Centerfield

Open Batman Thread

We agreed to do some babysitting-swapping with another couple with a same-age baby. We both saw The Dark Knight but on different nights. We'd been trying to decide between Mongol (I've got a weak spot for world conquerors) and Batman, and Mongol had

Spoilers below - YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

We liked it alot. Things that bugged me:

Aren't Key Voter Demographics A Good Way To Lose?

This post is a grumble about Penn's nomination of this campaign's fashionable campaign segment - boomer women

It seems to me that the idea of key voter demographics in an election is a good way to lose elections. After all, winning an election requires winning a BIGGER coalition than your opponent, with more segments than your opponent, not just one or two.

I haven't been in any political contests, but I have been in the business of selling computer goods. The best way to build a business market has always, ALWAYS been to go horizontal - try to sell to as big a coalition of different kinds of people with different reasons for buying as possible. The opposite strategy, vertical marketing, intensive selling to a handful of people, has always been a good way to shrink your sales and go bankrupt.

I saw a great computer company, Digital Equipment Corporation, be sold to a much smaller company because they squandered their size and a couple of amazing technical advantages to a vertical strategy. They even dragged my employer at the time down, because they were in the same region and shared alot of the same stupid memes.

Penn's record, of course, isn't so great. It would've taken positive effort to lose against the chosen-by-seniority Bob Dole in '96. When Penn faced a tough opponent, his campaign sacrificed a huge advantage to lose. There are other reasons, of course, but that might be one. Certainly, the Clinton campaign's big weakness was that it kept insulting its coalition - first the young, then blacks, etc. Was it trying to win solely by winning boomer women? That'd explain alot.

His choice of boomer women seems more like stroking the client than actual likely keyness. After all, most women are currently supporting Obama. Of course, there are MANY boomer women, which does make them important (like blacks or Latinos or men or women or...), but has anybody seen polls saying they're actually on the edge?

An Interesting Article On Election Margin

I'm not so incautious as to say the election can't be close, as the headline does (must bring eyeballs!), but Mann and Sabato do bring up some good points about reasons for hope.

Yeah, it really is too early for the poll margin to mean much: the article says Reagan had a narrow margin at this point,

Another point made was that getting comfortable takes time. That's especially true of the majority of non-politically (over?)involved voters.

Alot of righties probably don't really know what they're going to do, or will be less enthusiastic about getting out the door than they think. Only a small fraction are happy about McCain.

Many Hillary supporters are taking awhile to make the transition as well, though 80-90% will go to Obama.

An interesting case is that Hitchens only recently went from thinking Obama was a whippersnapper to thinking he's ept, though still not to supporting him. He's feeling homeless right now, like so many who liked Bush. It'll be interesting to see which way he goes in Nov. I think he's unlikely to vote for McCain - either staying home or biting the Obama bullet are my guesses.

I do believe Nader will draw far fewer voters than Barr. Us Dems are pretty thoroughly united, and more so with each weekly bit of Bush misadministration news. While the GOP is fractured, with each piece of Bush news more likely to send them to Barr or to stay home.

Iraq v Afghanistan Retrospective: We Didn't Have The Troops For Iraq

Rafique at Stubborn Facts had a pointer to an-as-usual thoughtful Hitchens article. But reading the article made me realize something: we only thought we could do both Afghanistan AND Iraq because both plans were short in a fundamental way. Both plans ignored thousands of years of warfare history and got lazy and just did the kinetic bits instead of considering the postwar problems and responsibilities that, gee, life always seems to bring after war. The reality was that we only had enough troops to give internal security in Afghanistan. That's because the terrain's against us.

Like far too many of his fellow reporters, Hitchens hasn't understood the planning failures in Afghanistan and Iraq. As a result, he and they have written mostly clueless articles about problems in Iraq and the Surge. He thinks there's some special sauce only developed in Iraq, when COIN is a set of general principles with Iraq just a special case, and most of Petraeus' work in Iraq in particular is really just providing internal security and making life hard for gangs and extremists.

