Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog

The correlation Matt Yglesias shows here is striking enough, but it becomes all the more striking when we notice that the two biggest outliers are the 1952 and 1968 elections, the two times we’ve had presidential elections in the midst of deeply unpopular wars. (The 1964 election also occurred during the Vietnam War, but there hadn’t been nearly as much blood shed at that point. Likewise, the Iraq war was still relatively popular in 2004) In both elections, the war had made the incumbent so unpopular that he decided not to run for another term, and the guy who ran in his place got several points fewer than the fundamentals would have predicted. Both candidates (Stevens and Humphrey) lost.

The economic fundamentals apparently predict a modest Obama victory in the range of 52 percent. But throw in the bonus that apparently goes to the opposition party during unpopular wars, and we might get an Obama landslide. On the other hand, this will be the first test of the Bradley Effect at the presidential level, so that may cancel out Obama’s anti-war bump.

Kerry’s Howley’s got a great post on her experience with donating eggs and some feminists’ infuriating assumption that she must have been traumatized by the experience, and her statements to the contrary are evidence that she’s in denial.

Meanwhile, Will Wilkinson in his biweekly Marketplace commentary, nails T. Boone Pickens, a charlatan who is using a toxic brew of economic ignorance and xenophobia to enrich himself at the expense of taxpayers.

I’m slightly bummed that Will and Kerry are moving to the Midwest next month, at virtually the same time I’m moving back to the East Coast. Luckily, through the miracle of the Internets, we don’t have to live in the same city for me to enjoy their work.

With all the fun with national level corruption (like Don Stevens), we often forget that even little politicians are often corrupt — and working on such a small scale often enables them to escape detection.  Luckily, I live close enough to this scandal to enjoy it firsthand:

[Cuyahoga County, Ohio] Auditor Frank Russo and Commissioner Jimmy Dimora’s offices were searched along with the rest of the third and fourth floors of the administration building. FBI vehicles were also spotted at the two county officials’ homes.

The Cleveland political scene is normally pretty corrupt — I mean, look at our history!  Still, it’s nice to see them actually getting in trouble for it, though they’re not exactly first in line to that party.

Moving from politicians who hide their failings to bad politicians who publicly announce their badness — my representative sent me the following:

Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones is working hard to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and bring down record gas prices, and launch a cleaner, smarter energy future for America that lowers costs and creates hundreds of thousands of green jobs.

Oh god, where to begin?  First of all, as many people have noted — you cannot simultaneously support “lower gas prices” and “a green energy future.”  High gas prices spur investment in alternative fuel sources — if you reduce the price of gas through any means, they will become relatively less attractive, and vice versa.  I don’t really care which you support, but you have to pick one.

Next up:

[...] Rep. Tubbs Jones has and continues to support legislative action on gas prices including: [...] cracking down on oil price gauging [sic]

Those terrible price gougers!  How dare they withhold oil from us unless we pay their too-high prices!

In an effort to combat soaring gas prices, [...] Rep. Tubbs Jones is supporting legislation to temporarily suspend the filling of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve until the end of the year.  Filling of the SPR takes 70,000 barrels of oil off the market each day and a temporary suspension could reduce gas prices from 5 to 24 cents a gallon, which would be a critical first step for America’s families, businesses, and the economy.

wait, so you and your fellow representatives have been withholding enough oil each day to drive the price up 5-24 cents all this time?  *insert faked surprise here*  At least the price gougers let us buy it!  Why is it “price gouging” when they do it but not deemed “hoarding” when the government does?

Finally, the classic piece of information that all politicians must convey to their constituents:

Tubbs Jones Helps Secure Over $42 Million in Funding for Cleveland

This year, Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones was pleased to announce that the 11th Congressional District received over $41 Million [sic] in Appropriations funding FY08.

This is why earmarks aren’t going anywhere.  And if you think that some upstanding individual should run against her — they haven’t been that successful in the past.  Her last challenger got 17% of the vote.

Can someone explain to me what horrible calamity would befall us if we simply allowed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac declare bankruptcy? They are, as the cliché goes, “too big to fail,” but I have yet to see a clear explanation of what this means. As far as I can make out, the idea seems to be that a lot of banks swapped mortgages they had originated for securitized versions of those mortgages, and it would damage these banks’ balance sheets if the securitized mortgages were suddenly discovered to be worth less than the banks had expected. And I guess the idea is that if Freddie and Fannie fail spectacularly enough, that could render some of the banks they do business with insolvent, creating a chain reaction that would bring down the entire financial system.

