Quotes of the week

There’s such a direct correlation between how much money you have and what you’re able to do or not do with your budget parameters. We’re better off as indie filmmakers studying South Korean filmmakers or Eastern European filmmakers — artists who have to do a lot with little. I admire the aesthetic of, say, the Duplass Brothers’ movies, but there are ways to bring bigger production value to indie movies without having gobs of money.--Steve Taylor

I fear that in the current climate the goal of "women's rights," with the compliance of politically motivated government policy and the tacit complicity of college administrators, runs the risk of grounding our most cherished institutions in a veritable snake pit of injustice—not unlike the very injustices the movement itself has for so long sought to correct. Unbridled feminist orthodoxy is no more the answer than are attitudes and policies that victimize the victim.--Judith Grossman

There is one thing present: That powerful human need to help. That is our hope -- in Boston, in Newtown, in Oklahoma City, in Columbine. People run toward the danger. People apply pressure to stop the bleeding. People send money they need. People pray for men and women and children they never met. People do stop attacks before they unleash and notice bombs before they go off.
...
Yes, this is our hope. All through the night, people in Boston wrote and talked about the terror and the pain, of course, but what was so striking is that they also wrote and talked about small kindnesses and large ones. They wrote and talked about the spirit of their city, and how it can never be broken. It was haunting and beautiful. And it was deeply true. This is something we hold on to in the moments of darkness.--Joe Posnanski


Rest in Peace Pat Summerall. You let sports breathe. You let Madden talk. And in an age where we so often use too many words to say too little, you let our imaginations fill in the gap.--Joe Posnanski

Susan Patton beats Erin Callan

I'm hoping my girls beat both.

Erin Callan helped perpetuate (or, perhaps, 'perpetrate') the financial crisis, as the Lehman CFO who reported that her firm was healthy when it was, in fact, dead bank walking.  But her bigger regret seems to be that her job came before her relationships and herself, according to her own words:

Sometimes young women tell me they admire what I’ve done. As they see it, I worked hard for 20 years and can now spend the next 20 focused on other things. But that is not balance. I do not wish that for anyone. Even at the best times in my career, I was never deluded into thinking I had achieved any sort of rational allocation between my life at work and my life outside.

On the other hand, Susan Patton is drawing the ire of feminists and the politically correct police with her letter on how women do need men, and need to compete hard for the good ones.  It looks like the internets have crashed The Daily Princetonian after publishing her letter.  A cached version can be found here.  From Patton's piece:

Men regularly marry women who are younger, less intelligent, less educated. It’s amazing how forgiving men can be about a woman’s lack of erudition, if she is exceptionally pretty. Smart women can’t (shouldn’t) marry men who aren’t at least their intellectual equal. As Princeton women, we have almost priced ourselves out of the market. Simply put, there is a very limited population of men who are as smart or smarter than we are. And I say again — you will never again be surrounded by this concentration of men who are worthy of you. 

Of course, once you graduate, you will meet men who are your intellectual equal — just not that many of them. And, you could choose to marry a man who has other things to recommend him besides a soaring intellect. But ultimately, it will frustrate you to be with a man who just isn’t as smart as you.

Here is another truth that you know, but nobody is talking about. As freshman women, you have four classes of men to choose from. Every year, you lose the men in the senior class, and you become older than the class of incoming freshman men. So, by the time you are a senior, you basically have only the men in your own class to choose from, and frankly, they now have four classes of women to choose from. Maybe you should have been a little nicer to these guys when you were freshmen? 

If I had daughters, this is what I would be telling them.

Mrs. Cav heartily agrees with Patton, and has saved this for our daughters to ponder when they are closer to college age.

The Bible and science agree:  making healthy babies who will make more healthy babies is a prime directive that cannot be denied, no matter how many protestors march on Washington.

UPDATE:
All the newspapers, all the tongues of to-day will of course at first defame what is noble; but you who hold not of to-day, not of the times, but of the Everlasting, are to stand for it: and the highest compliment, man ever receives from heaven, is the sending to him its disguised and discredited angels.--Ralph Waldo Emerson

UPDATE:  Ed Glaeser weighs in, affirmatively.  Anecdotally, this blogger met his wife at Cornell, where we were both undergraduates.

Easter weekend quotes

... we note that the founder of Christianity was a rule breaker. There wasn’t a PC bone in his body. He hung out with prostitutes, thieves, terrorists and collaborators with Rome.  He was notorious for shoving the rulebook aside when it got in love’s way.--Walter Russell Mead

People moving to the city have been illogical risk takers from the beginning. and the key is probably they like the sexual or mating opportunities inherent in large groups. Playing to that angle would bring in hipsters and gays. As to whether that's the key to the health of cities or our nation, I doubt it, but it won't hurt, especially because one of the best ways of making a city fun to go out in is that it's safe for young women.--Eric Falkenstein

The longer the road from sexual maturity to marriage, the more complicated the underlying cost-benefit calculus in any given relationship becomes, and the more difficult it becomes for people with fewer resources to figure out the wisest course to take. So while the new romantic landscape doesn’t offer automatic benefits to the upper class and automatic costs to everyone else, it does create a situation where the people who need the least help figuring out the wisest life course have multiple clear paths to take, and the people who would most benefit from a simple map to responsible adulthood can easily end up in a maze instead.--Ross Douthat

... all economists are, definitionally, very good at college.  Not all economists are good at marriage.  Saying that more people should go to college will make 0% of your colleagues feel bad.  Saying that more people should get married and stay married will make a significant fraction of your colleagues feel bad.  And in general, most people have an aversion to topics which are likely to trigger a personal grudge in a coworker.--Megan McArdle

History scorns the people who lived outside Auschwitz and Treblinka, with their weak protests of ignorance. How will history treat us, I wonder?--Tony Woodlief

My homeowner insurance doesn't cover the cost when my gutters need cleaning, and my car insurance doesn't cover the cost when I need to fill the tank with gas. Instead, the policies cover only catastrophic events, like my house burning down or a major accident. Now that the Obama administration has fixed the health insurance system, I trust they will soon move on to solve these other problems.--Greg Mankiw

I wonder if [Paul Krugman] (and all the others who are pushing for more controls) are not having a “Smoot-Hawley Moment”. In 1929 tariffs and other restrictions on trade were established. A global depression followed. In 2013 the tariffs and restrictions are on money, not goods. But if the result of those controls is a reduction (or even stability) of the external debt numbers, then the global economies will fall with it.--Bruce Krasting

