When we forget the history, to paraphrase Sir Edmund Burke, we are doomed to repeat it. And it takes about 80 years for that to happen. Roughly 90 years ago we saw the election of Warren Harding on a platform, his slogan was, “More business in government, less government in business.” He dropped the tax rate, deregulated banks, deregulated pretty much everything. It was this huge bubble in the ’20s that crashed in 1929.Perhaps so. In Mr Hartmann's view, the shadow banking sector is where the trouble will restart.
If you go back 80 years before that you see the big battles over regulation and deregulation of the 1840s and 1850s that led to the crash of 1857 that arguably led to the Civil War. And if you go back 80 years before that, you see there were somewhat similar economic debates.
Roughly every 80 years we kind of forget about economic bubbles, make the same mistakes, and those mistakes lead to economic disaster, which typically leads to a war. And I’m saying we’re 80 years out from the last one and we’re making the same mistakes.
I would say that the crash of 2008 wasn’t the housing bubble and the mortgage bubble, but it was the housing bubble and the mortgage bubble, which crashed the derivatives bubble, which is really what caused the crash of 2008. You had banks that had multitrillion-dollar liabilities, which we’d never seen before. In the late ’90s we had a derivatives market that was less than $80 billion, to, in 2008, having an unregulated derivatives market was over $800 trillion, according to the bank of international settlements. The entire GDP of the planet is $65 trillion and the entire GDP of our entire country is $15 trillion per year.I've been doing some reading on the shadow banking sector, and there may be less to it than meets the eye. Note -- and Mr Hartmann is not the sole commentator to get confused over stocks and flows -- that for all the quantitative easing the Federal Reserve and other central banks have done, they lack the power to replace the assets that were destroyed in the crash. That may be why the inflation some observers have feared has not yet materialized: those derivatives markets had credit expansion multipliers far in excess of anything the traditional banking system can produce. That gets too technical for the Feast of Stephen.
This is all funny money, and it dropped down to $400 trillion after the crash, but it’s back up to $700 trillion or $800 trillion now. Nobody knows for sure because it’s unregulated. So I’d say that the crash really begins back in ’99/2000 when Phil Gramm pushed through the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that allowed all that to happen. Of course he did that because [former Enron CEO] Ken Lay wanted it done.
There was an attempt to change [the law] with Dodd-Frank, but more than half of Dodd-Frank has not even been implemented. And I don’t think Dodd-Frank, even if it was fully implemented, would be strong enough to rein this stuff in. We need to go back to simple stuff like Glass-Steagall. Am I making sense?
I realized that object oriented programmed reifies normative subject object theory. This led me to wonder what a feminist programming language would look like, one that might allow you to create entanglements.The people who set up the health insurance exchanges created enough entanglements using reified normative subject object theory (put simply: you have insurance, or you do not.)
The critical penalties came during the final 2 minutes, beginning with outside linebacker Nick Perry being called for offside on what was going to be a Shawn Suisham field goal attempt on fourth-and-3 from the Packers’ 10.Winning "The Hard Way" is more fun than losing, but making it harder on yourself involves unnecessary exertion, and messes up the mental state of the fans.
The penalty gave the Steelers a first down. With the game tied at 31, they could’ve run the clock out with the Packers down to one timeout but scored two plays later to give Green Bay a minute to respond.
After Micah Hyde returned the ensuing kickoff 70 yards, the Packers got as far as the Pittsburgh 1 before T. J. Lang had a false start, which was incorrectly called on right tackle Don Barclay.
It caused a 10-second runoff and left the Packers with 10 seconds to work with. In a rush, quarterback Matt Flynn fired a pass high to receiver Jarrett Boykin as time expired.
“Penalties, that was not usually like us,” said defensive lineman B.J. Raji, who picked up an unnecessary roughness penalty in the third quarter. “My penalty didn’t help, but we had some crucial penalties. It’s just how the game goes sometimes. You can’t blame anybody, the officials or anybody — you just have to look at yourself.
Josh Sitton drew a second-quarter penalty for a face mask, but most of the damage was done in the second half, beginning with tight end Jake Stoneburner being called for roughing the passer. It came on a fourth-and-2 fake punt pass from Steelers punter Mat McBriar, which he completed to tight end David Paulson for 30 yards off a flood route.
To put the point in a nutshell: does anyone benefit from a traditional four-year college education? If it went away, or came to be seen as a luxury tailored to a wealthy elite, who would be worse off?Formative is not the same thing as prefigurative or transformative.
When I raise this question with my own undergraduate students, they generally emphasize the value of college as a coming-of-age experience. This strikes me as a poor justification for the four-year university. Before the mid-century expansion of higher ed, people came of age without taking on $80,000-worth of debt in the process. If college is valued primarily as a social experience, we should close down most of the four-year colleges and open more youth social clubs. People could come of age for the cost of a gym membership, not the cost of a house.
Nevertheless, my students’ instincts are not completely off base. They are right to suggest that our educational expenditures can be justified, if at all, only through the complete impact that a four-year education can have on the student’s character. Higher education should be a formative experience, both intellectually and morally, and should leave students better equipped to tackle a whole range of possible challenges that the future might bring.
To a considerable degree, the university has become the victim of its own egalitarianism. Liberal progressivism has, to be sure, been poisoning the well for quite some time, and this alone would probably have prevented us from developing a fully satisfactory liberal arts education outside of a few select cultural enclaves. But the really insoluble problems date back to the mid-twentieth century, when the foundations of America’s great egalitarian experiment were laid.Yes, and the damage is consequential.
