PAY FOR PERFORMANCE. The recently concluded American Economic Association job meetings included policy-relevant sessions.

Chairman Bernanke is by no means the only prominent economist worried about the fiscal outlook and how it will affect our economy. The American Economic Association devoted a great deal of time to the subject at its annual meeting that concluded Sunday. International Monetary Fund First Deputy Managing Director John Lipsky said the U.S. must “lay out the basis for credible medium-term fiscal adjustment” soon. He praised the proposal from the Bowles-Simpson Fiscal Commission. CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf discussed the bleak fiscal outlook and pointed out that there are no easy solutions.

The recently concluded Modern Language Association job meetings included a lot of play value.

I tried, but it is nearly impossible to parody the Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention’s yearly orgy of political correctness, anti-capitalism, and Theory, just concluded in Los Angeles. Rumor was that the MLA had “gotten better,” but if so, I didn’t hear it. Wondering “why literature matters,” I heard that the possibility that Helen actually sent a double to Troy shows how much “we need simulacra that are then exposed” and how “wars are fought and people die for illusion” and how “they also die for the narrative.” That’s how you use apparent literary analysis to (wink, nudge) criticize the Iraq War (as though the whole golden apple-Aphrodite deal was real in the first place).

There's more, including a Che Guevara tee-sighting.