Military and economic catastrophes are, by their nature, unpredictable. While we can’t plan on one, prudence requires that we take their possibility into account. In normal times, when we are lucky enough to enjoy peace and prosperity, the debt-to-G.D.P. ratio shouldn’t just be stable; it should be falling. That has generally been the case throughout our history, and it should become the case again as we look forward.   The bottom line is that President Obama is right that sustainability is a reasonable benchmark for evaluating long-run fiscal policy. But the standard he applies when evaluating it appears too easy. It will leave us too vulnerable when the next catastrophe strikes.--Greg Mankiw

Bitcoin isn’t tied to any commodity—besides trust. As a statement on the global economy, Bitcoin is hilarious. As a currency for the disenfranchised and distrustful, it’s as serious as can be.--Paul Ford

... a firm basis for religious freedom would be found in the Bible, supremely in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. "I did not come to judge the world," Jesus told his followers, "but to save it." Here is an Easter story—a message of the grace of God toward every human soul—for believers and doubters alike.--Joseph Loconte

Quotes of the day

Economics evolved as a more moral and more egalitarian approach to policy than prevailed in its surrounding milieu. Let’s cherish and extend that heritage. The real contributions of economics to human welfare might turn out to be very different from what most people — even most economists — expect. --Tyler Cowen

In the longer run, the solution to the economic plight of high school dropouts and other low skilled persons is, as I have argued in previous blog posts, to ease the obstacles to boys and girls from poorer backgrounds that prevent them from finishing high school and getting additional training after high school, such as learning to drive trucks or work with computers. In the shorter run, it would be desirable to replace the welfare benefits that discourages many low skilled individuals from working with an expanded earned income tax credit that does the opposite and encourages them to work.--Gary Becker

In Ms. Sandberg's ideal world, "half our institutions are run by women and half our homes are run by men." Until this utopia comes to pass, it might be wise to take another look at "society." Society is, after all, a fancy word for other people. And what is society actually telling women these days? It is telling them that they ought to go out and earn a string of degrees qualifying them for hard-charging careers that the majority of them eventually discover that they don't actually want. As a result, many of them quietly cut back their hours and do what they actually want to do and do very well: make homes for their families. Sheryl Sandberg isn't one of them, and more power to her. But she is likely to find that nagging men and women to change their natures is a more daunting task than anything she does at her day job.--Charlotte Allen

Because pursuit of the truth is often irrelevant in evolutionary competition, humans have an evolved tendency to hold self-favoring priors and self-deceive about the existence of these priors in ourselves, even though we frequently observe them in others.--Eli Dourado

The minimum wage is far from the most harmful regulation on the books.  Why then do I make such a big deal about it?  Because it is a symbol of larger evils.
...
From the standpoint of public policy, the minimum wage is a symbol of the view that "feel-good" policies are viable solutions to social ills: "Workers aren't paid enough?  Pass a law so employers have to pay them more.  Problem solved."  From the standpoint of social science, the minimum wage is a symbol of the myopic view that you can become an expert on X by reading nothing but the leading research that explicitly addresses X: "Does the minimum wage reduce employment?  Read the top papers on the minimum wage.  Problem solved."
...
We need to get rid of the minimum wage.  But that's only a first step.  Our ultimate goal should be to get rid of the errors that the minimum wage has come to represent.--Bryan Caplan

Quotes of the day

... if a male writer wanted to “analyze” gender differences by using a combination of misleading statistics about women, unscientific snapshots of particular men who seem like real go-getters, and musings about how men are adaptive and resilient and possess greater vision, he’d rightly get slapped down for shoddy thinking and poor journalism. What say in the interest of gender equality we hold Rosin to the same standard?--Tony Woodlief

Medical care is famously immune to the usual market incentives; the patient has little reason to make a cost-benefit tradeoff. Doctors and hospitals hardly do either; indeed the opposite seems to be the case. Matters are made all the worse, ironically, by the continual improvements in medicine – improvements which often treat what was previously untreatable, and which improve on existing treatments but at a higher cost.--Rick Brookstaber

I've done several types of work over the years but I don't know another as counterintuitive as startup investing. The two most important things to understand about startup investing, as a business, are (1) that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners, and (2) that the best ideas look initially like bad ideas.--Paul Graham

In his State of the Union address earlier this year, President Obama declared, “I will not cede the wind or solar or battery industry to China . . . because we refuse to make the same commitment here.” Given what’s really happening in China, he may want to think again.--PATRICK CHOVANEC

I was asked whether the new Fed policy will enable Obama’s big spending plans for his second term.  I doubt it.  The policy initiative is too small to decisively impact growth or the deficit, but large enough to take away support for further fiscal stimulus.  Obama will be forced to adopt Simpson/Bowles-style austerity during his second term.  There’s no longer any point in even wasting keystrokes on Mitt’s plans.  He’s done—put a fork in him.--Scott Sumner

Talk show transcript excerpt of the day

Larry King: What, Professor, puzzles you the most? What do you think about the most?
Stephen Hawking: Women
Larry King: Welcome aboard.

Source here.

Quotes of the day

Ludwig van Beethoven, widely considered one of the greatest composers in history, died on this day in 1827. Beethoven moved to Vienna from Germany in his early twenties where he became a virtuoso pianist, before beginning to lose his hearing. Some attributed his loss of hearing to his habit of lowering his head into ice-cold water in order to stay awake and continue practicing, though today this theory is dismissed. Despite the composers failed hearing, Beethoven remained committed to the creation of his art. He stayed sane, and even warded off thoughts of suicide, through devotion to virtue and to becoming accepted as an artist amongst the other musical craftsman of his day. It is widely believed that in the age of television and consumer distractions, another Ludwig van Beethoven will not develop.--Don Miller

Smart lad to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.--A.E. Housman

I try not to lose too many yards on sacks. When you realize that you don’t run very well, you try to get the ball out of your hands as fast as you can. Because when the ball’s in my hands, nothing good is happening. But other players have different strengths.--Tom Brady

"Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. Simon and his companions went to look for him, and when they found him, they exclaimed: 'Everyone is looking for you!' Jesus replied, 'Let us go somewhere else — to the nearby villages — so I can preach there also. That is why I have come.'"--Mark 1:35-38

In other words, sooner or later, everyone gets tired of his own hype.--Charles P. Pierce

I can't begin to tell you the impact [Tebow]'s had on my daughter [Kelly Faughnan, who has a brain tumor]. She's very positive, and she tries so hard, but she's had a struggle. Tim Tebow has built her self-confidence up so much -- taught her to believe in herself -- that when I see people criticize him, I'm just dumbfounded. I don't get it. It's almost incomprehensible to me. I don't understand why anyone wouldn't want to see an athlete use his position and platform to do good for people.--Kelly's dad

Mrs. Thatcher was the first and only woman ever to have led a major British political party, and remains so to this day. She was the first woman prime minister in the English-speaking world and the longest-serving British prime minister of either sex since universal suffrage.

