A PRIMER ON THE SAY AGGREGATION PRINCIPLE.

Reason's Nick Gillespie responds to worries about that vanishing middle class. I'll leave the policy inferences to the reader as an exercise and take this opportunity to address, in formal detail, a canard I have frequently complained about. Mr. Gillespie quotes a well known talking head who could use a primer in the laws of conservation in economics.

There's Lou Dobbs, the CNN host, self-described "lifelong Republican," War on the Middle Class author, and free enterprise fan who has never met a U.S. industry he didn't want to protect or a foreign worker he didn't wanted to deport. He ponders daily why it takes so many families two incomes "just to get by."

I would like to have an answer to that question that does not require a fairly advanced knowledge of economics. Suggestions are welcome. The problem, dear reader, is that the injection of additional productive resources into an economy implies that those resources will produce goods and receive income, either in the form of goods or in the form of claims to goods. Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that additional productive resources get injected into an economy in the form of women. At this level of abstraction, it matters not whether these women come from the ranks of stay-at-home wives seeking some income and some intellectual stimulation, or from the ranks of collegians discontented with the traditional education and nursing majors or with the notion of the M.R.S. degree. What matters is that their presence in the work force affects the potential output of the economy, as well as the equilibrium price ratio. (There are other, less intuitive propositions that are not germane to tonights talk.)

The first law of conservation to keep in mind is an accounting identity we call Walras's law, under which the value of aggregate excess demand must be zero in equilibrium or out of equilibrium. The intuition appears in the figure below: there is a positive excess demand for labor, L, at the current input prices, and a negative excess demand for capital, K, at those prices. The blue arrow indicates the direction of a rearrangement of the same resources at which neither input is in excess demand, and total output of both goods increases.


It will also be the case under this accounting identity that the value of excess demand for produced goods must be zero in and out of equilibrium. That's the story in the following figure, in which the existence of excess demand for L implies a smaller total output of produced goods X and Y. Equilibrium in all markets involves identifying and acting on all possible gains from trade, an abstraction that can be interpreted to mean "recognize that women employees have babies." But in or out of equilibrium, the aggregate value of excess demand is zero (do you see my sign error?), or the value of the goods purchased equals the value of the goods produced plus the value of endowments, which includes payment for the use of time female participants have injected into the market.


In competitive equilibrium, the accounting identity bites with full force. E. J. Mishan's "Say's Law and Walras' Law Once More," Quarterly Journal of Economics 77, 4 (November 1963: 617-25, on JSTOR) argues that the accounting identity ought be applied only as an equilibrium condition, and that whether it is known as the Say Aggregation Principle or Walras's Law is immaterial as they are the same theorem. See page 623. But what the condition does say is that the value of outputs in equilibrium must equal the value of inputs in equilibrium. Thus, to hope that a family can "get by" on one income with current levels of labor force participation by women is to hope that the laws of conservation in economics don't work.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE FISH WANTS A BICYCLE? Maureen Dowd of the alleged newspaper of record discovers she's been had.

So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax? The more women achieve, the less desirable they are? Women want to be in a relationship with guys they can seriously talk to - unfortunately, a lot of those guys want to be in relationships with women they don't have to talk to.

Villainous Company is, shall we say, unimpressed.

Ms. Dowd might also contemplate the difference between masculine fantasies and what they decide in real life. I think we can all agree that, if asked by an 'unbiased researcher', most men would say they "prefer" to hook up with [insert mindless, sex-starved starlet with surgically enhanced breasts and serious dependency issues here].

Um, not necessarily. Mark Kleiman (via Unfogged, where a lively discussion of the Dowd column is in progress) has gone public with his objective function. (Reword it to include "ability to re-rig your own sailboat is a plus" and it could be mine.)

But there's more serious stuff in the Villainous Company post, including a link to something resembling real research. Money quote:

Mary Balfour, director of Drawing Down the Moon, an executive dating agency based in London, says that college-educated and professional men in their 20s and 30s now want women who match their intellect and earning abilities. "It is only those in their 50s and 60s who tend to take a deep breath when introduced to powerful women," she says.

No surprise. The older cohort came of age as the times they were a-changin', and those changes were disruptive to everybody, as the men had to confront at the time and the women are now discovering. (Well, perhaps I exaggerate. I recall in the early 1970s a number of policy changes that the activist types had long advocated taking effect in rapid succession, without observing much of an increase in the happiness of the activist types.) There is also a quote about money.

Most couples require two paychecks to stay in the middle class, a math lesson that is not lost on men.

Just can't get away from that Say Aggregation Principle, can we? There's more.

A 1999 nationally representative sample--meaning it mirrors the population as a whole--of 4,405 couples found that divorce was more likely when a woman has no earnings than when she brings home a paycheck. In particular, the marriage of a woman with no earnings was more than twice as likely to dissolve as that of a woman who had a paycheck.

Having no income can be risky for a woman, and not just in the stability of her marriage. A wife who drops out of the work force and stays out for a long time will never make up that lost economic ground, even if she returns to the work force. Worse, if her husband's income starts to slip--an all too common event these days--the couple can be in trouble, both financially and emotionally.

Here we go again, what is the effect of no-fault divorce on the labor force participation rates of married women? Villainous Company summarizes the lesson.

And so once again, we're back to economics and tradeoffs and maximizing utility after all. Men and women don't behave all that differently - it's just a question of what we value. And the answers (at least in the real world) are more easily divined by looking at the decisions we make than about what we say we value.

Actions speak louder than words.

Laura at 11-D (if you want to keep busy, go to the top and start reading; she's been doing a lot of thinking and linking) is hosting a discussion based on this observation.

Whenever Maureen Dowd goes after the flaws in the male character, I get a little uncomfortable, which is odd, because I really have no problem with male bashing. But when Maureen does it, I start shifting around in my seat and tapping my feet. I feel like she's showing too much of her cards. Maureen has a full set of Samsonite baggage. ...

Maureen's baggage aside, does she make a good point? Do men really want to jump a non-English speaking maid in a uniform over an award winning columnist?

An award winning columnist who has made repeated disclosure of her baggage? (Don't you just love the words people use to speak of human interaction. Issues. Baggage. Co-dependency. Bleah.) And what do all of her references to nannies and maids say about the men she's observing?

THE WALLS BEGIN TO TREMBLE.

Seven years ago in Cold Spring Shops:

Presumably the set of social institutions that involved Dad working, Mom minding the kids, and parents staying together for the sake of the children, which takes advantage of the Say Aggregation Principle to ensure that one wage earner could support a family, and which makes unilateral dissolution of marriage less attractive, are not the set of social institutions envisioned in these discussions. There are, however, other institutional changes to consider, including reduced reliance on the treadmill career path, which might in fact be productivity enhancing as people might have less reason to look for ways out of productive but extremely time-consuming jobs.

An anecdote in USA Today is not validation.  But it's not reason to back down, either.

Tiffany Willis of Dallas has spent years climbing the corporate career ladder, working up to 70-hour weeks and pulling in about $60,000 as a middle manager.

She describes herself "as that mom sitting at the top of the bleachers at my kid's Saturday-morning football game on my cellphone for a conference call with my laptop."

She walked away from the pressures, paycheck and prestige of jobs she called "meaningful and important" earlier this year and refuses to return, no matter how many offers come her way.

"I will never go back to the corporate world," she says. "I want to own my life."

A new nationwide survey shows that Willis, 44, may not be alone. A women and workplace survey from More magazine shows that 43% of the women surveyed say they are less ambitious now than they were a decade ago. And only a quarter of the 500 women ages 35 to 60 say they're working toward their next promotion.

And forget about the corner office: 3 out of 4 women in the survey — 73% — say they would not apply for their boss' job. Almost 2 of 5 — 38% — report they don't want to put up with the stress, office politics and responsibility that often go hand in hand with such positions.