Notice, I do think we sent enough troops to occupy Iraq, given a good commander able to exercise the offensive like Petraeus. But, given that Afghanistan had to be given higher priority in any reasonable strategic look, the high numbers ACTUALLY needed for it should have kept us out of Iraq.

Open Warmonger's Thread: IOC Regime Change NOW!! ;-)

This thread is inspired by Stubborn Facts' grumble on the IOC's decision not to recognize the Iraqi Olympic Committee that the merely democratic Iraqi government provided."

As I see it, the IOC ARE fascists. There is no free speech around their activities; clothing with your messages aren't allowed. You HAVE to use the one credit card company that pays them most. And God help any ancient "Olympic Pizza" or "Olympic Amphora" businesses that happen to predate an Olympic event in their city. They love to maximize their control - they love to hand out advertising and TV monopolies, and give them rights incompatible with human rights and freedom.

I call for invasion of IOC headquarters at Lausanne, Switzerland, to force regime change to a truly democratic form of government, in which *I* make all IOC decisions. The troops should be stationed indefinitely to make sure I stay in charge^h^h^h^h^h^h make nuisances of themselves and so in case other of the tons of Swiss-based international organizations go wrong, we'll be ready.

Remember, if you vote for ME as IOC1 dictator, I promise to free broadcasting within countries so you get more competition for coverage, and I get more TV contract shekels to spend on a Linux Beowulf Cluster that I'll use to take over the WORLD!!! Bwahaha!

:-)!!

Today's Intellectual Propery Lawyers Doing Yet Another Landgrab

Throughout the settling of the United States, it was been customary for lawyers to grab in law offices what settlers have built with long work.

It continues today, in today's intellectual frontiers. Mind you, I don't believe that's their primary motive. Rather, I think they like to paid, so intellectual property lawyers promote the idea that patents are vital to corporate operation and look good on engineers' resumes. They've successfully promoted the patent equivalant of MAD - big companies accumulate thousands of patents. I'm skepical of the necessity, much less the helpfulness to the public, of big corporate patent clouds - see below.

The opportunity to grab existing work has been created by our patent office, by its negligent treatment of patent applications. For almost all my professional career, USPTO internal incentives have encouraged granting as many patents as possible. I've read five computer-related patents on otherwise radically different subjects and types, that have come to my attention different ways. Not one should have been granted. All had easily-findable and/or widely deployed prior art, like the Vonage patents I wrote about here.

So, is it worth it for companies to pay the huge bills patent clouds rack up? I think not. For offense, you only need a handful of solid patents. For defense against other chaps with clouds, the nonnovelty of most patents means they're a natural weak point. That's where you should work, both suing to have as much of the patent revoked as possible and suing for fraud for filing for a bad patent. You could also consider trying to sue the patent office for negligence. Patent attorneys like to imply that lots of patents help you in court because you have every angle covered, but all you need is one really good angle (see handful of solid patents, above). And, the bar to have your case listened to in the United States by a court is pretty low.

This is compounded by the absurdly long expiration time of most patents. Intellectual Property lawyers love to lobby for longer and longer patent and copyright expiration times (we all know the Mouse will never be free). But, really, that mostly only helps THEM, because it gives them more work to do - more patents to manage, sell, and buy in the form of patent troll corporations that live to sue, not innovate. They should be limited to the industrial product cycle length - 1-2 years for software, 2 for computers, long times for drugs.

A decided minority of engineers think modern patent and copyright terms are reasonable. But, of course, the IP lawyers are much better-represented in Congress, to say the least. I've been reluctant to take out patents as an employee, because I could find it used against me 15-20 years hence, after we've gone to nanotech and today's innovations are are about as innovative and set in stone as the Egyptian Sphinx.

