We had an exam today. One of the essays was based on the elephants example in this lesson plan written for this piece on private property. (BTW, the set of lesson plans that FEE has are great for learning the lessons of liberty.) I'm late today because I've been grading exams most of the afternoon.

We started this morning looking at how markets induce cooperation between people. One reminder is that buyers compete with other buyers, not with sellers, and vice versa. This explains much of business behavior in terms of advertising but also in trying to monopolize or cartelize markets. We'll talk more about this later this week.

We also talked about the value of markets in expanding the circle of potential borrowers. A question in the text asks, why is it easier in a barter economy for the toilet paper manufacturer to meet his or her demands than an electric guitar manufacturer. There were stories in Armenia that many times workers were paid with some of their products. There are two major manufacturers there: a brandy plant and a piano manufacturer. Getting paid in brandy is not nearly so onerous as it is transportable and desired by more people. Pianos are hard to transport. Many simply burned them.

I told them a story from my time in Ukraine, where I had a central bank official offer me data to help him understand the coal industry. It was balance sheet and income statements for each coal mine in the country ... collected weekly. So much data, and yet they had no idea what to do. This reminds us of the economic calculation debate and whether socialism could ever fix this problem. The textbook says:

We are extremely dependent on changing money prices to secure effective cooperation in our complex, interdependent society and economy. When prices are not permitted to signal a change in relative scarcities, suppliers and demander receive inappropriate signals. They do not find, because they have no incentive to look for, ways to make accommodations to one another more effectively. It is important that people receive some such incentive, because there are so many little ways and big ways in which people can accommodate--ways that no central planner can possibly anticipate, but which in their combined effect make the different between chaos and coordination. Changing money prices, continuously responding to changing conditions of demand or supply, provides just such an incentive.

Scarcity is inevitable; it's simply a question of what you use as a rationing mechanism.

I got word this morning that Penn & Teller's show Bulls*** that was to include a recording of me played last night. My interview was taped last fall. I notice that their page links to this site. I knew they would interview Mike Davis from here and Alan Kors, but I had no knowledge they could get Chomsky on tape too!

There's a show preview on ShowTime's site, and the show will replay Tuesday at 9pm ET/PT on SHO 2 and Friday at 10pm ET/PT on Showtime. I haven't seen the show, and must confess I don't buy Showtime on my cable package (nor any other movie channel -- I'm pretty much a news&sports junkie.)

Me and Chomsky, on the same show. That'll make the parents proud, if I can get them past the title.

... so there's no economics lesson here. But students might do well to consider whether economics is a microscope. If my students are reading, remember us talking about rent control? Here's a great story of how it benefits one pop star from my youth. (H/T: Emirates Economist.) You can bet that's coming out in class tomorrow morning!

I've been thinking a good bit today about what the no vote on the EU constitution in France (and its likely rejection in the Netherlands Wednesday) means for the issue that I am concerned with, the accession of eastern European countries to the EU. I am convinced that it rather helps than harms them. Let me explain.

EU is really three parts. First, there is the holdover of the Common Market days, a customs union that permits trade to occur between EU members at more preferable terms than between the EU and non-EU trading partners. The accession seeking countries feel that trade oriented towards the west rather than the east (read: Russia) will benefit them, and that accession is the only means of getting dialogue on removing the EU's infamous trade barriers. I'm skeptical that this will happen. Agricultural policy has always protected French farmers, who were a big part of the no vote yesterday. But I doubt that the farmers were motivated to vote no because they thought the political process the EU constitution begins would cost them subsidies. If anything, it seems to me it would bring more as the tax base was expanded.

Second, there is the Euro-zone, the countries that use the new common currency. Accession countries will wish to use the euro to provide a more stable money than they offer themselves, and to reduce the "fear of floating" premium many of those countries pay. We saw this in Macedonia when I worked there in 2003: The country pays much higher rates on government debt than you might expect for a country with what appears on the outside to be a stable currency pegged to the euro. They pay this because foreign investors fear a shock from, say, ethnic fighting between Albanians and Macedonian Serbs. So Macedonian bonds don't sell well, and higher interest rates have to be paid to induce foreign investors to hold them. Getting into EU reduces that cost. Of course, it comes at the costs of a loss of your domestic currency (and the seigniorage revenue that might help finance government deficits) and with explicit constraints on your fiscal policy -- that is, unless you're Germany.

Last, leaders such as Chirac and Kohl have argued that the economic and political come together, and the EU Constitution is part of this. And in this, I think most eastern Europeans would agree with this assessment from Fistful of Euros:

The point *isn’t* that this puts all of Europe into crisis. This is not necessary. But ’crisis’ can only be avoided by recognising openly and clearly that something has gone wrong. The EU leaders are not carrying the EU voters with them on the constitution, and a dialogue must begin. The sooner this is recognised the better.

I don't believe this dialogue matters to the accession countries, however (remember, they don't have a say at present), both because the economic benefits are seen there as being quite strong -- which I think is an overestimation, but that's another post -- and because many may feel that even this EU constitution gives them a more stable form of government than the new, imperfect constitutions many of these countries adopted as they escaped the USSR or Warsaw Pact.

The risk is that the political leaders in Brussels will handle defeat badly. Mark Steyn notes:

...a couple of days before the first referendum, Jean-Claude Juncker, the "president" of the European Union, let French and Dutch voters know how much he values their opinion:

"If at the end of the ratification process, we do not manage to solve the problems, the countries that would have said No, would have to ask themselves the question again," "President" Juncker told the Belgian newspaper Le Soir.

Got that? You have the right to vote, but only if you give the answer your rulers want you to give. But don't worry, if you don't, we'll treat you like a particularly backward nursery school and keep asking the question until you get the answer right.

Sounds like how we vote on school bond referenda here in Minnesota.

I would. Since our MOB Road Show two weekends ago, Mrs. Scholar has been quite interested in the goings-on of MOB, NARN, etc. I can't get her to contact the M.A.W.B. Squad yet, one of whom invited her to contribute there. But she would like us all to know she plays piano. She is one of the music leaders of our church (I am the singer, but I just sing what she says and there's no doubt who runs the band when she's at the keys), and an early date was us playing Canon in D by Pachalbel, me on the violin. This was stopped when Mrs. S realized that accompanying a violinist means really accompanying, rather than trading fours. Two hams, one spotlight: It's amazing we've been married so long.

But really, she would be a great writer. She is the funnier one of the couple, and she reads entirely different things than I do. The blogosphere is a big enough stage for us both. And maybe I could get to Keegans more often if she was part of the group.*

So if you would like Mrs. S to write or play, give her a shout. Her contact info is in the piano link. Who knows, maybe we'll put mp3s of her playing up here!

*And actually, we could use more spousebloggers in MOB. And kidbloggers! (Note to Night Writer: You've got a Day Writer in waiting.)

The Northern Alliance's website has often been viewed as a fairly low-tech affair, including us making fun of Mitch's heartbeat graphic, but over the weekend we've unveiled a new Flash-driven site. It's far beyond my abilities at programming, so no credit goes to me. My favorite part is the NA aggregator at the bottom, so you go to any of our posts from one site.

And if you want instead the low-tech site, it's still there. Heartbeat and all.

Understand, please, that I beleive a private group may have its own rules. If the Boy Scouts want to have a sexuality requirement for its scoutmasters, it's not any of my business since my son is no longer of scouting age. And so I'm not saying anything about this story other than, if it was me in charge of it, things would change.

Everyone agrees that Ligaya Lagman of Westchester, N.Y., is a Gold Star mother, part of the long line of women whose sons or daughters were killed in combat for the U.S. armed services.

Her 27-year-old son, Army Staff Sgt. Anthony Lagman, was killed last year in Afghanistan.

But the American Gold Star Mothers have rejected her for membership because -- though a permanent resident and a taxpayer -- she is not a U.S. citizen.