What intrigues is the reaction of the women of the fevered brow.

More Editor-in-Chief Lesley Jane Seymour says she's hoping that the survey, conducted in June, is more a reflection of the stress and negativity of difficult economic times and not a permanent trend.

"We're bemoaning the lack of women in top Fortune 500 companies or women in political office," Seymour says. "We're sliding backwards, and here's your answer. It's because we have thrown ice water all over ambition."

We're all underemployed compared to our ancestors who had cows to milk and fields to plow, with no mechanical assistance. We're rich enough that scaling back ambition doesn't have to mean starving.

Willis says she's not surprised about results showing more women backing away from top corporate positions.

"It's not worth it. I had what I called my 'heart-attack jobs,' and I strongly believe they took years off my life," Willis says. "I have been referred by people for other (management) positions, and I tell them no amount of money is worth it. I don't care if they offered me a million dollars."

Willis is now a freelance writer who also teaches a course at a local community college and says her plan is to remain a contract worker.

As a single mom, she says she and her children "have downgraded our lives and our expenses" and "we're going to live differently."

The flexibility of being able to meet personal and professional demands on her own terms makes any lifestyle changes worth it, she says.

She gets specific.

Willis predicts the trend of women opting out of high-pressure jobs will continue.

"We women enjoyed it for a time, but now we've had time to see the toll that it takes on us and our families," Willis says.

Still, the trend isn't just about women trying to manage children and professional demands. The survey found that only 15% say that household or child care responsibilities have held them back in their careers. Interestingly, while 62% of women with children say they would take more free time over more money, a larger number of single women — 68% — say they would.

Seymour says she's concerned about women who have no intention of getting a corner office or seat at the corporate boardroom table.

Women have been shown to be positive forces not only for promoting world change, but also for driving bottom-line results. As the economy struggles "if we back off from promoting women, we're just shooting ourselves in the foot," Seymour says.

Willis disagrees that women are backsliding and should make the choice to fight for top-tier jobs. She says women are simply making different choices and believes that young, unmarried and childless women will continue to seize those opportunities. As for herself, she doesn't rule out re-entering the corporate management when her children are grown.

"Women will continue to be powerful, but it's not going to be with a two-hour commute and a corner office," Willis says. "It's all about letting women make their own decisions about what's right for them and their families."

Meredith Lepore of The Grindstone agrees that freedom to choose matters.

It is wonderful if you would rather work less to spend time with your family but if you want to get that corner office, and there are most definitely women who do, it is okay to work as hard as possible and devote a lot of your time to do that. It is your time and you get to decide what to do with it.

The problem is, very few people are able to do both, and the positional arms races and the destruction of private lives will go on.  Robert Franklin of Fathers and Families weighs in.

Time and again, survey after survey finds that women in a position to do so tend to opt out of paid work.  Usually that’s to care for children, but the More survey shows that it’s just as likely to get out of corporate life.  Various studies have shown the same thing about female attorneys, MBA graduates and those in careers in science, technology, engineering and math fields.

My guess is that women further down on the educational and economic totem poll are just as likely to opt out when it’s feasible for them to do so.

What this suggests is that women are proving to be fairly resistant to much of the social engineering that’s been going on for the past 40 years or so.  Despite an astonishing array of cultural messages saying that motherhood is a snare and a delusion, and that a woman’s true place is in the corporate boardroom, women are saying ‘no.’  They’ve dipped their toe in the water and found it too cold for their liking.

That's a possibility. I'm not going to get into the custody battle and culture wars implications of that post today. I wonder, though, whether some of the discouraged workers of the ongoing Great Reset are using the straitened economic circumstances as occasion to say no to the most demanding employers.  What's the point of doing the work of four people for twelve hours a day on half your previous salary if "downgrading your expenses" doesn't rule out Internet access or a functioning car or clothing for the kids?

FALSE PRODUCTIVITY.

I've been suggesting almost as long as I've been running the Cold Spring Shops that labor supply curves are backward-bending, and that there may be no point in people making a lot of money without any opportunity to have a life.  Let's start in July, 2004.

Presumably the set of social institutions that involved Dad working, Mom minding the kids, and parents staying together for the sake of the children, which takes advantage of the Say Aggregation Principle to ensure that one wage earner could support a family, and which makes unilateral dissolution of marriage less attractive, are not the set of social institutions envisioned in these discussions. There are, however, other institutional changes to consider, including reduced reliance on the treadmill career path, which might in fact be productivity enhancing as people might have less reason to look for ways out of productive but extremely time-consuming jobs. (Regular readers will correctly note that I have played this tune before: perhaps with sufficient notes on the horn the walls will come tumbling down.)

In higher education, the crumbling of the walls might have been midwived by the feminists, but the general principle is still valid.

How then to balance the income effect of greater prosperity, which works in favor of shorter and more flexible working hours independently of any explicit policy, against the competition effect, in which the individuals willing to work harder (the most independent men and women, for the most part?) will get to the prizes first? The French solution of legislating a shorter work week has not been particularly successful.

But we see the same challenges in the private sector.

I wonder, though, whether some of the discouraged workers of the ongoing Great Reset are using the straitened economic circumstances as occasion to say no to the most demanding employers. What's the point of doing the work of four people for twelve hours a day on half your previous salary if "downgrading your expenses" doesn't rule out Internet access or a functioning car or clothing for the kids?

And there are limits to how far a company can apply the tournament model to its staff.  Dean Dad asks the pertinent question.

If the recent New York Times piece about Amazon is at least substantially correct, it sounds like working conditions at Amazon are somewhere between a reality show and Logan’s Run. The Times piece -- which Jeff Bezos denies is accurate -- suggests that Amazon uses its extreme secrecy to enable extreme arbitrariness in how it treats its own people. In the absence of any worker protections at all, hard-charging people are chewed up and spit out quickly. The system will work as long as it’s growing. When it starts contracting, though, the fall will be fast and hard. It’s one thing to put up with cruelty when there’s something in it for you; it’s quite another when the best to be hoped for is to squeeze a little more time out.

Yes, and if you're going to put in the hours of an entrepreneur for a salary, in a country that at least gives lip service to entrepreneurship ...

Here, via USA Today, is an essay by Dustin Moskovitz of Facebook recognizing that the labor-leisure tradeoff is real.

Many people believe that weekends and the 40-hour workweek are some sort of great compromise between capitalism and hedonism, but that’s not historically accurate. They are actually the carefully considered outcome of profit-maximizing research by Henry Ford in the early part of the 20th century. He discovered that you could actually get more output out of people by having them work fewer days and fewer hours. Since then, other researchers have continued to study this phenomenon, including in more modern industries like game development.

The research is clear: beyond ~40–50 hours per week, the marginal returns from additional work decrease rapidly and quickly become negative. We have also demonstrated that though you can get more output for a few weeks during “crunch time” you still ultimately pay for it later when people inevitably need to recover. If you try to sustain crunch time for longer than that, you are merely creating the illusion of increased velocity. This is true at multiple levels of abstraction: the hours worked per week, the number of consecutive minutes of focus vs. rest time in a given session, and the amount of vacation days you take in a year.

To which I add, there is nothing magic about 40 hours. The old formula was eight hours for work, eight hours for family, eight hours for sleep.  Yes, there will still be hard-charging people willing to outwork everybody else, never mind the cost.  But part of being able to live better than a cave man is more down time than a cave man enjoyed, and as we are able to live better than a Mad Man, perhaps we ought have more martini time than the Mad Men enjoyed.

Here's Mr Moskovits.