Let's take a look at patent clouds from the point of view of public interest. Of course, you have be big to play. But, of course, it' always been true that small innovators are generally the most effective. Even in mature industries, small startups start with the sole goal of selling an innovation to a big company. Small innovators have trouble even affording to pay legal bills, much less amass the kind of patent cloud you need for MAD. So patent clouds do alot of harm to the public interest by discouraging many of the majority of innovations delivered by small companies.

Another issue is software patents. IMHO, they shouldn't exist, because they amount to patenting thoughts. The USPTO also lets you patent business plans. And, think of the trouble to be had (and the tons of IP lawyers bills, yum, yum), to be had in suddenly allowing patents in a field not considered patentable. The USPTO didn't care about niggling details like existing Supreme Court caselaw when they started issuing software and business patents (!!). A patent lawyer has just written a post in fear, though, that US software patents may be weakened (hope, hope!).

Still another problem small innovators face is corruptly big discovery bills. That balloons legal costs associated with patent and other civil suits enormously.

There are good guys in this fight. The modern equivalent of the Southern Poverty Law Center is the Software Freedom Law Center (way to go, guys!). But they're vastly outnumbered by scum like David Boies' huge IP practice; the proportion of good to bad seems worse to me than in the general populace. A good blog to read on related issues is Groklaw, started to cover a multiyear copyright infringement case brought by a non-holder of the copyright they were suing about. More good guys on the lobbying front include the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The Free Software Foundation is also on the right side, succeeding in freeing alot of software from many of these problems, but probably sets us back PR-wise, because their public arguments presume you're already on their side.

Contradiction

Broder.

July has been a cruel month for McCain.

Sen. John McCain has inched ahead of Sen. Barack Obama in Colorado; come within inches in Minnesota and narrowed the gap in Michigan and Wisconsin, according to four simultaneous Quinnipiac polls of likely voters in these battleground states.

We're A Sick Family

Sorry I've been slow catching up on comments this week - we've all
been down with something this week. I've been
worst the last couple of days, but it was the Kid's turn last
weekend, and Blake's been sniffling for a long time.

Why Afghanistan is the Right Place for Withdrawn Troops

All invasions need to include occupation phases giving the state's internal security a chance to ramp up. We only even tried, after the fact, in Kabul there, and it's working about as well as it did in Iraq. But occupying Afghanistan will be hard because of the mountain terrain, and take lotsa feet on the ground to include much of the rest of the country. Otherwise, the current Afghan govt's not likely to stick, though.

The Obama Coalition Is Historically Weird

Most democracies in history has had, at the very least, big perpetual divisions that included between parties of the people and parties of the elites. Athens had their demos and aristoi, the UK has their Labour and Tories; we have Democrats and Republicans. The first set is the party of the people, and the second set is the party of the elites. Of course, those are only nearly-useless generalizations, but still, there's something real there.

This year, Obama's coalition an absolutely historically WEIRD fraction of elites on the (D) side. And, if you remember, during the primary, he was having some trouble with getting ordinary folk to vote for him - in a weird way, he was running more as a Republican than as a Democrat. I doubt Obama will have such a problem with Joe Ordinary in November. There are plenty of things he can and is already doing, but still, he's likely to end up with a smaller fraction than, say FDR or LBJ had.

The Democratic Republican Party (now just Democrats) started as the party of civil liberties, social progressivism, small government, and small and simple debts. It also included a belief in strictly limited gummint power, and of letting locals be free to oppress slaves, neighbors, and whomever is unfashionable locally.

Its founders, notice, were all big farmers. Most early Democratic Republicans were also farmers. Most of its early elites were rich farmers like Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and later Confederate president Jeff Davis. But, relatively speaking, that wasn't nearly such a small share as today's farming society has.

The Federalist Party, which was the Republican Party's first incarnation, started as the party of elitism, higher education, defense, infrastructure, high taxes in the form of high tariffs to "protect" local industry. At the start, Federalists and then Whigs and then Republicans were urban and frontier liberals (I'm both). Their elites were those who had jobs doing thoughtful stuff.

