TONY WOODLIEF:

Every month, money flies from my checking account to the education savings accounts of my children, because I don’t want them to become hobos. This is one way I allay my fear the world will eat them up. It’s a mark of a good parent to worry over where—and whether—his child will go to college, isn’t it?

I need to confess a profoundly un-American heresy: I question what my children will get for the money. I don’t question the value of education (though we make it a panacea for deeper ills of the soul); I doubt the capacity of most educational institutions to impart much beyond what one could obtain with, as the protagonist in Good Will Hunting notes, “a dollar-fifty in late charges at the public library.”

I know there are teachers who can help a student get far more out of Dracula, say, than he might acquire on his own—might help him develop a healthy awareness of the various psycho-sexual literary analytical clubs with which the text has been bludgeoned for decades, for example, or even help him challenge dominant beliefs about what Dracula, and monster literature more broadly, means to us culturally. There are teachers like that; I’ve seen them in action, and they are a heartening, humbling species to behold.

The practical reality, however, is that most educational institutions have no interest in rewarding excellent teachers, or even understanding which of their teachers are truly excellent. They are in the business of slinging feed to cattle.

Tony, I’ve got a book you ought to read.

AUDI RS7: A Supercar That Doesn’t Like The Cold.

CLICHE UPDATE: Obama’s Relentless Use Of “Relentless.”

AMY ALKON: “Male Privilege” — To Be Denigrated, Dismissed, And Shamed For Being Male.

LIFE LESSONS: 27 Shocking And Unexpected Facts You Learn In Your Twenties.

THE ACLU on the wrong side of a free speech case.

NOEMIE EMERY: ObamaCare Helps Blunt The “Emerging Democratic Majority.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Caffeine + alcohol keeps your chromosomes just right. “Now, researchers have found that caffeine makes it more difficult for cells to copy the ends of their chromosomes. But that may be OK, since they also found that booze has the opposite effect. . . . Some telomeres are too long, and some are too short. Perhaps striking the right balance of caffeine and alcohol is the key to keeping them just right—as if you needed an excuse to have another hot toddy.” As soon as I finish my latte.

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WITH JIM MATHESON’S RETIREMENT CLEARING THE WAY FOR MIA LOVE, here’s my interview of her from last year. Her favorite economist is Bastiat.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW. BUT ONLY THE EARLY PART OF THE 21ST CENTURY: It’s Actually Kind Of Heartbreaking To Hear Robot Telemarketer Insist She’s A Real Person.

Time’s Washington Bureau Chief Michael Scherer ecnountered the robo-woman when his cell phone rang and the voice on the other end wanted to know if he was looking for a good deal on health insurance (sassy!). Things didn’t sound quite right, so he asked point blank if she was a real person or a robot voice.

She laughs it off and says of course, she’s a “real person.” But she couldn’t answer other simple questions that weren’t part of her script, like “What vegetable is in tomato soup?”(although technically, a tomato is a fruit, but whatever) or “What day of the week was it yesterday?”

When she’s got nothing good to say or is accused of being artificially intelligent, she asks if you can hear her, and ponders whether the connection could be bad, as heard in recordings made by other Time staffers to the same number.

One of those callers keeps asking, “Are you a robot? Can you just say, ‘I’m not a robot?’ ” to which she stiffly replies, “I am a real person.” It’s kind of heartbreaking to listen to, actually. She even insists she has a name, just like you and me and Siri.

Turing test, failed. So far.

WILL YOU EVEN NOTICE the impending robot uprising? Well, I’ve got the Robot Insurance, just in case.

ENVIRONMENTALISTS’ HEADS EXPLODE: What if “Climate Change” makes GMO foods essential? My guess is that they’d rather see mass starvation.

READER BOOK PLUG: From Michael John Olson, Sky Shatter.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: ABA: Law School Enrollment Down 11% This Year, 24% Since 2010.