Student retention is a critical goal for almost every college or university; after all, a student who drops out will no longer be paying tuition. And it turns out that the best way to keep everyone in the pack is to hike the pace of the slowest hiker. Student evaluations are an effective mechanism for ensuring that professors cooperate with this broader student-retention strategy. Anyone who doubts the seriousness of that institutional pressure should try telling an untenured professor that his evaluations from the previous semester included multiple complaints that the class made students “feel stupid.” Witness the hunted, desperate expression that passes over the instructor’s face.The beginning of wisdom, however, is the recognition that some things are more challenging than they seem. The professor's calling is to create that beginning, uncomfortable though it might make some of the novices.
Our schools have more than they can handle in helping other students become fully functioning adults. There may be something to the view that socially awkward geniuses need a safe place to be weird, but the better approach is to focus on stopping bullying of all kids. Public schools are mostly successful at finding people who know how to teach English, math, history and science, but we don’t know how to encourage creativity very well and might find it better to let the gifted do their own exploring.Yes, inculcating the habits of the middle class is probably the best public service the common schools can provide, and yes, there is plenty of room for improvement.
Like any journalist, I have interviewed many bona fide geniuses, because they tend to make news. Their life stories suggest that such people are best left alone to educate themselves, as long as we make sure that they can get to all the riches of our culture and science and that we don’t require them to take grade-level courses that hold them back.
I have begun to worry about the basic competency of the administration, its ability to perform the most fundamental duties of executive management. One reason I worry is that I frequently speak with people who interact with the White House, and when I say, “That place just doesn’t seem to work,” they don’t defend it, they offer off-the-record examples of how poorly the government is run. One thing that’s clear this holiday season: New York’s Democrats, to the degree they ever loved the president, don’t love him anymore, and have moved on. They are not thinking about what progress he might make in Washington next year, they’re talking about what Hillary might do the year after that.The cult of the presidency still has its power, but ominous signs proliferate.
I’ve never worried about this with any previous administration, ever.Yes, and generals have a clear set of objectives (occupy Baghdad, cross the Rhine, return to Luzon, cut the railroads into Petersburg). That government has become too intrusive fails to register. David Brooks, in fact, sees in the Failure of Presidential Power reason to Further Expand Presidential Power.
“They mistook the White House for the government,” said an experienced old friend, a journalist and Democratic sympathizer. We were having holiday dinner and the talk turned to White House management. His thesis was that Obama and his staffers thought they could run the government from there, from the White House campus, and make big decisions that would be executed. They thought the White House was the government, but the government is a vast web of executive agencies that have to be run under close scrutiny, and within their campuses, to produce even minimally competent work.
I have come to see this as “West Wing” Disease. Young staffers grew up watching that show and getting a very romantic and specific sense of how government works. “The West Wing” was White House-centric. It never took place at the Agriculture Department. But government takes place at the Agriculture Department.
Anyway, my friend made me think of a story about Harry Truman. On leaving the White House after the 1952 election of Dwight Eisenhower, Truman made a small prediction about the general and his presidency. From memory: Eisenhower, Truman said, will pick up the phone and say do this and do that, pull this lever, and he’ll be shocked when nothing happens.
Ike was a general used to giving orders within an organization that takes the order and executes. But a government has to be leaned on every day, through management talent earned by experience. Generals can issue orders but federal agencies must be gently guided and clubbed around the head, every day.
We don’t need bigger government. We need more unified authority. Take power away from the rentier groups who dominate the process. Allow people in those authorities to exercise discretion. Find a president who can both rally a majority, and execute a policy process.Cato's Gene Healy is apparently so taken aback by the argument that he doesn't even note that rentier groups follow governmental power, and governmental power feeds off of rentiers, no matter who is in charge. Christopher Johnson, however, nails it.
Barack Obama just rolled out DemocraticPartyCare, the single worst piece of American legislations since the Kansas-Nebraska Act. But let’s give him morepower soOnce upon a time, John Maynard Keynes wished that economists might be regarded as dependable, humble practitioners, like dentists. We've seen how well that worked out. Changing the expectation for presidents, nay for Washington politicians generally is a task several orders of magnitude tougher. It might take even more serious government failure to change minds.even MORE harmful bills will be passedthings will “get done.”
Here’s an idea, digusting little suck-up, er, Dave. What say US presidents stop trying to be “historic?” What say that they deal with the actual problems they have in front of them rather than inventing global “problems” and then ineptly “solving” those?
One predictable result of years of grade inflation is the reaction of nonplussed prospective employers, who regularly complain that transcripts mean less and less. The deeper, more troubling result is described well by Rojstaczer and Healy: "When college students perceive that the average grade in a class will be an A, they do not try to excel. It is likely that the decline in student study hours [from an average of 24 hours a week in the '60s to 15 hours a week today, student engagement, and literacy are partly the result of diminished academic expectations."I lose track of the times I've heard colleagues say the university has to implement some stupid assessment policy or insulting workload policy "before the Legislature (or an accrediting agency, or the Elasticity Fairy) imposes a worse one."
