Happy Birthday, Dear Jacob & Sophia!

The SSA released their list of the most popular baby names in 2011. Those two names top the charts, and the general trend towards the popular names becoming less and less popular in absolute terms continues. The number of Biblically influenced names at the top of the list seems to have dropped in recent years.

Wishing For Open Access Journals

Ezra writes:

I have conflicted feelings about the public money that goes to academic research — including political science — in this country. I admire and rely on the work that comes out of these disciplines. But for all the public money that goes to support them, there’s a decided lack of public-spiritedness in how they act. The research is often locked away in pricey journals. There’s a premium placed on unnecessary convoluted rhetoric that confuses and dissuades interested outsiders. There’s almost no effort put into connecting research with the public debate — and academics who try and engage in it often risk professional and social sanction.

 If it were up to me, any research that took even a dollar of taxpayer funds would have to be in an open-access journal and stored in a publicly searchable repository. While much of this research deserves public support, the prevailing mores in academia don’t. 

I'm very sympathetic to a lot of this.  I agree totally with the bit about unnecessary convoluted rhetoric, and I'd boast on behalf of philosophy that we've been making some headway against that problem.  Metaphysics 200 years ago was a convoluted mess (Kant, especially Hegel) but the superstars of metaphysics in recent times (Saul Kripke, David Lewis) are fairly clear and straightforward writers.

The pricey journal problem is a huge one, and I'd like to lay out the problem that people like myself are caught in.  Because it sort of made sense in the pre-internet days to have for-profit corporations handle the printing and distribution of journals, a lot of the old prestigious journals that have historically published the most influential papers are in private hands.  I send papers there because that's the only way to get ahead in our profession.  And it's going well!  I had a paper come out in the #1 journal back in 2009, and I've got a forthcoming paper in the #2 journal.  (You can see the rankings here.)  When I was chatting with a senior figure at a conference this weekend, and I mentioned these papers, he swiftly said "You're getting tenure."

I do like to submit things to Philosophers' Imprint, the #10 and rising journal (founded in 2001) which is the only open-access journal in the top 20.  But they only publish 15 or so papers a year, as is generally the case with top journals (I haven't gotten anything in there yet).  And I published in JESP rather than the other journals in its class because it was open-access.  But there aren't enough open-access venues for us to publish in, and if you restricted yourself to them, your career wouldn't go anywhere.

There are a few things we could do about this.  I'm hoping that eventually when I and the rest of the internet generation rise to prominence, we can turn some of the journals open-access.  And when there are enough open-access journals, we can refuse to referee papers for the closed-access journals.  We can also set up more things like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is the best thing in all of philosophy.  But to get the prestige and power to accomplish these goals, we have to play the game by the current rules and submit to highly prestigious closed-access journals.

The point I'm trying to make is a lot of people are on Ezra's side about how it'd be better to have open-access journals, and it's absolutely the right side.  But it's less an issue of prevailing mores and more an issue of historical path-dependent phenomena locking us into a bad situation we can't get out of.  A lot of us are grumbling about the problem, but we can't actually do anything except play the game by the existing rules and hope to change it in the future.  I'm really not sure what the situation is with the senior people who currently run the journals, but my impression is that it's less an issue of actually liking the current system than of not feeling any motivation to go through the hard work of making changes.  I'm not really sure what can be done about them, especially given the collective action problems faced by large numbers of weak people trying to change how small numbers of powerful people behave.

It'd delight me if the federal government simply stopped enforcing copyright on publicly funded research.  None of us make any serious money off of books, and refereeing is entirely done on a volunteer basis.  I'm pretty sure there's no way to make this happen, though.

Irish Whiskey, Not Irish Austerity, For Germans

When chatting about European financial woes, my friend in Erfurt endorsed the stereotype of the German belt-tightener who works hard and saves his money.  He seemed amused by my suggestion that Germans need to do their part to fix the European crisis by buying lots of cool stuff from the troubled European economies.  But that's the happiest way out of this.  If the troubled countries are going to do better economically, they'll have to export more stuff.  For them to export more stuff, someone has to buy the stuff.  They can't buy their own stuff, since their economies are depressed and they don't have money.  So the buyers they need are Germany and the other prosperous countries in Europe.

This is why the European Central Bank needs to cut rates (actually, they need to start printing money to generate inflation.)  The way a central bank can make people spend is by making saving money a bad deal.  High interest rates make saving a great deal, low interest rates make it a mediocre deal, and inflation makes it a bad deal.  What people don't save, they spend.  There are lots of fun things to drink in the troubled countries, and Germans could spend their money on those.

Of course, this isn't likely to happen anytime soon.  Jens Weidmann, head of the Bundesbank, wants the ECB not to cut interest rates.  Which is a pity, as I think the Germans would really have a good time drinking Ireland and Southern Europe out of the financial crisis.  

Did Steve Jobs Save Mass Transit Without Even Trying?

The above is my attempt to write an attention-grabbing headline that bears only tangential relevance to the point of this post.

Five years ago, there were no angry birds you
could launch at pigs to take out your frustration
at bus service delays.

But it does have some relevance in this case. I think Atrios is missing the key way in which smartphones have improved the experience of waiting for and riding the bus. They've made it more fun! When I worked at Microsoft ten years ago, you would occasionally see some twenty-something male bus rider with a Game Boy Advance. But no self-respecting person who's not a twenty-something male geek would walk around with something like that. The will, however, walk around with an iPhone or Galaxy Nexus, which they can use to read news, play games, do crossword puzzles, or get some actual work done.

I sometimes think that mobile games are a blight upon society, distracting us from real person-to-person interactions, but in this use case, they may be giving more people reasons to take the bus. Perhaps Neil has a utilitarian point he could make here.

Destroying the Christian Brand

The exact numbers in this Rachel Held Evans piece, which show that almost all young American non-Christians and even most self-identified young American Christians think that the primary tenet of Christianity is hating on the gays, are a little higher than I've seen from other public opinion surveys. But the general shape is the same. The Millenial Generation has broadly equated Christianity with the political project of conservative Christians at the national level. Which is to say, opposition to abortion and gay marriage, with little room for anything else. Locally, this or that Catholic Parish or mainline Protestant congregation may try to insert itself into issues such as homelessness, or even at the national level we might see the Catholic Bishops might criticize Paul Ryan's budget. But these efforts are being drowned out by the homophobia and antiabortion rhetoric.

This should really serve as a wake up call to church leaders. The once near-universal brand of American Christianity is being associated with an ever-shrinking size of the American public. Like Burger King and Axe Body Spray, you may wake up one day and find that the overwhelming majority of the public has simply tuned out everything you have to say. Now, it's always possible that the leaders of the major American churches may want it this way. But for those who don't, the window of opportunity where people might be willing to consider a more relevant form of modern Christianity is closing.

(hat tips to Amanda Marcotte & Jamelle Bouie).