The group's national president, Ann Herd, said: "There's nothing we can do, because that's what our organization says. You have to be an American citizen." She added: "We can't go changing the rules every time the wind blows."

You should react better to sunlight, Ms. Herd. You can change the rule because it's your group.

Mrs. Lagman, meanwhile, has decided not to pursue membership further.

(H/T: Burt Dubow.)

The University of Oregon has decided to slow down on a plan to have tenure and post-tenure review of faculty include a review of their "cultural competency," acccording to the Chronicle of Higher Education. (That link will expire Friday, after which you might prefer this article from the Seattle Times.)

"I was hired to teach chemistry and do research," said Michael Kellman, a chemistry professor. "I wasn't hired to be evaluated and even interrogated about cultural competency, whatever that is."

In a letter to the president, David B. Frohnmayer, 24 professors called the draft plan "frightening and offensive." They complained that it would spend too much money on "diversity-related bureaucracy."

Mr. Frohnmayer said in an interview on Thursday that administrators had "taken a step back from the draft plan, given the extent of the response."

"We're wedded to the objectives of the plan, but not to particular steps in any lockstep way," he said. "We're a community that lives to move with a greater sense of consensus."

Indeed, the plan itself is expansive, covering 22 pages and full of new plans for expanding "cultural competency". A major flaw of the plan is that it doesn't take the time to define what it means. The university sent it to another committee with the usual CYA language of "it's a draft" and "we just wanted to begin a dialogue". Here's the language in the draft, though (I've edited down to the first three points; the others are not as enlightening):

Faculty – in conjunction with the University Senate & Senior Administration

1. Require faculty course evaluation forms to assess classroom content, climate, and openness to multiple viewpoints.
   
2. Revise 3rd year, tenure, and post-tenure evaluation criteria to assess ongoing skill building and demonstrable commitment to cultural competency.
   
3. Tie evaluation of cultural competency to raises, promotions etc.

That third point is not covered anywhere, but it's a nightmare bureaucratically. And while I'm quite happy to see any statement in favor of viewpoint diversity, its appearance in this document worries me. I don't necessarily believe that a leftist sociology prof is going to have her raise or promotion stopped by a student evaluation from a conservative student who was shouted down in her classroom. That would be a violation of her academic freedom, right?

Of course, the school has already been in the news once this month from a program to set aside seats in popular classes for math and English, and one prof in the Chronicle story isn't too happy about all this sunlight.

Not all faculty members were disturbed by the diversity plan. Matthew Dennis, a
professor of history, said some critics had overreacted, although he acknowledged that the plan could have been written better and agreed that not defining some terms was a mistake.

"There are reasonable concerns that can be worked out, especially if reasonable discussion aren't disrupted by incendiary discussions coming from off campus," Mr. Dennis said.

He could be referring as well to blog coverage by John Rosenberg and Dave Huber. He probably isn't talking about these puff pieces in the New York Times (there are six all together). And get a load of this, from the last paragraph.

This month, as the plan was sparking controversy, its chief architect announced that he was leaving the university. Gregory J. Vincent, vice provost for institutional equity and diversity at Oregon, is moving to the University of Texas at Austin to become vice provost for inclusion and cross-cultural effectiveness.

Those job titles are a doppelganger for the continued encroachment of the diversity cops.

One problem of teaching the intro class is that somewhere on Friday (which is the off day) you hit a wall. I just didn't have much energy most of the day, and that I did have went to the next QBR. Then went and saw Littlest run her first duathlon, and by the gods she was first female! Fourth overall. Exciting evening ended with our first try at MLB 2005.

I made the decision to try to record some Coleman so I could hear what all the Cities MOBsters hear. Dial 1-800-DREADFUL. What I got out of it was that he lost his mind in a port-a-potty while wearing a safari vest. Or something like that. And Lambert? Regrettably, writing is his comparative advantage.

NARN's back at the White Bear Lake Superstore tomorrow. Frivolities begin at noon, and I'll step up at 1; Kathy Kersten, who I'm happy to call both a good acquaintance and a columnist again, will be on during the 1pm hour.

So says a student at St. Olaf in yesterday's Pioneer Press (free registration required). Enrolled in a course in Latin American history, she discovered:

With six multiracial students in class, we heard about a personal example or experience relating to our topic nearly every day. For a while, everyone appreciated having these real-life examples of oppression in Latin American countries and of issues we discussed.

Soon, however, a division grew in our little classroom. I, and others, began to notice how quickly minority students criticized white students for daring to rationalize the actions of historical Europeans and Americans. This criticism happened only a few times, but the threat of attack was enough to instill a fear of speaking one's mind.

In contrast, white students regularly left inflammatory comments by these same multicultural students unanswered for fear that as a nonminority contradicting a minority they might sound racist. At one point, a student of Latin American heritage even went so far to say that minorities deal better with power because they have more sensitivity toward the rights of others.

When did one's ability to lead become based on what happened to their ancestors hundreds of years ago versus their intelligence and leadership skills today?

But worse is the problem that spreads outside the classroom at St. Olaf.

Last year, one minority student continuously bullied a first-year Asian student who had been adopted by white parents at a young age because "[she] couldn't even speak Korean … [she's] not really Asian." This tormented student transferred at the end of last year to escape persecution. I've also heard of another student who has an on-going feud with some of the multicultural students because they believe he is "white-washed" and not adequately connected with his roots.

Those stories are not at all uncommon on campuses in America these days. Most of the arguments for diversity on campus is that it's good for majority students to be exposed to minority students. It doesn't appear to be as good for the minority students themselves.

I forgot to check in with The Night Writer until late tonight, discussing MOB Road Show.

One, the Queen Banian [demerits for misspelling name! --kb] does not take a backseat to King in encylopedic knowledge or sparkling conversation. It was a delight to meet her and we enjoyed a stimulating discussion that ranged from soy cooking to the theatre, The Rules and, of course, The Mystery. My wife especially enjoyed the evening, while the Littlest Scholar and my youngest daughter found the most interesting part of the event to be the arrival of a hulking piece of Triple Chocolate cake - which they proceeded to demolish like Mitch Berg going through a Nick Coleman column. The flying forks looked like a light-saber duel from Revenge of the Sith.

Littlest is well-known at her school as The Consumer of All Sweets. If I ate half what she does I'd be Mr. Creosote. And in case you didn't know, Missus is a veteran of bulletin boards on the Rules. She claims indeed to have solved The Mystery, but was sworn to secrecy. All that remains is The Look and the firm knowledge that as soon as I drive out to work she's on the phone to her sister. The conversation always begins, "You won't believe what he said today..."

It was a different kind of class today. One of the joys of teaching an economics course specifically for nonmajors is that you get such a diversity of viewpoints. And, unlike most of my majors or the kids from the business school, these students love to talk.

First half of the class begun late because we were into a discussion of health care in Canada, as a student was discussing the importation of prescription drugs to the US. This allowed me to discuss rationing. All scarce goods must be rationed somehow. If we don't use price in the market system to ration, something or someone else has to do the job. This can be first-come-first-served, age, beauty, ethnicity, kinship, equal shares imposed by government, or any number of other items. We ran through the examples of price ceilings and price floors.

We spent some time as well discussing consumer and producer surplus (note to self: do more of this Tuesday.) Given a myriad group of rationing schemes, one wants to know which provides the most benefit to society. What we illustrate is that with an unfettered market that has competition, the combination of the two surpluses is maximized when you allow price to ration goods.

We were doing fine to there. In the end of the fourth chapter of the text was a question I asked students to answer last night in homework:

Friedrich bought a large painting by Turner that was on display at a major exhibition, but he had to agree not to take possession until the show ended six months later. When the show finally ended and Friedrich brought the painting home, he made two discoveries: The show had so increased Turner's prestige that the painting was now worth twice what he had paid for it, and the painting was too large to fit any of his walls. Karl has larger walls in his home and would like to purchase the painting from his friend Friedrich. What is the proper price for Friedrich to charge Karl? What he himself paid for the painting or what he could now get for it if he put in on the market?