Once President Andy Jackson reached office, he swapped civil liberties for the Federalists' militarism. At that point, the coalition he won on looked alot like Bush' (ok, no Latinos) - the Southern and conservative sides.

It's no great mystery that the first Republican president, Lincoln, was a liberal progressive type, since his major issue was antislavery and his major success in history being the abolition of slavery here. The Nation and NYT were on his side. He also passed the Homestead Act, another progressive measure.

There's been nearly an 180 switch since then. And, elitewise, it's been working badly for the GOP because there are few rich farmers and more urban elites, so they're almost down to defense and a minority share of urban elites.

In this election, the combination of the perception of Obama's eptness and persuasiveness, contrasted starkly with more and more Bush Administration corruption, illegal conduct, and ineptness coming out every week, are combining to bring an overwhelming majority of urban elites on Obama's side, against what started as the "Party of the Elite."

So, what are YOUR thoughts on this, and how we got there?

Worm Turning: Fallout Of Iraqi PM Maliki Endorsing Obama Iraq Plan

Yes, really (hat tip, Yglesias).

Now it's the GOP's turn to be unhappy about good news in Iraq. After all, it's only possible because Petraeus' stint in charge has succeeded. The GOP unhappiness is because, so far, Iraq has been McCain's one popular strong point.

Notice, I don't say "The Surge," because it's had almost nothing to do with putting in more troops, and everything to do with putting in a man who actually cares what happens to the Iraqis for a change. It started to be quite effective long before a single new soldier made it there.

There are times when the way things turn just amazes me.

Open Thread: Bleg

Looking for ways to get babies / young kids to go to sleep.

This was inspired by seeing somebody write on slashdot about putting his kid to sleep watching auto racing. , and The Kid getting to sleep an hour late tonight, as happens very very, often.

New Youth Activity Level Study

No, kids AREN'T spending all their time in front of TVs getting fat.

It's a good post about a new study of kids' activity levels and BMIs that also failed to find support for a few other widely held beliefs:

Not Covering Netroots Nation or Texas Defending the American Dream

Netroots Nation's too expensive for me. It's as bad as SXSW Interactive! Texas Defending the American Dream's much more reasonable (there's a bit of a surprise - a conservative conference being cheaper than a liberal one). But I can't imagine myself having the patience to do it. Sorry,,,,

If any of you WILL be in town, please let me know. so we can hook up.

Law Code Proliferation

Jeralyn at talkleft has an interesting thread titled The Exploding Number of Federal Crimes.

One Redshoes, on the thread, had an interesting suggestion: "if they passed a law that for every new law (criminal or civil regulation) they had to take an existing one off the books."

That idea looks like a really good one to me. I fear it could be hard to sell Congress on, though.

...Just What I Was Talking About

Seeing how the need's gone for it, the Navy's decided to effectively end its very expensive stealthy missile destroyer program.

Quite a contrast with the service that wants ALL its buys to be the stealthiest, coolest, biggest wastes of money in the contemporary world. Let's hope the recent USAF firing brings a clue or two. It's some nice support for Saturday's post on reasons for USAF trouble.

Hat tip, Robert Farley

One Big Reason Why USAF's In Trouble

It's been questioned in the blogosphere recently why the Air Force has been by far the worst at adapting to the post-Cold-War environment (I'd even push the problems back to the Cold War).

One big answer to me is success. Success breeds arrogance. If you read histories, you see a remarkably identical attitude in the UK's Royal Navy from the Napoleonic Wars the 19th eentury, right through WWI. They hated to adapt because they felt they were on top of the world because of who they were rather than what they did.

USAF has what the military calls dominance. It's by far the most powerful air force on the planet, in a world in which the air is the key to military power. I'm sure you can see where I'm going next, and you're right. Navies were the key to the world for thousands of years, right until the airplane got good enough to deliver more of a striking punch than navies, and to transport a good-sized striking force, in WWII. And, the Queen's Navy ruled the waves, being the biggest Navy, well, until WWII.

