Marc Lynch at Foreign Policy goes there:

See, Jay-Z (Shawn Carter) is the closest thing to a hegemon which the rap world has known for a long time. He’s #1 on the Forbes list of the top earning rappers. He has an unimpeachable reputation, both artistic and commercial, and has produced some of the all-time best (and best-selling) hip hop albums including standouts Reasonable Doubt, The Blueprint and the Black Album. He spent several successful years as the CEO of Def Jam Records before buying out his contract a few months ago to release his new album on his own label. And he’s got Beyoncé. Nobody, but nobody, in the hip hop world has his combination of hard power and soft power. If there be hegemony, then this is it. Heck, when he tried to retire after the Black Album, he found himself dragged back into the game (shades of America’s inward turn during the Clinton years?).

But the limits on his ability to use this power recalls the debates about U.S. primacy. Should he use this power to its fullest extent, as neo-conservatives would advise, imposing his will to reshape the world, forcing others to adapt to his values and leadership? Or should he fear a backlash against the unilateral use of power, as realists such as my colleague Steve Walt or liberals such as John Ikenberry would warn, and instead exercise self-restraint?

But here’s the other question: are Jay-Z and Beyoncé really in the same game? What about The Shins? In other words, maybe one set of actors are in the sphere of realist power politics, and another set are acting under a completely different set of assumptions – maybe idealist, maybe postmodern, maybe not based on the nation-state/single artist framework at all.

This was always my issue whenever we examined competing explanatory frameworks in political science: the assumption that whatever assumptions you made, they had to apply to all actors equally and individual actors consistently.

To me, it seemed (and seems) perfectly consistent to suppose that rational actors could be operating under different frameworks of rationality at different times, or even in some instances scuttling rationality altogether due to misinformation, contradictory internal forces, or misguided teleologies. “You can’t build models that way,” my freshman poli sci teacher said, half-joking but half-serious. No, I guess you can’t.

President Obama was in Warren, MI today (not far from where I grew up) to give a speech about community colleges. Here’s the gist:

In a speech Tuesday in Warren, Mich., he proposed sinking nearly $12 billion into revamping the country’s community-college system. The plan would provide $9 billion in grant money to boost academic programs and raise graduation rates, plus another $2.5 billion to upgrade school facilities. It would also fund open-source online courses so that schools don’t have to build more classrooms to admit more students.

Community colleges have long been where the bodies are in higher education, but now it’s ridiculous. The economy’s collapse has sent college students’ enrollments rolling downhill – kids who would have gone to expensive private schools are enrolling in moderately priced public universities, the university kids are going to regional colleges, and the regional students to community colleges. If you want to get more students with college degrees, community colleges are a natural place to start.

Christopher Beam at Slate notes further advantages:

If the university system is an ocean liner, community colleges are the speedboats of higher education. If they get more money and use it wisely, the thinking goes, they can produce results in a matter of years. After all, they’re designed to respond to the needs of the local community. For example, LaGuardia Community College recently introduced a program to train designers in New York City. When the fishing industry started struggling in Massachusetts, Cape Cod Community College turned its focus to nursing and other health-care-related jobs. When Connecticut introduced its first casino, one nearby community college started training croupiers. For an administration looking for shovel-ready projects, community colleges can provide a lot of shovels.

Let’s imagine the community college in twenty years. It’s taken up a fair amount of the role once played by larger state universities. It offers a wide range of four-year and two-year degrees, plus some applied postgraduate degrees. What’s more, different community colleges, like different universities and technical schools now, specialize. Some are outstanding teachers’ colleges, while others train designers, still others business professionals. But the biggest boom is in information technology – info techs work in medicine, business, law, government… You used to go to a community college to learn data entry. Now you go to learn data management, analysis, and modeling.

Think about it. Community college students (and teachers and IT departments) today often aren’t as tech-saavy as their university counterparts, but they can innovate in the use of digital technology. In fact, they have to. They don’t have the same physical plant and infrastructure as larger, more expensive schools. They’re unlikely to have folks on campus doing original research. They’re not mainframes. They’re terminals. But there’s a difference between smart and dumb terminals.