HEH: George W. Bush is a hipster icon now and Vanity Fair is angry about it. Of course they are.

SPACE: The Lunar X-Prize Heats Up. “There are still 18 teams in the running, and X Prize says that several of them have been making good progress toward the first private moon landing.”

IT’S BOUND TO MAKE JEWISH STUDENTS “UNCOMFORTABLE.” AMONG OTHERS. How can these U.S. universities justify membership in American Studies Association after Israel boycott? The ASA’s gleichschaltung is in opposition to everything higher education in America is supposed to stand for. Supposed to. . . .

I GOT YER “JUCHE” RIGHT HERE, KIM: Denounced By The North Koreans. “Reynolds established a heterogenous work system in the department and the relevant organs. Consequently, Reynolds’s trusted henchmen and followers made no scruple of perpetrating counterrevolutionary acts.”

LATELY, THE ONION HASN’T REALLY SEEMED MUCH LIKE A PARODY SITE: 30-Year-Old Has Earned $11 More Than He Would Have Without College Education.

After accounting for the cost of tuition, four years of lost earning potential, and the minimal increase in salary an undergraduate degree provides, 30-year-old local man Patrick Moorhouse has, at this point in his life, earned $11 more than he would have had he not attended college at all, an independent study confirmed today. “All told, Patrick’s B.A. in Political Science translates to about $5,000 more in annual wages, but when you account for his student loan payments, including his 6 percent interest rate, his degree from a respected four-year university amounts to slightly more than 10 extra bucks in his wallet,” said researcher Ken Overton, adding that had Moorhouse been accepted to his more prestigious first-choice college, his earnings would have totaled $54 more than if he had never enrolled in higher education.

Like I said. . . .

UPDATE: For example, this isn’t from The Onion: Harvard student charged in bomb threat studies ‘partisan taunting.’ “Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science lists Kim as a psychology major studying partisan taunting who is also pursuing a secondary in Japanese.”

TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal: Day 223.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The End Of Peak Blue: Productivity Up, Future Uncertain.

Unemployment is high, wages are stagnant, inequality is higher than its been in years, yet America is as productive as ever. Total productivity—essentially measured by how much a worker can produce in one hour—has risen substantially over the past quarter, growing faster than it has since 2009, according to a new Labor Department report.

This is both good news and a sign of the trouble we are in. Basically, it is always good when productivity goes up. Rising productivity means that capitalism is working: some combination of technology, management and competitive drive is enabling Americans to get more done—more widgets made, more meals cooked, more diseases cured—in less time. If absolute poverty is going to be defeated, if more people are going to be freed from repetitive, meaningless work, if humanity is going to have more time for art and culture because it spends less time in drudgery and toil, productivity must continue to rise.

But in times like ours, the link between productivity and wages looks broken. Back in Peak Blue, when the post-WWII model of mass production and mass consumption was working at its best, rising productivity translated very quickly into rising wages for most workers. Unions used those productivity figures to bargain for raises, and competitive pressures in a tight labor market forced employers to offer rising wages along with the trend in rising productivity. There was a close connection between the productivity level and the wage level.

That isn’t true today, and it hasn’t been true for the last thirty years. . . . So does that mean that the link between capitalism and rising living standards has broken down for good? There are lots of people who seem to think so, but history suggests they are wrong.

Read the whole thing. And if you’re looking for responses, try reading Jim Bennett & Michael Lotus’s America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity In The 21st Century. Must reading for candidates — of any party — in advance of 2014 and 2016.

PEGGY NOONAN: Incompetence. “Everyone is doing thoughtful year-end pieces on President Obama. Writers and reporters agree he’s had his worst year ever. I infer from most of their essays an unstated but broadly held sense of foreboding: There’s no particular reason to believe next year will be better, and in fact signs and indications point to continued trouble. I would add that in recent weeks I have begun to worry about the basic competency of the administration, its ability to perform the most fundamental duties of executive management.” In recent weeks, eh?

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