I've just been reading David Howarth's British Sea Power: How Britain Became Sovereign of the Seas, and, I've read Churchill's notes as First Lord of the Admiralty, before and at the beginnings of the two World Wars. There's a clear pattern of the Royal Navy absolutely hating change, and resisting thinking much about threats. That's why the RN bought no military subs for almost a century and a half after the US invented them in the Revolutionary War.

We also have the most powerful fleet and army in being, but, still, the USAF has tons more problems than her sister armed services. I don't think that's coincidence. Any thoughts on what we can do?

Open Thread: Tne Pork Continues To Roll Under New York

My favorite bit of pork continues, under the streets of New York.

So, why's this bad? Because the problem could be fixed for far, far less using conventional methods without the likelihood of things going wrong because they haven't been tried before. I mean, at least SOMETHING really,really expensive had to be done to solve the Big Dig problem. That's not true here. Tet another reason not to live in NYC.

Congress SO needs engineers. But specialization practically ensures we aren't very good at politics.

So, what's YOUR favorite bit of pork?

Bad Pick, Bush

Ray Odierno is a bad choice. I just hope the next President transfers him to Alaska quickly.

Odierno's idea of winning hearts and minds is to fire artillery rounds at them, which worked about as well in Iraq as bombing them did in Vietnam.

He'd fire rounds at civvies, but not at somebody useful like Al'Sadr. That and many other of his personal excesses and mistakes are a big part of the reason the occupation was failing.

If Odierno had commanded the Surge, it would've failed. Al'Sadr would probably control the country from the shadows, violence would probably still be getting worse, and Congress probably would've taken their marbles and gone home.

SOMETIMES people learn from mistakes. But usually a confession of error is involved, like Hillary's on healthcare. Where's Odierno's? Google brings up nothing for me.

Thomas Disch Committed Suicide

Unforunately, that doesn't seem to surprising to me. Unfortunately, he was depressed much of the time, and I feel he never came to comfort with his talent. And he suffered the very example of not being paid anything like what his writing was worth. Tor Editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden (of course) has a good thread on it.

Who was Thomas Disch? One of SF's best literary authors. His best work was maybe the edgiest and nastiest SF ever written.

I've been rereading my favorite Disch work, Camp Concentration, since I got the news. I like the book even better than on previous reads, and it has a completely different meaning to me now, a good sign of the classic. Maybe I'm just in sympathy with him for dying, but right now I can't think of an SF book I thought was greater.

!!Obamarcons!!

!!

This is interesting. This Dem didn't like Gore, and feared a third (D) in a row in 2000 would be pretty corrupt, but this is a different level altogether. Although, Bush took the corruption to a whole new level. Of course, the article doesn't even begin to go into how many Obamarcons there are.

American Revolution Nonexistence What-If?

Matt Yglesias suggested maybe the nation'd be better off if the American Revolution hadn't happened.

As it happens, there's a well-thought-out book on that very topic: "The Two Georges," by Turtledove and Dreyfus. I strongly recommend it. It also has a fun mystery and good characters. Things begin to go differently in that timeline when George III gets serious about negotiation instead of going through the cycle of increasing violence that our timeline saw.

I prefer our timeline because the Two Georges suggested the resulting overwhelming British success would mostly be a fine place to live, but less dynamic than our timeline, which seems right to me, since we gave the British Empire valuable competition. Travel was slower, for example.

Of course, American Indians and Blacks might prefer the world of the Two Georges.

Conservative Blogger Own Goal

We're all human, even Roger Simon.

July 4: Gasbag Edition

"There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America." - Otto von Bismarck

He's right, except our, er, protection, doesn't need luck or gods as much. We don't get people as stupid as Willy II on our thrones, wasting stupidly with aggression and starting WWI what Bismarck so painfully built. And when our rulers get stupid, we can turf them out in reasonable time. We don't have to live with Sihanouk of Cambodia's long cycle of increassing paranoia and hopelessness for more than four years, or eight if we get really unlucky about opposition choices.