My intellectual conclusion is that these companies are both destroying the personal lives of their employees and getting nothing in return. A candidate recently deciding between Asana and another fast growing company told me that the other team starts their dinners at 830pm to encourage people to stay late (he’s starting here in a few weeks). I also hear young developers frequently brag about “48 hour” coding sprints. This kind of attitude not only hurts young workers who are willing to “step up” to the expectation, but facilitates ageism and sexism by indirectly discriminating against people who cannot maintain that kind of schedule.

The most charitable interpretation of that job description is that people will have accumulated enough of a nest egg to retire by 35 or 40, but there's insufficient evidence of that labor-leisure tradeoff being common.

IS THAT ALL THERE IS? Mahablog comments on a New York Times article discovering that female students in the Ivies aren't as interested in staying attached to the work force. Key news discovery:

Much attention has been focused on career women who leave the work force to rear children. What seems to be changing is that while many women in college two or three decades ago expected to have full-time careers, their daughters, while still in college, say they have already decided to suspend or end their careers when they have children.

"At the height of the women's movement and shortly thereafter, women were much more firm in their expectation that they could somehow combine full-time work with child rearing," said Cynthia E. Russett, a professor of American history who has taught at Yale since 1967. "The women today are, in effect, turning realistic."

That may mean your boss 20 years from now will be wearing a Northern Illinois class ring. And she's not going to be one of the Ashleys with delusions of snaring the next Donald Trump that populates the article. There's a lot more to higher education and labor force participation than what the society reporter at the Westchester, er, New York Times discovers. On the other hand, that resources are scarce and have competing uses, which prompts the title of this post.

"It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?" said Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, who served as dean for coeducation in the late 1970's and early 1980's.

It is a complicated issue and one that most schools have not addressed. The women they are counting on to lead society are likely to marry men who will make enough money to give them a real choice about whether to be full-time mothers, unlike those women who must work out of economic necessity.

Was the inventor of the desktop computer disappointed that people were buying them to play games rather than work engineering problems? Perhaps. Are we better off that desktop computers are available for game playing as well as for working engineering problems -- and with algorithms more powerful than Quick Basic? Now, on to that "economic necessity." How many times must I run a review session on the Say Aggregation Principle? More labor force participation by women, more two-income households, more prices that reflect the ability of two incomes to bid for those goods. That actions have unintended consequences ought not come as a surprise. And what's this about "lead society?" You mean that lady over there, yes, the one with the Northern Illinois class ring, ought not be viewed as a possible leader? (On the other hand, does an emergent order have to have leaders? Questions, questions.)

University officials said that success meant different things to different people and that universities were trying to broaden students' minds, not simply prepare them for jobs.

Quite. A working jive-detector is useful, whether it's being used in the employ of others, or in minding kids, or in shooting the breeze at the model railroad club.

"What does concern me," said Peter Salovey, the dean of Yale College, "is that so few students seem to be able to think outside the box; so few students seem to be able to imagine a life for themselves that isn't constructed along traditional gender roles."

Perhaps because the box evolved to reduce some transaction costs. Sometimes the proper response to these "think outside the box" cliches is to say, "respect the box." Turmoil for its own sake is not equivalent to improving one's life. That's something that Mahablog appears to be recognizing.

This, of course, rather ignores the fact that sixties feminism was very much a reaction to the mistakes of fifties Stepford-wifism.

But the larger issue no one wants to talk about is that raising children in a post-Industrial Age society is a problem with no good solution.

Again, there's the title of my post. Forty years ago, the daughters of dependent housewives were asking that question. Today, the granddaughters are observing their stressed-out moms and rephrasing the question.

So, it became socially acceptable for women to work outside the home. In fact, in recent decades the American economy has become increasingly dependent on the productivity of women, just as the famous American middle-class lifestyle has become dependent on two paychecks.

Yes. There are laws of conservation in economics. It ought come as no surprise that if some people see the financial benefit that comes from two incomes as simply incidental to the greater freedom made possible by those daughers asking my question, prices will adjust to reflect those incomes.

At least we are getting away from the "having it all" myth, which said that women can have the high-power career and be excellent parents at the same time if they just tried hard enough. There may be a few high-energy types who manage it (the ones I've met made enough money to hire nannies), but most of us who have tried this end up leading lives of unquiet desperation.

Institutions evolve to conserve on transaction costs.

I'm not sure what the solution is, other than better social supports and more Real Men who carry their share of the load. Ultimately I wish we could re-think the whole nine-to-five employment thing.

Good point. Sometimes I'd be happy to be limited to nine-to-five rather than whenever-to-whenever, depending on what's on the answering machine or in email or how imaginative the wrong answers on the homework or the methods of the research paper under review are.

I continue to notice summer rush hours beginning around lunchtime (one story here) and employers may implicitly understand that there is a backward-bending supply curve and offer promising employees with families a different combination of pay and hours. The rethinking, however, is likely to be an emergent phenomenon, with any codification in law to come later.

SECOND SECTION: Crooked Timber and Althouse comment on the Times, with spirited bull sessions in progress at both sites. In those discussions some irritation with treating one or two anecdotes about life among the priviligentsia as evidence of a social trend emerges.

THIRD SECTION: The view from 11-D.

TIME TO START A LIFE AS WELL AS A CAREER? The Chronicle of Higher Education covers a report recommending changes in the way scholars establish themselves.

In particular, the report says, women are being driven away from careers at research universities because of the lock-step nature of a tenure-track career. That is happening even though women now earn 51 percent of the doctorates conferred by American universities (The Chronicle, December 3). If careers in higher education do not become more flexible, the report says, universities will continue to lose out on talented women, particularly those who want to have children. Already, female faculty members say they are much less satisfied with their jobs than men say they are, according to the report.

Part of the problem is that departments are run by men who "typically have spouses or partners who do not work or work only part time to manage their home lives," says the report. Young faculty members, by contrast, are much more likely to have partners who work. "Consequently, faculty homes with spouses or partners to manage the family and household are becoming obsolete," says the report.

That's the Say Aggregation Principle catching up with young workers, and the problem is not limited to the academy.

Playing School, Irreverently, suggests that the job dissatisfaction is not limited to working moms.

And is that why universities lose female faculty? This bit about wanting to have children assumes that by the time one arrives on campus one has a spouse and is ready to procreate. Or has spouse and kids already. It totally ignores that many new faculty have focused on school, not social lives, for years and then suddenly find themselves uprooted to parts of the country where they know no one. They get a demanding job, and then work either in relative isolation (research, writing) or with people who are not suitable friends/dating material (students, departmental colleagues). No one really seems to pay attention to that problem, but I've known 3 women who have left for that reason ... and it is possible that in a year or two I would make myself a 4th.

So, looking at this proposed tenure delay idea ... can I take 10 years to tenure because I need time to meet men, date, and figure out if I want to get married and/or have a kid? Or because I need to travel long distances regularly to see friends and family in order to be happy? Because if I had a corporate job I'd have made my choice in part based on geography.

And presumably working men would benefit by a similar dispensation. How then to balance the income effect of greater prosperity, which works in favor of shorter and more flexible working hours independently of any explicit policy, against the competition effect, in which the individuals willing to work harder (the most independent men and women, for the most part?) will get to the prizes first? The French solution of legislating a shorter work week has not been particularly successful.

THE SAY AGGREGATION PRINCIPLE AT WORK. Labor Day is no longer much of a holiday, with the summer clearance sales in progress. The rest of the year is not that much better, suggests this Chicago Tribune article.

But as America transforms itself from a manufacturing to a service-based economy, more employers require around-the-clock hours.

That makes it easier for, say, working mothers to buy groceries and shop for their children's back-to-school outfits.

But it also can strain families who must cope with competing schedules, said the University of Maryland's Presser. She found that the divorce rate is three to six times higher for American couples who have children and work the night shift than for comparable couples who work during the day.