...

Even in 2011, only one important Western country—Germany—is led by a woman. Whatever the sterling qualities of Chancellor Angela Merkel, one must judge it highly unlikely that she will be the subject of a major feature film 20 years after she retires. Mrs. Thatcher was, in effect, the one and only woman. That unique status still fascinates.

...

And this Lady was first called "Iron" not by her admirers but by her enemies. After becoming leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, Mrs. Thatcher opened a new, controversial front in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. She questioned the then fashionable idea of "detente." Soviet communism, she argued, should not be accommodated. It should be overcome—by repairing the defensive military strength of the NATO alliance and by holding out to the subjugated peoples of the Soviet bloc the promise of Western liberty.

...

Not many people in the West agreed with her at the time, except one Ronald Reagan, and he was just an ex-governor of California with a dream of running for president.

...

After Mrs. Thatcher had made a couple of stirring speeches on this theme, the Soviet Red Army newspaper Red Star christened her "The Iron Lady." In doing so, it intended to make a satirical comparison with Otto von Bismarck, the 19th-century "Iron Chancellor" of Germany and to paint her as rigid and harsh.

...

And since 2010, as the debt problem gradually mutated from individuals to banks to entire countries, one of Margaret Thatcher's loneliest battles—her effort in the late 1980s to stop the integration of the European Community (subsequently given the grander title of the European Union)—has begun belatedly to win respect.

...

Indeed, it was Mrs. Thatcher herself, a couple of years after she left office, who identified the problem with European construction. It was, she said, "infused with the spirit of yesterday's future." It made the "central intellectual mistake" of assuming that "the model for future government was that of a centralized bureaucracy." As she concluded, "The day of the artificially constructed megastate is gone."

...

There is precious little sign that today's European leaders want to listen to what Mrs. Thatcher said. The manic building of a continental megastate continues apace. But Margaret Thatcher's legacy will never be one of elite consensus. As the Western world sinks deeper into obfuscation, it is her habit of tackling the hard bit of every question that continues to look good and to seem more relevant than ever.--Charles Moore

In my opinion, they’ve turned the NYU graduate film degree into swag for James Franco’s purposes, a possession, something you can buy.--Professor José Angel Santana, who gave Franco a 'D' and then was fired

[Homeless couple Scott and Whitney] have the spending power of a couple earning nearly $50,000 each year, without the burden of having to work. They wake up around 9 a.m. each day, an hour when most New Yorkers are at their desks after a long commute over the subways. In short, this is not a sad story about an impoverished duo. It’s the romantic story of a couple who have figured out that they can live quite well without jobs or a home.--John Carney

Wilpon asked Selig to strike the provision requiring him to enable and assist David Einhorn in his pursuit of majority ownership, if Wilpon couldn’t repay him. The idea would be that Selig would play the bad cop. When Major League Baseball put the kibosh on Einhorn, Wilpon would have plausible deniability, and could throw up his hands and say, ‘What can I do? This is how MLB works.'--Howard Megdal

Our union members and staff have participated in many OWS actions, and we have endorsed OWS’ important message that corporate greed and economic inequality are wrong. So we were disappointed to learn that last week people associated with Occupy Wall Street disrupted the set of an episode of Law & Order: SVU, written and produced by members of the WGAE, and crewed by other entertainment industry union members. The demonstrators’ actions were as misguided and inappropriate as the City of New York’s response – revoking Law & Order’s permit for the shoot and directing the dismantling of its set. Presumably the protesters and police did not set out to achieve a common end but together they prevented the scene from being filmed and the story from being told. Freedom of speech is freedom of speech, whether it is the OWS demonstrators’ right to peacefully assemble and protest without fear of retribution or Law & Order’s ability to film in the streets of New York and tell its stories without fear of vandalism from protesters or overreaction by the police.--The Writers Guild of America

Even before the protesters were displaced on Nov. 15, Trinity gave many of them hot chocolate, blankets and a place to rest at a space owned by the church. But when the Occupy movement expressed an interest in setting up an organizing camp on vacant Trinity property at Canal Street and Avenue of the Americas, the church said no. The Occupy Wall Street forces then directed their skills at the church: They took their arguments to the streets. In familiar fashion, police officers converged on the area, standing around the perimeter. A flier distributed by protesters summed up their mood: “While the event may include a reoccupation, the event itself is a broader celebration and expansion of Occupy Wall Street,” it said. It also advised people to bring backpacks, warm clothes and sleeping bags. About 3 p.m., several hundred people began to slowly march along the blocks around the park. They went about five blocks north, then circled back. They were carrying homemade wooden ladders, draped with yellow banners. At Grand Street, the protesters made a move: They threw a ladder fashioned into a portable staircase against a chain-link fence separating the sidewalk from the church’s property. Many people went over the fence that way. Others lifted the fence from the bottom, allowing protesters to squeeze into the space.--AL BAKER and COLIN MOYNIHAN

[If you want to benefit from the seven fat years] you must suffer the seven lean years too, even the catastrophically lean ones. We need free markets, but we need them to be principled.--Emanuel Derman

And now nobody remembers from where Christmas comes
All the festivals and cultures and praise for the sun
Or the charity or giving, how it spread through the land
Then was rightly taken up by our Lord, the Son of Man
Now it’s all about the Benjamins, Bentleys, and bling
And how much in revenues each store can bring.--J.G.C. Wise

Image links here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

New study shows no gender differences in math abilities

here.

I believe that gender differences exist, because (among other things) I believe in Darwin's sexual selection theory.

I wonder why Morocco and Tunisia are the best counterfactuals that authors can trot out.  For one thing, they are rather distinctively different in culture from much of the educated world.  For another, they only achieve approximately 5% and 10% the GDP per capita of the U.S.