I’m not sure how plausible that is. When a company goes into bankruptcy, its assets don’t just disappear in a puff of smoke. Companies go into bankruptcy all the time, and their assets get divvied up among all the creditors. That would be painful for banks that hold a lot of Freddie- and Fannie-created assets, but it’s not, in and of itself a cause for alarm. If a bank’s books are so precarious that one non-paying firm can knock it over, that seems like a sign of incompetent management.

Even accepting the idea that a bailout is required to prevent a financial meltdown, we sure as hell shouldn’t bail out Frannie and Freddie’s shareholders. Let them declare bankruptcy, liquidate their assets, and then have the government step in and supplement the payout to the firms’ creditors. There are plenty of companies out there that can pick up the slack in a world with no Freddie and Fannie, and letting them go under would be a good cautionary tale for other firms that might be tempted to try the “too big to fail” strategy.

Of course, this will never happen because Freddie and Fannie aren’t so much financial institutions as rent-seeking shops. Their primary business is, and always has been, using their special relationship to the federal government to bilk taxpayers. They aren’t normal companies, and they won’t be treated like normal companies by the political process. Not because they’re “too big to fail,” but because they’ve got too many lobbyists, from both parties, on their payroll.

This is obscene:

At age 17, while a high school sophomore, Whitaker had oral sex with a 15-year-old male classmate. In 1997, she pleaded guilty to sodomy and got five years’ probation.

Whitaker, 28, has moved twice because of the sex offender law’s restrictions that say an offender cannot live within 1,000 feet of places where children congregate. Whitaker was recently told by a sheriff she must move again because her home is within 1,000 feet of a church…

Whitaker said Friday she has had ownership rights to the home, even if her name was not on the deed. “We’ve been married eight years, and everything we have we have together,” she said.

Whitaker’s lawyers asked Whittle to not enforce the residency restrictions against the woman while the suit is pending. The sheriff agreed. The matter is now pending before U.S. District Court Judge Clarence Cooper, who is overseeing the federal case.

But on Thursday, the state Attorney General’s Office filed a motion stating that if Whitaker actually has a property interest in the home, she should seek relief from being evicted in the state courts, not the federal court.

“Assuming there is actual enforcement of an existing provision of the sex offender statute, [its] purpose … is to protect the most innocent of victims, Georgia’s children,” the motion says. “There is indisputable evidence that convicted sex offenders have a propensity to re-offend.”

Whitaker’s lawyer, Sarah Geraghty, said the state should let the matter rest until the federal suit is over.

“Wendy Whitaker is not now and has never been a threat to anyone,” she said. “The state of Georgia has better things to do than to evict a woman from her lawfully purchased home because she had sex as a teenager.”

Awesome:

Bush Tours America To Survey Damage Caused By His Disastrous Presidency

I’m thrilled to see that Tim Sandefur has been named a Cato adjunct scholar. Tim wrote the definitive book on post-Kelo eminent domain law for Cato, and he’s done some great research on the history of American property law that’s been invaluable in my writing on eminent domain. His excellent blog is here. He’s a great addition to the Cato line-up. I hope he enjoys the free drugs and hookers that come with the title as much as I have.

I worry about confirmation bias when I read things like this on McCain’s claim that the surge was responsible for the Anbar Awakening:

Spencer Ackerman points to then-Colonel, now-General Sean MacFarland explaining the origins of the awakening to UPI’s Pam Hess on September 29, 2006. That was a bit over a month before the midterm elections. The surge wasn’t announced until after the elections and wasn’t actually implemented until long after MacFarland gave the interview. And presumably the events he was describing happened before the interview itself.

This specific timing issue aside, we can see here the larger point that McCain doesn’t actually seem to know what the surge was. But the surge troops were overwhelmingly sent to increase the level of manpower in Baghdad (i.e., not where the Anbar Awakening happened) and almost certainly (along with a tactical shift to more of a population protection mission) deserves credit for reducing the bloodshed in Baghdad by stabilizing the borders between now-segregated neighborhoods. I’m not sure I would go so far as to say that it had nothing to do what happened in Anbar, but it wasn’t a major factor, and certainly didn’t make anything happen in September 2006. I note that this isn’t the first time the right has had occasion to appeal to Michael Dummett’s theory of backward causation in their discussion of Iraq.

