links for 2007-09-23

• Artificial Intelligence - New York Times
• What chimpanzees can teach us about economics - Vanderbilt News Service
• The Big Con - Jonathan Chait - Review - New York Times
• China in Three Colors - T. Friedman - New York Times
• The Day Louis Armstrong Made Noise - New York Times
• Will American automakers ever build a decent hybrid? - by Daniel Gross
• Canadian health-care does more with less - Free exchange

Comments

[ndd]

Well, that chimpanzee study throws an interesting, er, monkey wrench (cough, cough) into the debate about the endowment effect. I await the study that demonstrates that the experimenters said something to the chimps that implied a high value to the item they received!

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/opinion/23margolick.html?ref=opinion

September 23, 2007

The Day Louis Armstrong Made Noise
By DAVID MARGOLICK

FIFTY years ago this week, all eyes were on Little Rock, Ark., where nine black students were trying, for the first time, to desegregate a major Southern high school. With fewer than 150 blacks, the town of Grand Forks, N.D., hardly figured to be a key front in that battle — until, that is, Larry Lubenow talked to Louis Armstrong.

On the night of Sept. 17, 1957, two weeks after the Little Rock Nine were first barred from Central High School, the jazz trumpeter happened to be on tour with his All Stars band in Grand Forks. Larry Lubenow, meanwhile, was a 21-year-old journalism student and jazz fan at the University of North Dakota, moonlighting for $1.75 an hour at The Grand Forks Herald.

Shortly before Mr. Armstrong's concert, Mr. Lubenow's editor sent him to the Dakota Hotel, where Mr. Armstrong was staying, to see if he could land an interview. Perhaps sensing trouble — Mr. Lubenow was, he now says, a "rabble-rouser and liberal" — his boss laid out the ground rules: "No politics," he ordered. That hardly seemed necessary, for Mr. Armstrong rarely ventured into such things anyway. "I don't get involved in politics," he once said. "I just blow my horn."

But Mr. Lubenow was thinking about other things, race relations among them. The bell captain, with whom he was friendly, had told him that Mr. Armstrong was quietly making history in Grand Forks, as he had done innumerable times and ways before, by becoming the first black man ever to stay at what was then the best hotel in town. Mr. Lubenow knew, too, that Grand Forks had its own link to Little Rock: it was the hometown of Judge Ronald Davies, who'd just ordered that the desegregation plan in Little Rock proceed after Gov. Orval Faubus of Arkansas and a band of local segregationists tried to block it.

As Mr. Armstrong prepared to play that night — oddly enough, at Grand Forks's own Central High School — members of the Arkansas National Guard ringed the school in Little Rock, ordered to keep the black students out. President Dwight D. Eisenhower's meeting with Governor Faubus three days earlier in Newport, R.I., had ended inconclusively. Central High School was open, but the black children stayed home....

[Please do continue....]

[anne]

Remember though, as I have written and will keep on writing, that 1957 was 3 years after Brown v Board of Education had turned aside Plessy V Ferguson which had stood from 1896 and institutionalized segregation under the guise of separate being equal. Then, 101 years after Plessy, 53 years after Brown, the Supreme Court conservative activists have returned us to separate and equal and 1896.

[anne]

Plessy was a 7-1 decision, with a remarkable dissent by Justice Harlan. Brown was unanimous. Overturning Brown, was 5-4.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/29/washington/29stext.html?hp

June 28, 2007

Use of Race in Public School Admission Policies

Justice Stephen G. Breyer:

Finally, what of the hope and promise of Brown? For much of this nation's history, the races remained divided. It was not long ago that people of different races drank from separate fountains, rode on separate buses and studied in separate schools. In this court's finest hour, Brown v. Board of Education challenged this history and helped to change it. For Brown held out a promise. It was a promise embodied in three amendments designed to make citizens of slaves. It was the promise of true racial equality — not as a matter of fine words on paper, but as a matter of everyday life in the nation's cities and schools. It was about the nature of a democracy that must work for all Americans. It sought one law, one nation, one people, not simply as a matter of legal principle but in terms of how we actually live.

Not everyone welcomed this court's decision in Brown. Three years after that decision was handed down, the governor of Arkansas ordered state militia to block the doors of a white schoolhouse so that black children could not enter. The president of the United States dispatched the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock, Ark., and federal troops were needed to enforce a desegregation decree.

Today, almost 50 years later, attitudes toward race in this nation have changed dramatically. Many parents, white and black alike, want their children to attend schools with children of different races. Indeed, the very school districts that once spurned integration now strive for it. The long history of their efforts reveals the complexities and difficulties they have faced. And in light of those challenges, they have asked us not to take from their hands the instruments they have used to rid their schools of racial segregation, instruments that they believe are needed to overcome the problems of cities divided by race and poverty. The plurality would decline their modest request.

The plurality is wrong to do so. The last half-century has witnessed great strides toward racial equality, but we have not yet realized the promise of Brown. To invalidate the plans under review is to threaten the promise of Brown. The plurality's position, I fear, would break that promise. This is a decision that the court and the nation will come to regret.

I must dissent.

[im1dc]

The Day Louis Armstrong Made Noise, - New York Times

Real history like that gives me goose flesh. I know I am onto something special that I should respect. Superb article, highly recommended to each and every American.

[robertdfeinman]

There has been a rash of historical revisionism of late. Here is today's version from Ben Stein.

The Great Inflation Mystery, Still Unsolved

Economics is an extremely inexact science. The more economists try to doctor it up with formulas, the clearer it is that we know very little about what causes great economic events. In particular, we do not know what causes inflation.

A few weeks ago he was backtracking on trickle down and now he is willing to accept that economics is "inexact".

I doubt that the libertarians such as Stein and Greenspan have really changed their worldview, so their abandoning their GOP allies can be seen as a tactical move or yet another example of what happens when utopian ideas get turned into policy.

Will they go off and sulk, or is this the first step in the creation of a new movement which is still to be defined? The Roundheads never recovered so perhaps there is hope that the libertarians will go into permanent decline as well..