Another comparison: try this.

How does one control a US Republican Senator, or any other political entity, for that matter? An economic way is to make him, her or it transparent, and thus amenable to discipline. Take the American Conservative Union ratings: one can find out that Senators Inhofe, Coburn or Barrasso vie for the most conservative record in their voting. With a lifetime score of almost 90, Lindsey Graham might have felt reasonably secure. You wanna mess with me and call me a RINO (Republican In Name Only), check my ACU rating, pal. But then he struck a framework agreement with John Kerry on global warming and clean energy, and Harry Kimball, RINO HUNTer, just flushed him down the toilet. So much for the abstract, carefully constructed, boring transparency provided by ACU, to be replaced, says good old Harry, by a “committee of  folks who are working on researching the incumbents”, and create a “definitive list of RINOs”.

So, in the end, as with all transparency matters, the question is who do you trust? Surely, a committee of folks, morally akin to me, beats hard-to-decipher numbers… One can only think so much about these political things before yelling politically…

Comparing something to something else (say, today’s France to the Vichy Regime) does not mean that this something and that something else are exactly identical. They are just comparable, which means that the resemble at least a little bit. So let’s compare:

“On Monday 5 October the film-maker José Chidlovsky was summoned to the offices of the French border police at Toulouse-Blagnac airport. Chidlovsky is currently filming a documentary called Journal de sans-papiers. This feature-length documentary, filmed in Paris and Toulouse, is due to be completed in 2010. It follows the experiences of several people without residence permits who live in fear of being deported. Amongst them is a young Algerian woman threatened with being escorted to the border and suffering from severe emotional stress. José Chidlovsky is accused of having provided accommodation for the young woman at his home in Toulouse. [...] Eric Besson, the Minister for Immigration insists that assisting illegal immigrants, the so-called “offence of solidarity”, is not a crime in France. Yet for having “housed a person in an illegal situation” José Chidlovsky risks a prison sentence. According to his lawyer Pascal Nakache, the prosecutor can either close the case or send the documentary maker before the criminal court.” (from “Film-Maker Accused of Assisting ann Illegal Immigrant”, translation of “Un cinéaste poursuivi pour délit de solidarité”, L’Humanité, October 6 2009) (and see here for a solidarity campaign)

What should a fine comparison start with? With nazis marching in leather boots? Well, no. Not with that, of course. That would be silly.

From some very preliminary opportunistic fieldwork conducted during an important organisational studies conference in Barcelona this summer it was found that expenses receipts were a major preoccupation for many society testers. A particularly poignant vignette from this fieldwork was provided by an experiment in the collective ordering of the highly refreshing drink of orxata (unknown to many of those involved in the experiment until then). Apart form providing an opportunity to see Douglas Adams’ Bistromathics “in the wild”, the vignette also raised a number of interesting calculatory and ethical issues about whether such an “unknown” (unknowable?!) object would fit into the increasingly rigid categorisation and classification schemes of the administrative bureaucracies of the institutions to which the various self experimenters belonged to and then, on seeing a plethora of discarded receipts on the floor, about whether to exploit or not the get-rich-quick opportunity presented by these trampled pieces of paper. Now, in true STS fashion, a completely new direction to such experimentation is being provided by the technological innovation of  the  Random Expenses Receipt Generator. The article includes some ‘bonus tracks’ in the form some brilliant accounts of the expenses practices of British journalists and a link to an article about the institution by this profession of the proto-market device of the London Bill Exchange.

Some new guys on the block, Stiglitz, Sen and Fitoussi, just let us know that the GDP doesn’t represent the economy correctly: it may be leaving out the world.

“Choices between promoting GDP and protecting the environment may be false choices, once environmental degradation is appropriately included in our measurement of economic performance.”

Indeed. So once a controversy is “appropriately” built into the measuring device, beyond politics, no arguing is necessary. Same old game.