Retailers say extended hours also are good for business."Customers want to be able to bank when they want to bank, not when bankers want to provide the opportunity for them to bank," said Alan B. Levan, CEO of BankAtlantic, a Florida bank that says it has increased new accounts from 17,000 a year to 175,000 since it opened its doors seven days a week and extended evening hours in 2002. The bank will be open on Labor Day.

Whether people are more overworked, or less, remains open to debate.

A 2003 report by the International Labor Organization found that Americans worked longer hours than Europeans, with the average American putting in 1,815 hours a year on the job compared with 1,300 to 1,800 in industrialized European economies.

And another study, this one by the Families and Work Institute, found that more than one third of employees sometimes use a computer at home for job-related work. The New York-based think tank also reported that 28 percent of employees feel overworked. ...

"We live in a work-centric culture," said Ellen Galinsky, president of the institute. "The boundaries between when people are working for their jobs and when they're not are much blurrier than they used to be."

But not all economists agree that Americans work more than they used to.

Thanks to technologies like the microwave and home washing machines, a 1993 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that Americans enjoy more leisure time than ever.

That's not a view shared by Benjamin Hunnicutt, a University of Iowa professor who's so devoted to the idea of Americans taking more time off that he teaches leisure studies."

Labor Day is just one of many forms of free time that has been eroded," he said. "We regard work as the center of life."

On the other hand, the traditional breadwinner-division-of-labor arrangement did not satisfy everyone, either.

PREACHING TO THE CONVERTED? I could make a very short Book Review No. 1617 simply by noting that I purchased Joe Conason's Big Lies in October 2003 and only recently finished it. (Again, I may have to go cold turkey on polemical material for book reviews.) The book went to press shortly after the fall of Baghdad and some of its national-security content is overtaken by events. Its purpose appears to be to shore up (old-style?) liberals against the more over-the-top criticisms from talk radio and tabloid television. Mr Conason, however, is not above offering a few statements of faith of his own. Consider his version of the New Deal Credo.

If your workplace is safe; if your children go to school rather than being forced into labor; if you are paid a living wage, including overtime; if you enjoy a forty-hour week and you are allowed to join a union to protect your rights -- you can thank liberals. If your food is not poisoned and your water is drinkable -- you can thank liberals. If your parents are eligible for Medicare and Social Security, so they can grow old in dignity without bankrupting your family -- you can thank liberals. If our rivers are getting cleaner and our air isn't black with pollution; if our wilderness is protected and our countryside is still green -- you can thank liberals. If people of all races can share the same public facilities, if everyone has the right to vote; if couples fall in love and marry regardless of race; if we have finally begun to transcend a segregated society -- you can thank liberals. Progressive innovations like those and many others were achieved by long, difficult struggles against entrenched power. What defined conservatism, and conservatives, was their opposition to every one of those advances.

Had Mr Conason taken his credo as the organizing principle for his book, and spent some time supporting some of those points, he'd have a much longer book. And had he properly engaged some of the controversies he treats as given, he might have been surprised by what he could learn. Compulsory schooling for children: not as an alternative to paid work, but as a form of indoctrination into Protestant America. Children at paid work (or more often for many years, unpaid work on a family farm): an understandable response to the realities of the Say Aggregation Principle. Fortunately Mr Conason doesn't trot out the wheeze about two incomes required to support a family -- his work doesn't get anywhere near that rigorous. Shorter workweeks: income and substitution effects lead to workweeks codified much later in labor standards acts. Dangerous food and water (and other consumer goods): how many of the "malefactors of great wealth" of the so-called Progressive Era made their fortunes (and attracted the attention of trust-busters) by making products better, safer, cheaper? Paging Alfred D. Chandler ... Medicare and Social Security: unfunded contingent liabilities. Could we have a debate on the merits of private accounts that isn't presented as if it's Visigoths sacking a cathedral, which is what little we get from Mr Conason? The history of government-mandated segregation, and its later repeal, is not one that makes self-styled "progressives" look good. The latest Reason runs an article on a libertarian synthesis of hippies and evangelicals in which the Liberal Establishment really stood in opposition to both. (And that confusion is one that observers of the popular culture can properly be frustrated by: many a talk-radio fulmination about "liberals" is better understood as a gripe about Sixties agitators still at odds with an Establishment that isn't always an ally.) Pollution: smoke is fuel wasted. In many instances the policy disagreement between conservatives and liberals is over methods, not ends. Nobody really likes dirty water. Nobody really likes being unemployed. Mr Conason's credo, however, does not admit of the possibilities of tradeoffs, such as environmental regulations inducing migration of dirty factories to developing countries or to smokestack-chasing counties in the States.

But it's probably more fun to catalog faux-populist plutocrats, war planners with no military experience, latter-day Arthur Dimmesdales, revolving-door capitalists becoming advisors to executive and legislative officials, and intellectually inconsistent pundits taking opposing views.

CONTEMPLATING IMMISERIZATION. It's Labor Day, and time for a roundup of observations on the political economy of work and pay.

Zeidler Union Square, Milwaukee.

For tonight, four columns on income inequality, courtesy of University Diaries, who identified two fretful and two hopeful. First the fretful. Start with E. J. Dionne.

Want to know why so many men out there are mad? Check out Table A-2 on Page 38 of the Census report. (I'm grateful to my friend Bill Galston for calling it to my attention.) Adjusted for inflation, men's earnings were lower in 2005 than they were in 1973.

Dear liberals, who worry about the political leanings of angry men, and dear conservatives, who exploit that anger, do you have any proposals to end this income stagnation?

Ah, the joys of aggregating without respect to age, education, or country of origin. Then consider Thomas Frank. (No self-respecting Displaced Cheesehead pays for Times Select.)

When you view the world from the satisfied environs of Washington — a place where lawyers outnumber machinists 27 to 1 and where five suburban counties rank among the seven wealthiest in the nation — the fantasies of postindustrial liberalism make perfect sense. The reign of the “knowledge workers” seems noble.

Seen from almost anywhere else, however, these are lousy times. The latest data confirms that as the productivity of workers has increased, the ones reaping the benefits are stockholders. Census data tells us that the only reason family income is keeping up with inflation is that more family members are working.

University Diaries lays some smack on Mr Frank.

Longtime readers know that I have nothing in principle against Frank's effort to get the rest of the country outfitted with pitchforks and sent to Garrett Park. But I think he's wrong to assume that "Democratic leaders" are going to want to "talk about class issues." I've lived here a long time and met scads of Democratic leadership types -- in politics, academia, journalism, think tanks, etc. -- and the problem is that their class is absolutely equivalent to the Republicans' class.

Bill and Hillary vacation on Nantucket. Then there's John Kerry.

These are all happy satisfied rich people. You don't stir up class resentment among such people, whatever their theoretical ideological commitments may be.

In a way, Frank's comment admits as much; he says that class war will have to come from the grassroots. Then why is he writing in the New York Times? If something's the matter with Kansas, why isn't he publishing his opinion pieces in their newspapers?

But if he's going to stir up the populists, isn't he going to have to get his facts right? Work backwards: is Mr Frank against increased labor force participation by women, or in favor of sex-based pay differentials? If total output is increasing because of greater labor force participation by women, and labor markets reward equally productive male and female workers equally, the Say Aggregation Principle says family income, not prime-age male income, grows as the economy does. Laws of conservation are like that. Keep working backwards. I suspect that during the Eugene V. Debs era, lawyers outnumbered machinists in Washington, D.C., even if not by 27:1. That's called specialization and division of labor. (Someday I must post a column on the folly of expecting a lawyer to also do the work of a machinist, or conversely.) Those rich counties surrounding the Beltway? I like Steven Landsburg's formulation: bipartisanship is the conspiracy of the political class to keep some of the rents for itself.