I have a theory that math abilities can converge in lower socioeconomic subcultures, and diverge in higher socioeconomic cohorts. The findings of this study would seem to support that theory.

I think there's some more wood to chop here.  But I am ready to eliminate math ability as a gender difference.

Quotes of the day

Today's young women make $1.17 for every $1 their moms earned back in 1980. Young men, however, are earning 10 cents per dollar less than their fathers did 30 years ago, new research shows.--Annalyn Censky

Big losers had to have been small losers first. You have to be down 2% before you can be down 5% before you can get down 10% and so on. Cut your losers at the knees before they cut your throat.--Michael Martin

It's a cliche to say risk management is the combination of art and science. You need to know something about history, statistics, and programming to be useful as a risk manager. You also need common sense, and that is best informed by experience ...--Eric Falkenstein

... now it’s looking increasingly as though Corzine demonstrated virtually all of the pathologies of the rogue trader more generally. Lots of financial firms make big bets and blow up. But what we saw at MF Global was much more than that. In fact, as Corzine detailed at great length in his prepared testimony last week, his big sovereign-debt bet didn’t actually lose money at all. But MF Global died all the same, because the bet was so large and risky that it caused a fatal cascade of downgrades and margin calls.--Felix Salmon

In a democracy people are free to express and debate their opinions. This is valuable in itself. But it has also been held to be instrumentally important because it is claimed that through open free debate true ideas will conquer false ones by their merit. Democracy thus has an epistemic value as a kind of truth machine. In a democracy therefore there should be no dogma, no knowledge that cannot be questioned. Not only is this view mistaken, but it is so obviously wrong that it is astonishing that it has ever been taken seriously.--Philosopher's Beard

“Public choice” economics explores the problems of concentrated interests. There are fewer corn farmers than taxpayers, and the gains from ethanol subsidies are large for each corn farmer, while the costs per taxpayer are quite small. The costs of coordination and the financial incentives mean the farmers will get their way so long as the government has the power to subsidize or penalize. This simple dynamic explains much of how our government allocates resources.

...

And, unlike Marx or Citizens United, it is something the Tea Party and Occupy can agree upon. Although it may seem far-fetched at first glance, if Occupy found common ground with the Tea Party or the sentiments behind it, much could be done politically. After all, there are many 99 percents. But so far, Occupy has absorbed or been co-opted by various one percents.

...

For example, in education policy, teachers are the one percent, while students and parents are the 99 percent. But it is generally the power of the concentrated teachers’ unions that drives decisions about education spending and policy. The fact that teachers unions support Occupy undermines its power. A true movement of the 99 percents would be on the side of students, not teachers.

...

Examples abound that cut across typical ideological lines. For instance, military contractors are the one percent, while soldiers and the citizens they defend are the 99 percent. It is for this reason that in the recent census, 7 out of the 10 richest counties surround Washington, D.C.--M. Todd Henderson

Any time someone gets fired, a manager has failed. He or she hired the wrong person, moved someone into the wrong job, or screwed up in some other way. When it’s necessary to show an employee the door, it’s going to be because we’ve tried and failed to fix whatever in the relationship and the structure wasn’t working. It’s never going to be because the person fits a category that someone has outlined for us. That, in fact, is the opposite of leadership.--Liz Ryan

Fail a lot before you are paying for the failure….I got fired or asked to leave from all my jobs.--Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga

In 2002, a schoolteacher with previously normal sexual desire began experiencing sexual desires that he was not used to. He began looking at child pornography and engaging in sexual activity that was not common to him before this point. Little did he know, he had an egg-shaped tumor in the orb frontal cortex of his brain, and when he had the tumor removed his sexual desires stopped. A little while later the desires reappeared, so he went back to the doctor’s office. Lo and behold, the tumor had returned to the same region of his brain.--Mike Friesen

... changing your offense makes all your seniors freshmen.--unattributed

In the same way that there are people who never thought they'd see a black American president, there are also people who never thought they'd see a black basketball star dressed like a nerd.  ... If you happen to be someone who looks at Durant, James, or Amar'e Stoudemire's Foot Locker commercials — in which he stalks along a perilously lit basketball court wearing a letterman's cardigan, a skinny tie, and giant black glasses (his are prescription) — and wonders how the NBA got this way, how it turned into Happy Days, you're really wondering the same thing about the rest of mainstream black culture. When did everything turn upside down? Who relaxed the rules? Is it really safe to look like Carlton Banks?--Wesley Morris

On Dec. 12, 1991, [Paul] Kunz set up a Web interface based on a Web server to search a popular database of particle physics literature at Stanford, and sent an email to Tim Berners-Lee about it. It was the first Web site in North America and one of the first dozen in the world.--Liz Gannes

The smartest worriers are learning to code or marrying a developer.--Howard Lindzon

By virtue of its size, business model and popularity, Facebook is the rare company that doesn't need Wall Street to go public. It should press home the advantage and blaze a trail for others to follow.

...

Mr. Zuckerberg's has two options: a traditional IPO, in which banks distribute shares to investors in exchange for a percentage of total proceeds; and the little-used "Dutch auction" that cuts out the Wall Street middlemen by making the allocation of shares dependent on prices bid by each investor.

...

The biggest difference between the two systems, apart from the lower fees paid by companies in auctions, is that when IPOs go Dutch, banks don't choose who gets shares, giving all investors a fair shake and avoiding potential conflicts of interests.

...

This is particularly important for "hot" IPOs, like Facebook. Since these deals often record sharp rises in the first days of trading, there is a temptation for banks to dole out shares to their favorite investor clients, who stand to profit if they get in early.

...

Wall Street's penchant for being both poacher and gamekeeper has left banks with conflicted loyalties; they take companies public while at the same time trying to keep hedge funds and other high-paying customers satisfied.--FRANCESCO GUERRERA

Image links here, here, here, here and here.

Quotes of the day

Ironically, the topic of [my Harvard economics] lecture that the protesters chose to boycott was economic inequality, including a discussion of recent trends and their causes.

...

like most economists, I don’t view the study of economics as laden with ideology. Most of us agree with Keynes, who said: “The theory of economics does not furnish a body of settled conclusions immediately applicable to policy. It is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique for thinking, which helps the possessor to draw correct conclusions.”

...