A major-party presidential candidate can’t possibly be this stupid, right? That’s not an entirely rhetorical question. Most of the blogs I read are from an anti-war perspective, and so it’s possible that I’m simply missing major pieces of the story that would make the right’s apparently incoherent story coherent. But every time I try reading pro-war stuff, it strikes me as so transparently hackish that it’s hard to even wade through, to say nothing of taking it seriously.

This could mean that my side of the issue is simply right and the other side doesn’t know what it’s talking about. It could also mean that I’m trapped in the same kind of ideological echo chamber as the (probably apocryphal) New Yorker who expressed surprise at the results of the 1984 election because he didn’t know anyone who voted for Ronald Reagan.

This (Via Greg Mankiw) is a really amazing graph. About a quarter of law school graduates enjoy starting salaries upwards of $100,000 (salaries for the top 2008 graduates are reportedly pushing $160,000). The bulk of the rest are paid between $30,000 and $60,000. Relatively few graduates are making between $75,000 and $100,000.

Something is really weird about the market for legal services. As the post linked to above says, you would think there’d be a market for a law firm that focused on hiring lawyers in this “Death Valley” of $80,000 salaries, attracting clients who demand better legal services than is available from the $40k-caliber lawyers but aren’t willing to pay the fees to chase the top talent. But evidently not. It’s weird.

I think this is more right than not:

The ability of CEOs to get huge paychecks, even when they run their companies into the ground, has nothing to do with the free market. It is due to rules of corporate governance that allow top management to pillage the companies for their own ends.

The government sets the rules of corporate governance, that is due to the fact that corporations are legal entities — they are creations of government. The rules in principle are supposed to protect shareholders from abuse by insiders, but they clearly no longer serve that purpose.

But this is not a failure of a free market. The current situation is not the free market.The current situation is one in which the government has rules that allow insiders to rip off shareholders. (Think of all the Wall Street firms where top executives pocketing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars based on what turned out to be non-existent profits.)

This is one of Baker’s favorite activities: tweaking free-marketeers by pointing out ways in which the economy deviates from a free market to the benefit of the rich and powerful. Since Baker isn’t himself a free-market ideologue, it’s hard to tell how much of this represents a sincere desire to enact more free-market policies, and how much of it is simply a game of “gotcha” with his ideological adversaries. Either way, thought, it’s something libertarians should take seriously. Because the United States has a relatively freer economy than most other parts of the world, we often wind up in the role of defenders of the economic status quo. But there’s plenty to criticize, and it’s often worthwhile to acknowledge some of the flaws of the American economy and point out the non-free-market policies that might explain them.

This from Paul Krugman is a particularly glaring case of the pundit’s fallacy:

What the economy gives, it can also take away. If the current slump follows the typical modern pattern, the economy will stay depressed well into 2010, if not beyond — plenty of time for the public to start blaming the new incumbent, and punish him in the midterm elections.

To avoid that fate, Mr. Obama — if he is indeed the next president — will have to move quickly and forcefully to address America’s economic discontent. That means another stimulus plan, bigger, better, and more sustained than the one Congress passed earlier this year. It also means passing longer-term measures to reduce economic anxiety — above all, universal health care.

If you ask me, there isn’t much suspense in this year’s election: barring some extraordinary mistakes, Mr. Obama will win. Assuming he wins, the real question is what he’ll make of his victory.

If the premise here is right, and I suspect it is, the politically expedient course is not to enact a “stimulus package” to dull the pain and salvage the 2010 midterm elections. Rather, the solution is to encourage the Fed to do what it did under Ronald Reagan in 1981: institute tight-money policies that wrung the inflation out of the economy and lay the groundwork for the robust economic recovery that commenced in time for Reagan to win a landslide re-election in 1984. Loose money and expansionary fiscal policy might make the recession less painful, on the margin, but it’s also likely to make it longer and the subsequent recovery more inflationary.

If the US is in the midst of a deep recession in 2010, it will be relatively easy for Obama to spin this as partly the fault of past mis-management by the Bush administration. Democrats will lose some seats in Congress, but if 1982 is any guide, it won’t be a catastrophe. In contrast, if the US is mired in lingering stagflation in 2012, Obama’s going to have an awfully hard time spinning that as the fault of anyone other than himself—especially if the Democrats have held Congress for the preceding 6 years. Better to get the pain over with early in the first term, so that things will be on the upswing by the time he faces re-election.

