demetriodor

The European Commission vs. the People

Published by demetriodor on December 6, 2012

Note: re-post from the sister-blog The Commission has recently published its vision about the future of European integration. The report is more than ambitious calling for full banking, economic, budgetary and political integration, including ‘dedicated fiscal capacity for the euro area’ which I believe means taxation powers for the EU. Here is the assessment of the Commission about the present state of EU’s legitimacy: The Lisbon Treaty has perfected the EU’s unique model of supranational democracy, and in principle set an appropriate level of democratic legitimacy in regard of today’s EU competences. ..it would be inaccurate to suggest that insurmountable accountability problems exist. (p.35) Wow, wait a minute! P e r f e c t e d the model of supranational democracy?! Appropriate level of democratic legitimacy?! Are the Commissioners living on the same planet as the rest of us? According to data from autumn 2012, fewer than 1 in 3 Europeans said they trust the EU. 60% don’t trust the EU. For only 31% of European citizens the EU ‘conjures’ [sic] a positive image, while for 28% it ‘conjures’ a negative one. In late 2011 only 45% of European expressed satisfaction with the way democracy works in the EU. 43% were not satisfied with the ‘perfected model of supranational democracy’. And what about the impact of the Lisbon Treaty? Here is a graph of the trust Europeans have in the different EU institutions. By the way, the Commission currently stands at 36% (click to enlarge the graph). The trend is quite clear from a…

The most successful party family in Europe?!

Published by demetriodor on December 5, 2012

“The populist radical right constitutes the most successful party family in postwar Western Europe.” (Cas Mudde, Stein Rokkan Lecture published in the latest issue of the European Journal of Political Research) I hope this is a typo or some other type of unintentional misunderstanding. How can the populist radical right be the most successful party family when they have never gotten more than 16% of the votes outside Austria and Switzerland (according to Table 1 in the same lecture)? Mudde, C. A. S. “Three Decades of Populist Radical Right Parties in Western Europe: So What?” European Journal of Political Research 52, no. 1 (2013): 1-19. Abstract The populist radical right constitutes the most successful party family in postwar Western Europe. Many accounts in both academia and the media warn of the growing influence of populist radical right parties (PRRPs), the so-called ‘verrechtsing’ (or right turn) of European politics, but few provide empirical evidence of it. This lecture provides a first comprehensive analysis of the alleged effects of the populist radical right on the people, parties, policies and polities of Western Europe. The conclusions are sobering. The effects are largely limited to the broader immigration issue, and even here PRRPs should be seen as catalysts rather than initiators, who are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the introduction of stricter immigration policies. The lecture ends by providing various explanations for the limited impact of PRRPs, but it is also argued that populist parties are not destined for success in opposition…

Intelligence and Politics

Published by demetriodor on November 27, 2012

“Intelligence can let you solve harder problems, but some problems are just resistant, and you get to a point that being smarter isn’t going to help you at all, and I think a lot of our problems are like that. Like in politics – it’s not like we’re saying that if only we had a politician who was slightly smarter all our problems would go away.” Peter Norvig, director of research in Google, Guardian

Why EU Commissioners Are Poor Politicians

Published by demetriodor on November 23, 2012

Note: a highly-opinionated piece re-posted from the EU blog I contribute to EU Commissioners might be seasoned bureaucrats but make for lousy politicians. Viviane Reding, currently responsible for Justice, Fundamental Rights and Citizenship, and Commissioner since 1999 (!) is surely a masterful mandarin, but doesn’t play the politics game very well. And by politics, I don’t mean the internal bickering between the Commission, the Council and the European Parliament: I am sure she is a world champion at that – I mean politics as the art of pleasing the public while getting things done. Perhaps after so many years in the Brussels bubble Commissioner Reding has forgotten altogether that pleasing the public is part of the politics game as all. But when public support for the EU is hitting a new low, I can’t help but think that the feelings of the public should be high on the Commissioner’s mind. In September this year Viviane Reding announced that the Commission is coming up with a proposal to set a compulsory 40-% quota for women on boards of public companies. Immediately, nine countries (including the Netherlands and Britain) and a few fellow Commissioners (including several women) expressed very strong disagreement. This, however, was not enough to put the brakes – on 14 November, the Commission approved a watered-down version which ‘sets an objective of a 40% presence of the under-represented sex among non-executive directors of companies listed on stock exchanges’, a “flexi quota” and a statement that ‘given equal qualification, priority…

The International Journal of Indexing

Published by demetriodor on November 20, 2012

This just needs to be re-posted [from Kottke]: [F]or the Society of Indexers, book indices are a topic that holds endless fascination. And I do mean endless. The Prime Minister of England wrote to the Society of Indexers at the society’s founding back in freaking 1958. “I can scarcely conceal from you the fact that I am at present somewhat occupied with other matters, so that I cannot say all that comes into my mind and memory on the subject of indexing.” … One of the longest running features of the society’s publication, The Indexer, is its reviews of indices which are snippets culled from book reviews that pertain to the book’s index… They also regularly publish articles that meditate on what it means to be an index, defend indexing, and a look at the history of indexing societies. These guys should definitely be invited to the World Congress on Referencing Styles.

The education revolution at our doorstep

Published by demetriodor on November 14, 2012

University education is at the brink of radical transformation. The revolution is already happening and the Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera and the Marginal Revolution University are just the harbingers of a change that will soon sweep over universities throughout the world. Alex Tabarrok has a must-read piece on the coming revolution in education here. The entire piece is highly recommended, so I am not gonna even try to summarize it here, but this part stands out: Teaching today is like a stage play. A play can be seen by at most a few hundred people at a single sitting and it takes as much labor to produce the 100th viewing as it does to produce the first. As a result, plays are expensive. Online education makes teaching more like a movie. Movies can be seen by millions and the cost per viewer declines with more viewers. Now consider quality. The average movie actor is a better actor than the average stage actor. As a result, Tabarrok predicts that the market for teachers will became a winner-take-all market with very big payments at the top: the best teachers would be followed by millions and paid accordingly. My prediction is that the revolution in education will also lead to greater specialization – maybe you can’t be the best Development Economics teacher, but you can be the best teacher on XIXth Century Agricultural Development in South-East Denmark: economies of scale brought by online education can make such uber-specialization of teaching portfolios profitable (or, indeed necessary). Surprisingly or…

Author: demetriodor