That is not to say that economists understand everything. The recent financial crisis, economic downturn and meager recovery are vivid reminders that we still have much to learn. Widening economic inequality is a real and troubling phenomenon, albeit one without an obvious explanation or easy solution. A prerequisite for being a good economist is an ample dose of humility.

...

My fervent hope is that any students who are still protesting the class will return — and that, while recognizing our limitations, they will learn from us what they can. A few might choose to become economic researchers themselves. Their contributions will surely be welcome. They might even improve the next generation of textbooks.--Greg Mankiw

"Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae" which translated from Latin means "Truth for Christ and the Church."--Harvard motto, adopted in 1692

If there’s any strong ideological undercurrent in Mankiw’s teaching, I would say that it’s Nerdism: the belief that people should listen to, and learn from, nerds…. Because believe me—and I say this with genuine respect and affection—Mankiw is a nerd’s nerd.--Connel Fullenkamp

Down-on-her-luck protester Tracy Postert spent 15 days washing sidewalks and making sandwiches at Zuccotti Park — then landed a dream job at a Financial District investment firm thanks to a high-powered passer-by who offered her work.--CYNTHIA R. FAGEN

I'm in the sort of sustainability space around kind of bringing synergistic value-add to other people's work around this kind of space.--Dan Palotta's Valley Girl 2.0

You should meet this guy with the SIO. He's sort of this kind of social entrepreneur thinking outside of the box in the sustainability space and working on these ideas around sort of web-based social media, and he's in a round two capital raise in the VP space with the people at SVNP.--Dan Palotta, again

It was fifeteen years ago today that Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan gave his famous "irrational exurberance" speech, suggesting that U.S. equities were overvalued.

...

Between then and now, on an annualized basis,
the return on the U.S. stock market has been 5.55 percent.
the return on the U.S. bond market has been 5.98 percent.
Score that as one point for Alan.--Greg Mankiw

America looks like Mexico of the 70’s – 90’s. The last election cycle brought us the biggest economic crisis in 70 years. The next election will be no different. Dozens of landmines have been planted. They are timed to go off in 2013. Some may be fixed, others kicked further down the road. However the odds of the country addressing all of the things that have been programmed to explode is, in my opinion, close to zero. One or more of these things is going to trip us up. There are too many big issues to confront. When history looks at this period it will point to the incredible mismanagement of the economy that has taken place. A crisis is being programmed. It will go off like clockwork; it is now set on autopilot. I blame the partisan politics in D.C. for setting the country up for a big fall. But the reality is that the politicians are deeply divided because the voters are equally divided.--Bruce Krasting

Why are men less willing to work with a woman who attempts to negotiate?--John Carney

1) Does imprisonment reduce crime? Yes.
2) Do many crimes cause considerable harm and hardships to victims? Yes.
3) Does America imprison too many people?  In light of my answers to 1) and 2) you might expect my answer to this question to be “no”, but it is a strong “yes”.--Gary Becker

Hang up some stained glass windows. Where? I don’t know. I’m not in charge of logistics. My job is awesome ideas. And nothing says old school like a 3,000 pound stained glass window.--Jon Acuff

Image links here, here, here and here.

Quotes of the day

... much of the money raised from any “millionaire” tax hikes would go to fund the growing phenomenon of public-sector millionaires. How’s that? Well, most dictionaries define a millionaire as someone with wealth (i.e., assets) of $1 million. By that definition, many New York teachers and the vast majority of police and firefighters are millionaires, because the “net present value” of their retirement benefits is well in excess of $1 million. ... City pension costs have jumped from about 4 percent of city tax revenues to 20 percent over the past decade, crowding out other vital public investments.--LAWRENCE MONE

Who but Bernie Madoff guarantees [a return of 8% on his NYC pension] permanently?--Joel Klein

When President Barack Obama jets to Scranton, Pa., Wednesday to promote his jobs package, he'll log his 56th event in a presidential battleground state this year, putting him well ahead of President George W. Bush's record-breaking swing-state travel in 2003. Mr. Obama's extensive travels this year have opened the president to criticism from Republicans that he is intertwining campaigning and governing at a time when he has called for bipartisanship on intractable national problems. Most of the cost is typically borne by taxpayers.--JONATHAN WEISMAN And CAROL E. LEE

Over the last two years gun ownership among Democrats (including Independents who lean towards the Democrats) surged a staggering 10 percentage points from 30% to 40%, while Republican ownership was essentially unchanged ... Second, the number of women who reported household gun ownership also surged by 10 percentage points to 43%, whereas male ownership was essentially unchanged. I'm really not sure what this all means, except clearly female Democrats appear to be a lot more uncomfortable with the reality of the Ice Age than male Republicans do.--Albert Edwards

In my more cynical moments, I can even imagine this winning Best Picture.--Jeffrey Overstreet

Gender divides in higher education

reported by Mark Perry. Degrees mostly conferred to women:

87% Family and consumer sciences/human sciences
85% Health professions and related clinical sciences
82% Public administration and social service professions
79% Education
77% Psychology

Degrees mostly conferred to men:

84% Engineering and engineering technologies
82% Computer and information sciences and support services
67% Theology and religious vocations
62% Philosophy and religious studies
59% Physical sciences and science technologies

Photo link here.

Quotes of the day

... Mr. Buffett didn’t build his $10 billion-plus stake in I.B.M. overnight. He started buying eight months ago, beginning in March. You wouldn’t have known that if you had been studiously reading Berkshire Hathaway’s filings — known as 13Fs — in which companies must disclose stock holdings. There was no mention of I.B.M. in Berkshire’s quarterly filing in April, nor in August. Instead, if you were looking carefully, you might have found an odd footnote that said: “Confidential information has been omitted from the form 13F and filed separately with the commission.”
...
Translation: Mr. Buffett received special permission from the S.E.C. to keep secret his investment in I.B.M. — and possibly keep secret stakes in other companies that he is building positions in that we have yet to learn about. Mr. Buffett’s special treatment from the S.E.C. is not new — he has long taken advantage of an obscure rule to avoid disclosing his bets to the public before he is good and ready. Mr. Buffett — and other billionaire investors like Carl Icahn, Bill Ackman and Nelson Peltz — essentially argue that the simple disclosure of an investment would cause the price to rise so much as to scuttle their strategy.
...
The rule says that the S.E.C. “may prevent or delay public disclosure of form 13F information for public interest reasons or the protection of investors.” In this case, the rule is clearly meant to protect the investor — Mr. Buffett — not the public.--ANDREW ROSS SORKIN