How are students able to study less and yet receive nearly triple the percentage of A grades? Education researcher George Kuh cites the "disengagement compact" that he argues has been struck between professors and students: "'I'll leave you alone if you leave me alone.' That is, I won't make you work too hard (read a lot, write a lot) so that I won't have to grade as many papers or explain why you are not performing well. . . . There seems to be a breakdown of shared responsibility for learning--on the part of faculty members who allow students to get by with far less than maximum effort, and on the part of students who are not taking full advantage of the resources institutions provide."
Will honest transcripts exercise a salutary effect? It's too soon to say, given the small number of schools that have adopted the reform to date. But things are always bigger in Texas, where there is a movement in the legislature to require all of the state's public universities (which enroll nearly 600,000 students) to adopt honest transcripts. Championed this year by first-term state representative and former NFL player, Scott Turner, Texas' Honest Transcript was approved nearly unanimously by the Texas House of Representatives. It did not receive a hearing in the Senate, but Turner has already begun efforts to bring it back next session. If passed, supporters expect that the "Texas Transcript" will come quickly to be regarded as the gold standard by prospective employers, heightening transparency and, with it, public awareness of and indignation over decades of lax university standards.Ultimately, it will come down to market tests. What good does it do for Ashley to find some good catch at a prestige school, only to discover that all the cum laude in the world doesn't keep them both on Daddy's health insurance and in Mommy's basement well into their twenties?
In one sense, Turner's work has already gone national. His bill was just adopted as model legislation by the American Legislative Exchange Council, whose members include over 2,000 state legislators across the country. In addition to Turner's bringing the bill back in the 2015 Texas legislative session, other statehouses could soon pick up the grade-inflation ball and run with it.
Even so, will this transparency measure prove adequate to restoring sound grading standards? Academically Adrift's Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa offer reasons for doubt. Although they grant the "inadequate information on school performance being provided to students and parents" could be "remedied by greater institutional transparency," they find "no reason to expect that students and parents as consumers will prioritize undergraduate learning as an outcome. Rather, it is likely that other features of institutions will largely be focused on, including the quality of student residential and social life, as well as the ability with relatively modest investments of effort to earn a credential that can be subsequently exchanged for labor market--and potentially marriage market--success. . . ."
Arum and Roksa's acute critique takes us to the heart of democracy's perennial challenge. Defenders of the Honest Transcript bill rejoin that their faith in transparency springs from the same faith undergirding the defense of democratic self-government--that the people are capable of enlightened consent and that, in this case, the transparency wrought by honest transcripts will inform their consent and lead prospective students and their parents to be more discriminating in their choices of schools and majors, thereby reforming higher education from the ground up.
It is no coincidence that this rise correlates with the closure of the mental health institutions in 1969. After they were shuttered, they were supposed to be replaced by community outreach programs. Sadly, these programs never took root and many parents who are dealing with severe mental illness feel they are out of options.Read the whole thing. Guns are incidental, and imprisonment counterproductive.
By now, most of us know some of the things Wayne Watson’s administration stands for: crony hiring, retentions and promotions, interference in matters that should be the province of faculty and turning a blind eye to lies by high-ranking administrators with personal ties to him or his friends. He likes to style himself an “educator,” a meaningless term when applied to someone with his meager teaching credentials. His admirers are always careful to refer to him as “Dr. Watson,” a title he earned in 1972. Since then his non-existent scholarly production has made a mockery of the “privileges and responsibilities” of the degree. His contempt for academics seeps through in various ways, most recently in the appointment of a completely unqualified interim Provost.In the past fifteen years, working with the common schools, I've discovered that "Outstanding Economic Educator" plays better than "Outstanding Economics Teacher" for some reason, and that "Doctor" this or that becomes the salutation rather than "Professor". Make of those observations what you will.
Angela Henderson recently completed her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois Chicago. A brief glance at her dissertation reveals a couple of interesting things: first, in what can only be classified as a stunning example of cronyism, Wayne Watson, who clearly desired to promote Henderson to her current position, and who was represented in March 2013 by Henderson's husband, sat on her dissertation committee. Certainly, Henderson stood to benefit materially from Wayne Watson's presence as one of her examiners. Second, one portion of her dissertation proves that information she provided on official documents when she was hired in 2011 was a bald-faced lie.
While her friends dressed Barbie dolls, Lucy Sanders designed and constructed buildings with Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys and playing cards. She learned physics by playing with her Slinky, and chemistry through her chemistry set. Sanders says that the board games she played with her family taught her strategy, empathy and how to win and lose. Her parents did get her a Barbie, but she and her sister turned her into "gladiator Barbie," "medieval Barbie" and "superwoman Barbie."Whatever. But let's at least get our facts straight.
Sanders became a researcher and earned the title of Bell Labs Fellow, the highest technical accomplishment bestowed by the legendary research lab. She now heads up the Boulder, Colo-based National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT), which focuses on increasing women's participation in technology. Sanders says that children's toys greatly influence how they see themselves and what they become.
Years ago, for lack of sales of its products to girls, Lionel Trains produced a pink train set in an attempt to market their product to girls. It failed miserably. Marketing STEM-related toys to girls is not easy.Such parents likely instilled enough awareness of reality in their girls that the girls understood a steam locomotive was black, not pink, which is the real reason the Lionel girl's train failed. Besides, the independent girls wanted the Warbonnet F unit.
The Toy Industry Association is enthusiastically supporting an initiative by [Andrea] Guendelman, her friend Carrie Van Heyst and NCWIT to create a toy competition called PowerPlay Toy & Game Challenge. The goal is to encourage the development of toys that are educational and that girls actually want to play with.
