Plagiarism

Without ever actually using the word "plagiarism," Michael Moynihan in last weekend's Wall Street Journal makes the case that Dominic Sandbrook engaged in a good deal of it in Sandbrook's new book, MAD AS HELL: THE CRISIS OF THE 1970s AND THE RISE OF THE POPULIST RIGHT.

Moynihan, the senior editor of libertarianism's flagship magazine, REASON, says that Sandbrook "shamelessly and repeatedly cannibalizes the work of others...." such as Mark Bowden's book about the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-1981, GUEST OF THE AYATOLLAH (2007).

Such a charge requires putting passages side by side. Sandbrook writes thus:

"At Washington's National Cathedral, bells tolled every day at noon, once for each day of their captivity, while in Lawrence, Massachusetts, churches rang their bells fifty times a day in sympathy."

Bowden had put it thus: "At the National Cathedral in Washington, bells tolled every day at noon, once for each day of the lengthening captivity. In Lawrence, Massachusetts, all of the churches around its city hall sounded their bells fifty times each day at noon to remember the American captives."

To be fair: Sandbrook did a little re-writing of Bowden. He shortened Bowden's sentences in that passage, as a copy-editor might, deleting the arguably unnecessary word "lengthening" in the first of those sentences for example. Still, the similarity is rather too great for comfort. It would have been better to use quotation marks and credit Bowden in the text even if it did mean using that adjective.

Another example? Any book about the politics of the 1970s will have to describe the bicentennial celebrations of 1976. In that context, Sandbrook writes specifically of the Boston fireworks:

"On television, pictures showed girls applauding on their boyfriends' shoulders, fathers lifting their children in the air, a South Boston priest waving an enormous American flag."

J. Anthony Lukacs had described those fireworks in his 1986 book, COMMON GROUND. Thus: "Long-haired girls perched on their boyfriends' shoulders, fathers held children aloft, a priest from South Boston waved a huge American flag."

One gets the feeling, from such examples (Moynihan provides others) that Sandbrook did just enough copy editing to avoid the p word. In that Bostonian scene, this chiefly involved changing the tense from past to present. Also, Sandbrook might say in his own defense that Bowden, Lukacs, and the other sources to which Moynihan refers were all explicitly cited in his footnotes.

The problem remains, though. The borrowing isn't of the usual scholarly sort, but goes to the choice of anecdotes, the physical details thereof, and the adjectives. In order to write a book about the 1970s, it is necessary but not sufficient to read a lot of the stuff that has been written about the seventies. One must think about the subject sufficiently to make it one's own.

Links about health care reform

The subject of the day. I don't have a lot to say about it, so I'll simply offer links.

1. What I said 2 and a half years ago still reads well to my own biased eyes.

2. Here is something along analogous lines, that Ronald Bailey wrote back in 2003.

3. But let's be more up-to-date for a moment. Here is something from the folks at Cato, who are watching all this with some more particularity than I am.

4. Julian Sanchez reminds us that insurance is about managing risks. If health insurers aren't allowed to manage risks (by for example protecting themselves against liability for pre-existing conditions) then whatever exactly it is that they are doing, it is no longer insurance as that term has always been understood.

5. It does seem to be an odd but empirically observable fact that in some fields low-risk people purchase more insurance than do high-risk people.

6. Virginia Postrel tells us about her life, her breast cancer diagnosis of 2007, and what she makes of it in terms of health insurance as an industry.

7. On the intra-party split the Democrats now face? This may be important. The bill is hardly home-free given the huge differences betwen the two sausages that have come out of the two chambers of our sausage making apparatus. Here is a columnist in The New York Times on the intra-party split.

8. And here is ABC News.

9. Forty-five years ago, Kenneth Arrow wrote a "seminal paper" about the economics of health care. Krugman cites it as gospel, others aren't so worshipful.