THE UNIVERSITY AS WHOLE FOODS: Should Faculty Know Their Colleagues’ Salaries? At my school, all salaries are public, though it doesn’t matter much since they’re basically lockstep.
Archive for 2014
May 1, 2014
READER BOOK PLUG: From Reader Ed Robinson, The Untold Story of Kim.
TO ME, THE WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENTS’ DINNER IS LIKE STUDENT COUNCIL MEMBERS SUCKING UP TO THE PRINCIPAL: Documentary Sheds Light on How D.C.’s ‘Nerd Prom’ Became a Celebrity Swarm.
FASTER, PLEASE: Stem Cells Regenerate Heart Muscle in New Study.
ORLY LOBEL: Aereo Isn’t Illegal Just Because It Threatens Broadcasters. “An argument that a new venture poses a threat to your lucrative business is not a legal argument.”
IN THE MAIL: From Thomas Wictor, Hallucinabulia: the Dream Diary of an Unintended Solitarian and Chasing the Last Whale.
Also, today only at Amazon: Up to 60% Off Select Backpacks, Speakers and Tablet Cases and 77% off 24: The Complete Series.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 357.
AN INSIDER REPORTS ON MISCONDUCT AND CORRUPTION IN THE IRS. “IRS executives are confident in their lack of accountability because the decision makers in Washington will not hold them accountable. Ordinary people understand that misconduct and corruption in the national tax collection agency is a critical problem. They also understand the difference between right and wrong. Ordinary people, however, are not running things.”
JUST BACK FROM ASIA, Obama Heads For Europe. “Of course, every president travels as part of the job. Every president makes political appearances. And every president takes time off, though the last president tended to do that at his own secured home, not luxury resorts. But the Obamas have taken presidential travel and tourism to expensive new heights — or depths. Remember the family’s $100 million tour of Africa last year?”
DUDE, WHERE’S MY RECOVERY? Megan McArdle: Recovery? What Recovery?
Relatedly, it’s undoubtedly true that the weather depressed economic output. But it didn’t depress economic output enough to explain these lackluster figures. If economic growth were actually healthy, it shouldn’t be possible to see numbers this low.
No, despite the caveats, the fact remains that we seem to be stuck. Six years after the financial crisis, we still haven’t entered anything that could really be called a “recovery.” A recovery would mean some sort of catch-up growth that reabsorbed stranded workers and capital. Instead, we’re barely limping forward, and the most cheerful thing we can say about any of it is that at least we’re no longer falling back.
Even that’s not clear. The numbers are as likely to be revised downward as upward. The truth is, we don’t have a recovery, because we’ve had the systematic imposition of policies — tax increases, redistribution, and especially regulatory uncertainty — that undermine economic growth. But a lot of insiders have gotten rich.
THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: The worst excuse ever: The Rhodes memo debacle. “This was a surreal answer from Jay Carney. Now, this is a prep session with Susan Rice, getting ready for five Sunday talk shows. This is three days after 9/11 when four Americans, including the American ambassador to Libya, are killed. Everybody in the chain has said it’s a terrorist attack, everyone in the chain is saying there’s no protest. And yet this email, if we’re to believe Jay Carney at the White House, had nothing to do with Benghazi.”
Plus: “Jake Tapper was similarly dubious, observing ‘The context of Rhodes’ emails is, of course, that President Barack Obama was in the midst of a heated re-election campaign where one of his talking points was that he had brought a steady hand in fighting terrorists, indeed that ‘al Qaeda is on the run.’”
So the coverup of the coverup has now pretty much unraveled.
THE SCOTUSBLOG DEBACLE: A good example of how not to make press-credentialing decisions.
ABOVE THE LAW RELEASES ITS 2014 Law School Rankings.
AT AMAZON, Kindle Daily Deals.
Also, Digital Deals.
GEORGE WILL: The Heavy Hand Of The IRS Seizes Innocent Americans’ Assets. “In 2010 and 2012, IRS agents visited the store and examined Terry’s and Sandy’s conduct. In 2012, the IRS notified them that it identified ‘no violations’ of banking laws. But on Jan. 22, 2013, Terry and Sandy discovered that the IRS had obtained a secret warrant and emptied the store’s bank account.”
OUR INCESTUOUS POLITICAL CLASS: Brother of CBS News President at Center of Latest Benghazi Bombshell. “Missing from much of the coverage of yesterday’s revelations that Senior White House adviser Ben Rhodes coordinated an effort to obfuscate the truth behind the Sept 11 2012 terror attacks in Benghazi was a key detail about the insidious relationship between politics and media in Washington. The brother of Ben Rhodes is David Rhodes, president of CBS News.”
And the guy up at the podium lying about it yesterday was ABC reporter Claire Shipman’s husband, Jay Carney.