I'm hopeful that we will one day see chess sets, robot constructors, and holographic simulators in the pink-colored aisles of toy stores. In the meantime, parents should do what Lucy Sanders's parents did: inspire their children to go beyond stereotypes and to build houses for their superwoman Barbies.
Personal finance courses get short shrift for several reasons. The content is viewed as too “vocational” and lacking in rigor—even remedial. Hardly any institutional special interests champion its inclusion because there are few prestigious journals in personal finance, and research and professors who win grants focus on much grander finance topics. Since there is little prestige in teaching personal finance, many senior faculty avoid it, and the course is often delegated to adjuncts. In fact, many students enroll in personal finance as an elective and seemingly “discover” the course because of its absence from the required list.It's an opportunity, starting with elementary school. Investors of the future are going to be better able to spot the traps in the more complicated financial instruments, including adjustable rate mortgages and credit card cash advances, if they understand checking and passbook accounts first.
From an instructor’s perspective, however, the experience of teaching personal finance is remarkably positive because students almost always express gratitude for having learned the material. In contrast, students rarely express such enthusiasm when I cover internal rates of return or net present value in my managerial finance courses. Students immediately see the value of learning personal finance material because it directly impacts their lives.
Around here at the local HS, in an effort to keep graduation rates up, students are allowed to turn work in all the way up to the end of the term, and the teachers must accept it. They are allowed to retake tests.Within higher education, however, there are officials with the job description of antagonizing faculty by encouraging the placation of spoiled students. Fortunately, the comments include encouragement of the faculty to push back. "I tell [students] I am the brick wall (the first of many) they are going to run into if they don't get their shit together and take ownership of their education."
This sets up an expectation on their end that college will be the same, and it's become my colleagues' and my aggravating job to become the brick wall they slam into their first semester in college. It sucks. I had a student tell me the first day of spring semester (as I was explaining my deadline policy) that they should be able to turn work in whenever. I kept my temper and said "Well, you can try that but you won't like the results." (The student flunked out of my class. Surprise.)
There’s no painless and elegant way to correct regional overcapacity. That’s especially true in an industry like higher education that is both labor-intensive and built on the assumption of growth.That's been a Cold Spring Shops theme for some time, and I'm well-versed in the dynamics of decline, because that was the reality on the railroads for many years. "Something similar happened to the railroads in the late 1960s: there was simply insufficient money to handle the routine maintenance, and the payloads got heavier and the tracks deteriorated and the trains moved more slowly, if at all."
If you were the president of a small, struggling, not-terribly-prestigious liberal arts college in a region without much population growth, what would you do? For the sake of argument, let’s assume that you’ve hit the practical limits of tuition discounting (“presidential scholarships”) as a strategy, and let’s further assume that you’ve already done a decent job of marketing. And let’s say that your budget is mostly tuition-driven, so you can’t rely on a hefty endowment to bail you out. The freebies have already been taken. And keep in mind that presidents can’t act alone; they have to work with trustees, alumni, faculty, students, faculty, and staff, among others. Each of those has its own interests, and if it perceives those interests as threatened, will respond accordingly.
You could try to cut your way out. In the very short term, this is probably the path of least resistance, at least if it starts with cutting by attrition. But over time, this strategy has natural limits. Beyond a certain point, it threatens the ability of the college to compete.
The railroads discovered that in some ways they had to turn the clock back to 1945, replacing some second and third tracks, and replacing some main lines that had been taken out of service. Are any academic administrators sufficiently forward-looking today? Or will the current crop of administrators have to retire, as was the case with the old-line railroad administrators, before there is any change?The evidence, nine years on, does not look good for higher education.
We experience racism at Chicago State as a thousand small slights, not mass shootings. Many things are inferior; these are racist conditions experienced by our students, mostly black: long lines for financial aid and at the bookstore, lost paperwork in the Cook building, chalkboards and whiteboards that have not been cleaned or maintained, broken concrete and stairs, bathrooms in need of repair. The need to focus on the racism of the oppression not the color of the oppressor applies to the struggle against the bookstore policy of excluding CSU students from the textbook aisles.Excluding students from the textbook aisles?
Sizable government initiatives in the postwar era created more demand for such institutions, which became “an expression of the Progressive idea that bigger government was better government,” [Pennsylvania's John] DiIulio explains. For example, he says, “no one had ever built an interstate highway system before,” and no one knew how to make the federal government work with state and local governments and for-profit contractors to make it happen. Enter public policy schools.Yes, that sounds a lot like market-failure-warrants-government-intervention, complete with Pareto Optimality conditions and omniscient experts.
The mission of these institutions began to change in the 1970s, when the Ford Foundation issued multimillion-dollar grants to eight universities, including Yale, Duke and the University of Michigan. According to Graham Allison, writing in 2006 in the Oxford Handbook of Public Policy, the new cadre of students needed to be versed in not only “budgetary cost and efficacy” but also “social equity, civil rights, and quality of life.” People who were concerned with intragovernmental relations and American federalism began to seem “old and crusty,” DiIulio says. Now the goals of these schools were to dream up ways to “make the world a better place.”
Lofty goals have often produced research and teaching that is further and further removed from the day-to-day operations of government. While the field is so disparate that “it’s hard to talk about public policy schools as a whole,” Slaughter cautions, she and other school leaders identify certain trends, including a renewed zeal for quantitative analysis. When Georgetown President John J. DeGioia announced his university’s new policy school, he explained that “the availability of massive data to provide new analytic tools have resulted in an invaluable opportunity for our university.” The new emphasis on big data is reminiscent of the Progressive idea that if we just gather enough information, the policy conclusions will be obvious to all.