Of course, being a monarchist, Bisarck wouldn't've had a chance to understand our luck, and clearly he didn't.

Certain kinds of governments have more potential to spread than others, and democracy seems to be the biggest that way. Here's what a more clued-in leader on democracy than Otto had to say about it: "Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighbouring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves." That was just as true when Pericles, leader of Democratic Athens, said it over two millenia as it is of us today.

Every July 4th sees more freedom and democracy out there because of what this nation has done and continues to do, and thus more reason still to celebrate even beyond the already pretty good reason of having fun. The first such reason was, ironically, our enemies. According to Churchill, Georgie III's leadership had been the first such use of royal leadership during the Georgian monarchies, and it had lead rather obviously and publically to the loss of an empire. After that, British monarchs left the mental heavy lifting to the PMs. The second set was much of South America. Colombia remains continuously democratic to this day. I feel we've often failed to give them the respect they deserve. TR was especially unfair when he supported the breakaway Panama because he grew impatient over slow communications to Bogota.

Independent Open Thread: Whatcha Doing This Weekend?

We're ALL down with the flu, so we're being on the unenergetic side. The plans are to eat a roast chicken we got at Central Market yesterday in a neighborhood park and then take in fireworks from a distance in a mall parking lot with a good view but farish away.

What are your plans?

Long Tail Controversy and Explanations

Dr. Elberse of Harvard caused a ruckus in an article in the current Harvard Business Journal issue about an interesting new study she's been involved in ( Wall Street Journal summary here), as far as I know the only one to look at how online buying patterns are changing. She also raises a ruckus with her title, "Should You Invest in the Long Tail," which is chosen to discredit Chris Anderson's Long Tail book.

I see her title as attacking a straw man, personally. My sense of the Long Tail isn't about ignoring what's popular, as she implies, but rather understanding that stocking the top ten of anything is getting you less market share than it did pre-Internet. But, Chris Anderson is perfectly able to take care of himself, as he shows. As is Anita in response. They're also more fun than my verson.

The Long Tail is of particular interest to me, because I studied it personally, and was involved in a way to overcome it somewhat in one arena, web caching. The Long Tail is a newfangled network-researchy name for an oldfangled problem: why libraries need to be big to keep more than a handful of their clients happy, and why you can never keep all your customers happy with any finite-sized library. Even in the Library of Congress, some people will want books only published abroad.

A mathematician named Zipf came up with a mathematical model that he designed to model the frequency of linguistic word use. It decays slowly, to reflect the fact that, although "the" and "and" are way popular, you also see "arthroscopic" and "quantitative" in real use as well. The law turns out to apply to libraries and web caches as well.

A cache is a bunch of commonly used stuff kept close by for quick access. They've traditionally done well indeed in computers, speeding up processors and disks alot. A web cache is that idea applied to the Web, except it doesn't actually work as well. And that's because what people look at on the web follows Zipf's Law. You need to continuouly prefetch the entire Web onto your web cache to get the kind of improvement you get with disk caches.

I was involved with a couple of measures to work around this a bit. One measure was to support efficient push and look at how much different policies for pushing pages accessed by cache users would help. Another was, observing that caches work better the more people they have going through them, to implement a scalable way of having big cache clouds work together. Our work showed each of those could've been a big improvement, but would still not bring you to the domain of disk cache improvements. So, *I* certainly saw fit to invest in the Long Tail. The answer to Elberse's question, of course, depends on what you're doing.

So what did Dr. Elberse et al see over time? That the long tail on the overall curve tails off at the end and becomes more concentrated at the moat interesting stuff. The highest 10%, for example, becomes more popular and the lowest 10% becomes less popular. That's very interesting stuff, and it's something to think about and research more. The work raises one additional question for me: if you have a certain number of marketing or cache slots to fill, will they become more or less effective over time? Notice that's a different question.

Another thing to think about is that books' title popularity is still long-tailed, despite having had centuries to concentrate.