A community college, with an instituional subscription to the Google Books of the future, can do without a substantial library; they can do without cyclotrons or football stadiums or anything else that drains dollars and energy, public or private; I don’t know, but it seems to me that we’re standing at a unique juncture. Just as many of our parents (and especially grandparents) often don’t quite recognize what schools are like today, those of us in our twenties might not recognize the delicate ecology of colleges and universities when our kids start filling out those applications.*

Read more…

Ezra Klein writes that “I imagine that when Sonia Sotomayor is putting together her scrapbook of memories from the time she was nominated for the United States Supreme Court, this will be a page she’ll particularly treasure”:

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), seeking to discredit Judge Sonia Sotomayor

Legislators – in the US, but probably elsewhere too – don’t read bills before they vote on them. No one could.

Congress passed the gigantic, $787 billion

The title is half a joke, but half true. Part of navigating the logic, grammar, and rhetoric of this century of scarcity and abundance is going to involve not just working and understanding flows of goods and money, growing and eating things, understanding marketing or images, or managing your attention and identity (or identities), but also trying to figure out what you give away and what you charge for, what you take and what you pay for, and why and how you do all of these things.

Many, many people have been at least as interested in how and why we printed only 200 copies of New Liberal Arts and then gave digital copies away as they’ve been interested in any or all of the entries. And you know what? I’m kind of more interested in that too — at least for the past thirty minutes or so.

Kevin Kelly’s formulation of what we did is worth repeating: “The scarce limited edition of the physical subsidizes the distribution of the unlimited free intangible.” We knew that we wanted to make an honest-to-goodness well-made book*, AND that we wanted everything to be freely available on the web. I don’t think there was ever a conversation about doing it any other way.

But I think there’s a difference between just selling a physical thing and giving it away for free. One of the things that I think was clever was the “ransom” model that Robin came up with, whereby the free copies were only released after the print run was sold. I think it was the motive of patronage, the aligning of the interests of the purchasers with the freeriders, that made it work.

(Aside: When I was a kid, I remember how the Detroit Lions’ football games on TV used to be blacked-out in Detroit whenever the Silverdome didn’t sell out. Since the Lions stunk, this happened a lot, and CBS wouldn’t even show you another football game, you’d just be stuck watching reruns or infomercials instead of football, which made you hate the Lions even more.)

Janneke Adema keys in on this:

Actually this is just a variant of the delayed Open Access model, in which after a certain embargo time the books or journals are made Open Access. What I like however about the example Kelly mentions of the New Liberal Arts book, a Snarkmarket/Revelator Press collaboration, is how they combine this delayed Open Access model with a community support or maecenas model.

In another, earlier entry, she elaborates:

It looks like we might be slowly returning to the old Maecenas system, or Maecenate, when it comes to culture, flourishing as it did in the old Rome of Virgil and Horace, and still visible today in many a country’s subsidy system, stimulating (historically) mostly the so called “high arts” which in some cases and some countries have known some kind of patronage or state subsidy for ages (the Dutch system is a good example in this respect).

What seems clear however is that this new digital Maecenic culture will be quite different in many respects from so called subsidy systems. It will be way more “democratic” for one, no longer favoring art picked out by committees of wise experts but directly benefiting those chosen by the public to merit their money. It will also not be a “traditional” Maecenic culture in which a few rich people out of philanthropy and the goodness of their hearth give their money to the arts or the projects they endorse. This new Maecenic culture will probably be upheld by large communities of people of all income classes, all offering a little money to support their favorite band, artist or cultural entrepreneur (think of those small labels again).

The new digital Maecenate! Just typing it gives me shivers of delight.

Until I read Adema’s post, though, the way I’d been thinking about it was less classical, and maybe less flattering. I was thinking about Polish farmers in Prussia.