As a general rule, you can usually assume that someone is trying to screw someone else whenever you find these two elements working together:

Complexity
Money

Complexity is how evil schemes are hidden from the public. Complexity is what caused so many people to get mortgages they couldn't afford. Complexity is how hedge funds hide their treachery. Complexity is how the derivatives debacle was possible. Complexity is how your financial manager can get away with charging you for doing nothing. Complexity is why you don't know if you can get a better deal with another phone carrier.--Scott Adams

I’ve always been curious about successful men, leaders, and what they know that the rest of us don’t. This book was entertaining because Eisenhower was a character, nearly getting himself kicked out of West Point, causing a lot of trouble. But always there was in him a sense of confidence, a sense he would become somebody important. And more than this, he believed the world needed him — that if he didn’t exist, things would fall apart. He believed he was called to be a great man. I wondered, as I read, where he got this confidence.  I found the reason for Eisenhower’s confidence early on in [ At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends.], in a chapter in which he discussed his childhood. Dwight Eisenhower said that from the beginning, his mother and father operated on an assumption that set the course for his life: that the world could be fixed of its problems if every child understood the necessity of their existence. Eisenhower’s parents assumed, and taught their children, that if their children weren’t alive, their family couldn’t function.--Don Miller

Plans are nothing. Planning is everything.--Dwight Eisenhower

... because Oscar campaigns are always based in part on the terrified certainty that the performance in itself cannot possibly be enough, all three men also come equipped with prepackaged narratives. DiCaprio’s, unveiled in a New York Times "Arts & Leisure" cover story simply headlined “Risk Taker,” is just that: I’m a hard worker who challenges myself with transformative roles for serious directors, and you’re never going to see me sell myself out for Pirates of the Caribbean 5: Shitload of Doubloons. Clooney’s narrative goes something like: I use my star power to get small and worthy movies greenlit, the clear implication being that the difference between The Descendants with Clooney and The Descendants with someone else is the difference between a movie you get to see and a movie you don’t. And Pitt’s, tailored to the tortuous history of Moneyball, is: I stick with projects I believe in for years until they get made. All three of these premises have enough truth in them to be legitimately deployed. But there’s a problem: They all fall into an awards-narrative category that Movieline’s Oscar guy, Stu Van Airsdale, astutely identified a couple of weeks ago “It’s a nice story. It’s just not … charming.”  Academy voters like to be seduced by a narrative, not simply persuaded by it, and a Clooney vs. Pitt vs. DiCaprio contest has a slight whiff of “Which of the three richest, handsomest, most popular boys in the school are we going to choose as class president?” They are, in short, the 1 percent — and this is not an ideal year to be in that category.--Mark Harris

The [Stereotype Threat] study investigated the applicability of previous experimental research on stereotype threat to operational Graduate Record Examinations® (GRE®) General Test testing centers. The goal was to document any relationships between features of the testing environment that might cue stereotype threat as well as any impact on GRE test scores among African American, Hispanic, Asian American, and female test-takers. Among such features were the gender and ethnicity of test proctors and more general factors, such as the size, activity level, and social atmosphere of test centers. Our analyses revealed several relationships among environmental factors and several variations in test performance for all groups. However, we found no direct support for stereotype threat and, in fact, found some effects for proctor ethnicity that ran counter to a stereotype-threat explanation.--Walters, Lee, and Trapani

These angry women have even less of a leg to stand on, now. Ding dong, the Sterotype Witch is dead, at least when it comes to race and gender in GRE performance (unless someone has another study with the same scientific credibility they can point me to).--Cav

Photo link here.

I remember Rosie Grier singing "It's Alright To Cry"

When in doubt, I think it better that strong men are apt to feel other emotions ahead of weeping.

But in Matt Millen's case, I think he did it right.

Quotes of the day

If Men’s Health magazine was true, you would never need to buy more than one issue. If the articles that promised flat abs and less stress and better sex really worked as promised, you’d never need to have a subscription because every issue is the exact same thing.--Jon Acuff

You can't stop Tebowmania. You can only hope to contain it.--Peter King

In four starts, Tebow now has two fourth-quarter comebacks from at least 13 points down. In John Elway's career, guess how many he had. Two.--Kerry Byrne

I.B.M. named Virginia Rometty as its new chief executive, certifying her status as one of the most powerful women in technology. She joins a list that includes Meg Whitman, the newly installed chief executive of Hewlett-Packard; Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook; and Safra Catz, the chief financial officer of Oracle.--Michael De La Merced

According to the British lexicographer John Ayto, 'cool' has become an “all-purpose term of approval.” Indeed, the term is so widely used that this might, at first glance, appear to be a valid definition. But I beg to differ: cool is more precise and complex, and an elusively moving target. It’s cool to be clever, but it’s uncool to be a know-it-all. Sometimes cool stuff is expensive – but sometimes it comes cheap, and the expensive stuff is uncool. Sometimes it’s cool to break the law; at other times it isn’t. Communism used to be cool, but not so much any more. Brooklyn didn’t use to be cool, but now it is. And of course people can be (or not be) cool. Steve McQueen was very cool. Clint Eastwood? – not really: he’s too edgy and tightly wound. Collectively, the Beatles could be cool, but viewed individually, John Lennon was cooler than the other three put together. The Dalai Lama is cool (or, at least, admiring him is), but it’s hard to imagine anyone seeing a pope as cool. Barack Obama is sort of cool, for a politician – although the word on the street says he’s failed to live up to his full cool potential. Tony Blair tried very hard to be cool, and for a while he seemed to enjoy some success. But you can’t fool all the people all the time.--Colin Eatock

No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath. ... It’s a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn’t matter how old you are; it is coming to a close quickly, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still and silence. And they will make a fire and pour some wine and think about how you once were . . . and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you never again will be. So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right.--Don Miller

I write about this mostly anonymous man because players like [Kent] Hull are the bedrock of so many good teams, past and present. Hull did his job and never sought glory. If glory came, as it did in the form of three Pro Bowl nods and two All-Pro selections, he would deflect it. He was the perfect Bill Polian/Marv Levy player. Do your job, be responsible, lead when needed, care only about winning -- and be smart. I am confident in saying he was one of the five or six most valuable players on those four Buffalo Super Bowl teams, because of what he meant to the team in making the line calls on the fastest-moving offense in football, and for what he meant as the last guy out of the locker room ... after every game, after every practice. If a problem needed to be solved, he'd help. If someone just wanted to talk, he'd talk. Part of his football life included being there if anyone needed him; someone usually did. I remember lots of big-talking (rightfully so), boisterous players on those Bills teams, on and off the field, and I remember Hull, with a dip between his lip and gum, accommodating teammates, reporters, fans, and never being too big for any of it. He'd do it quietly. He loved Levy's trademark, "Where would you rather be than right here, right now?'' He lived that. Being a cog in the wheel was his thing.--Peter King

I owe a lot of that stitching in my Hall of Fame jacket to Kent Hull.--Thurman Thomas

Image link here.