Marquette Warrior weighs in with a link to a somewhat more pungent column.

Frankly, it's the conservatives who talk the language of this group. If the clueless people in the GOP would only understand that. This disconnection of the GOP leadership and their voters, is almost laughable if it wasn't so dangerous.

This group of people, the guys and gals that drive pickup trucks, use their hands for a living are fair game, but the conservatives have to go after their vote. Elections are not won by the upper crust in both parties, but on the ground at the Wal-Marts, and their working class customers.

If the GOP had the sense that they were born with, they would embrace the Wal-mart demographic and welcome them into their big tent. Who really represents the working class and who can do the best for them in their daily lives?

We know it's not the effete snobs of the liberal upper class.

Tell us what you really think. (Where's a good syndicalist column when I want to link to one?)

Now to the hopeful. Nicholas Eberstadt offers a riff on the permanent income hypothesis, with a call for better measurement.

These criticisms of the official U.S. poverty rate should not be confused with indifference to the plight of America's disadvantaged and poor. Indeed, the opposite is true. In the richest society humanity has ever known, material deprivation still afflicts too many Americans. We cannot expect to make progress, however, without adequate and accurate information. Advocates of social and economic justice in the United States should be in the front ranks of those demanding more accurate assessments of U.S. poverty. Without a clearer sense of where we stand, how we got here and where we are headed, most initiatives aimed at reducing poverty in the United States will be needlessly ineffective.

The editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal get to the heart of the matter.

The truth is that there has been a modest widening of the income gap in recent decades, regardless of which party is in power. That gap seems due largely to growing returns on education and skills in the global economy. Americans without a high-school diploma are losing ground against those who have college degrees. But this argues not for higher taxes on the rich, who already pay the vast bulk of U.S. taxes. It argues for reforming K-12 education so even the weakest and poorest students can compete against the world.

More stuff for my strategic plan?

ON THE DOMESTIC FRONT. (Warning: omnibus post.)

First, some unusual incidences of spouse abuse, and some commentary on the changing nature of the conversation about such things.

Second, some anticipation of wacky statements to come.

Third, some ongoing wackiness. Laura at Apartment 11-D wants everyone else to be comfortable with her prejudices:

Just as we shouldn't discriminate against homosexuals and feel that it is right to accommodate people with disabilities, society has to accommodate parents. That means changes in the workplace. And it means sacrifices from the childless.

Catch the howling non-sequitur in there? The Americans with Disabilities Act and the continuing attempts to determine positive or negative rights for homosexuals are two fronts in the Culture Wars. And there is more than one change in the workplace by which "society" can accommodate parents. I was under the impression that the old accommodation, with Dad working and Mom minding the kids, had to be changed precisely because it meant Dad was away from the kids too much and Mom was with the kids too much. Perhaps that was just another Silent Generation experiment against reality, to go with no-fault divorce and tax-supported day care. And Dr. Laura loses any sympathy for her demand that "the childless" sacrifice on behalf of her leaving work early with this:

Couples who work full time without the expense of childcare or diapers are much better off than we are. They have houses, while we live in a dumpy apartment. They take vacations and only pay for two plane seats. They have two full time salaries with benefits. Children are the leading indicator of poverty.

Um, this is somebody who lives in New York City, making a classic argumentum ad misericordiam. Further, it is somebody who still has failed to read and understand the Say Aggregation Principle. Furthermore, it is a bit disingenuous to demand further changes in working life, when it is precisely the end of the old sex roles that made it possible for two-income power couples to outbid one income, or income-and-a-half couples for the good houses and the good cars. (Although, as there is a large premium for good houses in good school districts, there must be some bidding by power couples WITH CHILDREN going on in such neighborhoods.)

Harry at Crooked Timber has chimed in with some observations of his own, which are worth a look, but ought to be read in light of two realities that are difficult to change. First, high achievers might be childless by choice (and quite willing to pick up some of the slack the early-leaving moms and dads create, for an eminently sensible price: the promotions and the prestige.) In that light there might not have to be any additional sacrifices. Second, women have babies, which makes de-sexing the division of labor in child rearing a bit more cumbersome in practice than in principle.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR. I've recently noticed nostalgia for the 1950s, particularly among self-styled "progressives." Now comes Howard Zinn, who would like to set the Wayback Machine^(TM) for the 1930s.

Still, in today’s climate of endless war and uncontrolled greed, drawing upon the heritage of the 1930s would be a huge step forward. Perhaps the momentum of such a project could carry the nation past the limits of FDR’s reforms, especially if there were a popular upsurge that demanded it. A candidate who points to the New Deal as a model for innovative legislation would be drawing on the huge reputation Franklin Roosevelt and his policies enjoy in this country, an admiration matched by no President since Lincoln. Imagine the response a Democratic candidate would get from the electorate if he or she spoke as follows:

“Our nation is in crisis, just as it was when Roosevelt took office. At that time, people desperately needed help, they needed jobs, decent housing, protection in old age. They needed to know that the government was for them and not just for the wealthy classes. This is what the American people need today.

Pedant's note: that admiration for Lincoln is a recent phenomenon. Visit the Lincoln Presidential Library to see what his defenders would characterize as Lincoln Derangement Syndrome, had they had the vocabulary.

On to the substance of Mr Zinn's article. A lack of decent housing, when brand new McMansions are available at foreclosure prices in many neighborhoods? (Puzzlement: why do realtors place a "Foreclosure" notice on their For Sale signs? Is it required by law in some states? I see it as a large invitation to drive a particularly hard bargain.) A lack of protection in old age, when Mr Roosevelt's Social "Security" is soon to run afoul of its actuarial design flaws, abetted by the propensity of Democratic Congresses to use the trust funds to mask the size of the annual deficit? Come off it.

“I will do what the New Deal did, to make up for the failure of the market system. It put millions of people to work through the Works Progress Administration, at all kinds of jobs, from building schools, hospitals, playgrounds, to repairing streets and bridges, to writing symphonies and painting murals and putting on plays. We can do that today for workers displaced by closed factories, for professionals downsized by a failed economy, for families needing two or three incomes to survive, for writers and musicians and other artists who struggle for security.

Note the conjuring tricks. Closed factories? Must public policy repeat the preservation of manufacturing for its own sake what it has done for farming? Two or three incomes to survive? How many times must I remind readers of the Say Aggregation Principle? Or perhaps Mr Zinn doesn't want female labor force participation rates to approach those of males. Writers and musicians and artists? Why ought their hobbies rate subsidies? Is it really a "failure" of the market system that MFAs and Ph.D.s in the evergreen disciplines fail to grasp the signal in their pitiful starting salaries and the paucity of tenure-track jobs? What gives the guitarist a claim on the public purse that a railway preservationist does not enjoy?

“The New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps at its peak employed 500,000 young people. They lived in camps, planted millions of trees, reclaimed millions of acres of land, built 97,000 miles of fire roads, protected natural habitats, restocked fish and gave emergency help to people threatened by floods.

“We can do that today, by bringing our soldiers home from war and from the military bases we have in 130 countries. We will recruit young people not to fight but to clean up our lakes and rivers, build homes for people in need, make our cities beautiful, be ready to help with disasters like Katrina. The military is having a hard time recruiting young men and women for war, and with good reason. We will have no such problem enlisting the young to build rather than destroy.

There he goes again with those houses. On that military recruitment, follow this and weigh the evidence. Then take a road trip to one of the national forests and note those Corps projects: monoculture tree farms particularly sucsceptible to pests or disease or fire. But the Brain Trust knows what's best.

“We can learn from the Social Security program and the GI Bill of Rights, which were efficient government programs, doing for older people and for veterans what private enterprise could not do. We can go beyond the New Deal, extending the principle of social security to health security with a totally free government-run health system. We can extend the GI Bill of Rights to a Civilian Bill of Rights, offering free higher education for all.

