INSTAVISION: Is Law School Becoming a Fool’s Errand? I talk with law Profs. Richard Epstein of NYU and John Yoo of Berkeley about the utility of the bar exam, the value of today’s legal education, and what people applying to law school should be thinking about. Plus, advice for the Harvard professoriate on avoiding those pesky plagiarism scandals! (Bumped).
TUNKU VARADARAJAN: The Case For Obama/Hillary 2012. Lots of people are saying this. A few quick thoughts:
1. This smacks of desperation. It’s basically an admission that the Biden pick was a mistake.
2. Is Hillary Clinton really the fresh new face that will excite the American public?
3. If Hillary is going to be one heartbeat away from the Oval Office, would you want that to be your heartbeat?
I’m just sayin’.
WALTER SHAPIRO REPORTS: Charlie Rangel’s Birthday Bash: A Night for Ethics Amnesia.
RAND SIMBERG: Anchor babies? Maybe we should worry more about native anchors. “Perhaps it’s time to rethink not just birthright citizenship, but citizenship in general, and what it means.” With inspiration from Robert Heinlein.
I wonder if Heinlein expected this book to be so influential?
WHERE ELSE YOU GONNA GO, CHUMPS? Gibbs Stands By His ‘Professional Left’ Critique, Expects Liberals To Vote In 2010.
MEGAN MCARDLE: The Great Stock Myth: Why the market’s rate of return—and your nest egg—may never recover. “Once everyone believes that the stock market offers high returns for relatively little risk, that notion stops being true. And everyone apparently does believe just that—even after the 2008 crisis, the price-to- earnings ratio of the S&P 500 remains near the top of its average historical range. Paradoxically, the current high price may be supported in part by a belief that the old equity premium still obtains. . . . If the return on equities really has fallen, this decline poses a big problem for the average investor who planned to stick 5 to 10 percent of his or her annual income into stock funds and retire comfortably. At an annual inflation-adjusted growth rate of 8 percent, savings of just 5 percent of your income for 30 years will leave you with a nest egg big enough to replace almost half your income when you retire. Saving 10 percent will make you really comfortable. But if the return is 2 to 3 percent, you’ll need to save close to 40 percent to replace almost half of your income. And a 2 percent return seems to be a real possibility—in fact, it’s a hair above the 1.8 percent that Smithers & Co., an asset-allocation consultancy, forecast for U.S. equities over the next decade.”
But there’s no free lunch:
When confronted with the erratic performance of the equity market, many people start daydreaming of gold-plated corporate pensions, cushy civil-service jobs, or at least their Social Security benefits. But as it turns out, all of these dreams have drawbacks—and none of them escapes the tyranny of the equity market.
Start with private pension plans, which underpin nostalgic yarns about the golden age of the 1960s, when every man could raise a family on assembly-line wages and then retire in comfort. These pensions never were as widespread in fact as they are in popular legend—when the number of such plans peaked in the 1980s, they covered only about one-third of the workforce. And as it turned out, a lot of those plans failed catastrophically. Defined-benefit plans have a huge downside: they drastically discourage labor mobility. Not only do they make an economy less dynamic by tying workers to a given company, but they also leave the workers vulnerable if the company goes under, taking their retirement with it.
Indeed.
JUST AS THE DEMOCRATS DECIDE TO TIE REPUBLICANS TO GEORGE W. BUSH, these photos appear. Hmm.
More here.
TOM MAGUIRE IS APPALLED: “A CNN opinion poll shows that 68% of Americans (including 54% of Democrats and 45% of liberals) are anti-Constitutional bigots opposing the Ground Zero mosque.”
HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY: Prechter: The Last Time The Market Looked Like This Was Right Before The ’87 Crash.
Related: Fortune: Is this finally the economic collapse? The contrarian view, of course, is that once we start seeing these headlines, things are about to turn up. We’ll see. But there’s this:
Lest our doom and gloom seem built entirely on technical measurements, what they boil down to is actually quite simple — an idea about our country which dates back to 1835. Alexis De Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America, which was published that year, seemed to warn of this day when he wrote: “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money.”
Ugh. Yeah.
UPDATE: Various readers point out that the Tocqueville quote, while common, is misattributed.
SIGN OF THE TIMES: It’s not nudity on TV that’s controversial, it’s unshaved pubes on TV that’s controversial.
RECOVERY SUMMER! Job Openings Fall In June.
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MCCAIN, JOURNALISTS WOULD BE FIRED FOR QUESTIONING THE OIL INDUSTRY’S TIES WITH THE WHITE HOUSE. And they were right! Journalist Fired For Talking About Obama/BP Ties.
TALKING ABOUT the Moon.
MEGAN MCARDLE: How Much House Can I Afford? Generally, it’s less than the realtor says you can. And the bank: “It’s frightening to know that the above calculations, which don’t seem too stringent, are far, far tighter than those used by our relatively sober credit union. We McSudermans may be a fiscally conservative people, but we Americans clearly still aren’t.”
A BETTER DEPARTURE THAN THAT FRUSTRATED FLIGHT ATTENDANT’S, ANYWAY: Girl quits her job on dry erase board, emails entire office.
UPDATE: A hoax? Say it ain’t so! Amazingly, literally dozens of people had emailed me within minutes.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Okay, I updated this within a few minutes of posting, and yet, over an hour later, people are still emailing me corrections. Is the update not showing or something?
Meanwhile, Charlie Martin writes: “She is adorable, though, isn’t she?”
MARKDOWNS ON men’s clothing.
COMPASSION as a scarce resource.
JOHN HAWKINS: Let’s You And Him Fight!
AN INSIDER LOOK AT pickup artist workshops: “There are a lot of hucksters in the seduction community.”
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