James Wilburn, dean of Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy, worries that too often, “what gets studied depends on whether there is an available database.” He accuses economists at policy schools of being “more interested in their models than in the people” whom public policy will affect.Yes, that's an occupational hazard with economists. Unfortunately, I don't get paid any more for uncovering my own data, let alone sharing it with others, or a bonus for pointing out that "things given" need not be modified by "on a government website." And I've grown weary of applied economics workshops in which dueling specifications are more important than the conclusions. Whether a minimum wage law overcomes monopsony power becomes a struggle over difference-in-difference as opposed to some other estimator, never mind that there's no attempt to calculate the Herfindahl index for employers within the labor market.
So, what should these schools be doing in terms of training and research? DiIulio suggests that maybe it’s time for them to return to their roots, teaching students to focus on implementing policy and making the government we have work better. “These seem like technical, boring matters, [but] someone has to get under the hood,” DiIulio says. For instance, he adds with a laugh, “How do you build an IT system for a new federally financed system of health care?”What, we have to worry about building a computer system for an insurance market? Isn't the law of large numbers and mandatory risk pooling going to reduce everything else to second- or third-order smallness? On the other hand, with grants becoming harder to get and merit money a memory, there might be opportunities for professors to supplement their income, or their pensions, assisting local governments with making sense of the research.
Henry Brady, the dean at the University of California at Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, told us in an e-mail that his school has been “quite successful with a real impact on bringing tough-minded economic and analytical methods into government and bringing evidence based research into the formulation of regulations and the appraisal of programs (although politicians often ignore the research).”
That last caveat may prove the most important. [New America Foundation's Anne-Marie] Slaughter notes that the research coming out of public policy schools is “less and less accessible to the lay reader. The jargon has become more and more specialized.” She says she “doesn’t know anyone in government who would read the academic journals that policy school professors get rewarded for publishing in,” and while the “need for translation [for lay readers] is ever greater, the rewards for translation in the academy are ever smaller.” Indeed, she says, “in many departments you will be less valued by your colleagues because you’re no longer doing ‘cutting edge’ research.”
If policymakers ignore policy school research or can’t understand it, what can policy professors and graduates possibly accomplish?
I feared that releasing Nelson Mandela from jail, especially amid the collapse of South Africa’s apartheid government, would create a Cuba on the Cape of Good Hope at best and an African Cambodia at worst.That's not how events turned out.
Mandela invited the warden of Robben Island prison to his inauguration as president of South Africa. He sat him front and center. While most people would be tempted to lock up their jailers if they had the chance, Mandela essentially forgave him while the whole world and his own people, white and black, were watching. This quietly sent South Africa’s white population a message: Calm down. This will be okay. It also signaled black South Africans: Now is no time for vengeance. Let’s show our former oppressors that we are greater than that and bigger people than they were to us.One television reminiscence from Thursday noted Mr Mandela's interest in the Civil Rights era in the United States. Apartheid was the oppression of a majority by a minority; Jim Crow the other way around: how get the majority to see the logic of ending Jim Crow?
I can remember growing up in the 1980s when there was widespread suspicion among conservatives in the U.S.–including many in the Reagan administration–that if the African National Congress were to take over, South Africa would be transformed into another dysfunctional dictatorship like the rest of the continent. That this did not come to pass was due to many reasons including F.W. de Klerk’s wisdom in giving up power without a fight.On occasion, a Cincinnatus still lives among us.
But the largest part of the explanation for why South Africa is light years ahead of most African nations–why, for all its struggles with high unemployment, crime, corruption, and other woes, it is freer and more prosperous than most of its neighbors–is the character of Nelson Mandela. Had he turned out to be another Mugabe, there is every likelihood that South Africa would now be on the same road to ruin as Zimbabwe. But that did not happen because Mandela turned out to be, quite simply, a great man–someone who could spend 27 years in jail and emerge with no evident bitterness to make a deal with his jailers that allowed them to give up power peacefully and to avoid persecution.
Mandela knew that South Africa could not afford to nationalize the economy or to chase out the white and mixed-raced middle class. He knew that the price of revenge for the undoubted evils that apartheid had inflicted upon the majority of South Africans would be too high to pay–that the ultimate cost would be borne by ordinary black Africans. Therefore he governed inclusively and, most important of all, he voluntarily gave up power after one term when he could easily have proclaimed himself president for life.
The (not unexpected) tragedy for South Africa is that Mandela’s successors, Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma, have not been men of his caliber: Mbeki, the previous president, was a colorless technocrat who could not inspire his people or face head-on the challenge of AIDS; Zuma, the current president, is a rabble-rouser who has been accused of numerous improprieties from rape to corruption. Their struggles and that of the ANC bureaucracy they preside over only place in starker relief the transcendent genius and sheer goodness of Nelson Mandela.
President Barack Obama, down in the polls because of popular indignation over his fraudulent health care “reform,” adopted the unlikely pose of tribune of egalitarian values in a speech on Wednesday sponsored by the pro-Democratic Party Center for American Progress in Washington DC.The MSNBC echo chamber, predictably, hopes to see more money thrown at poverty. Joan Walsh has an unrequited pundit-crush on Our President.