Will Davies is the author of Reinventing the Firm, a Demos report made available today. A praise for corporate pluralism and financial mutuality:

“Capitalism is always a curious mixture of liberalism and despotism. It grants freedom, equality and participation with one hand, while it imposes orders, hierarchy and inequality with the other. We barely notice that we live schizophrenic economic lives, in which half our waking hours are spent being indulged and obeyed as sovereign consumers, while the other half is spent being ordered around as employees. But in neither case are we treated as responsible adults. To live responsibly, both as consumers and as workers, would mean exercising economic freedom with a sense of the stakes involved. The liberal and the despotic elements of capitalism would be brought a little closer together, so that freedom was never untrammelled and power never unaccountable. At the centre of an argument for employee ownership is a
subtly different vision of how economic power should be organised and utilised. Managers possess a greater sense of accountability to the employees who own the firm, while employees acquire a greater sense of responsibility for the assets that they are tasked with using and developing. An alternative form of autonomy is at work, that is very different from that demanded by the investors and executives that control listed companies.” (from Will Davies, 2009, Reinventing the Firm, Demos, 2009, p. 61)

See also “Mutuality would be a good fit for the Tories”, Financial Times, September 10 2009.

This is a little reminder about how French policemen like to use their great weapon, the proverbial flash-ball (from Verney-Carron),  in order to to fight chaos and defend order: pointing straight towards the face of the “chaotic” (a note on terminology below). Someone lost an eye in a demonstration this summer in Montreuil. And the little device is now an acknowledged tag in the French media.

TV  journalist Mélissa Theuriau just got a little pushy on this and related topics with Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux (this blog’s old friend). Cops got pissed off and issued a letter saying that the lady was under the influence of evil anti-cop primal forces. Hey, perhaps she’s a “chaotic” too! Radical Chic rightly spotted the cops’ unconscious: she’s married to Jamel Debbouze, comedian of Moroccan descent, agent of the chaotic.

Note on terminology: “chaotic” means arabs, leftists and women (especially if they ask the right questions).

For those who follow economists in their world-making activities, this roster of brilliant economists in The Economist provides some ancillary relevance. It says that

[...] today’s economists show no great attachment to the rational model of behaviour that guided Mr Becker. Economic theory has become so eclectic that ingenious researchers can usually cook up a plausible model to explain whatever empirical results they find interesting. Economics is now defined neither by its subject matter nor by its method.

It also seems that the stories economists tell about the world are becoming ever more interesting politically. Take the new economics of unemployment: bigger, longer subsidies may in fact be better than pushing the unemployed to get a job, any job, as soon as possible. Pay people to find good jobs vs get those lazy bastards to work now. In social sciences, all the cognitive handiwork is propped up by a moral tale. But hey, that’s the way we are made to be.

Readers of Nature got the chance of hitting a very nice review of Robert Paarlberg’s Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa, by Ian Scoones and Dominic Grover (see also here). A little excerpt:

“The book has quickly become influential. Paarlberg was asked to speak about hunger alleviation in front of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. The book’s arguments were repeated in a major policy speech by Nina Fedoroff, science and technology adviser both to the US Secretary of State and to the administrator of the US Agency for Inter national Development (USAID). Economist Paul Collier of the University of Oxford, UK, praised it in an article in the journal Foreign Affairs, and British peer Dick Taverne described it in a House of Lords debate as one of the most important books he had read in years. But Paarlberg’s account is one-sided. Just as the heated debate about GM crops had settled around a position that recognizes they can be useful in some circumstances yet are not a panacea, this book unhelpfully polarizes the matter once more. [...] A dogmatic and unscientific stance on GM crops — whether for or against — helps no one, least of all African farmers. A more evidence-based approach than Paarlberg’s is needed.” (in Ian Scoones and Dominic Grover,  “Africa’s biotechnology battle”, Nature, Vol. 460, pp. 797-798, August 13 2009, full pre-print version available here)

For information: Nina Fedoroff is the famous advocate of something called “science diplomacy”, a technique basically consisting in saying that scientists and politicians critical against Monsanto are a bunch of idiots and in throwing at them slideshows with random pictures of starving kids (preferably African) and of big, shiny GM maize crops.

Our secret is out as the magazine Cabinet dedicates its latest issue to the theme ‘testing’. Cabinet has a tendency to exploit (or, rather, explode) interesting topics without covering them in any substantial way. This issue is no exception.