RICHARD EPSTEIN: An American in India. “For this populous country, an agenda of economic growth matters most of all.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 243.

HEY, SOMEBODY SHOULD WRITE A BOOK ON THIS PROBLEM OR SOMETHING: California students sue state over ineffective teachers.

Nine California students have launched a lawsuit against the state, arguing that current law and entrenched practices they see as pro-union actually short-change the poor and the minority communities on their education.

Students Matter, the group driving the suit, said in a press release, “Ineffective teachers are entrenched in California’s public school system. The superintendents of many school districts affirm that their districts are beleaguered by grossly ineffective teachers and attribute the continued employment of these teachers to the challenged statutes.”

More here.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Yes, Academia — Winter Is Still Coming.

The business model for PhDs is functionally off. Graduate schools are minting far more PhDs than the market can absorb.

The problem as we see it is that the post-World War 2 university system was built on the assumption of an ever expanding population of students needing more and more higher ed. Therefore there was a need for each generation to produce more professors than the last. (This is not all that dissimilar, by the way, to the way many pension systems and social programs like Medicaid were built on the assumption that a bigger generation would roll around to pay the bills for the current enrollees.) . . .

This system is now coming undone. There aren’t many jobs for entry level doctoral grads, and even fewer for tenure track. Oversupply pushes wages down and keeps desperate hangers-on thronging around looking for adjunct positions. Older professors who were once obliged to retire at 65 now keep teaching. The result is a huge jobs crush.

To resolve the oversupply, we’re going to have to close down many PhD-generating graduate programs and shrink most others. The result will be that demand for professors in the affected field will shrink even more. With fewer grad students to teach, most schools will not need the large tenured faculties they have today, and tenure positions will shrink more still. That in turn should lead to another round of grad school shrinking—even fewer openings as more universities cut department size to adjust to the shrinkage of grad school programs—until at some point the process reaches an equilibrium.

Key bit: “Smart schools are already thinking about these things and making preparations for change.” Couldn’t have said it better myself.

HOW BAD IS CALIFORNIA’S BUSINESS CLIMATE? “It is so bad that even New York is now trying to poach businesses from the Golden State.”

THIS SEEMS SENSIBLE: Scott Walker to tea partiers: Let’s focus on taking out Democrats, not our fellow Republicans. “Because a year from now things will be much different if Republicans hold the United States Senate.” Particularly where Supreme Court appointments are concerned.

BRUCE SCHNEIER: How the NSA Threatens National Security. “Our choice isn’t between a digital world where the agency can eavesdrop and one where it cannot; our choice is between a digital world that is vulnerable to any attacker and one that is secure for all users.”

AT AMAZON, Warehouse Deals in Lawn & Garden.

Plus, today only: Save up to 45% off on Select ION Bluetooth Portable Speaker Systems.

And, also today only: Save 40% on Select BOB Jogging Strollers.

AT NRO, A QUESTION-AND-ANSWER about my new book, The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself. I was pleased with how this turned out.

GETTING EDGY IN ACADEMIA: Historians Talk Fondly Of Jobs In Government. “It feels a lot like graduate school, but it’s less competitive and there’s more security.”

It reminds me of these ruminations on academe.

JAMES TARANTO: The Moralistic Fallacy: How value judgments cloud social thought.

Hymowitz’s hypothesis that family breakdown causes “boy troubles” is an entirely plausible one. But there’s still a problem with it: That framing makes the argument circular. Recall that she posed the question as (among other things) why “poor and working-class boys” fail to become “reliable husbands and fathers.” She ends up concluding that the cause of fatherlessness is . . . fatherlessness.

Which isn’t as absurd as we just made it sound, for circular causation is distinct from circular reasoning. Life would be impossible without circular causation–after all, babies come from parents, who started off as babies, who came from parents, and so on into the mists of the distant past. But identifying a causal cycle begs the question if the question is about the ultimate cause. If your child is sophisticated enough to ask how human beings came into existence, he won’t be satisfied if you answer by explaining where babies come from.

It may be true that fatherlessness begets fatherlessness, but widespread illegitimacy is a recent phenomenon whose ultimate causes demand inquiry. In his landmark 1965 report, “The Negro Family: A Case for National Action,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed that “both white and Negro illegitimacy rates have been increasing, although from dramatically different bases. The white rate was 2 percent in 1940; it was 3.07 percent in 1963. In that period, the Negro rate went from 16.8 percent to 23.6 percent.”

