Tuesday, December 28, 2004
COMMON LAW, CIVIL LAW AND PROSPERITY
Here's a fascinating article about economists who claim to have statistically correlated prosperity with legal systems, concluding that countries with common law systems fare better economically than those with civil law systems. This is no news to me, but it's a welcome support from a new (for me) quarter for a thesis I've been considering for a long time. The economists find the causal link in the relatively greater judicial independence found in common law systems. I'm sure that's one factor, but I think there are others of equal importance. To name just a few off the top of my head:
- the common law system tends to be more flexible on a case-by-case basis; i.e. the laws can evolve on a more fine-grained basis, based more on specific facts than abstract ideals;
- the system of published case precedents in the common law system provides a wealth of fact-based templates to guide the activities of economic actors;
- the possibility of more flexible judicial interpretation in the common law system incentivizes economic actors to be more explicit and detailed in their contracts and other legally effective action, thus making them more self-consciously directors of their own economic and legal fates (i.e. encouraging self-reliance, with the obvious economic consequences)
As an international lawyer, I've had quite a few interactions with civil law legal systems around the world and have some pretty strong opinions about the many weaknesses of the civil law model. I'm an ardent apologist for the quirky, sometimes seemingly inefficient ways of the common law: That apparent inefficiency is really just realism about legal costs; you either pay them up front and more to private parties (lawyers and economic counter-parties) or later and to the state. My preference is clear.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 1:50 PM
BAH HUMBUG
This was a relatively cheerless Christmas -- Both Anthea and I had bad cases of the flu and we're still only inching toward completion of the construction of the new addition of our house. On top of that I continue to have small waves of problems in the computer systems here in the Batcave and its links to the outside world. So if I haven't responded to email... that's why...
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:11 AM
Thursday, December 23, 2004
PIPES MUSIC
Here's a surprisingly balanced profile of Daniel Pipes from Harvard magazine. Not surprisingly, it focuses on Pipes' rocky relationship with academia in general and the Center for Middle East Studies at Harvard in particular. If you're not familiar with Pipes (but I assume most of my readers will be), I recommend this article.
The advent of "independent scholars" like Daniel Pipes and Ibn Warraq (both focused on the growth of militant Islam) is an interesting and important phenomenon. Pipes' influence and intellectual "reach" has been made possible in large part by the advent of the web, where he has found a voice that couldn't have existed before. These people are a crucial counterweight to the near-monotone of opinion that exists in today's academic humanities departments.
A personal aside: I had the pleasure of meeting Pipes' father, the renowned cold warrior Richard Pipes, more than 25 years ago when I was in the University of Washington's Chinese Area Studies Program. I'm sure he's forgotten about it, but we talked about space-based ballistic missile defense -- a couple of years before the term "Star Wars" had been applied to that concept. At the time, he thought the idea was "too science fiction." Only a few years later, he had become an advisor to the Reagan administration and an advocate of SDI.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:36 AM
Sunday, December 19, 2004
MOVIE NIGHT
We rented some DVDs last night -- an increasingly rare occurrence with the advent of on-demand digital cable movies. For once we got a couple of real winners:
- Monster. Wow! Charlize Theron really, really deserved the academy award for best actress for this. We've watched documentaries about Aileen Wournos before and so were able to judge her portrayal of the Florida serial killer. The accuracy was chilling, a nice compliment to the sad and scary subject matter. I often have deep reservations about Hollywood "crime movies" for the overly-flattering and sympathetic way modern Hollywood portrays the subjects of such films (Bugsy comes to mind). There was some sympathy for Wournos in this flick, but enough raw portrayal of her crimes to make it possible to maintain moral judgment while still becoming submerged in the sheer artistry of the performance and production.
