One more for the blogroll

Via the always wonderful Acephalous, I found this very interesting blog: Zunguzungu. Straight to the feedreader.

He has just posted two wonderful, knowledgeable, well-written posts on the situation in Kenya. "What I don’t know, the Washington Post doesn’t know even more" is pretty much the opinionated version of the article we should have had in our morning papers today. "Fears of Regional Instability as Iowa explodes into Ethnic Violence" is the one we did have, wizh a twizt.

*

More generally, I've been very encouraged lately by finding, in a short period of time: e.g. The Edge of the American West, Paul Krugman, Zunguzungu... blogs* which are written by people who are

a) Experts in their fields. As well as
b) polymaths, knowledgeable in other fields.
c) Write really well.

This gives me hope that the blogosphere is capable of moving both towards the netroots-organization of e.g. Daily Kos, but also towards some sort of new mode of public expert intellectuals who participate in the day-to-day changing of the rhetorical guard, of analysing the news and responding to the ideas of others. People who have, say, academic knowledge, but still choose not to waste their talents on the Journal of the Econometric Analysis of Advanced Eggplant Parmesan, as Michael Bérubé put it, but engage in public discourse because that's where knowledge is put to use and makes a difference in politics and in the discourse which shapes it. And these people see the value of placing themselves in the public sphere exchange of blogging: it is like open-source thinking. You work out loud and share your ideas.

And what I find so heartening is that the progressive netroots movement in the US, like Kos or Atrios, is so actively converging on the experts, using them, and responding to and being responded to by them. Paul Krugman's** ideas are routinely being thrown around and responded to in the netroots' discussions, while Krugman, on the other hand, responds to the ideas and movements in the progressive blogosphere, just as likely to quote Kos or Atrios as he is to quote some obscure economical article (from the aforementioned Journal of Econometric Analysis of Advanced Eggplant Parmesan), or other blogging intellectuals like Brad DeLong or Ezra Klein. Blogging expert intellectuals have been around for a while now, but the rate of interplay between the institutional intelligentsia and the political activists is, I think, somewhat new, and it's a Good Thing. I'm hopeful it will revitalise the stagnant public sphere of the US, and I think I see something similar starting to happen (although slower) in Scandinavia now.

* What is the collective noun for blogs? A trackback of blogs? A rumour of blogs? A flamewar of blogs? You decide.

** I just finished his book tonight. I'll try to post on it in a day or two.

We're screwed: facts and figures for the apocalypse

The shorter Paul Krugman on climate change:

The US is our biggest problem. China is our second-biggest but fastest growing problem, Europe is our third biggest problem.

More statistics:

China:
1.3. billion people.
GDP: 10.17 trillion.
CO2 emissions per capita: 3.84 tonnes in 2004, probably a lot more now, given the Δx on Krugman's graph. Maybe as much as 5?

India:
Population: 1.12. billion.
GDP: 4.1 trillion.
CO2 emissions per capita: 1.20 in 2004. Their economy is the second-fastest growing major economy in the world, with an almost 10 % growth last year, so probably some big movement on this one as well.

United States:
Population: 301 million.
GDP: 13.13. trillion.
CO2 emissions per capita: 20.4

It looks to my haven't-done-a-statistics-course-in- 10 - years-eyes as if CO2 has a much stronger correlation with GDP than with population. If that's true, then that relationship is asymptotic. As China and India's GDP keep growing at respectively 9.5% and 11.1 % per year, their emission rates are at the cusp of gaining a much, much faster rate of change-for-the-worse.

I mean, I knew we were basically screwed when it came to India and China re: CO2. Just not how bad. (If I'm right.) Obviously, this doesn't tell us anything new, except to underline that there can be no fixing climate change unless the US, India and China are all onboard.

But I'm not a statistician, so I'm hoping that all this means is that CO2 emissions are not correlated to GDP at all, just a heap of other factors which are growing at a far slower rate.

[Update: actually, ignore this post. CO2 emissions are obviously far more complex than a direct correlation to GDP. It also involves technological levels, energy production methods, degree of urbanisation, wage levels and so on and so forth. I was just really tired when I wrote this, and I didn't feel like just throwing all those facts and figures away after I had meticously dug them up after maybe as much as four or five minutes of googling and hyperlinking.]

"These days what I do is say that 2+2=4"

Paul Krugman is a brilliant economist and writer. His columns in the NY Times are must-reads: always informative, educational and merciless. He is one of those rare pundits who also happens to be (gasp!) well-informed. His last column is on Gore and the Nobel peace prize.

“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” said F.D.R. “We know now that it is bad economics.” These words apply perfectly to climate change. It’s in the interest of most people (and especially their descendants) that somebody do something to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but each individual would like that somebody to be somebody else. Leave it up to the free market, and in a few generations Florida will be underwater.

The solution to such conflicts between self-interest and the common good is to provide individuals with an incentive to do the right thing. In this case, people have to be given a reason to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, either by requiring that they pay a tax on emissions or by requiring that they buy emission permits, which has pretty much the same effects as an emissions tax. We know that such policies work: the U.S. “cap and trade” system of emission permits on sulfur dioxide has been highly successful at reducing acid rain.

Which is not exactly news, but the more well-informed, rhetorically skilled people say this, the better.

Many economists mention Krugman as a possible winner for the Nobel Prize in economics himself, incidentally.

Anyway, I think I might have mentioned that he also has a wonderful blog where he shares little bits and pieces of interesting information which lead into his columns, or in which he answers questions that arise after his columns have been published. A sort of way of continuing the debate in the backstage area.

Also, there's this video interview of Krugman. At one point he says that he worries about the state of democracy in the US: "What I worry about is that we'll keep the forms, but the reality will just erode. Like the Roman senate kept meeting for a long time after the country had become, in effect, a monarchy." He also talks about how there is no longer non-political truth. He says that most of what he does these days is saying that 2+2 = 4 and getting called an extreme leftist for saying so. Special bonus in the interview: he reveals that he is a science-fiction fan and that a fascination for Isaac Asimov's Foundation series led him into economics.

the daily link

The daily links:

An interesting blog post/essay on photographic reality.

The NY Times, incidentally, has made its archives and all of its current articles available for free now. Which is about time.

Another blogger at the NY Times: Paul Krugman.. Great stuff. This would have gone into the feedreader, if I still had one. But I don't, because my own computer's network card has failed, so I'm using Ragnfrid's mac and can't make myself at home here.

The Norwegian literary fanzine magazine Vinduet recently celebrated its 60^th birthday. In the otherwise good anniversary edition was an article showing photographs of the working desks of Norwegian writers. I didn't really think they were all that interestin but now I see that the Guardian has been doing it a while (or so it seems - the articles aren't dated) and their articles are actually pretty fascinating, so maybe my peripheral eyes are just blinded by the bright lights of the continental, imperial glory of actual European newspapers.

On another happy note, were finally, finally getting an internet connection tomorrow. So no more buying bad expensive coffee to sit in cafes with WLAN access whenever I have to pay a bill. Hopefully, this also means I will be able to find the time to start blogging more regularly again.