Lovely. Does that mean a two- or four-year degree for all? There are already inefficiently many people in college, with inefficiently much capacity devoted to access-assessment-remediation-retention, and he wishes to have more.

"We will have trillions of dollars to pay for these programs if we do two things: if we concentrate our taxes on the richest 1 percent of the population, not only their incomes but their accumulated wealth, and if we downsize our gigantic military machine, declaring ourselves a peaceful nation.

“We will not pay attention to those who complain that this is ‘big government.’ We have seen big government used for war and to give benefits to the wealthy. We will use big government for the people.”

If there is any consolation, the true believers appending favorable comments to the post are even sillier than Mr Zinn.

THE SIMPLE CASE FOR MIDDLE-CLASS DISCIPLINE.

A City Lab post identifies the crime-reducing effects of property maintenance.  Where the city takes care of its public spaces, there's less crime.  That's also true where property owners take care of their yards.

The most powerful indicators of a decrease in crime were having a lawn, the presence of garden hoses or sprinklers, shrubs, tree cover, percentage of pervious area, and the presence of yard trees. The factors most strongly tied to more crime were the number of small street trees, litter, uncut lawn, and a dried out lawn.

It’s hard not to see the income-related implications of this: If you can afford to live in a leafy neighborhood and maintain a lawn with plentiful bushes and trees, chances are you’re in a safer place than if you live in a trash-strewn block with a dried up, unmowed yard and a bunch of weed trees left unattended along the roadside.

That's not immediately obvious, as those outward signs of prosperity might also be shouting STATE OF THE ART ELECTRONICS or UPSCALE JEWELRY or RIDING MOWER inside.  And a lot of that lawn maintenance gets contracted out, thanks to the Say Aggregation Principle and two income households.  But the author of the research isn't crediting frequent police patrols or expenditures on burglary alert services.

But there’s more to it than that, says author Morgan Grove, who’s also a researcher with the Forest Service. Criminals tend to look for spaces where they can operate without being seen, or where if they’re seen they won’t be reported.

“The level of maintenance of the yard is almost like a neighborhood watch sign saying, ‘We have eyes on the street and we will say something,’” Grove says. “There’s a physical fact, which is that people can see criminals, but also this symbolic meaning that reinforces the social order that people will act upon their own behalf and on behalf of others.”

So mote it be.

CONTEMPLATING MACROECONOMICS.

Lynne Kiesling has a useful summary of the macroeconomics of stimulus failure, with numerous links.  The Say's Law she invokes is the same accounting identity I refer to as the Say Aggregation Principle, which E. J. Mishan demonstrated in 1963 is the same identity students of general equilibrium learn as Walras's Law (the aggregate value of excess demands is zero, in and out of equilbrium; that trailing prepositional phrase is not always fully appreciated by novice economists).

BECAUSE YOU CAN, DOES IT FOLLOW THAT YOU SHOULD?

Kevin Williamson of National Review offers a perspective on intersectionality that you aren't likely to encounter in a Victim Studies class.

I ordered a ribeye, extra rare, and the chef or the waiter or somebody messed it up. I sent it back to the kitchen. A lesbian couple near Uniontown, Ohio, ordered a baby, extra white, and their order got messed up — the sperm bank mistakenly gave them the product of a black man, with the result that their daughter, Payton, is half black. And that’s the problem with treating children as consumer products: You cannot send them back to the kitchen.

In some ways, the consequences of New Age parthenogenesis are the quintessential first-world problem.

While one must pity the poor little girl who is being treated like a defective Honda Civic, it’s a delicious clash of progressive pieties. The mother — and somehow I suspect that I’ll be informed five minutes from now that it is wicked to call the half of the couple who carried the child and gave birth the “mother” — Jennifer Cramblett, among other things complains that it is difficult to find a place to get her daughter a decent haircut. It should be a hoot watching her make that case in court.

Dig deeper, and it ceases to be funny.

The disassembly, now complete, of the triangular linkage of sex, marriage, and procreation is going to present us with even more awkward questions than whether you can sue for breach of warranty if your daughter turns out to be racially other than as originally specified. There is some evidence already of sex-selective abortion in the United States — the opening salvos in an actual war on women — particularly in subcultures that have a strong preference for sons, though data about that is scarce. The reason it is scarce is that we refuse to collect it, and the reason we refuse to collect it is, presumably, that we do not wish to know. If we ever develop a test for a hereditary inclination toward, say, homosexuality, we’ll probably have gay-selective abortions, too.

And, inevitably, the cultural change rot collides with the Say Aggregation Principle.

A model of parenthood dominated by the mandate to satisfy the parents’ needs rather than those of the children will be forever defective. But it is, increasingly, the model we have. It’s a perverse consequence of the times in which we live: Cultural and economic pressures see to it that many young women spend their most fertile years trying desperately to avoid motherhood and then spend their least fertile years trying, with the same desperation, to conceive. It’s cruel.

Yes, and protestations that the old dispensation, in which young women were encouraged to marry and start families, was its own form of cruelty, aren't an adequate response.

THOSE LAWS OF CONSERVATION IN ECONOMICS.

For years, I've been directing readers' attention to the backward-bending labor supply curve and the Say Aggregation Principle as suggesting a change in the labor force participation habits, particularly for higher income individuals or households.

I wonder, though, whether some of the discouraged workers of the ongoing Great Reset are using the straitened economic circumstances as occasion to say no to the most demanding employers.  What's the point of doing the work of four people for twelve hours a day on half your previous salary if "downgrading your expenses" doesn't rule out Internet access or a functioning car or clothing for the kids?

This American Interest discussion of the reduced labor-force participation of "elite women" does not suggest I should rethink my hypotheses.

So while the surveys might seem to vindicate the conservative view that many women would opt for part time work or full-time motherhood if given the choice, they also highlight the fact that this choice is not actually available to the majority of the population—in part because of economic inequality and the lack of social support for low-income mothers. And while they might seem to vindicate the feminist view that true parity in the workplace will come about through government intervention and cultural reform, this view is complicated by the fact that even the most high-achieving women, with the most resources at their disposal, in the most socially progressive generation in history, are planning to put their careers on hold to care for their children.

It's precisely along the upper reaches of the offer curve that the income effect begins to dominate the substitution effect.  And the bourgeois conventions of Mom, Dad, and the kids are more likely to be honored among, well, the bourgeoisie.  Thus, as stuff becomes relatively cheaper ...

Ultimately, the survey data support the narrative Charles Murray put forward in his 2012 blockbuster book, Coming Apart: that the cultural habits of privileged Americans are looking less and less like those of Americans in the working and middle classes. Whether you are a libertarian or a liberal, a feminist or a conservative, that trend should be a cause for concern.

Reason, apparently, for me to stick to my stances that the common schools ought be inculcating bourgeois habits and that the trendy cult of authenticity is enabling dysfunctional behavior, to the disadvantage of the authentically poor.

NOW THEY ARE BEGINNING TO UNDERSTAND. Virginia Postrel comments on a USA Today article that discovers people opting out of the 24/7 treadmill. The article itself might be introduced as a Fourth Turning Alert(TM).

Nobody knows why the change is happening, but there are several possible causes, Galinsky says. "What I hear all the time from young men is that they want to be different than their fathers, who often worked long hours. They want to be more involved in their children's lives."

Many young workers grew up in an era of rising divorce rates and corporate layoffs. "They saw the 'rewards' parents could get for work loyalty," Galinsky says. Gen X'ers and Y'ers also saw stressed-out boomer parents multitasking, Galinsky says. And fears of terrorism may have increased the value of comforting families to young Americans, she says.

There are still incentives at work.