The answers to this were fascinating. One student allowed how she faced just this problem with some free infant formula she has but doesn't need: should she give it to her friends who are expecting infants of their own, or sell it to them, or what? Another student said you couldn't charge the market price to a friend because it's a friend, a violation of the opportunity cost rule (the marginal cost of the painting is now double what you paid). But a third student said to the second, if you sell it at cost and your friend turns around and sells it on the market, wouldn't you be upset? Yes, the second student allowed. I gave an example of an ugly tie Mrs. S might buy for me. She asks me to wear it. If I do, it's not because I like it, but if I don't she will be mad. You'd call it a gift with strings attached. So what about the transaction between Friedrich and Karl? And on and on it went, for a half-hour.

The end point of the story to me was a realization that, when dealing with friends, a transaction doesn't always involve the exchange of the same set of property rights as an exchange between strangers. I wouldn't imagine telling a stranger where to hang the Turner picture, but I might tell Karl to hang it where I can come see it later. And of course, in return I charge a lower price, because I didn't transfer a complete set of rights. I closed with a weird example sent to me by reader jw yesterday, wherein a transaction for a sperm donation between a man and a woman later gives rise to a claim for child support, which the court grants. The students are shocked, but I get lucky: one of my students has experience as a guardian ad litem, and helps explain that while a man and woman can have a transaction over the sperm, the woman is not allowed to terminate the rights the child has over the father.

So, I concluded, what is really being transferred isn't the good itself, but a set of rights, which sets up next week's lectures.

Mark Gisleson at Norwegianity, about whom I wrote a post wondering why he had a problem with something James Taranto had said (of which I approved), has decided to return fire. It's a long and rather tedious post, full of fury that the "culture of business" is "f****** over people" and that "The system has been gamed by the people running the show, and they’re not even trying to play fair." He refers to it as a fisking. Well, call it what you wish, I don't particularly care. Let me respond to substantive points and not play with his pyrotechnics. I think his points are threefold:

1. The data I use is older and not telling what is happening right now;
   
2. The data show that income mobility is declining; and
   
3. It's all the Republicans' fault.

Quickly, my replies are 1) the data is hard to come by and doesn't change dramatically year to year, and it's hard to control for other factors that change over time; 2) we agree that mobility is less than twenty years ago, but that 3) the trend has been happening for so long that it's unlikely due to any specific policy of either party.

Over at Cafe Hayek, Russ Roberts has been running a series on income mobility.

The bottom line is that it is extremely difficult to measure mobility and opportunity. One way to avoid all of these structural changes that contaminate the numbers is to look at the same people over time, rather than looking at snapshots of different people over time.

This is a major problem with how numbers get used in the debate. The size of the survey you need to calculate the distributions are large -- in the States there are only two or three sources you could use, including the Census (full disclosure: I have no exposure to doing these studies here; I have worked with ones in Ukraine and Armenia, but not much and they're not comparable) -- and so mobility studies tend to be somewhat infrequent.

I used the chart that Mark apparently had trouble reading because it tries as best possible to look at people longitudinally. It says that 59% of people in the lowest quintile of the income distribution in 1969 moved up a quintile by 1994. Nearly 53% went up from the second lowest quintile to the middle. &c. The part that should catch your eye as much as that on the right hand side you see over 61% of those in the top quintile in 1969 moved down. If The Man was always protecting his own, how come 3 of 5 rich people in 1969 were relatively worse off by 1994?

Mark's second major point is that it's not that there is mobility, but that there's declining mobility. The evidence does support that; my statement is that it's still substantial (did I spell that right?) And the decline in mobility pre-dates the present Administration and, in my judgment, has declined for reasons that are not related to any government policy. Roberts links to a study from the New England Federal Reserve (link is to a non-technical summary; here's the more technical article if you wish to wade into deeper water.) Here's Roberts' summary of the results.

What percentage of families during the '70s, '80s and '90s stayed in the same quintile of the income distribution:

1970 36%
1980 37%
1990 40%

What percentage moved up or down one or more quintiles:

1970 38%
1980 39%
1990 39%

What percentage moved up or down two or more quintiles:

1970 26%
1980 24%
1990 21%

Roberts and I are not sure what to make of that. The study Roberts quotes thinks it has to do with the increasing number of females heading households. Female-headed households are simply poorer that families with two adults present. The median income of a family with two working spouses in 2000 was $74,000, up 48% over 1970, but the median income of a female-headed household $27,000 and up only 28% from 1970. Higher divorce rates and increasing numbers of kids born out of wedlock play a role in these data. (Interestingly, Roberts notes, the income of households headed by a male and no female adult present has grown even less than for female-headed households.) As well, immigration plays a huge role. Roberts is rather skeptical that it plays a role, but I think it might be more: Think of the new enterprises immigrants creating high-tech firms in California. Those weren't McJobs. Is it enough to increase wages overall? Hard to say, but see this. (Interestingly, I also found that African immigrant household median income is more than $9000 greater than that of African-American households; this makes me wonder if the gains in black per capita income are also influenced by immigration. I didn't look further into this yet.)

But ascribing the mobility numbers to some thought that "Bush did change everything" is simply missing the point. The trends we're looking at have been going on for quite some time, for a variety of reasons -- which we cannot reliably disentangle, but seem to have little to do with public policy. I don't have the luxury of easy socialism that Gisleson turns to with his jeremiad against businesses (and their Clinton bagman Bob Rubin, he says) to provide simple answers, but neither do I have an easy response to why mobility is declining. If Mark wishes to take comfort in that or launch another blog missile, expect nothing more from me.

It appears as well that it's not clear what a government could do other than maintain a healthy market economy. A recent article in The Economist wondered why India, a democracy with healthy electoral competition, had done so much more poorly reducing poverty than China, which has no electoral competition. Citing a World Bank study, it says

Why might democracy militate against poverty reduction in poor countries? Mr Varshney has two suggestions. First, democracies have a bias towards “direct” methods of tackling poverty, such as subsidies and hand-outs, which, in the long run, are less effective than “indirect” methods—ie, those that generate faster economic growth. In India, this seems undeniably true. Governments have built up whopping budget deficits, thanks largely to subsidies. Many farmers, for example, receive subsidised or free fuel, fertiliser, electricity and water. But little public money is spent on improvements that would do most to lift the growth rate: in infrastructure, primary education and basic health care. Everybody wants better roads, and nobody votes against them. But every politician promises to build them and hardly any do. Cutting subsidies, on the other hand, is a sure vote-loser.

Second, the poor are not necessarily a homogenous group. In a democratic system, they may organise themselves along lines other than economic class and “the shared identities of caste, ethnicity and religion are more likely to form historically enduring bonds”. If you are born poor, you may die rich. But your ethnic group is fixed. In India, with its myriad linguistic and caste-based groups, the upshot is a dispiriting beggar-thy-neighbour politics. Just as subsidies are easier to deliver than are roads and schools, so are affirmative-action schemes, giving jobs to members of specified castes.

That description is apt elsewhere. Attempts to use the political process to redistribute directly sacrifices resources that could be used productively. This rent-seeking behavior occurs in any democracy where the government puts out to auction its coercive power to parties that win elections. I'll argue with my Republican brethren that they are as guilty of this as Democrats -- this was one of the two things that originally drove me into the arms of the Libertarians -- but those that respect the power of markets yield benefits that cut across class, caste or ethnicity.