As for universal health care, whatever the policy merits of socializing medicine, it’s hard to see how such a policy would effect macroeconomic trends. And the political outcome is far from clear. A botched reform would, as in 1994, be a major talking point for the Republicans. Even successful legislation would likely be phased in over several years, and so there might still be a painful transition in progress in 2010 and 2012. Either way, if people are having trouble finding jobs in 2012, they’re going to throw the bums out regardless of the state of health care policy. Nationalized health care could conceivably be a boon for Democrats in the long run (although I have my doubts) but it’s certainly not a good political strategy in the short run.

This looks like a good book:

From the War of 1812 to the 1898 Spanish-American War, the main opponents of foreign military adventures were people motivated by aversion to either empire or emperor. But their anti-imperial critique wasn’t obviously leftist or proto-Chomskyite. The characters Kauffman sketches are decentralist, traditionalist, and constitutionalist. Many were businessmen with fairly conservative politics. The Anti-Imperialist League, for instance, was funded in part by Andrew Carnegie; it nearly fractured when it endorsed William Jennings Bryan for president 1900, because he opposed—wait for it—the gold standard.

Progressives played a leading role in agitating for both the Spanish-American War and Woodrow Wilson’s subsequent crusade to the make the world safe for democracy, although their ranks also included some notable dissenters, such as Hull House founder Jane Addams and the radical essayist Randolph Bourne. People on the right were also active in opposing those wars and the subsequent fight against Hitler as well. Sen. Robert Taft (R-Ohio), “Mr. Republican,” opposed U.S. entry into World War II until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and he wanted to keep American troops out of Korea.

Conservatives are champions of authority and tradition, values that usually go hand in hand. The United States was weird because it was founded by radical liberals with rabidly anti-authority political views. As a consequence, there’s a tension between that part of the American right that chooses authority over tradition, and the part that chooses tradition over authority.

Unfortunately, as the 18th century recedes into history, the it’s becoming ever easier for today’s leaders to invoke the founders not as intellectuals with important thinkers but as generic rhetorical props. Use their quotes about liberty in the abstract, and ignore their critical views on (among other things) centralized government power, organized religion, standing armies, and empire. Ron Paul is, I think, a more authentic champion of the founders’ values than any of the “conservatives” who defend the Bush administration, but unfortunately most conservatives’ knowledge of history is so deficient that they don’t even see the tension.

Matt Yglesias has been showing his libertarian side more often in recent months, with a series of posts pointing out that many of the problems with urban planning can be laid at the feet of bad local government policies in various areas. It seems that one of the reasons that certain cities have awesome amenities that other cities lack is that the latter have laws that create huge barriers to entry for those particular amenities. Matt concludes this is a failure of political will:

A relatively strict licensing regime keeps the number of drinking establishments relatively low. That reduces one’s set of options. But beyond that, it makes for a less competitive environment with higher prices and less effort going into making an establishment appealing. Laxer licensing regimes and more liberal zoning policies about where you can open retail would produce lower prices and more options. To make that observation is to begin rather than to end the argument about whether we should prefer the “plentiful, cheap bars” equilibrium to the “rare, expensive bars” equilibrium. But the point is that instead of just vaguely complaining about this or that aspect of the place where they live, or musing about moving elsewhere, it would serve people well to educate themselves about policy in their own communities and make things better. When we don’t do that, the policy just gets set by incumbent interest groups whose main concern is to block competition rather than build a livable community.

Obviously, what we have here is a collective action problem. It’s in the interest of most Washington, DC residents not to have protectionist regulations that limit competition in certain sectors of the economy. However, the expected benefit to any given individual to becoming informed and active on any given regulatory question is quite small. Even if I became a full-time liquor-license-liberalization activist, it’s unlikely I could shift the equilibrium very much. And no matter how much I might like going out drinking, even a significant shift in bar regulation is unlikely to improve my quality of life very much, since I spend the majority of my waking hours doing things other than going to bars.
(more…)

This is potentially huge:

In an interview with Der Spiegel released on Saturday, Maliki said he wanted U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq as soon as possible.

“U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.”

It is the first time he has backed the withdrawal timetable put forward by Obama, who is visiting Afghanistan and us set to go to Iraq as part of a tour of Europe and the Middle East.

I’m actually a little bit surprised by this. My assumption was that the situation in Iraq is still unstable enough that pulling out would mean a civil war that the Iraqi government could easily lose. I also wouldn’t have guessed that the Iraqi government had enough backbone to directly contradict American policy like this. I guess I was wrong.

This obviously puts the Republicans in a really tough spot. Foreign affairs is currently their strongest political issue. If they shift positions to basically mirror Obama’s, the implicit admission that he was right will make it awfully difficult to play the terrorism card. On the other hand, if McCain “stays the course,” he’s going to have to explain why the United States should continue spending American blood and treasure to defend a country whose leader has explicitly said he doesn’t want us there.