JAMES TARANTO: If Data Were A Journalist, He’d Work For Ezra Klein.
“Vox.com joins a crowded field of data-driven news sites,” USA Today reported earlier this month on Ezra Klein’s new venture. Maybe “Data” should have been capitalized.
A pair of articles the site published yesterday, one on John Kerry’s diplomatic efforts in the Middle East and one on ObamaCare, demonstrate a glaring deficiency in Vox’s “explanatory” approach to journalism. Both reflect a determined detachment from reality–specifically, from the human element in human affairs.
And that’s not all they’re missing. Yesterday, outgoing Popular Mechanics editor Jim Meigs tweeted incredulity at Vox’s story on economists and the minimum wage: “Wait, that’s your whole story? Just ‘it’s complicated’? No stats? No case studies? How does that help readers?”
Explanatory journalism is hard.
IT’S A START: Lawmaker Moves To Disarm BLM, IRS. I’d like to see all federal agencies whose primary mission isn’t law enforcement (e.g., FBI, Secret Service) disarmed. There’s no reason for the Department of Education to have SWAT teams.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Stories of Kids Who Aren’t Going to College. You know the difference between a barista who went to college and one who didn’t? $800 a month in student loan payments.
THIS CALLS FOR EXTREME PUSHBACK: Criminalizing Speech In the UK.
He’s being charged explicitly for the content of that Churchill passage, and the penalty could be two years in jail. This is remarkable, and not just because Islam is not a race, as its ever more numerous pasty Anglo-Saxon “reverts” will gladly tell you. For one thing, the police have effectively just criminalized Liberty GB’s political platform. There are words for regimes that use state power to criminalize their opponents and they’re not “mother of parliaments” or “land of hope and glory”.
Tar. Feathers.
THE NBA IS A REAL COLLECTION OF PRIZES: Shaq Gets Owned Like a Chump After Cruelly Mocking a Man for the Way He Looks. “Jahmel Binion suffers from a disorder that has caused him to be teased ever since he was a child. He never dreamed that his hero, Shaquille O’Neal, would join in on the cruel laughter, but that’s exactly what happened, and now the basketball star is taking a lot of criticism over it.”
I think there’s obviously a culture of cruelty and abuse. We should probably just shut the whole thing down.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Welcome to the Well-Educated-Barista Economy: A new study offers an unsettling explanation of why young adults have been hit so hard.
So why aren’t there more housing starts? Answer: Because new households are forming at less than 40% of the normal rate. Young adults are living with their parents at much higher rates than before the Great Recession. Many cannot afford monthly rental costs, let alone come up with the down payments they need to qualify for mortgages.
This reflects the continuing travails of young adults in a slack labor market. Among recent college graduates ages 20 to 29, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports, unemployment stands at 10.9%, more than three points higher than in 2007. A study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York finds that of the recent college graduates who have managed to find work, more than 40% are in jobs that do not require a college degree; more than 20% are working only part-time; and more than 20% are in low-wage jobs. . . .
These developments are jarring. For the past generation we’ve been telling ourselves and our children that demand for higher-order skills is surging and that a college education is the key to the future. But recent research by three Canadian economists calls this proposition into question. Paul Beaudry and David Green of the University of British Columbia and Benjamin Sand of York University document a declining demand for high-skilled workers since 2000. In response, they say, “high-skilled workers have moved down the occupational ladder and have begun to perform jobs traditionally performed by lower-skilled workers, . . . pushing low-skilled workers even further down the occupational ladder and, to some degree, out of the labor force altogether.” Well-educated baristas and unemployed high-school graduates are flip-sides of the same phenomenon. . . .
To explain this, Messrs. Beaudry, Green and Sand argue that as the IT revolution matures, the demand for advanced cognitive skill cools relative to the preceding investment stage, as it has with the maturing of every preceding general-purpose technology. That’s plausible, but so is the even more troubling hypothesis that IT can replace an ever-widening range of higher-skilled workers with less-educated individuals using systems whose inner workings they cannot begin to fathom.
If correct, these economists’ work turns conventional wisdom on its head. It would imply that our wage and employment woes are structural as well as cyclical—that in tandem with the global market for labor, the IT revolution has permanently transformed the U.S. labor market by suppressing the growth of purchasing power on which the economy depends. Responding to this new reality would challenge the innovative capacity of a political system that is hard-pressed to discharge even its most routine obligations.
To be young and underemployed is bad. To be young, underemployed, and $100,000 in student-loan debt is worse.
GEE, DO YOU THINK? New NSA chief Michael Rogers: Agency has lost Americans’ trust.
Mr. Rogers, try reading this. Now what are you going to do about it? Try reading this.