Walter Williams explains trade deficits. The punchline:

Some politicians gripe about all the U.S. debt held by foreigners [as a result of our trade deficit -- kb]. Only a politician can have that kind of audacity. Guess who's creating the debt instruments that foreigners hold? If you said it's our profligate Congress, go to the head of the class. If foreigners didn't purchase so much of our debt, we'd be worse off in terms of higher inflation and interest rates. What about the possibility of foreigners dumping our debt? Foreigners aren't stupid. Dumping large amounts of Treasury bonds would drive down their value. Foreigners as well as we would take a hit.

The fact that foreigners are willing to exchange massive amounts of goods in exchange for slips of paper in the forms of currency, stocks and bonds should be a source of pride. It means America, with its wealth, rule of law and the sanctity of contracts, inspires foreigners to hold large amounts of their wealth in U.S. obligations. Their willingness to do so means something else: Trade increases competition. Ultimately it's competition, many producers competing for his dollar, that truly protects the consumer. What protects producers, at the expense of consumers, are restrictions on competition. The quest to restrict competition is what lies at the heart of the trade deficit demagoguery. When's the last time you heard a consumer complaining about his buying more from a Chinese or Japanese producer than that producer buys from him?

See further Mahalanobis. H/T: Don Boudreaux

The headline trumpets good news for liberals:

Left-Wing Bias in Education Schools Is Overstated by Conservative Critics, 2 Reports Suggest

The two studies found that "only about 12%" of course weeks were directed towards exposing students training to become school principals recieved exposure to "different educational and pedagogical philosophies, to debates about the nature and purpose of public schooling, and to examinations of the racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic context of education." But of these 12% of course weeks,

instruction devoted to such topics was biased, with 65 percent of those course weeks qualifying as left-leaning, 35 percent as neutral, and less than 1 percent as right-leaning.

According to the report, Mr. Hess and Mr. Kelly labeled left-leaning course weeks as those that advocated concepts such as social justice and multiculturalism, focused on inequality and racial discrimination, emphasized notions of "silenced voices and child-centered instruction," or criticized testing and school-choice reform.

Right-leaning course weeks were those that criticized ideas of social justice and multiculturalism, viewed focusing on inequality or discrimination as engaging in "victimhood," advocated phonics or "back-to-basics instruction," or framed discussions of testing or school-choice reform in a positive light.

Some course weeks identified as left-leaning included "The role of the curriculum in legitimating social inequality" and "What role(s) do race and social class play in school reform? Is social Darwinism a useful reform concept?"

Course weeks labeled as balanced or neutral included "Are unions good or bad for public education? What does the evidence say?" and "What should schools teach? Phonics vs. whole language; multicultural education/teaching for diversity."

Understand what they did, then: They went to 56 education schools, picked out 31 schools that had four syllabi that they could code, and coded them by course weeks. The article makes a big deal out of the finding that the words diversity, multicultural or multiculturalism appears in only 3% of the syllabi. That tells me nothing of what happens in the classroom. What evidence does exist says that 1/8th of course weeks gets devoted to looking at different views of higher ed policy, and that eighth is pretty darn liberal. Moreover,

Of the 50 most influential living management thinkers, as determined by a 2003 survey of management professionals and scholars, just nine were assigned in the 210 courses. Their work was assigned a total of 29 times out of 1,851 readings.

So where is the evidence that claims of bias are "overstated"???

It's interesting that when you try to discuss what happens in manadatory diversity training, they don't want you to know.

The Guilford County Schools invited the public to attend an anti-racism workshop held for teachers, parents and community leaders last week, but refused to allow a reporter to stay in the room once he was identified as such.

In fact, Crossroads Ministry, who held the seminar, has such clout that the second day, a reporter was thrown out after Guilford County School Superintendent Terry Grier had given permission for him to attend.

Notice: they were invited to attend, but not to tell the non-attendees what they saw. David Beito, who sent me this link, has some of what happened inside and considers it "appalling". This description, of true, is far worse than anything we experienced in our MDT.

There is a post of these MTWR for this and the next two weeks, 11 lectures in all.

I led today with the quote I ended with yesterday from Heyne's instructor's manual. We spoke both of demand and supply curves. I do mine a bit different as a result of Heyne's book, insofar as I like to tie the supply curve directly to the production possibility curve (in the principles courses we seldom have time for this.) Here's a nice interactive example of production possibilities, but it kind of poops out at the end. What do you do with it? Well, if you multiply the opportunity cost of producing units of a good -- in terms of the alternative production foregone -- by the price of the alternative good, you have the marginal opportunity cost. Plot them on a graph, like this, and you have a supply curve. Supply curves represent opportunity costs of production to producers.

There's a good example of opportunity costs in yesterday's WSJ -- heck, they even use the words in the title, o happy day! -- where the difficulty of setting up business in Brazil is killing economic growth there. This picture is worth a bit more than thousand words:

You can perform more analysis from the World Bank's Doing Business site. If you're an international investor, that picture tells you to send your money elsewhere. While the rest of the world is getting freer, Brazil is getting economically less free. It's also gone from the 8th to 14th largest economy in the world in the last ten years.

We spent a good deal of time talking about substitutes to discuss demand. We listed out all the different uses of water, and for each we identified a substitute. We also, following along with the text, challenged the use of the word "need". People crossing a street in front of onrushing traffic demonstrate that they do not place an infinite value on their lives. People take riskier jobs; they don't use seat belts; they don't check the smoke detector's batteries. Forensic economists are often used in tort cases to establish compensatory damages.

We played with the idea of opportunity costs as well looking at a couple of movie clips. In Family Man, Nicholas Cage wants to move his family to NYC so he can pursue what he says is his gift of arbitraging securities. Tea Leoni tells him how much it will cost the family. We had a good discussion listening to the end of the clip where Cage says "We can have the perfect life!" Leoni: "We already do." There's projection of one's value to others. To get across the power of thinking on the margin, we also played Mr. Creosote getting just one thin wafer. You might even call it a non-linearity.

Last, there's this question in the text which I love: "In order to decide whether or not to drop intercollegiate football, your school undertakes a student of the program's cost. To what extent do you think the following budget items represent genuine costs?

• Tuition scholarships to players.
• Payments on the stadium mortgage.
• Free tickets to all full-time students.
• Salaries of the atheletic director, ticket manager, and trainer.

This is not an idle question at SCSU, as some other NCC schools have gone Division I. When I talk to football boosters, they point to "not having enough scholarships", but ask yourself -- what is the cost to SCSU of giving a student who wouldn't come here otherwise a full scholarship on the day before school starts? What additional costs does the university bear?

I'm not arguing SCSU should go D1 -- I hope we would not -- but that the issues have more to do with building costs. We just built a stadium which is too small for D1. That's your binding constraint. It's not got to do with scholarships.

I haven't discussed the confab at the Governor's Mansion here. I don't wish to say it wasn't a big deal. The governor's name is whispered in discussions of 2008, he seems like a guy you might like to have a beer with (as opposed to Jesse, about whom you'd be afraid he'd drink your beer as well as his own), and a chance to see some other bloggers is something I don't pass up. But let I'm not a naif around politicos myself. Many summers I end up in some country you look up in an atlas, and work around ministries of finance or central banks. I don't know if meeting Pawlenty was as meaningful as meeting and working with Viktor Yushchenko, now president of Ukraine. I often stay in the same hotel where the power meetings occur in, for example, Macedonia, so I once literally bumped into and shook hands with its future head of state. Having lunch as a 23-year-old with Milton Friedman might rank higher with me. I don't believe I was quite so wide-eyed at the mansion as some would believe, or as others might have.

Nick Coleman, with whom I would also share a beer (not just because of my thirst), sees in posts others have had of the meeting that bloggers dreamt "big, beautiful blog dreams" of following the fellow to Washington in 2009. It's interesting that this comes a few days after Craig Westover pretty much said the same thing. Perhaps Coleman should send Westover $75. The one thing he adds is a phone call to Kelli Gorr, the PD at WJON, which happens to be where Mitch and I agreed to appear on her show last Thursday.