Flexibility at work is a prized benefit for young working moms, according to another recent survey by Galinsky's institute. On a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 most valued), employed mothers gave flexibility a 9.2 and advancement 5.5.

That's not to say working mothers are quitting in droves to go home. Even if they wanted to, most can't afford it. "The idea that mothers work for pin money should have died a long time ago," says Stanford University economist Myra Strober.

More precisely, the death of that idea contributes to the higher labor force participation of women, with the Say Aggregation Principle at work. The existence of no-fault divorce induces additional labor-force participation by married women, for reasons of insurance independent of any reason to help pay a higher price for a house that comes bundled with a better school district.

Ms Postrel notes something else at work.

If you're a highly skilled, highly educated professional, you can make quite a good living these days without working terribly long hours or putting your work first. (You can, of course, make more if you work obsessively. But even the most rationalistic economist believes people maximize utility, not income.) And, contrary to widespread belief in places like LA, Washington, and New York, in most of the United States, a family can live a comfortable middle-class life on middle-class pay, in many cases on a single salary. You won't have every luxury, but you'll have more than your parents.

Sounds like a backward-bending supply curve of labor to me. Regular readers knew about the fallacy of longer hours equating more productivity and about income and substitution effects long ago.

ON MY NIGHTSTAND. Warren and Tyagi's The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents are Going Broke (details or compare prices) has come out in paperback. I will have more to say about its conclusions when I finish, but let me offer the following by way of prologue.

Ultimately, however, it did not matter whether there was a meaningful gap between the schools in the center cities and those in the surrounding suburbs, or whether the streets really were safer far away from the big city. It didn't even matter whether there really was a crisis in public education, as the politicians and the local news might insist. What matters was that parents believed that there was an important difference -- and that the difference was growing. The only answer for millions of loving parents was to buy their way into a decent school district in a safe neighborhood -- whatever the cost.

That's page 28. I'm glad to see the argument that there is school choice -- it comes bundled with a house purchase -- is getting broader circulation. There's more, in the next paragraph.

And so it was that middle-class families across America have been quietly drawn into an all-out war. ... Their war is a bidding war. The opening shots in this war were fired in the most ordinary circumstances. Individual parents sought out homes they thought were good places to bring up kids, just as their parents had done before them. ... Millions of parents joined in the search for a house on a safe street with a good school nearby. Over time, demand heated up for an increasingly narrow slice of the housing stock.

Or perhaps midwived sprawl, although there has to be a gold mine of research topics dealing with the expansion of school districts perceived as "good." What is the supply elasticity of teachers? Let me return to the book.

This in itself would have been enough to trigger a bidding war for suburban homes in good school districts. But a growing number of families brought new artillery to the war: a second income. In an era when the overwhelming majority of mothers are bringing home a paycheck and covering a big part of the family's bills, it is easy to forget that just one generation ago most middle-class mothers -- including those in the workforce -- made only modest contributions to the family's regular expenses.

You just can't avoid the Say Aggregation Principle. It's only logic.

But what is really impressive is a suggestion that surfaces at page 33.

In order to free families from the trap, it is necessary to go to the heart of the problem: public education. Bad schools impose indirect -- but huge -- costs on millions of middle-class families. In their desperate rush to save their children from failing schools, families are literally spending themselves into bankruptcy. The only way to take the pressure off these families is to change the schools.

The concept of public schools is deeply American. It is perhaps the most tangible symbol of opportunity for social and economic mobility for all children, embodying the notion that merit rather than money determines a child's future. But who are we kidding? As parents increasingly believe that the differences among schools will translate into differences in lifetime chances, they are doing everything they can to buy their way into the best public schools. [Colleges, too, although the premium to attending a name college is small to nonexistent. This book will be good for several week's worth of posts.[ Schools in middle-class neighborhoods may be labeled "public," but parents have paid for tuition by purchasing a $175,000 home within a carefully selected school district.

I like it when the bundling argument gets where lots of people, possibly some with more influence than I, might read it. I also like thos (p. 34)

A well-designed voucher program would fit the bill neatly. A taxpayer-funded voucher that paid the entire cost of educating a child (not just a partial subsidy) would open a range of opportunities to all children. ... Fully funded vouchers would relieve parents from the terrible choice of leaving their kids in lousy schools or bankrupting themselves to escape those schools.

And here, in a neat form, is the choice argument packaged with an egalitarian argument. Haven't I been ringing these changes for years?

More, much more, once I finish reading the book.

KUDOS. Atlantic Blog has been recognized by Isra Pundit as Site of the Week. He's also been posting for a year, during which he's been recognized as InstaPundit's "Trans-Atlantic Fisking Squad," at least until reading Fisk got to be too much of a chore. Go on over and wish him many happy returns, and check the progress report on the orphan kitty.

There's an interesting smackdown of a Jeff Madrick column inspired by The No-Frills Middle Class (details or compare prices.) I have a bit more to say about the Madrick column, probably on the weekend, because I can post and watch college football at the same time, and this afternoon is a good time to take some derivatives. For now, let me observe that the Madrick column ties into an extended conversation (noted by Crooked Timber and Joanne Jacobs) involving the battle of the sexes and workplace advancement. For now, let me refresh readers' memories about the Say Aggregation Principle, not in the normative "supply creates its own demand" form trashed by Keynesians, but in the accounting identity form that you might remember as "Income = Wages + Interest + Rent + Profit." In that form, the value of output equals the value of payments to factors. It's an accounting identity independent of equilibrium, and it's germane to any "Two Income Trap." Increased labor force participation by women, accompanied by women and men making children, means the incomes of women translate into both additional output and additional competition for output. Hence, something to dig into more deeply on the weekend. Go Huskies!

PUNISHED FOR BEING COOPERATIVE.

The Chronicle of Higher Education's Tenured Radical spells out the false economies of downsizing in the university.  Read past the following false start for the substance.

[Mid-career academics face] personal responsibilities that can make sustained work on a book difficult for both men and women. Children are born or require a different kind of attention; spousal careers take unexpected turns that create logistical problems; parents age out and require care; sometimes the scholar herself becomes ill. These difficulties reverberate into scholarship: the complexities of the middle decades make sustained writing difficult. Travel to archives becomes increasingly difficult to reconcile with domestic, child-care and dual work schedules.

That's probably as true of middle managers or surgeons or hedge fund managers or other professionals who would like to have a home life of some sort, and the Say Aggregation Principle bites on dual-career families no matter their circumstances.

Now, history's current promotion metric is probably too restrictive, and Professor Potter recognizes that historians might have something to learn from (gasp) economists.

But why must the exercise of continued engagement result in a book? Don’t other aspects of a faculty member scholarly production demonstrate continued engagement and intellectual growth? Any of the things I suggested above might plausibly demonstrate this engagement, as they often do in fields like economics, political science and media studies — to name a few fields.

Yes, and mid-career economists and political scientists might want to have a life, too. (Sticking the single people with additional responsibilities might work, as long as that's where the pay raises and promotions go. But we're talking about higher education.)

The cause of faculty burnout, however, is a rise in scut-work accompanying a shrinking of the faculty.  Regular readers know about this phenomenon.  Read the comments that accompany Professor Potter's post, though, and consider how widespread the disaffection must be.

Being promoted to Associate Professor makes a scholar eligible for endless institutional labor.

That might be manageable with sufficient Associate Professors and Professors to share the work.  Ain't happening.

The “raising of standards” for those on tenure lines has been accompanied by accelerated adjunctification: thus, there are fewer full-time faculty at all ranks and they do more institutional work than they ever have done.

Yes, and the proliferation of computer-based data handling achieves a false economy.

