A few weeks ago I gave some advice to Governor Pawlenty's poor handling of the budget negotiations. In about half an hour the deadline for a budget will pass, and we got no deal. Not only did he not get a deal, he didn't even get the conditionality he said he had to have.

On Thursday, Sviggum said he and Pawlenty had backed away from a demand for government reform legislation as part of a budget deal. He and Pawlenty also dropped calls for a new casino at Canterbury Park, although they didn't declare it off the table for good.

Oh, it's dead, Tim. Bring it out to the cart.

But, hey, the parks will stay open!

Mr. Pawlenty, do you understand the meaning of the word 'leverage'? How exactly do you expect anyone to make a deal with you when you draw more lines in the sand than a French diplomat? When 2/3 of state employees are going to keep working, and you won't even inflict the pain of a lost weekend in a state park to make people pay attention to the insistence of the bureaucracy, all the way to the courts, that Leviathan is getting hungrier?

Think you're better off now without the pledge? Do you really believe the Cities newspapers and the gasbag on (we don't c)AIR (4) AMERICA will lighten up on you at all because you made conciliatory gestures to demonstrate leadership? Watch, my friend. The best thing happening this weekend is everyone's gone and so the STrib will have fewer readers (though sales will be up as they leave 10,000 copies in front of your mansion and call it circulation.) You're about to reap the shitstorm, all because you got off message trying to be nice with people who play with knives.

Here's the message, one more time: IT'S THE SPENDING, STUPID!

Question to those who thought Pawlenty would get the message from the battle over the state Republican chair -- think he got it?

UPDATE: At least someone is maintaining his sense of humor.

Some of my colleagues from UVa will not be pleased to find that their economics department has a cheating scandal.

Department officials said that some problem sets from textbooks used in introductory graduate economics courses have answer keys online. At least one student found answers for a course taken by all first-year students, and apparently shared the information with classmates. Though the solutions were apparently available, David Mills, chair of the economics department, said students should have “known it was off-limits,” but that they instead “used it without the professor being aware.”

Virginia has a farily strict honor code, so these students should normally be expelled. But this is highly unusual in the case of grad students, at least at UVa. One of the graduate students notes,

from an economist’s perspective, he considered it a bad tactical move to cheat. “It isn’t worth the risk,” he said. He had never heard of graduate students finding answer keys before, and said he would be shocked if someone cheated on a test, but that “as far as for homework, that doesn’t surprise me at all.” He added that the idea a cheater would share his or her apparent competitive advantage with classmates is also less than stunning. “There’s sort of a communal feel in that everybody’s trying to help each other out a lot.”

I agree that grad school is not nearly as cutthroat as one might think from hearing stories of law or medical schools. And it's also not surprising that the economics department is trying to find some way to deal with the dishonesty short of expulsion. Faculty probably should know if their textbooks have problems answered online, and it's easy to catch who didn't learn the material with an exam or the students' qualifying exams. I suspect one problem to arise will be that the students in this class of UVa economics PhDs will be scrutinized a little more carefully on the job market.

h/t: reader Roger Lewis

St. Cloud Mayor John Ellenbecker has decided to run for re-election here in St. Cloud. Most of the local pols of the liberal persuasion will clear out for him, but there's still talk state Senator Dave Kleis might run against him. Kleis is not saying anything about that until the Legislature finishes its work. Given Senator Kleis' preference for small government, the story today provides early ammunition should he choose to run:

If he's re-elected, Ellenbecker said he'll focus on the city's financial health and a capital improvement plan for big-ticket items such as new fire stations, a new public library and a campus-style government center.

That is, having already twisted arms to gain a half-cent sales tax to expand government, he now wants to increase spending on capital projects. Improving financial health probably does not involve reducing spending somewhere else.

The mayor, as I've mentioned before, likes to read the chat room at the St. Cloud Times, and is responding to posters commenting on this story (up over 185 today, which is the most I can remember.) If you want to talk with or debate Mr. Ellenbecker, there are opportunities available to you on that chat room. He responds frequently and hasn't been bashful about responding. Those posts are going to make some nice food for debates this fall.

One more point: Ellenbecker is frequently cited as a possible DFL candidate for US Congressional District 6, the seat Mark Kennedy is leaving to run for the Senate. (St. Cloud mayoral races, like many other municipal elections, are non-partisan.) There is nothing in this story to indicate he isn't still looking at the race, but it's quite obvious that a defeat in this election would probably preclude a run for the House. It will be interesting to see both what opposition is offered to take Ellenbecker down a peg and how much DFL sources are used to support his re-election.