"I'll stand as the one person who would not be considered right-wing," said Gorr, who broadcast a talk show from the governor's reception room in St. Paul on the day of the reception, but who took pains to present a politically balanced program. "The spin was that they [the governor's staff] wanted to reach new media able to disseminate information quickly and to say thank you to the nontraditional media. That was the spin. But if you call it most definitely right-wing, you're not off base."

Again, if you looked around the room, there was no doubt in my mind that it was largely center-right bloggers and some talk radio people from outstate. I met the news director from Willmar station KDJS as well, and I have no idea what her views are, and I know Kelli but not her views. (Nick gave me an actual piece of information I can use.) The remainder? Yeah, probably not a Kerry voter in the bunch.

And yet, consider that Pawlenty's $200 of wine and old cheese didn't exactly buy him great coverage of his abandoning the no new tax pledge in many places. That this opinion is not universal doesn't indicate that the last link is to someone fully in bed with Pawlenty (First Ringer's said enough about the rest of the negotiations to make that last one fit). What it indicates is something we can't say enough: there actually is a diversity of opinion over any number of issues among what Coleman calls on his radio show "wingnut bloggers". Likewise, while some of the attendees may have been gosh and golly about the mansion, I think it's safe to say the Powerline duo, also in attendance, didn't have their socks knocked off.

I don't control the governor's invite list to the mansion. And frankly, had he asked, I'd've preferred that rather than invite me for chips and dip in posh digs, I get a pass to hear a press conference, or put me on a distribution list for press releases, or some such. There are politicians who get this already, both the Howard Deans and national candidates and those running for more mundane offices. I don't write a blog to be wooed, I write to become better informed and a better writer. I attended for those reasons: I hadn't met the guy, and this was as good a chance as I was going to get, and it helped with the critical cigarette tax post to put the guy in a visual context. (Not everyone writes that way, I suppose, but being able to see and hear imaginary conversations when you can attach a real voice helps me play out events.)

For all the abuse we take for going to the Gov's house, I wish I'd gotten some of the Gov's wine, or J.B. scotch. All I had was a Coke and the nickel tour. Next time, I'll steal the silverware, and send Nick a setting.

Craig Westover makes the point about the governor's foolish cigarette tax proposal:

...the proposal comes with conditions. Pawlenty insists that the Legislature pass two of the following measures: initiative and referendum; meaningful school choice; a ban on teacher strikes during the school year; and a tribal/racino partnership.

Only politicians and members of the education establishment could view this proposal as anything but obscene treatment of children from low-income families, and yet ironically, it is proposing "meaningful" school choice as the backside of a political power play that endorses its criticality to the future of children in Minnesota.

Westover correctly rips the governor's plan to help school choice, an education tax credit for businesses, with those that go directly to students, such as the Hann-Buesgens or Knoblach-Ortmann plans. Those have withered on the vine, Westover says, because the governor and Commissioner Seagren have not invested time and resources to the effort. And, he concludes, Pawlenty might need a bigger victory in school choice now.

Elevating meaningful school choice to a priority in its own right is not just the morally right thing to do; politically, it allows the governor some wiggle room behind the scenes to maneuver his way out of the self-inflicted "fee" versus "tax" issue. Pawlenty has shown the bluster to kick open the door to educational opportunity; it remains to be seen if he also has the courage to walk through it.

As Republicans search for leaders that actually have courage, it might be a good time for Pawlenty to step up.

You'll find one of these each day MTWR the next three weeks.

Because we have students without textbooks, I didn't cover as much as I'd've liked today. We spent time on the textbook issue, playing out the game as we saw it and concluding -- later found correct -- that the bookstores intentionally were understocking because of textbook buys through online and off-campus brick-and-mortar stores.

We then spent a good deal of time on efficiency. I love Dwight Lee's* description:

This emphasis on efficiency seems strange, if not reprehensible, to many people. They are convinced that economists are so narrowly focused on efficiency that they ignore the truly important things in life. Who but someone lacking completely in a sense of what makes life meaningful doesn’t recognize that pollution is bad because it harms the environment? We should get rid of it whether or not it is efficient.

This criticism is unwarranted, though understandable. Efficiency is a tricky concept. Once it is understood what economists mean when they refer to efficiency, it becomes clear that it is a much broader, and more desirable, goal than many people realize.

We differentiate between technical and economic efficiency, where the former talks of outputs and inputs and the latter talks of values. While we can always seek more technical efficiency in, say, gas engines, we end long before that giving up the chase, because thinking marginally means that's a bad idea.

Sure, new engines might convert more of the energy in gasoline into motion, but doing so would require diverting resources away from producing other things of value. Long before technical efficiency was maximized, the marginal cost of improving that efficiency would exceed the marginal value. This would reduce economic efficiency because it requires sacrificing more value (marginal cost) than is realized (marginal value).

Fortunately, market prices provide the information and motivation required to achieve economic efficiency. For example, engine producers increase profits by improving the technical efficiency of engines until the marginal revenue from the improvement declines to the marginal cost. Since marginal revenue tends to reflect how much consumers value additional improvement, and the marginal cost reflects the value of the goods and services sacrificed to make additional improvement (since input prices reflect their value in alternative uses), engine producers increase their profits by improving engines only as long as they add more value than is sacrificed. That’s not technically efficient, but it is economically efficient because it increases the total value realized from scarce resources.

We illustrated this with a film clip from Along Came Polly, where Jennifer Aniston convinces Ben Stiller to stop spending time putting throw pillows on and taking them off his bed. Ben says he spends 56 minutes a month doing this. While it makes his bed look nicer, less nice and 56 additional minutes to, say, spend snuggling with Aniston might have more value. They end up knifing all the pillows. The scene immediately following has Aniston finding her keys with an electronic finder given to her by Stiller. He wouldn't use it because he's neat -- but it's the substitution of technology to allow Aniston to continue her level of messiness. Substituting money for neatness can be efficient.

We then went to talk about comparative advantage. One of economics' fundamental insights is that markets allow for people to specialize according to their comparative advantage and then exchange goods to get to consumption policies they couldn't under autarky. (There's your word of the day. You're welcome.) And what is wonderful about the process is that it does not require any design: there are incentives for people to find it by dint of their own self-interest. When it happens, both sides can gain from trade. Here's an example.

I closed with this point, offered by Heyne in a set of notes to a different text, but quite applicable here.

We all realize that demand [for a good] depends upon people's preferences. But so does supply. Technological or physical facts don't supply anything. It is the decisions of people that make goods available.

Supply curves slope upward for the same reason that demand curves slope downward: a higher cost for any activity encourages the finding of substitutes. When potential suppliers are offered a higher price, the cost of not supplying, by pursuing alternative opportunities, increases. And alternative opportunities are pursued to a lesser extent.

Tomorrow we'll talk about supply and demand.

*-there are a whole set of Dwight's pieces on FEE that he did for The Freeman that were economic primers. Readers using these lectures as a tutorial will do well to search for others on that site.

What is the correct number? One might think competition is better, but I had reason to question this today.

My course had 30 seats available, and several weeks ago I sent a request to the campus bookstore for them to be sure to have thirty copies of my text available. This information is spread to all four bookstores that service SCSU. Nineteen students are currently enrolled in the class, but I find I haven't enough textbooks, as students reported to me this morning. We found only fifteen.

Panicked, I had my office manager call around the bookstores while I taught class. She reported back that one of the stores had dug up two books that AM, and two other bookstores had them on rush order. Thursday, one said. The other thought maybe tomorrow. Since it's only a three week class and Memorial Day weekend lurks, this is creates a serious problem for my students.

Now the question is how this could happen with four bookstores on or near campus. The answer, of course, is that each bookstore is assuming the others will pick up the slack. "We don't order for full enrollments because of the other bookstores," said one to my office manager. And that makes some sense, since there are costs of warehousing, freight on returns, and perhaps restocking fees. (I don't know about the last other than what others have told me when I've asked.) And this isn't the only campus on which this is a problem: Google says Kentucky, Pace and U. New Brunswick also had this.