In typical fashion, Obama decried the growth of inequality in America as though he were an innocent bystander and had absolutely no role in the process he was criticizing. The most remarkable aspect of the speech was the contempt for the intelligence of the American people it expressed.
Calling the growth of income inequality the “defining challenge of our time,” Obama declared that “the combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American dream, our way of life and what we stand for around the globe.”
That this multimillionaire can mouth such a string of clichés with a straight face, when “our way of life” has become a celebration of avarice for the few and a nightmare for the many, only demonstrates his unlimited capacity for hypocrisy.
What seems new to me is a sustained feistiness among progressives. The push to expand rather than cut Social Security is already widening the debate and making it harder for any Democrat to fearlessly back even hidden cuts like the chained CPI. And the wave of fast-food strikes and Wal-Mart protests is channeling the anger and moral outrage that inspired Occupy Wall Street, and then seemed to dissipate, into a policy agenda.Joining her now is Ezra Klein. "The best speech Obama has given on the economy." The blog-post is the speech, without erasure, alteration, interlineation, additional punctuation, or commentary.
Which brings me to the president’s speech. He gave a similar one in the wake of the Occupy uprising, in Osawatomie, Kan., two years ago this Friday, and yet it’s been hard to translate his rhetoric into change. I find it hard these days to get excited about speeches, and yet, given the Republican extremism that’s led to gridlock, that bully pulpit is one of Obama’s most effective tools, and he doesn’t always use it to advantage. He did on Wednesday.
Actually, there’s plenty of evidence that unwed childbearing, father absence and fraying kinship and community networks exacerbate the problems of low-income people and make it incredibly hard for them to gain a foothold in the middle class. These are thorny problems that aren’t easily solved by the kinds of government measures Obama champions. So his speech says very little about the ways that strong marriages, family stability, or a robust role for churches in helping struggling Americans improve their lives can all improve economic mobility in this country. These social and cultural factors are arguably root causes of inequality, and it’s a pretty conspicuous omission to ignore that in a presidential speech on the subject. We’re glad people are talking more about about the yawning gap between rich and poor, but this troubling reality deserves a better treatment than Obama gave it.And, only this morning, Our President doubled down on his conceptual error.
Just this week, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted that allowing benefits to expire will be a drag on our economic growth next year. A report by the Department of Labor and my Council of Economic Advisors estimated that it could cost businesses 240,000 jobs. And without the ability to feed their families or pay the bills, many people currently looking for work could stop looking for good.Good Keynesian counter-cyclical public policy advice. Provided the recession is like all other recessions.
So extending unemployment insurance isn’t just the right thing to do for our families – it’s the smart thing to do for our economy.
So this holiday season, let’s give our fellow Americans who are desperately looking for work the help they need to keep on looking. Let’s make it easier for businesses to attract more customers, and our economy to grow. And together, let’s keep doing everything we can to make this country a place where anyone who works hard has a chance to get ahead.I doubt that he's calling for a reduction in regulatory uncertainty or encouraging the common schools to inculcate middle-class values or for a new initiative to turn baby-mamas into Tiger Moms.
At 0600 hours on 6 December the spearheads of all three panzer divisions crossed the Zhitomir—Korosten road. Contrary to what we expected, there was a strongly manned position running along the road, although it was still in course of construction. The Russians were taken completely by surprise as they had seen absolutely nothing of our outflanking maneuver.That's an excerpt from F. W. von Mellenthin, Panzer Battles 1939-1945. The Germans were able to stabilize their lines and buy some time until the 1944 spring campaign season opened.
During the night 7/8 December “Leibstandarte” thrust deeply through the Russian lines. Unfortunately the success could not be exploited, as the tanks ran out of gasoline and “Leibstandarte” was kept busy the whole day rescuing immobile tanks. First Panzer Division broke down all resistance and pushed through as far as the Teterev river. Fighting stubbornly the 7th Panzer Division smashed the Malin bridgehead on the banks of the Irscha and on 9 December the area between the two rivers was mopped up. Seventh Panzer eliminated the bridgehead south of Malin while the divisions of the 13th Corps took up positions in rear of our armor.I've previously expressed my gratitude that my great-grandparents migrated from Willenberg, Prussia (now Wielbark, Poland) first to Volhynia and subsequently to Wisconsin. Their Volhynian home was in Walki (now Valky) or Jagodinka (Yahodynka), along the banks of the Irscha near the Zhitomir to Korosten road. If the ethnic cleansing of Germans in 1914 hadn't caught them, either the Bolsheviks or the Nazis would have had their chances.
The results so far achieved were satisfactory. The Russian Sixtieth Army had been completely disrupted, and it was clear from their huge ammunition dumps and the intricate roadnet they had developed that we had forestalled an offensive of gigantic dimensions.
The number of losers is growing so quickly, and so much of the economies’ winnings are going to a small group at the top — since the recovery began, 95 percent of the gains have gone to the richest 1 percent — that some direct redistribution of the gains is necessary.It's worth recalling that the Luddites were skilled artisans rendered redundant by machines that could be operated by women and children, in much the same way that locomotive firemen were skilled artisans rendered redundant by diesel-electric locomotives with automatic fueling and, later, electrical transition, and many of the more boring tasks in automobile assembly plants could be programmed for robots.
Without some redistribution, the losers are likely to react in ways that could hurt the economy. They’ll demand protection from global markets they believe are taking away good jobs, and even from certain technological advances that threaten to displace them (rather than smash the machines, as did England’s 19th-century Luddites, they’ll seek regulations that preserve the old jobs).