You can add this to the fact that online university systems now substitute for the pink and white collar workers who used to do a great deal of the administrative work and paper pushing of the university. Using the software provided by my university, it can take me up to an hour to process the charges for a research trip; using course platforms or online reserve systems to organize a class can now take up to three or four days; using “student success” software can be a time-suck of gargantuan proportions. This isn’t just true at the level of the university: applying for grants on line is a huge headache because each foundation has its own system, requires its own passwords, and has slightly different requirements (personal statement no longer than four pages/three pages/ 1000 words that is double-spaced/single-spaced/fits in the box below.)

No one has done the research, but I would stand by this assertion: associate profs are being asked to do more scholarship in less aggregate time because, in addition to everything else, they are now doing all their own secretarial and administrative work. Promotion standards need to take into account not just the lack of time, but what this does to the ability to sustain the continuing labor of writing a book – as opposed to articles.

What our current system does by raising expectations, raising the bar for promotion, and keeping pay flat, is to create a high level of burnout at the level of associate professor.

I'd add to that list the introduction of password-protected submission management systems by the journals.  It's probably more convenient for authors who can compose on the keyboard, convert their Scientific Word to a PDF, and upload the works.  But when an unsolicited request to do refereeing comes in, with some peremptory request to register someplace and go through all the password rigamarole, I tend to ignore it, and reserve the right to advise the editor that I'm calling it a career shortly.

On the other hand, it is the duty of the tenured faculty to say no to administrative requests that are not essential.  Hell, it's probably a good idea to ask the maker of any such request to justify it, and to propose a compensatory reduction of duties elsewhere if the most recent request is justifiable.

REVEALED PREFERENCES. The allegations of rape by members of the Duke lacrosse team are without merit. Professor K. C. Johnson's Durham-in-Wonderland has done yeoman work addressing the failures both of the prosecutor and of the university administration, and the follies of assorted vanguardists on the faculty. But I have to wonder if the case tells us more about the administration and the vanguardists than simply their capacity to be outraged. Start with an observation by LaShawn Barber.

I’ve had the misfortune of knowing the type of privileged, ungrateful professors who inexplicably paint themselves as “victims” of “white male privilege.” They sounded stupid to me even when I was younger and liberal. I’d agree with what William Anderson, an assistant professor of economics at Frostburg State University, said about the Group of 88: “These young men represented everything these faculty members despised, and they were not going to permit something as bourgeois as truth stand in the way of their attempt to remake Duke University in their own image.”

The rot, dear readers, starts at the top. Consider the "Letter to the Duke Community" President Richard H. Brodhead issued on April 5, 2006.

Compounding and intensifying these issues of race and gender, they include concerns about the deep structures of inequality in our society—inequalities of wealth, privilege, and opportunity (including educational opportunity), and the attitudes of superiority those inequalities breed. And they include concerns that, whether they intend to or not, universities like Duke participate in this inequality and supply a home for a culture of privilege. The objection of our East Campus neighbors was a reaction to an attitude of arrogant inconsiderateness that reached its peak in the alleged event but that had long preceded it. I know that to many in our community, this student behavior has seemed to be the face of Duke.

There is more of the same in his January 8, 2007 "Letter to the Duke Community."

One thing that has made this event so difficult is that particular charges against individuals have tended to be conflated with larger community issues of race, gender, privilege, and respect. During these hard months, some have seemed to imply that if you insist on the students' innocence, then you must not care about the underlying issues. Others have seemed to suggest that if you insist on the underlying issues, then you must not care about fair treatment for the students.

But it is essential that we separate the legal case from the larger cultural issues and give each its separate, appropriate response. The Campus Culture Initiative, begun last year and due to report this spring, is not a referendum on the party last March. It is an effort to visualize the best community we could make for students to grow and learn in, a community of mutual respect and vibrant mutual engagement. It will be all of our work to advance toward that goal. I see this as a chance to build on existing strengths in our educational experience and to press toward higher ambitions: the latest chapter in Duke's long history of self-improvement.

That's about what Betsy Newmark anticipated in her Raleigh News-Observer column.

I expect we’ll hear instead calls for healing. The players will be urged to get on with their lives and not to focus on suing Durham or the D.A. They’ll be reminded that Durham is not a wealthy county and can’t afford an expensive civil suit.

Those who were quick to say that this story was emblematic of racism at elite colleges will say that the lesson is still true, even though this one specific story was a hoax. Wahneema Lubiano, the Duke professor of African and American Studies who led the group of 88 who published that ad, wrote back in May that, no matter the outcome, the whole story exposed deeper truths about racism on Duke’s campus. Expect that storyline to be repeated if the charges are all dropped. The song of “fake but accurate” will be sung again.

In another News-Observer column, Duke English professor Cathy Davidson reconsiders her position, while continuing to maintain that it's more important to denounce what happened rather than find out what happened first.

Last April I added my name to an ad published in the Duke Chronicle. The ad said that we faculty were listening to the anguish of students who felt demeaned by racist and sexist remarks swirling around in the media and on the campus quad in the aftermath of what happened on March 13 in the lacrosse house.

The insults, at that time, were rampant. It was as if defending David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann necessitated reverting to pernicious stereotypes about African-Americans, especially poor black women. Many black students at Duke disappeared into humiliation and rage as the lacrosse players were being elevated to the status of martyrs, innocent victims of reverse racism.

As it turned out, 87 other faculty members were alarmed at this distressing side-effect of the lacrosse incident and signed the ad. I am positive I am not the only professor who was and continues to be adamant about the necessity for fair and impartial legal proceedings for David, Collin and Reade while also being dismayed by the glaring social disparities implicit in what we know happened on March 13.

A team of distinguished athletes at an elite and highly respected university hired two local women to strip at a house filled with men (including those underage) who had been drinking too much. That's sleazy, to say the least. That those women were women of color underscores the appalling power dynamics of the situation.

As a professor at Duke, I felt shame when the media's account of the behavior in the lacrosse house came to stand for all Duke students and the institution itself. So many students, faculty and administrators here work hard to live down our unflattering old segregation nickname, "the Plantation." Yet after March 13, Duke again came to symbolize (seemingly for the entire world) the most lurid and sexualized form of race privilege.

What, did all these academic hotshots wake up one morning and discover, "hey, we're working in a gilded ghetto, the academic equivalent of a gated community?" Professor Davidson continues,

We are in the midst of a social disaster where 18 percent of the American population lives below the poverty line and a disproportionate number of those are African-American. We live in the midst of a social disaster where 30 percent of our students do not graduate from high school (making the U.S. No. 17 in the world). We live in the midst of a social disaster where women's salaries for similar jobs are substantially less than men's (and, as of this year, starting to go down again, not up). We live in the midst of a social disaster where we do not have national health care or affordable childcare. And we live in a situation where a group of white athletes at a prominent university can get drunk and call out for a stripper the way they would a pizza.

As if a few college athletes hiring out a stripper is bidding up the price of childcare (hint: Say Aggregation Principle and power couples, many with professional degrees) or, more troublingly, as if an English professor has taken the time to understand "broken down by occupation, experience, and industry."

As if President Brodhead and Professor Davidson and the rest of the priviligentsia who signed that faculty letter have done anything concrete to address the "social disaster" she identifies. These people are working at Duke. The president used to be a high-level administrator at Yale. Have any of these people ever hired out at Temple or Wayne State or DePaul or Anonymous Community or any of the other institutions of higher learning where faculty struggle to establish their professional reputations while dealing with the perception that their work can't be as good as the stuff being done at Yale or at Duke and while attempting to work with precisely the students who those presidential letters and that op-ed suggests are being disrespected by the Dukies? (Sorry about the run-on sentence.) The disrespect begins with the administration and with the faculty, revealing a preference to mau-mau some of their students and condemn real or imagined social inequities, while leaving the real work of improving the lot of less-privileged students to invisible others. Mere de crisse, calisse d'tabarnac.