Bookstores insist they aren't making very much money, perhaps no more than $1.25 on a $50 textbook. Margins on new textbooks tends to be 22.5%, but universities will capture a good bit of that back from the bookstore in terms of contributions to the athletic program or scholarships. Nationwide, fulltime students typically spend $850 on books and 9% of the sales come back to colleges. It's likely that SCSU receives upward of $1 million from the bookstores.

In return for that, you'd think they'd find a way for my students to actually get their books.

So what to do? The problem here was a noncooperative game between the bookstores trying to stick the costs of returned texts on other bookstores. We get a sub-optimal equilibrium. One solution would probably be to reduce the number of sellers to one. They'd have nobody to game with and probably order more books, but students would pay more. Controlling the price they are sold at would result in reduced contributions from the bookstore to the university.

From the beginning of his administration, I worried for President Yuschenko when he chose Yulia Tymoshenko as prime minister. I wasn't worried because she had little experience or even her dicey past working with ex PM Pavel Lazarenko. What worried me was that she had a clear idea what she wanted to do and that she had not clearly worked out details with Yushchenko. According to an article last week by the well-connected economist Anders Aslund, it appears they are working at cross-purposes and dissipating the fruits of the Orange Revolution.

[T]he new Ukrainian government of Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, another revolutionary hero, has surprisingly opted for an economic policy that appears to be socialist and populist in nature. The results have been immediate: Last year Ukraine enjoyed economic growth of 12 percent; in the first four months of this year, the growth rate plunged to 5 percent, while inflation has surged to 15 percent. How could things turn so sour so fast?

The biggest blow to the economy has been the new government's foggy plans for re-privatization. During the election campaign, Yushchenko advocated the renationalization of Ukraine's biggest steel mill, Kryvorizhstal, to be followed by a new privatization deal. The goal was to undo the sale of the mill to Ukraine's two biggest oligarchs in a sweetheart deal last year. The new government quickly acted to recover Kryvorizhstal, but the owners have taken the case to the European Court of Justice, where the proceedings are expected to be prolonged.

For months top Ukrainian officials have discussed publicly how many flawed privatization deals should be reversed -- the possibilities range from 29 to 3,000 -- and how this would be done. The government is trying to recover many enterprises through the courts, and it has drafted a broad law that could undo much of Ukraine's privatization. The dispute can be settled only by the fractious parliament, which will need months to come to a decision -- if, indeed, it ever decides anything.

Meanwhile, the property rights of thousands of enterprises are in limbo. In Kiev, rumors abound that oligarchs connected to the old regime are trying to sell their enterprises to Russian business executives and are preparing to escape the country. Naturally, executives are cutting off investment, and economic growth is screeching to a halt.

Populists try to dump wads of cash on the population, and Tymoshenko's popularity is rising rapidly after disposable income in real terms was up more than 23% in the first quarter largely through huge social transfers. (Data from State Stastistical Committee.) But inflation is being fueled by rapid money growth as the deficit has widened to 3.4% of GDP from rough balance in 2004. If I remember right, the number tends to widen more in late summer, so the government is starting from behind.

Other problems are emerging after Tymoshenko chose to freeze gasoline prices, leading to spot shortages. (You really should read Scott Clark on the shortages.) Jed Sunden writes in the Kyiv Post:

The effects are already being felt. Ukrainians have been lining up for gas outside filling stations that – logically enough – are refusing to sell gasoline at the low prices the law demands. In Kyiv, it’s difficult to find gasoline at all. The government’s socialism has taken us right back to the scarcity days of the Brezhnev era. And observers could only hang their heads in despair when Fuel and Energy Minister Ivan Plachkov announced on May 13 that the Cabinet of Ministers would devise a special formula for calculating prices of petroleum products. A working group consisting of both government officials and representatives of Ukraine’s petroleum refineries was charged with coming up with this formula before the end of June.

Before the end of June? Not only is this an example of flagrant, Soviet-style interference in the economy, it also suggests that the authorities are in the price-fixing game for the long haul. But in a country that calls itself a market economy, there should be no government formula setting prices in the first place. Let supply and demand and market forces rule.

It seems rather grim to some, but Dan McMinn is actually optimistic that Yushchenko is keeping control of the situation. Yet Yushchenko can't go too boldly against Tymoshenko unless she would be weakened for the parliamentary elections in March, and after that the handover of powers from the presidency to parliament.

Interesting side note: Despite all this, FDI is increasing in Ukraine, but according to some reports its coming from top Ukrainian oligarchs selling out to Russians trying to get away from Putin ($479 million.) Western European companies are abandoning plants they already had started as tax amnesties are reneged. One wonders what will be left when the dust settles from the battle certain to continue through parliamentary elections.

I could not write fiction this good. The bicentennial of Lord Nelson's victory at Trafalgar comes up this June, and there's supposed to be a celebration and a recreation of the battle, kind of. Brian Ferguson reports:

According to this piece from the Sunday Times organizers of the commemoration have decided that the re-enactment they're planning isn't really a re-enactment:

Organisers of a re-enactment to mark the bicentenary of the battle next month have decided it should be between “a Red Fleet and a Blue Fleet” not British and French/Spanish forces. Otherwise they fear visiting dignitaries, particularly the French, would be embarrassed at seeing their side routed.

As for what it is they're not actually commemorating for fear of offending someone,

Even the official literature has been toned down. It describes the re-enactment not as the battle of Trafalgar but simply as “an early 19th-century sea battle”.

It should be quite a spectacle, whatever it is.

The aim is to create a spectacular “son et lumičre” re-enactment with pyrotechnics, lights and effects from barges in the Solent. Tall ships will create the illusion of a real battle.

Illusion it will be. A spokesperson for the Royal Navy reports "This is an illustration and theatre on water. Nelson is featured, but we are not billing it as Britain versus France. This will not be a French-bashing opportunity."

Well certainly not, we couldn't have that now could we? Ferguson concludes his insightful post wondering when they'll sandblast records of French battles at l'Arc de Triomphe which name the other Europeans who were vanquished by the French. Hey, we're all Euro-homies now, right?

H/T: The Eclectic Econoclast.

Mandatory diversity training is the event at the Guilford County school system, and David Beito is having none of it. The training is run by Crossroads Ministry, with whom David and the other members of the Alabama Scholars Association had a run-in at the University of Alabama. The teachers have expressed their own difficulty with the training.

The Andrews and Southwest teachers said mid way through their Crossroads session that they feel singled out.

The teachers, who are mostly white, said they felt defensive going into the workshop because they feel the assumption is they are racist and need the training.

They have been required to take this training, although typically the district allows each school to decide which training to offer or require of employees.

Parent Cheryl Smith wrote a letter to the News & Record about her concerns with Crossroads, particularly descriptions of whites being racist attributed to the Rev. Joe Barndt, a co-founder of Crossroads.

“I have problems with other individuals calling me names and saying ugly things about me or millions of other people when they don’t know me,” said Smith, who is white.

We have had our own experience with mandatory training, but based on David's reading it appears we got off lightly.

Psycmeister has a great story of how the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce screwed up and slandered Senator Dave Kleis, by sending a form letter to the St. Cloud Times saying Kleis supported a tax increase which he in fact opposed. MCC now claims its a clerical error. Psycmeister reports the form letter now has a disclaimer stating the error on its website. And late in the day a commenter said he got a letter back from MCC prez and letter author David Olson:

There is clearly a mix up here and we are trying to get to the bottom of it. We know that Senator Kleis did not vote for the tax increase so we will be doing something shortly to remedy this.

Hey, mistakes happen! I hope it publishes a clarification on its printed page tomorrow.