Without some redistribution, our ever-increasing number of low-wage workers won’t have enough money to keep the economy going. (This is one reason why the current recovery has been so anemic.)Yes, and the aggregate value of excess demand equals zero, in and out of equilibrium. Perhaps government action impedes the price discovery implied by taking that identity seriously. In layman's terms, a slow economic recovery implies some resources in excess supply (incentives to lower prices) but Walras's identity suggests other resources are in a condition of excess demand (incentives to bid up prices). Professor Reich is correct, though, to suggest that people who find themselves rendered poor are unlikely to wait for Walras, or for Keynes, to come to the rescue.
And without some redistribution, America’s growing army of low-wage workers may fall prey to demagogues on the right or left who offer convenient scapegoats for their frustrations.More so than the current evangelical base of the Republicans and the public-assistance base of the Democrats?
Bowling Green simply possessed the formula to beat NIU. They caught the Huskies on an off night and executed almost to perfection when the previous 12 NIU opponents before them had so often folded in pressure situations with chances to win.Like chess, the mistakes are there, waiting to be made. And the better player finds them.
The upset bug finally bit NIU after the Huskies had avoided it time and time again with comeback victories and consistent second-half dominance.
With busted coverage after busted coverage, they showed why [Northern Illinois] came into the game ranked 108th in the nation (out of 123) in pass defense. It was because of this that NIU coach Rod Carey didn’t look at the performance as a particularly poor one.A bowl season that might be more expensive to the Mid-American Conference. "[A] win for Bowling Green would also lose millions for the school, the [conference] and all of the non-Automatically Qualifying Conferences." The author concludes that the operating profit of Bowling Green's athletics program would vanish without its cut of the BCS jackpot.
“We’ve had busted coverages before this year, and the quarterback doesn’t see them, so he doesn’t throw it to them,” Carey said. “Give [Bowling Green] a lot of credit. The quarterback found it when we did have a bust here and there.”
So while Carey and his team certainly weren’t proud of the defense, it was more about what Johnson did well than what the Huskies did poorly. They were exposed for mistakes they’ve made all year, mistakes that may have caused them to give up 274 passing yards a game.
It’s an area of concern as the Huskies head into bowl season.
The singer was wearing a £2,915 Christopher Kane wool-blend parka with real fur collar, which would have no doubt hit a bum note with any fellow Vegans dining at the restaurant."Stylish" is in the eye of the beholder.
Fashion faux pas aside, the mother-of-one looked effortlessly stylish as usual, teaming the coat with quilted tracksuit bottoms and platform ankle boots.
A night of the living dead classroom — lights set low, silent students enrapt before screens, professors intoning PowerPoints — this is, let us admit, a beautiful thing, a mystical thing, a floating atmosphere that frees the dreaming mind to roam…The good news, going into finals week, is that occasionally a student objects.
Many professors seem to take a “you get what you give” approach, letting those who distract themselves suffer the consequences in the form of lower test grades. But this method ends up hurting everyone. It is frustrating for students who can’t help but be distracted by their classmates’ screens. I imagine it doesn’t feel good for professors to see students clearly choosing to go on Facebook or other sites instead of at least trying to pay attention.Student-centered. Just keep in mind the type of student you wish to center to.
And it’s the worst for students who try to take notes in class but find themselves haplessly Internet-ing instead. Who do these kids think they’re kidding? Echinoderms are kind of cool, but they’re not cool enough for you to be giggling shamelessly into your keyboard and typing rapidly when the professor is only walking up to the chalkboard.
Why do professors take this lackadaisical approach when they can ban laptops and get rid of such high levels of distraction altogether?
Though it is easier for some students to quickly jot down notes on a computer than by hand, this advantage is greatly outweighed by the distraction and loss of spatial placement they cause for students’ memories.
Traditional note-taking methods are better not just because of the lack of distracting alternatives but because of the relation between real notebooks and the mind. We tend to remember things based on spatial placement, and little details such as where a sentence is located on a page or within a notebook can help students remember a fact within the context of the overall lesson. If that same fact is just another line on a computer screen, it can be lost amid thousands of other ephemeral tidbits students scroll through every day. Without the ability to substantially differentiate the placement of pieces of information, students lose the advantage of spatial memory when it comes to studying and remembering what they learned in class.
As traditional work and family structures crumble in the United States, middle-class Americans have the money to build relationships, yet remain satisfied as individuals. For working-class Americans, personal stability sometimes requires staying single and avoiding the risk of abuse, abandonment, and even more economic and emotional disruption.That's the pop social science version, perhaps better summarized by Charlotte Hays (via College Insurrection) on the intergenerational transmission of bad life management skills (it appears as though she's written a polemic on the subject).
Young people who have bad manners (now called "social skills) and dress eccentrically drive high youth unemployment. Time quoted a global study by Talent Shortage Survey from ManpowerGroup that found that one in five employers worldwide can’t find qualified young people to fill jobs.But self-actualization, without the benefit of middle-class habits, is even less cheap.
"Specifically, companies say candidates are lacking in motivation, interpersonal skills, appearance, punctuality and flexibility," Time noted. Such sloppiness shows us that the values of Skunk Hollow have gone mainstream. And if a young person gives off a vibe of believing a job is just another entitlement, he is less likely to get it. It's also not a bad idea to dress appropriately when seeking work.
