them heads over you captains over thousands captains over hundreds 50 10

doctrine that the choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people by Gods own allowance

2 doctrine the privilege of election which belongs to the people it must not be exercised according to their humors but according to the blessed will and law of God

3 doctrine they who have power to appoint officers and magistrates it is in their power also to set the grounds and limits of the power and places unto which they may call them

1st of I – I reason because the foundation of authority is laid firstly in the free consent of people

2 – reason because by a free choice the hearts of the people will be more enlarged to the love of the person and more ready to yield obedience

3 – reason because of that duty and engagement of the people

Source: Connecticut History on the Web – Colony Readings (scroll down near end, no in-page anchors)

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