What is remarkable to me is that our university is still campaigning about anonymous comments on the Times site, yet in this case not only did they expose the error and get it corrected, but that not one but three local legislators -- including the two area DFL legislators -- came up to Sen. Kleis' defense rather early in the day. But in the middle of the chat there's our Mayor Ellenbecker trying to score a political point on Pogomonster's soak-the-rich tax increase. Ellenbecker would do well to get off those boards -- he keeps adding fuel to the fire. Which, as long as he is going to stand in the middle of it, is just fine by me.

UPDATE (5/24): Olson of the MCC sends a retraction and apology to the Times.

Our sincere apologies to Sen. Dave Kleis for our letter Sunday, which misstated his vote on the Senate tax bill ("Kleis' vote on taxes sends clear message.")
He did not vote for the tax increase, and we know better. The mistake was ours, regardless how it happened.

Translation: The dog ate my homework, but it's my fault.

As requested, I'm including a few notes from each day of my crash course in introductory economics. I hope you will forgive me for not being more expansive, but this is a blog, after all.

This is the text for my course. It's in the 11th edition; the two latter co-authors signed onto the book only after Paul Heyne passed away in 2000. I found on the web this set of PowerPoint slides for the chapter if you are interested in flipping through them. They are thorough. As I mentioned in a comment, I am also having students read The Invisible Heart, authored by Russell Roberts of George Mason, who co-blogs with Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek.

What students should pick up by the end of the course is the power of incentives. We spend a good deal of time discussing the rules of the road which govern traffic. We know how cooperation on a freeway works because we observe (too often!) the times when it does not. Markets work so well that we take them for granted, and we do not see how they work. This is what makes economic conclusions surprising sometimes. We end up with unintended consequences of actions (as Bastiat points out in That which is seen), which is the type of story that thrills most economists to tell. We love the ironic (occasionally too much: we occasionally pass over a good, simple, true story in search of irony.)

Cooperation results from mutual adjustment. When we drive, we adjust to how others are driving: we tend to mimic others' speed; we tend to stay in lanes when others do; each driver seeks an advantage in getting where they want to go faster by reacting to others doing exactly the same thing. It helps to have rules of the road in traffic, to establish some parameters like speed or lanes through which traffic can pass.

Markets work the same way. Rules of the game exist, such as private property rights and the sanctity of contracts, that permit individuals to transact in a way that is mutually advantageous and allows them to capture the gains from transactions themselves. The aforementioned Boudreaux talks today about Zimbabwe, a place that doesn't work that way, and in which country citizens are trying some other way to transact because it is a natural act. The Mugabe government's attempts to squelch that natural desire to "truck, barter, and exchange" -- in Adam Smith's elegant words -- "is like a diseased and deformed baboon calling Charlize Theron ugly." Markets develop to reduce the costs of fulfilling that desire, to expand the circle of potential traders.

Last, we spend time discussing the view that individuals choose rationally. A corrolary of that is that things do not have a cost, only actions do. How does one get a beer? You can brew it, buy it, steal it, borrow it, charm a friend into giving you one. Each action has a different set of costs involved. You produce a beer using that action which is cheapest to you. Which, now that it's 6pm, sounds like a good idea to me.

Many people may not even know that the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder exists as a black newspaper in the Twin Cities. The paper has run a series of articles that help out the loony critics of SCSU. All appear to be written by Jeremy O"Kasick Two give sympathic portrayals of Bianca Rhodes, who's skills as a commencement speaker we've discussed. Two weeks ago, it ran a story effusive of Rhodes upcoming commencement speech, while the week before O"Kasick wrote a report on her failed attempt to get an amendment to the Minnesota State University Students Association's charter supporting under-represented students.

Rhodes, along with eight SCSU delegates and a handful of others, walked out of the assembly in protest. The multiracial group only had to cross the street to their hotel room on a cool spring night, but Rhodes spontaneously began to sing the spiritual, “A Motherless Child,” to ease everyone’s emotional intensity.

Our student homecoming queen called her "the Angela Davis of our school". Now I wonder where he got that from?

In its latest edition, O"Kasick gives new attention to a couple of fringe players who continue to send letters to school counselors telling them not to send minority children to SCSU.

Since 2002, a small group of local African American activists have also intermittingly sent letters to Twin Cities area high schools, condemning SCSU as a racist institution. ...

The two activists involved, Myrle “Buster” Cooper and Michael Davis, recently informed MSR that they have sent a new batch of letters to 48 high schools throughout Minnesota. ...

“St. Cloud is somewhat like the segregationist South,” said Cooper, a retired SCSU faculty member and longtime local gadfly. “City Hall and the university control everything around here, and they get real nervous when the word gets out about all the racism.”

Cooper said that the aim of their letter-writing campaign is to dissuade students of color from coming to St. Cloud, or at least compel them, their parents, and academic counselors to look deeper into racial issues at the university. They have hoped that such efforts will ultimately force SCSU to implement significant changes in order to improve its environment.

"Retired" faculty member and "longtime local gadfly" are, to be polite, euphemisms and an attempt to inflate Cooper's stature. Davis, who at least still is a faculty member here, manages to evade disciplinary procedures while attempting to impede a state goal of the campus, to increase its diversity. For its part, SCSU sends out its enrollment management person with data. And O"Kasick eventually undercuts Cooper and Davis with an interview with another student of color on campus.

Between all the numbers reported and cases made by administrators and activist professors, however, couldn’t high school students of color learn the most from SCSU students of color?

“I am glad I came here. It opened up my eyes,” said Chanmany Sysengchanh, a fourth-year student who graduated from Minneapolis’ North High School, living near the intersection of Plymouth and Emerson. “It hasn’t been easy — that is for sure. But now I know how the world is outside the one I grew up in.”

Over the past year, Sysengchanh has served as the chair of campus affairs for SCSU’s student government. He said he is discouraged by what he views as campus-wide backlashes against cultural diversity, but that it was SCSU in the first place, along with a handful of professors, who inspired him to pursue studies in sociology and human relations.

I don't quite get the "backlashes" bit, since the backlash seems to be that anytime we put students of color in picture we are accused of "tokenism" and anytime we do not we're accused of bias. And yet it was SCSU in the first place, he said, that got him inspired to study (albeit fields of questionable merit.) It's here that the student really was able to learn. It makes you wonder what the MSR has against SCSU, unless it's to simply puff up a few Angela Davis wannabes.

Dear Governor Pawlenty,

Chad points out that the STrib believes it is a tax. Your new buddy Mitch is writing letters to you. David is polishing his rapier, and PolicyGuy is pointing out that the DFL is trying to repackage its gas tax as a "wholesale fee". You've heard from several sides now that you may have stepped in the lutefisk. So what's a guy to do?

Well, we didn't have a chance to discuss this at our meeting, but I've been known to give advice to a few other governments, and I'm here to provide you some help. The first thing we need to do is keep your eyes on what is important, and what is important is not the size of the deficit, but the size of government. The problem with ever proposing to put up taxes is that it requires, if you're a fiscal conservative, having enough votes later down to take them down. The problem with cigarette taxes is that once they are put up, there isn't a constituency clamoring to take them down, because smokers are a minority. If you raise cigarette taxes, then, you've made sure that government gets permanently bigger. That is not just a "bad thing", that is the baddest thing when you are a fiscal conservative.

So first thing to do, today, is to say that the cigarette tax increase -- and for goodness sake, quit splitting hairs on semantics, lest we give the STrib another good editorial line -- is only good for two years. Sunset it. You can even use the label surtax, which would now make sense. Make the next Legislature propose to keep the increase, and then veto that increase when it comes in. The left will howl, but they weren't about to vote for you because you were nice this time. The right might find it in their heart to forgive a backing away from your pledge, though, and a good veto fight over cigarette taxes two years hence will be red meat for the faithful.