I guess this doesn’t bother me as much as it does Glenn Reynolds:

IF SOMEBODY DID THIS ABOUT OBAMA it would be a national scandal and evidence of America’s incurable bigotry. But since it’s an artist named Wafaa Bilal and it’s about Bush it’s just “confrontational art:”

An artist’s video game that is being exhibited at a free-speech exhibit in Chicago challenges players to kill the president. The video game is part of a “confrontational art” exhibit by Chicago-based artist Wafaa Bilal.

In the 3-D game, “The Night of Bush Capturing; A Virtual Jihadi,” players are sent on a mission to kill President George W. Bush.

Bilal, 42, said his art is a personal attempt to deal with the deaths of citizens in the country of his birth. The artist said his brother died in Iraq in 2004 from a U.S bomb.

In an earlier age, this kind of thing would have been considered unacceptable enemy propaganda. On the other hand, this is just more proof that all the lefty bleating about George Bush’s fascism is just self-indulgent — and utterly dishonest — twaddle.

Yeah, sure, it’s dumb — but at least George Bush is partially responsible for whatever grievance this artist has. The outrage of September 11th stems from the fact that it was directed at those who obviously not responsible for whatever offenses (imagined, justified or whatever) the attackers intended them to be retribution for. That is what terrorism is — attacking those who are not responsible (civilians) in order to influence those you are too strong to attack directly. Attacking those actually responsible (right or wrong) is just an act of war. The world is awash with unjustified punishment of innocents. When some silly confrontational artists wants to direct his wrath at those who are at least partially responsible, I don’t care.

What this world needs is for our conflicts to have more consequences for George Bushes, Osama Bin Ladens and Saddam Husseins, (while opposed to invading Iraq, I supported his execution) and fewer consequences for New Yorkers and brothers of Wafaa Bilal. Unfortunately this is an unrealistic hope.

And honestly, one about killing Obama wouldn’t really bother me either. I do not seriously think that national politicians are a suffering demographic whose interests we must be sensitive about offending. The nation is a better place when we are disrespectful to our leaders.

cialis

Congratulations to Matt Yglesias who is moving from the Atlantic to the Center for American Progress, a newish liberal think tank. At his new job he’ll be… blogging. The same thing he’s done (not counting the book-writing break) for his last three jobs. It seems that all this really means is that we all have to change the URLs in our feed readers, once again, to reflect the new institutional home. It must be strange to hop from employer to employer while doing essentially the same thing at each.

This article is so perfect that I feel I must have some nasty confirmation bias at work:

Enslave your girls and women, harbor anti-US terrorists, destroy every vestige of civilization in your homeland, and the Bush Administration will embrace you. All that matters is that you line up as an ally in the drug war, the only international cause that this nation still takes seriously.

That’s the message sent with the recent gift of $43 million to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, the most virulent anti-American violators of human rights in the world today. The gift, announced last Thursday by Secretary of State Colin Powell, in addition to other recent aid, makes the United States the main sponsor of the Taliban and rewards that “rogue regime” for declaring that opium growing is against the will of God. So, too, by the Taliban’s estimation, are most human activities, but it’s the ban on drugs that catches this administration’s attention.

Never mind that Osama bin Laden still operates the leading anti-American terror operation from his base in Afghanistan, from which, among other crimes, he launched two bloody attacks on American embassies in Africa in 1998.

You might forgive the author for deliberate understatement with “among other crimes” — until you notice the date it was written: May 22, 2000.

One of the last lines is most painful:

There’s little doubt that [despite the ban] the Taliban will turn once again to the easily taxed cash crop of opium in order to stay in power.

Anyone keep track of how that turned out? Oh, right. One of my favorite solutions for this problem is simply buying all of Afghanistan’s opium and simply using it to make legal narcotics for medical uses. I forget who exactly proposed it, but it seems acceptable even to those who can’t imagine legalization.

I usually don’t indulge in anti-Bush hyperbole, but you have to wonder about people who demand that silly surveillance laws are getting in the way of the supreme goal of fighting terrorism but who seem to forsake that goal in favor of our laws about opium. What could be the thread that links these two stances, he asked, as rhetorically as possible.

Today I read some stuff. It just so happened that the things I read kind of related to each other — Ezra Klein, James Poulos and Will Wilkinson.