I have to depend on the father of my children for a lot, always asking him for money. It would be nice to be able to support my kids on my own. That's why I decided to work. I applied to McDonald's and they called me right away. I was hired right on the spot.Thus we all have to pay higher prices for a Big Mac (that is, if the counter help, not to mention the drive-through, doesn't mess up the order) so this representative of the fast food strike can toss the baby-daddy out?
The university and some local politicians think the bill will also damage NIU’s ability to lure in and retain faculty — something it already struggled with amid pension woes — because it changes employee benefits, potentially sending faculty looking for out-of-state jobs with better pension packages.That is, if we're actually authorized to recruit. This year, headquarters might authorize searches in the event of tenure denials, but no such authorization is forthcoming in the case of retirements. But pension clawbacks have to be weighed against a background of pay packages and job descriptions that are not competitive with institutions we recruit against, and in light of a pay-raise policy that compels people who stay active to seek external offers, and perhaps that will bring forth a counter-offer. "NIU has had 42 percent turnover in four years, double the normal level for a university." Some proportion of that is people who have reached their maximum benefit and chose to retire. At least some of that is a consequence of faculty receiving outside offers.
I remind you that academic freedom is a limited protection, and applies only to your research and classroom teaching, and, in the case of the latter, to discussion of materials relevant to the course subject.The message was forwarded to the useful Rebecca Schuman, who described the restructurings in progress at two relatively obscure institutions.
Otherwise, faculty can be (and have been) punished for written and oral communication that is disruptive or uncivil.
Nobody seems to notice that the structure of today’s higher-ed “business” model is backward: It’s far easier to cut academics than it is to cut anything else, so that’s what universities are doing. The irony that the very raison d’être of a university—education!—is also its most disposable aspect seems lost on everyone (perhaps because nobody studies English, philosophy, or French anymore, so nobody recognizes irony or knows what a raison d’être is).It's pure Benjamin Ginsberg. With the connivance of the faculty.
The years of faculty self-governance, that all-powerful faculty senate teeming with frothy-mouthed Trotskyites, are long past. Nowadays the power to declare large swaths of higher education unfit for human study rests solely with administrators, who are obviously not going to vote to demote or “reduce” themselves.There's more at work: after years of identity politics and affirmative action and special education and all the other trendy pet projects coopted the radicals, the idea of serving on faculty senate to challenge administrative bloat lost its appeal to the people around whom a principled opposition might emerge. And once the administration and its willing accomplices in governance write "incivility" into the index of proscribed behaviors, it only becomes a matter of time before the proscription is applied to the faculty.
After years in which the ease of instant communication via e-mail and smartphones allowed bosses to place greater and greater demands on white-collar workers, some companies are beginning to set limits, recognising that successful employees must be able to escape from work.The next step might be to issue placards in the style of World War II posters, to be placed at workstations. "Is this attachment necessary?" "Promiscuous e-mailing costs time and money."
"Industry is now responding," said Cary Cooper, a professor of organizational psychology and health at Lancaster University, who says the imperative to be constantly reachable by iPhone or tablet is taking a toll on the work delivered at the office. "Employees are turning up, but they're not delivering anything."
"The HR people now talk about regrettable turnover. We cannot afford to lose our best people because we have fewer people," said Mr Cooper, the professor. "We will lose them to companies with better work/life balance, where they don't have to work 19-hour days."Quite.
Unlike many award programs, the APLU competition required universities to describe both accomplishments and challenges. To that end, NIU’s application includes a “growth and improvement” section that outlines how the university intends to maintain momentum in its regional engagement efforts.That last part is not going to be as easy as it looks, in the presence of hiring freezes for an already shrunken faculty.
“Highlighting this kind of work is critical to developing a sustainable culture of innovation and entrepreneurship among our students and faculty,” [interim provost Lisa] Freeman said. “It really requires us to consistently focus on what works, why it works, and what it will take to do more of it.”
[Railroad union president Anthony] Bottalico said [engineer William] Rockefeller "never said anything about not getting enough sleep." But he said the engineer had switched just weeks earlier from the night shift to the day shift, "so he did have a change in his hours and his circadian rhythms with regard to sleep."Changes in working hours, which are more frequent for freight train crews, and the concomitant disruption of crew rest, have long been contested between the unions and railroad management. There's also the possibility that habit is the quickest way to get yourself killed on the railroad, and coverage of the derailment has raised the possibility of the engineer having a lapse of concentration akin either to nodding off at the wheel, or to highway hypnosis.
The highest recorded blood alcohol content level from a preliminary breath test occurred at Saturday’s game against Pennsylvania State University at 0.33. Six students were also transported to detox during the game, the highest of all home games this season.Pegging the meter appears to be a sport in Madison.
[Protection and Security spokesman Marc] Lovicott said UWPD maintained similar alcohol policies as previous years but was concerned about the high blood alcohol levels they had seen.
Lovicott said UWPD generally sees higher intoxication levels during the first and last games of the season. At the beginning of the year, there are new students that are adjusting to the environment and may not know how much alcohol they can handle, Lovicott said.
At the end of the year, people party harder and “want to go out with a bang,” Lovicott said. There is also a new population as much of the audience consists of people visiting over Thanksgiving, Lovicott said.
The game against Indiana University had the lowest number of incidents with five citations, five arrests, eight ejections and one detox transportation. The highest BAC level recorded for the game was 0.29, which was the lowest in comparison to all other home games.