Second, enforce the conditionality of your offer. You asked for four things, two of which must be passed for you to sign onto the cigarette tax increase. Be damn sure you get these. It looks to many of us like you folded your hand then asked for a quarter of the pot for being nice. Show us this isn't true, that there was a quid for the quo. To do this, you must leverage your power to call the special session by insisting that all the parts of the deal you offered must be in place before you'll sign the order for the legislature to come back. Get it in writing, don't trust the Senate on this (ask Cheri Yecke if you need advice borne of experience.)

Last, get one of those stickers that the Center for the American Experiment's FACT group was handing out after Guiliani's talk Thursday night, which read It's The Spending, Stupid, and put it on your car. I'll repeat the first point: It's not the size of the deficit, it's the size of government. As Milton Friedman said a couple of years ago:

Many discussions of the economic effect of tax cuts and deficits implicitly assume that government spending is predetermined and independent of whether there is a tax cut or a deficit. In that world, deficits are produced entirely by a shortage of tax receipts. Raising taxes can eliminate the deficit without affecting spending. As I see the world, the situation is very different. What is predetermined is not spending but the politically tolerable deficit. Raise taxes by enough to eliminate the existing deficit and spending will go up to restore the tolerable deficit. Tax cuts may initially raise the deficit above the politically tolerable deficit, but their longer-term effect will be to restrain spending.

If you raise taxes, the Legislature -- including your friends in the Republican party -- will increase spending to create another deficit that you will be pressured into funding two years from now. Do not get yourself in that box. To paraphrase a quote about inflation I heard given by a governor of the Bundesbank, do not flirt with taxes, because if you do you'll end up marrying them, and divorce is quite expensive.

After reading some give and take in comments on a post by Mitch the other day, I thought I should address this issue one time and one time only. The issue is: Can I blog at work? The answer is yes, provided it

• is relevant to my job duties;
• is not in direct service to a political party;
• and doesn't reveal anything subject to data confidentiality (like student records).

The advantage of being an economist and an academic is that I can blog about economics and higher education pretty much within the purview of my job. Academics research in many fields: I've been at times a Fedwatcher, a forecaster, a public choice economist, a sports economist, a development economist and a central bank specialist. I still to some degree hold all of those interests, some more than others. I once was asked to write an article about affordable housing. Certainly not my field, but researching it became part of my job until the article was done (I didn't enjoy the experience, so I haven't read about the topic since.) So my remit in terms of subject matter is pretty darn elastic. That's the nature of academic inquiry, and you wouldn't want it any other way.

Look around the blogosphere and you'll find many academics who blog. Instapundit is a law professor, and I dare say he blogs a good bit from the office. At Crooked Timber last year, Eszter wondered what the value of academic blogging as an alternative to scholarship printed in academic journals, and it may open up new markets for scholarship. cff John Quiggin and Tyler Cowen. The advertising value of this blog for me and for SCSU can be evinced by the increased traffic I get when John Hinderaker says nice things about me on Powerline. The university has benefit from that (double normal traffic on a Saturday when all I'm doing is blabbing about MOBfest.)

No doubt there are days the university does not like this blog, and they've had occasion to lodge complaints and seek redress. Yet they also read here; they were the blog's intended audience initially, and this whole MOB/NARN/VRWC thing was an unintended, serendipitous consequence. I've had members of the administration discuss posts with me. So it will do nobody good to contact the university and tell them I might be moonlighting on company time. They don't think of it that way, and neither do I. If and when they change their mind, I'll change my behavior.

First big thanks goes to Granite City for working with us to make a great evening. It's a fabulous facility and I love the beer they have. Our waitress was Annie, a delightful example of Minnesota youth: polite, pleasant, earnest and kept about twenty tabs going flawlessly. I will drop a note tomorrow to the general manager with our thanks.

Shiner the laptop made the rounds and we had live blogs from the event by Shot in the Dark and
Eckernet, as well as the posts immediately below. We couldn't get someone to start a new blog but we are working on getting Mrs. Scholar to blog with a group. Details forthcoming if she decides to take the plunge.

Third, special thanks to the Night Writer family for entertaining Mrs. and Littlest. The families hit it off marvelously and we will hope to visit with them again.

Last, to all who attended, thanks for a memorable night! We particularly appreciated visits from readers of mine, from those who traveled with nonblogging spouses (hi Mrs. Paul's!), and from one of my readers who hooked up with his high school friend. We have let St. Cloud know what blogging is, and they've seen the fine people who do it. Littlest is just turning in now, and so will I after linking all the names on the previous post. G'night!

King wanted to update you on the progress of our MOB gathering here in St. Cloud. Unfortunately, he's too busy trying to convince the waitress that he has unlimited credit with the IMF and his signature on a matchbook, when submitted with the proper forms, is sufficient payment for the seven beers and multiple shots of whiskey he's consumed in the last hour.

Oh Jeez...King is wrestling with the waitress. She's got him in a half-nelson. Thank goodness - Mrs. Scholar has stepped in...ooh! In a brilliant tag-team move, Littlest Scholar has clocked the waitress on the head with a pint of pale ale while her mother distracted the waitress with a gin and tonic to the face.

You people should make a better effort to come to these events.

Mitch needs the computer; I am being kicked off so he can surf for pictures of Barbara Eden. Some issues there, I'm sure.

Thanks, King, for organizing this wing-ding.

UPDATE (10:30p): King says, All's back to normal. Thanks to Cathy for recording our events!

I'm blogging to you live from Granite City Food and Brewery in St. Cloud! I'm sitting with Cathy, Kevin Ecker, Mr. and Mrs. Fishsticks. Behind me are the Mrs. and Littlest and the Night Writer family and Psycmeister. At the next table are Mitch of Shot in the Dark, Shawn of The American Mind, and Gary of Let Freedom Ring. Phil of Market Power, Brian of Heavy-Handed Politics is here, along with Jo of the M.A.W.B. Squad, Marcus Aurelius of The Attic, Wog, and Speed Gibson and our good reader friend Roger. Wish we could see you here too!

UPDATE: (11:20pm) Links put in. Add Marty Andrade and Flash to the list attending, as they came after this post. Seventeen blogs represented and 27 people altogether attended.

We have more reported attendees of the MOB at tomorrow night's gala celebration at Granite City Food and Brewery in St. Cloud. Scheduled to attend are one or more owners of these blogs (listed in alphabetical order, in case you couldn't see that it's sorted by the alphabet):

• American Mind, Minnesota branch office
• Cathy in the Wright
• Centrisity (if memory serves, Flash dropped me a note last week)
• Craig Fishsticks Westover
• Ecker.net
• Fraters Libertas (especially the Chamberlain of the MOB, Brian St. Paul Ward.)
• Market Power
• Marty Andrade
• M.A.W.B. Squad, outstate division
• Night Writer
• Our House
• Pair o' Dice
• Psycmeister
• Shot in the Dark
• Speed Gibson
• Wog's Blog (if Wog can get a ride)

If I forgot anyone, drop a comment and let me add you to this list (and it's not too late to change your mind, Doug. "Prior commitments" are the things we use to get out of dating our friend's sister.) If you hadn't made up your mind yet, it's not too late. You don't need to be a blogger, and since Mitch and I announced this on WJON yesterday you might not even have ever read a blog before. That's cool, just come on down, and see what fun we can have! Rumors have it that there will be special videos, a laptop to try your hand at blogging, and a bus driven by a fatuous columnist. Festivities begin at 5:30 and the Horst Wessel Lied contest begins at 7.

UPDATE (5/21, noontime): Again, here's the map and you can get directions from wherever you are. If it's raining -- and it's not looking great p here right now -- we'll have to sit and be nice, but I just spoke to the nice people at GCFB and they'll have a long table for us.

UPDATE (5:20pm): We're here, and we've got wifi! The first attendees are Speed Gibson and reader jw with his missus!