- Julius Caesar. An unknown gem, this is a 4-hour (on a single disk) Turner miniseries following the life of Julius Caesar from his early adulthood c. 83 B.C. to his death in 44 B.C. I had never heard of it, but happened to pick up the single copy in Blockbuster, noting that Christopher Walken (playing Cato the Younger) and Ruchard Harris (playing Sulla) were in it. Of course there had to be a lot of redaction to pack Gaius Julius Caesar's life into four hours, but, given the miniseries format, the job was amazingly well done. I spent much of my teen years immersed in Roman history, especially the story of the end of the Republic (having read a few biographies of GJC over the years during that time and since), so the subject matter was something about which I'm pretty familiar (even after all these years). Even with the level of familiarity that can often spoil enjoyment of film treatment of a historical subject, this piece worked very well. The costumes and sets were deeply realistic, the soap-opera-like ins and outs of Roman patrician politics in those years accurately depicted and the acting was, over-all, pretty damned good. Richard Harris especially was an excellently cruel Sulla. Walken as Cato was a very interesting choice -- he made Cato's "Republican virtue" (the template we have from Plutarch and Suetonius) seem a little brittle and managed to overcome the self-caricature he can sometimes be to make a convincing scion of one of the first families of Rome. He even started out with a realistic haircut (but then, perhaps as a subtle visual character joke) reverted to his more typical long pompadour during his final North African stand against GJC. An interesting choice was the relatively shallow treatment given to Cleopatra's role, but enough attention was paid to that element of GJC's story to make some interesting takes on scenes from the Burton-Taylor classic. The military action was very realistically portrayed, with a lot of detail being given to the final main seige campaign against Vercingetorix in Gaul. I recommend this disk to anyone interested in Roman history.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:39 AM
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
LASER PROGRESS
Here's an update from Defense Tech about industry groups starting to organize to build operational battlefield laser weapons. As I've noted here before, I think the development and deployment of real military lasers at the tactical level will work a real revolution in the military landscape of the 21st century. Mortars and cheap, simple ballistic rockets are two of the primary weapons of the small, lightly-armed forces that the U.S. faces now and will continue to face as we combat the Islamist threat for the next few decades. Small, mobile (truck- or Hummer-mounted) lasers that can blast a barrage of mortar shells or small artillery rockets out of the sky are just around the corner. If you have a hard time imagining the importance of such a defensive weapon, consider what a dozen or so of these positioned inside Baghdad's Green Zone or a ring of them defending Israel's borders would mean. Now to find a solution to those damned IEDs...
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:24 AM
STATE OF FEAR
My general view of Michael Crichton has been one of a steady downward arc -- as his popularity as a writer of blockbuster Hollywood movie scenarios masked as novels has grown, his skill as a novelist has declined. But this review by Ron Bailey of Crichton's latest book, State of Fear, may mark a redemption. Crichton has apparently novelized the critique of environmentalist alarmism he's been giving lately as a speech, using characters in the novel to explicate the extent to which the "doom industry" has turned one view of climate science into a dogmatic element of the general anti-American, anti-globalization mentality of the left-leaning world intelligentsia. Crichton's novel may or may not be worth reading, but the facts pointed out in Bailey's review definitely are.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:48 AM
Sunday, December 12, 2004
THE LEFT-ISLAMIC UNITED FRONT
I've been preoccupied with the house construction project we've got going -- that is finally in the last stretch -- thus the long silences here. But I came across this review of David Horowitz new book about the growing alliance between the far Left and radical Islamists and couldn't resist passing it on.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:49 PM
Sunday, December 05, 2004
IS EUROPE FINALLY WAKING UP?
Maybe. Up till now there's been no effort to assimilate Europe's 13 million Muslims, with predictable results. This article in the Times points to hopeful signs that Europeans are realizing that leaving this group unassimilated is a prescription for disaster. An ironic note at the end of the artcle:
Reluctantly, some intellectuals have lately concluded that the model for Europe should be the US. On Tuesday a writer for Libération, the French left-wing daily, noted that immigrants in the US threw themselves into “the American dream” and prospered. “There is no French, Dutch or other European dream,” she noted. “You emigrate here to escape poverty and nothing more."
You have to pause a moment to savor the one ...
GB,m THHotA
posted by Greg 7:17 AM
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