Okay, I’ll explain. Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism begins with a weird and probably a little racist anecdote about Catholic farmers in the Eastern province of Germany. The farmers, and young people from the farms who’d emigrated to the cities, didn’t seem to respond to economic incentives. They were traditionalists: if you showed them a new way to farm that yielded more crops, unless the difference was overwhelming, they didn’t care; they’d just do it the way they always did it. If you paid them more for their crops to try to get them to produce more, they’d work less, because they could live off of the same amount of money they’d always had.

Actually Weber very smartly avoided the racist conclusion – that the Polish farmers were congenitally lazy — that most of the Prussian farmowners who employed these Polish workers had made. Instead, he concluded that to work your butt off to make more money than you could most likely spend was actually a very strange way to live – that it wasn’t, as some of the early economists and social engineers thought, a natural and universal response to maximize utility, but a historically contingent phenomenon.

He spends the rest of his startlingly brilliant book trying to trace the conditions under which that phenomenon could have emerged based on the startling economic success made by Protestant sects in Western Europe and the United States, all of which hinged on new notions of work and personal austerity that turned out to be, quite accidentally, a primary engine in the development of modern capitalism as it emerged in the West.

So, where am I going with this?

Well, the NLA model is like a color negative of the noncapitalist peasant. I say a color negative because the economic conditions have actually reversed. The peasant could earn more, but he didn’t really have any place to put it. Once his physical needs were met, he had no reason to keep working. He would curtail the potential abundance of nature when the scarce physical resources were purchased.

What can do is the opposite – to unlock the potential abundance of the artificial once the scarce physical resources have been paid for. Instead of stopping work – stopping the flow of goods and closing the circuit of circulation – this opens it up. This is only natural.

*My calfskin-and-vellum copy is particularly nice.

We all know how I feel about suburbia. How would you redesign the suburbs?

The question is the subject of a contest from Dwell magazine and Inhabitat. I’m pretty curious how Snarketeers would answer this question.

California, strapped by an insane budget crisis, is issuing IOUs to its employees and creditors, and will soon likely be willing to accept these IOUs as payment for taxes and other state obligations. Nothing like a little extra-constitutional currency creation to spice up the economic picture of the U.S.A!

The Economist’s Free Exchange offers this take on the consequences:

The highly uncertain long-term value of the IOUs may make anyone reluctant to accept them, preventing them from rising to de facto currency status. On the other hand, if enough people and institutions begin accepting them, Gresham’s law may apply. Consumers may be anxious to hold on to dollars and spend their funny money wherever they can, until circulation is dominated by the IOUs.

But then, of course, economies that do business with California would have a demand for the IOUs, and other states

If you want people to know what awesomely supercool books you are reading, you can use the internet to tell them.

Ezra Klein, “Can the Internet Be Your New Bookshelf?”:

This is one of those spots where I imagine social networking really will save us. Back when I was using Facebook more, I was a big fan of Visual Bookshelf, which let you display what you were reading and, when you finished, let you rate and review the books. As a matter of signaling, it’s quite a bit more efficient. Your friends don’t have to catch you in a literary moment on the Metro. And being able to browse the collections of all my friends was a delight, and offered occasional surprises that helped me known them better: former football teammates who were now reading John Kenneth Galbraith, for instance, and libertarian friends who listed “The Grapes of Wrath” as one of their favorite books of all time.

I also found that displaying the contents of my bedside table helped counteract my tendency to get distracted 90 pages in and start something else. Now that the books were hanging out on my profile, I felt more pressure to finish them. Somehow, simply leaving books around my room didn’t carry the same silent reproach. In fact, I sort of miss that pressure. Which is why I’ve added a little Amazon widget that does much the same thing to the right sidebar. Technology!

James Wolcott laments the loss of personalized conspicuous consumption that goes with putting down a paperback and picking up a Kindle:

How can I impress strangers with the gem-like flame of my literary passion if it

When you use mobile-optimized webpages for a while, inevitably you’re going to find a few that you like better than their desktop counterparts. They’re trimmed-down sure, but they give you quick access to what you really want, perfect for a quick peek to see whether you’ve gotten a new email, a file has uploaded, or if the weather’s going to change before you go outside.