Stuff White People Like helps readers fit themselves definitively inside the experience. If you’re into Asian fusion, the Wire, kitchen gadgets, and Barack Obama, you’re part of the club. And everyone likes being part of the club.

This last sentence just infuriates me, but not at Ezra. It pisses me off because clubs — defined as groups that people identify with — are stupid (I make exceptions for merit-based clubs — I can see why someone would want to be a member of The Nobel Prize-Winner Society, but that’s based on actual benefits, not group identity). I actually think “Stuff White People Like” is hilarious because it makes fun of things I think are silly — and where I share the target trait, I often admit that it does look silly to others. But never did I think that people went to the site for this:

reading the site gives a lot of folks a warm sense of belonging. They’re part of something. That something may be absurd and privileged and heavy with self-congratulatory irony, but it’s real, and by giving it shape and boundaries,

Disgusting. Can’t people just define themselves… as themselves? Why this ridiculous quest to find out where you belong? Why does this have to be a drive to define “us” — and then the subsequent defining of “them”? I’m a mid-20’s, middle class programmer, married white (well, a quarter Lebanese — does that count? Who cares?) male — but I always thought those were “facts about me” not “clubs I belong to.” I am acutely aware that I sound like some trite song about looking past our differences, but it can’t be helped.

I guess this makes me some kind of socially inept cretin, but why do people need validation from some identity club? I guess I sound like an idiot saying it out loud, because I know people do it all the time, but do people really sit around thinking “Am I acting sufficiently white/black/gay/asian?” Kenan Malik (via Will) confirms that I am an idiot:

An identity has become a bit like a private club. Once you join up, you have to abide by the rules. But unlike the Groucho or the Garrick it’s a private club you must join. Being black or gay, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah suggests, requires one to follow certain ‘life-scripts’ because ‘Demanding respect for people as blacks and gays can go along with notably rigid strictures as to how one is to be an African American or a person with same-sex desires.’ There will be ‘proper modes of being black and gay: there will be demands that are made[.]

That’s ridiculous — can’t we just do ‘Demanding respect for people as blacks and gays’? Why is the second part necessary? I also certainly reject any claim that just because people are being annoying about the second part that we should stop respecting them. The reason being unkind to black (or gay, or white, or whatever) people is wrong is because they are people, not because the club they belong to requires some specific respect. My opposition to racism is based on the idea that everyone is in the same (and in fact, only) club: People With Equal Rights. We meet daily on a small blue-green planet, please bring punch and pie.

I could go on about all the stupid side effects that looking at people this way creates, but I’m sure everyone is pretty aware of them — and then everyone will want to join the club named “People Who Think Brian Posts Too Much Obvious And Inane Crap.” Just Be Yourself. *cue sappy music here*

Warning: this post, like the essay linked, contains opinions unverified by facts and data!

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education: (via Overcoming Bias)

The final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual. … Being an intellectual is not the same as being smart. Being an intellectual means more than doing your homework. … They are products of a system that rarely asked them to think about something bigger than the next assignment. … Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas - and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade. … Students at Yale and Columbia … have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them.

The other part is, even for that color-inside-the-lines education, many Ivy League schools practice rampant grade inflation in order to make their students more appealing to graduate programs, thereby increasing their ratings. This means that in many cases not only are they pushing elitism, but elitism totally unjustified by the “education” they provided. “Getting into” Harvard is largely equivalent to “having graduated from” Harvard, on the elite-o-meter.

However, I don’t believe that poor (even elite) higher education particularly harms people’s prospects, or our economy. Many fields are now so specialized that as long as you get a bare-bones understanding of the subject, your employer will be able to train you on the necessary aspects. There’s no way on earth that a 4 year program could certify you to be able to start day one at any engineering job — there will be extensive training, and in many cases unlearning, to be done first.

Plus, there are just lots of degrees where the education you receive is virtually nil — your diploma is just a certification that you A) can follow simple instructions and B) that you had the skills necessary already to survive in the field already. I’m looking at you, management majors. Sorry.

Those who look at the fact that only a small percentage of our citizens go to college as some kind of national crime are vastly overestimating the causation of that education. The idea that a typical liberal arts education at a standard university somehow imbues a callow youth with a wide breadth of general knowledge and a keen understanding of the subject listed on their diploma is pretty laughable. That most college graduates choose not to accept this is probably more a factor of not wanting to feel like one wasted lots of time and money.

Watch the video on the other side of this link.  It’s a stunning quadrupedal robot.  Make sure you watch at least up to the point that it slips on the ice, and astonishingly rights itself.  I don’t have enough adjectives for this.