Gender bender of the day: SAT math scores

Source here.

Quotes of the day

The nation's state and local public employee retirement systems had $2.5 trillion in total cash and investment holdings in 2009, a $726.1 billion or 22.7 percent decrease from $3.2 trillion in 2008, according to new statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau. This follows a $176.7 billion loss the previous year.--U.S. Census Bureau

... IS-LM provides absolutely no framework for policy analysis because it makes no assumptions, and draws no conclusions, about what people are trying to accomplish. If you don’t know what people are trying to do, you can’t possibly know how best to help them.  ... Greg Mankiw and Matt Weinzierl have recently provided ... a [useful] model. Like IS-LM, their model is fundamentally Keynesian. Unlike IS-LM, it is capable of evaluating the relative desirability of various policies. Would we be better off in a world where everyone floats in a vat of money until we all starve to death? The Mankiw/Weinzierl model, reassuringly, says “no”. The IS-LM model, unhelpfully, says “that’s not my department”.--Steve Landsburg

You know, Jamie Dimon is one of the greatest bankers, he’s brought more business to this city than maybe any other banker.  To go and pick on him, I don’t know what that achieves. Jamie Dimon is honorable and works very hard and pays his taxes.  ... The majority of people who work in the financial services sector make something like $72,000 a year. They’re hard-working people and just bashing them doesn’t make a lot of sense.--Mayor Bloomberg

... deviations from Benford's law are compellingly correlated with known financial crises, bubbles, and fraud waves. And overall, the picture looks grim. Accounting data seem to be less and less related to the natural data-generating process that governs everything from rivers to molecules to cities. Since these data form the basis of most of our research in finance, Benford's law casts serious doubt on the reliability of our results. And it's just one more reason for investors to beware.--Jialan Wang

... analysis of the Senate returns over the six-year period, published in the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis in 2004, showed that the Senate portfolio outperformed the market by approximately 12 percent a year. In April of this year, the team published a follow-up analysis of the House in Business and Politics, which showed that House members on average outperformed the market by a smaller but still impressive figure—roughly 6 percent a year. ... Certainly, the guardians of our laws don’t seem eager to pursue the question. No member of Congress has ever been investigated for insider trading. Four times since 2006, Congresswoman Louise Slaughter (D–New York) has sponsored the STOCK Act, which would explicitly make congressional insider trading illegal, and require members of Congress to disclose significant trades within 90 days. It’s never even come to a vote.--Megan McArdle

Why should our legislators be above the law? I have yet to hear an even vaguely plausible reason that our legislators shouldn't be watched at least as closely as we watch CEOs. In fact, I've yet to hear any reason. No one in government wanted to talk about it. The best I can infer is that well, it's a pain in the ass, and they don't wanna. That's absurd. What's even more absurd, however, is that we permit it.--Megan McArdle

If the Republicans want a nominee who will pander to the left, right and middle with no coherent philosophy and no coherent policy proposals, why not just drag out Bob Dole [instead of Mitt Romney]? At this rare historical moment when the country just might be willing to take a flyer on some truly radical changes, it saddens me deeply that warmed-over Dole might be the best the Republicans can manage to dish up.--Steve Landsburg

I find myself liking Herman Cain this year. It reminds me of how I liked Sarah Palin in 2008. And Barack Obama in 2004.--Cav

For an economist, the most fascinating aspect of Pan Am is the highly attractive flight attendants -- or rather, stewardesses, since the show is set in the early 1960s. If you’re young enough, you might think that’s just TV. But I’m just old enough to remember flying in the 1970s, and I recall stewardesses who really were, in fact, hot. Okay, I was too young to understand the concept of “hot” -- but I was definitely aware that I was being attended by some very pretty young women  Not so anymore. Flight attendants aren’t necessarily unattractive now, but they’re no more fetching than people in any other service profession that doesn’t get tips. And what’s changed? In a word, deregulation.--Glen Whitman

Quotes of the day

Nature, like an enemy, seemed intent on concealing from us its master plan. At the same time, we did have a valuable key to nature’s secrets. The laws of nature evidently obeyed certain principles of symmetry, whose consequences we could work out and compare with observation, even without a detailed theory of particles and forces. There were symmetries that dictated that certain distinct processes all go at the same rate, and that also dictated the existence of families of distinct particles that all have the same mass. Once we observed such equalities of rates or of masses, we could infer the existence of a symmetry, and this we thought would give us a clearer idea of the further observations that should be made, and of the sort of underlying theories that might or might not be possible. It was like having a spy in the enemy’s high command.--Steven Weinberg

What my mother could envision was a future in which I made my own choices. I don’t think either of us could have predicted what happens when you multiply that sense of agency by an entire generation. But what transpired next lay well beyond the powers of everybody’s imagination: as women have climbed ever higher, men have been falling behind. We’ve arrived at the top of the staircase, finally ready to start our lives, only to discover a cavernous room at the tail end of a party, most of the men gone already, some having never shown up—and those who remain are leering by the cheese table, or are, you know, the ones you don’t want to go out with. ... Just as I am fully aware that with each passing year, I become less attractive to the men in my peer group, who have plenty of younger, more fertile women to pick from. But what can I possibly do about that? Sure, my stance here could be read as a feint, or even self-deception. By blithely deeming biology a nonissue, I’m conveniently removing myself from arguably the most significant decision a woman has to make. ... When Gloria Steinem said, in the 1970s, “We’re becoming the men we wanted to marry,” I doubt even she realized the prescience of her words. ... Increasingly, the new dating gap—where women are forced to choose between deadbeats and players—trumps all else, in all socioeconomic brackets. ... It appears that the erotic promises of the 1960s sexual revolution have run aground on the shoals of changing sex ratios, where young women and men come together in fumbling, drunken couplings fueled less by lust than by a vague sense of social conformity.--Kate Bolick