The 2011 figures (which exclude Hispanics) were 29.1% for whites and 72.3% for blacks–a more than eightfold increase for whites and more than threefold for blacks. A cycle of fatherlessness operating over two to three generations cannot be sufficient to explain such an enormous rise.

So what does? In our view, a dramatic change in incentives owing to two major social changes that were just getting under way when Moynihan wrote.

Yeah, you could write a book on that.

SURPRISE! Walmart health plan is cheaper, offers more coverage than Obamacare.

ROGER SIMON: Confessions Of An Oscar Voter. Speaking as a Grammy voter, I haven’t even been motivated enough to open the ballot this year.

WAR ON WOMEN: WHY DOES OBAMA HATE SINGLE MOTHERS? Oregon Mother: I Can’t Afford ObamaCare For Myself, Son.

One Oregon mother says that she is unable to afford health insurance for her and her 18-month-old son because it’s too expensive.

The woman — who wishes to remain anonymous — tells KOIN-TV that she originally championed President Barack Obama’s signature health care law because she thought it would help people in her situation.

Yeah, well, live and learn, lady. But this wouldn’t have been a surprise if you’d been paying attention.

BUT NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THEIR ABILITY TO BLOW IT: Larry Sabato: Republicans Really Could Win It All This Year.

MY GOVERNOR, BILL HASLAM, IS ON THIS LIST: Ten freshman governors who have shrunk their states’ bureaucracies.

CHANGE: Fathers Spending Three Times More Time With Their Kids Than In The 1960s. Well, sure. Back in the 1960s, they could get jobs.

UGH: 3 Amtrak Trains With Hundreds of Passengers Stranded Since Monday.

Laurette Mosley of California says she has been stuck for more than 14 hours on one of the trains. Mosley was en route to Chicago to attend her mother’s funeral.

“The conditions is cold, we’re wearing coats. And my husband is a diabetic. He hasn’t had any food all day,” Mosley told ABC News by cellphone. “The bathrooms are flooded. The sinks are full with water and the toilets are flooded.”

Double ugh.

ROLL CALL: Spending Bill On Track to Avert Shutdown. “If it weren’t clear already that lawmakers — especially Republicans — want to avoid another government shutdown, the overwhelming optimism Monday that Congress will pass an omnibus spending measure for the first time in two years tips their hand. Democratic and Republican aides in both chambers believe that Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Barbara A. Mikulski, D-Md., and House Appropriations Chairman Harold Rogers, R-Ky., will come to an agreement this week on a more than $1 trillion bill to fund the government. But even with the highest hopes for swift passage, negotiating a behemoth spending package that touches every corner of the government is not easy.”

I’d rather see a bunch of separate bills rather than another “behemoth spending package.”

EUROPE: “It is difficult to go more than a day in France without hearing someone express the conviction that the greatest problem in the country is its ethnic minorities, that the presence of immigrants compromises the identity of France itself.”

ONLY GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO HAVE GUNS (CONT’D): “Jerome M. Hauer, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s director of homeland security, took out his handgun and used the laser sighting device attached to the barrel as a pointer in a presentation to a foreign delegation, according to public officials. . . . These officials, one of whom claimed to be an eyewitness, said that three Swedish emergency managers in the delegation were rattled when the gun’s laser tracked across one of their heads before Hauer found the map of New York, at which he wanted to point. . . . Hauer, commissioner of the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, was disabled by a stroke a few years ago and can be unsteady. He isn’t a law enforcement official. He carries the loaded 9-millimeter Glock in a holster into state buildings, an apparent violation of state law barring state employees from bringing weapons to the workplace, several witnesses say.”

THE HILL: Senate confirms Yellen at Fed. “Yellen will be in control of an institution that has just begun unwinding years’ worth of unprecedented stimulus for the economy while seeing its regulatory workload explode under the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. All of this activity comes as a growing chorus in Congress is calling for the Fed to come under more scrutiny, something the central bank has responded to by seeking to make its leader more accountable to the public.”

REVELATION: Mystery muse of globetrotting photographer revealed.

BRR: It’s So Cold in the Midwest that Antifreeze Could Freeze. Which is just so . . . wrong. It’s like antiperspirants sweating.