Hat tip and good call on the Elberse/Anderson controversy at Marginal Revolution.

Canadian Human Rights Commission

I haven't yet gotten around to grumbling about the anti-human-rights Canadian Human Rights Commission. In a free society, the right way to deal with hate speech is to laugh at it and teach your kids that words can never hurt them, not to take away freedom.

There is some good news. The CHRC decided to dismiss the charges against Mark Steyn.

But it's not enough to be letting them go. With the cost of lawyers and the difficulty of dealing with bad PR what it is, simply being charged is a problem. This avenue of charges should be shut down.

No, Slavery Wasn't Competive With Free Labor

Megan Mcardle has a stunner of a bad-assumptions post up. It relies on a book claiming slaves are more efficient than free labor, based on limited slaveholder sources.

I can see why Fogel's controversial: because he neglects to pay attention to some important parts of the facts out there. He just looks at how ONE slaveholder saw it. As one reviewer wrote, "Time on the Cross is seriously flawed. While the intent behind it is honest, the outcome of this project is a gold mine for Confederate apologists."

Well, I'm not surprised that most slaveholders BELIEVED slavery was more efficient, Reality is a different question. At the very least, he should've looked at many other kinds of evidence.

Other whoppers excerpted from Fogel in McCardle's post:

1. . . . The purhcase of a slave was generally a highly profitable investment which yielded rates of return that compared favorably with the most outstanding investment opportunies in manufacturing.

Slaves were certainly profitable investments, or slavery woudldn't've needed Lincoln to put it out of its misery. But, more profitable than manufacturing? Then why was the average northerner richer than the average southerner? Magic? It flies against economic basics as well - prepared goods are usually more profitable than farming, because they have value added.

2. The slave system was not economically moribund on the eve of the Civil War. . . .

3. Slaveowners were not becoming pessimistic about the future of their system during the decade that preceded the Civil War. . . .

Unbelievable - points the evidence I've seen agrees with!

4. Slave agriculture was not inefficient compared with free agriculture. . . .

6. Slaves employed in industry compared favorably with free workers in diligence and efficiency. Far from declining, the demand for slaves was actually increasing more rapidly in urban areas than in the countryside.

Several majorities of entire states decided to abandon slavery because they found it unproductive for their uses (both farm and nonfarm). Were they all just making it up? And how does the first half of (6) follow from the second half?

7. The belief that slave-breeding, sexual exploitation, and promiscuity destroyed the black family is a myt. . . .

8. The material (not psychological) conditions of the lives of slaves compared favorably with those of free industrial workers. ...

9. ... Over the course of his lifetime, the typical slave field hand received about 90% of the income he produced. . . .

Those don't much resemble what the slaves had to say, do they? Shouldn't he've read some of their accounts before passing judgement on slavery's efficiency and effects?

10. Far from stagnating, the economy of the south grew quite rapidly. Between 1840 and 186, per capita income increased more rapidly in teh South than in th rest of the nation. By 1860 the South attained a level of per caita income which was high by the standard of the time. Indeed, a country as advanced as Italy did not achieve the same level of per-capita income until the eve of World War II.

This is just sad spin; I guess we aren't comparing against the North because we'd lose; and the rapid increase just supports the point, as it's easier for weak economies to improve quickly, as Fogel oughtta understand as an economist.

Maybe Fogel's just from an alternate time line where Nazi Europe at its height, with tens of millions of slaves, approached free Allied production levels, and where the USSR was a food exporter.

It's clear there are some people who wish slavery was more powerful than free labor, like, say, Steve Stirling, author of the Draka novels, in which a slave society takes over the world (never mind that it never seems to work that way in practice). I hope Fogel's not in that basket. Another explanation is that historians are often "captured" by the people they study. I read one TR history that backed his resource imperialism, now considered evil by most societies.

Back online

The blog was hacked over the weekend, but thanks to William Swann's efforts (with an assist from Rick Heller) we are back up and running. Consider this an open thread.