For these sort of things, you don’t need to fire up your whole browser, update your extensions, and parse through all of your old auto-saved tabs just to see something that probably isn’t going to be there anyways. All you need is a little web-connected widget that tells you the same thing.

Do you know how to make a widget? Neither do I. But I do know how to use an application called Fluid for the Mac to make single-site-browsers (or SSBs) to do one thing, do it very well, and otherwise get out of the way.

At its basic level, Fluid creates an OS X application using Webkit (the guts of Safari) for individual webpages. I use this for Gmail, for example. Gmail runs on my Mac with its own icon, in a window without any toolbars or other clutter, that I can start without opening my browser, and that won’t crash if (or when) my browser does. It even displays dock badges – which means when I’ve got a new email, I can look at the dock see a little number on the application’s icon. Which, by the way, I was able to pick myself – Fluid will convert almost any image into an OS X icon.

That’s nice enough. But you can also tell Fluid to identify itself to web pages using other engines besides Safari’s. A Fluid-built SSB can show itself in multiple versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, or — and this is the kicker – MobileSafari, the web browser used for the iPhone.

Weirdly, you can’t select this when you first create your app. All you pick is the URL and your program icon (which defaults to the web favicon). But all you have to do, once you’ve created your browser, is to click on the program name, then “User Agent,” to run the site as a mobile browser once you restart.

Why is this important? Well, after you create the application, you have a few more options. One that I’ve never used is to embed your SSB into the Desktop. This is nice presumably because you can close all of the other apps and just show the one you use most frequently. But I keep files and folders on my desktop, so it’s never worked.

The other, which I like a lot, is to convert the SSB into what’s called a “MenuExtra SSB.” The name makes it sound like you’re going to get extra menus or something, but in fact, you get a good deal less. This option runs your SSB not out of your dock, but your menu bar, up there with always-accessible apps like “Airport,” “Clock,” and “Volume.”

If you pick MenuExtra SSB with an ordinary web engine, it’s a little weird – when you click the app’s menu bar icon, you get either a huge browser window or a little window where you need to scroll around to see everything. It’s jarring. But with MobileSafari, it’s perfect. You’ve got a little iPhone-sized window where you can fire up a mobile site – then quickly close it by clicking the same button.

Why would you want to do this? I use the mobile SSBs for Facebook (especially when I just want to check a message or number and not get lost in the labyrinth), Gmail (when I want to check email without having to log in to chat, or waiting forever for the application to start, or worrying about clearing spam, etc.), Google Translate (perfect for a quick lookup), Google Reader (sometimes, since I mostly use NetNewsWire), Pandora (which is currently wonderful), Google Chat (when I want to log into chat but not email – it’s complicated), and Dropbox. If you don’t like any of the rich client Twitter applications, it’s great for Twitter, too. (I use, and like, Tweetie.)

The last one has truly been a lifesaver. I have a 50GB Dropbox account and an older computer that I sometimes use that only has an 80GB hard drive. Syncing the entire account would kill that HD – all of my clever symbolic-link ruses to try to get Dropbox to sync to an external drive have only create giant cache files full of pain. But I don’t even want to have everything synced to my old computer – I just want to be able to access it sometimes. Dropbox in the menu bar lets me stay always logged-in, and quickly navigate to the file I need, download it or read it, and get on with whatever else I need to do.

So that’s it. Fluid is terrific – it creates stable and powerful but lightweight web clients that just work on almost any site you can think of. You can also use the MobileSafari capability to create slick sidetabs in any regular SSB… but I think that’s enough functionality for now.

PS: All of this stuff I have learned elsewhere – if you want fancy pictures or a more explicit walkthrough, google “Fluid MenuExtra” or look at the Fluid site. I’m really just trying to sell you on the idea of it – webapps without walls.