Roubini Global Economics, the economics research firm begun by noted economist Nouriel Roubini, is for sale, according to sources who have been approached by an investment bank conducting an auction for the firm. RGE, as it's known, has grown quickly since its founding by Roubini, who is its chairman. It has over 85 employees, and is still losing money.--David Faber

The top 1% of New Yorkers pay over 40% of all income taxes, providing huge benefits to everyone in our city and state. Paulson & Co. and its employees have paid hundreds of millions of dollars in New York City and New York State taxes in recent years and have created over 100 high paying jobs in New York City since its formation. New York currently has the highest income taxes of any state in the country and thousands of businesses have fled New York to states with no income taxes such as Florida, Texas and Nevada, or moved offshore. Instead of vilifying our most successful businesses, we should be supporting them and encouraging them to remain in New York City and continue to grow.--Paulson & Co.

We are legion ... for we are many.--Occupy Wall Street protestor

We are legion for we are many.--possessive demons begging Jesus not to deport them

Top female reasons for sex

Source here (which also ranks top male reasons, ranking 100 reasons in all for each gender), via Robin Hanson:

1. I was attracted to the person
2. I wanted to experience the physical pleasure
3. It feels good
4. I wanted to show my affection to the person
5. I wanted to express my love for the person
6. I was sexually aroused and wanted the release
7. I was ‘‘horny’’
8. It’s fun
9. I realized I was in love
10. I was ‘‘in the heat of the moment’’
11. I wanted to please my partner
12. I desired emotional closeness (i.e., intimacy)
13. I wanted the pure pleasure
14. I wanted to achieve an orgasm
15. It’s exciting, adventurous

Quotes of the day

[HP] looks cheap, but the future of the PC is a very, very difficult business to handicap.--Bill Ackman

One of the interesting things that we’ve noticed is that companies correlate on decision making and speed of decision making. There are basically no companies that have good slow decisions. There are only companies that have good fast decisions. I think that’s also a natural thing as companies get bigger –they tend to slow down decision making. And that’s pretty tragic.--Larry Page

... even though a computer can execute millions of instructions in a microsecond, the furthest light can travel in that time - even in a vacuum - is just 300 meters.--Jeff Hecht

The world has experienced five major technical-economic cycles:
(1) 1771 - , The First Industrial Revolution in Britain, based on mechanization of the cotton industry.
(2) 1829 - , The Age of Steam and Railways
(3) 1875 - , The Age of Steel and Electricity
(4) 1908 - , The Age of Oil, the Automobile, and Mass Production
(5) 1971 - , The Age of Information and Telecommunications
--Leonard Wilson, on Carlota Perez's Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital

Proposed List Of Demands For Occupy Wall St Movement!--LloydJHart

I think we are between the last cycle and the next cycle, the latter of which will hopefully improve the intellectual capacity of people who make lists like the one above.--Cav

The midsection of a 67-year-old is not a pretty sight.--Bill Gross

For centuries, parents have given their kids the awkward “birds and the bees” sex conversation. But we are the first generation of parents in the history of mankind who must have a “digital footprint” conversation with our kids. We are the first generation that has to sit our kids down and say, “Let’s talk about Facebook and Twitter and Youtube.”--Jon Acuff

Koch Industries has spent more than $50 million to lobby in Washington since 2006." My reaction to reading this was, "$50 million? That's it?" That might sound like a lot, but let's compare that to, say, General Electric. Over the same period, GE has spent more than $136 million lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. ... I don't know the Koch brothers; I've never met them. I can't tell you if they're saints or sinners. But at least from this Bloomberg article, their company doesn't appear to be especially destructive or immoral. That much is crystal clear through some perspective. But maybe the reporters can prove me wrong about their bias by their next article detailing the many alleged misdeeds of a company with political ties to the left, like GE.--Daniel Indiviglio

Ms. [Betty] Liu deserves some credit for being a rare interviewer of Mr. Buffett who, rather than simply fawning, challenges him. Other journalists sought out by Mr. Buffett would do their profession and the country a favor by following suit. Some possible follow-ups for next time: “What’s your justification for making your tax apply only to “people who shuffle money around all day” but not to athletes or CEOs? Would it apply to CEOs of banks, insurance companies, or other publicly traded financial firms? Are there any other precedents for taxing income differentially by occupation rather than by source? Is that something we want to encourage in the tax code? Wouldn’t it just make things more complex?--Ira Stoll

Obama has basically confirmed the worst fears about regulators (and himself) which is that business shouldn't be regulated based on any predictable rules, but rather the whims of people who might in their gut just feel that something is wrong. In this instance, people who scream about "uncertainty" may have a point.--Joe Weisenthal

Gibor Basri, Berkeley’s vice chancellor for equity and diversity, could have served a valuable role here by pointing out that the [affirmative action] bake sale was obviously a parody of racial and gender preferences, not a criticism of students themselves. Whatever one thinks about the issue of preferences, he might have said, such political theater belongs to Berkeley’s once-revered tradition of free speech. Instead, Basri chose to stoke the melodramatic self-pity of today’s college students. “A lot of students, especially students of color, read [the bake sale] as placing a higher value on white students,” Basri told the New York Times. Basri, in other words, obeyed the ironclad script for all such minor perturbations in the otherwise unbroken reign of campus political correctness. That script requires that the massive campus-diversity bureaucracy treat the delusional claims of hyperventilating students with utter seriousness. Students in the ever-expanding roster of official campus victim groups flatter themselves that by attending what is in fact the most caring, protective, and opportunity-rich institution in the history of the world, they are braving unspeakable threats to their ego and even to their physical safety. (Indeed, so desirable is this alleged threatened status that a gender and women’s studies major held a sign during Tuesday’s protest of the bake sale decrying the exclusion of “queer people” from the Republicans’ pricing structure.) ... If he really is incapable of understanding such a simple satire, he does not belong in an institution of higher learning—or at least what used to pass for one. --Heather MacDonald

Eight new Dodge Grand Caravans, purchased 10 months ago with $186,192 in federal stimulus funds, are sitting unused in storage at a county park because Waukesha County has found no takers for its proposed workers' van pool program.--Laurel Walker

Photo link here.