Over at Apprehension, Douglas Bass offers another thought and an interesting graphic on the question of foreign aid and infant mortality rates (IMR).

The rows are nations/regions, the columns are years, and the cells are the IMR's for that nation/region and year. The cells are black if the Census Bureau doesn't have data for that nation/region and year, brown if the IMR is above 50, and green if the IMR is below 50. All of the countries that were green when measurement started have stayed green, and most of the countries that were brown, and have gone green, have stayed green.

Now what I plotted before, for Africa, was the level of IMR versus foreign aid. Douglas' post talks about the change in IMR. Given that he left on my comments page the data for his graph, I thought it rather simple to calculate the decline in IMR versus foreign aid. So, same graph except using the change in IMR over 1990-2000.

I've got a slight change in my data, as I added North Africa back into the dataset. I also have the problem that I only have aid data from my source for 1999-2003, and only the 2000 dataset looks complete. So I could be wrong in what I have here if the earlier aid pattern to Africa is different than it was in 2000. This is supposed to be a back-of-the-envelope exercise, not a detailed senior paper. (If any of my students are reading: You have a ready-made senior paper topic.) But here are two pictures, one for the level of IMR in 2000 (the previous graph had two fewer datapoints) and the second of the change in IMR over the 1990s versus foreign aid in 2000.

There doesn't appear to be much of a relationship. Depressingly, the data don't seem to show any change in IMR in the 1990s in Africa; you can count seven countries with noticeably hire IMR in 2000 than 1990.

This week's Economist has a review of the aid for Africa question as its headline piece, and it includes this intriguing reference to the Sharon Stone-mosquito bednet story.

Top of the list of quick wins are mosquito bednets, impregnated with insecticide. They cost less than $4 and cut the risk of infants dying by 14%, to 63%. The appeal is obvious and immediate. At the World Economic Forum in Davos this year, a speech on malaria by Benjamin Mkapa, Tanzania's president, prompted Sharon Stone, a Hollywood actress, to stand up, pledge $10,000 for bednets on the spot, and challenge her fellow audience members to do the same.

Sadly, this impulsive generosity will not be instantly gratified. Nets cost more to distribute than to make. Misguided policies can make matters worse. Nigeria, for
example, has on various occasions imposed tariffs of up to 40% on imported nets to protect its own netmakers. Demand for the insecticide, with which many Africans are unfamiliar, cannot be taken for granted (less than a fifth of nets are retreated regularly) nor can demand for the nets themselves. The Monitor, a Ugandan newspaper, reports that a government official last month warned villagers not to turn their nets into wedding gowns.

So where are Ms Stone's nets now? In fact, the Tanzanian government has a sensible policy of not giving bednets away. To do so might crowd out the commercial sellers of bednets, who distribute them more efficiently than the public sector—and can be relied on to keep selling them, provided they can make a profit, long after celebrity donors have lost interest. Instead, the government hands out vouchers to pregnant women at antenatal clinics, covering much of the cost of the nets in the market.

The dilemmas of distributing bednets illustrate some general problems of aid. Donors muster resources, but they fail to align the incentives of the people providing them or benefiting from them. The grand macro-solutions often neglect the nagging micro-foundations.

The Economist story goes on to tell of informal markets developing to distribute drugs; this may not be out and out corruption but simply the means by which clinics stay in business when they don't receive payments expected from the public sector. And getting incentives right is important for both the micro and macro levels, as this piece from the IMF's research chief Raghuram Rajan suggests. It's not just the amount that Africa gets but how it gets it that matters.

If the country’s government is thoroughly corrupt, then the status quo—no forgiveness and no additional aid—is best, for it gives the government no official resources to misuse and limits its ability to raise private sector funds. Aid in this case should be distributed directly to nongovernmental organizations. If the country has a reasonably committed government, look at the country’s primary need. When social sector projects top the list, then what matters is the extent of official sector net funding. Here, the first alternative—debt is not forgiven but official creditors lend more—is best. But if most projects are commercially viable, the second alternative—some relief but leaving enough outstanding official debt that foreign private investors lend responsibly—may be optimal. Finally, substantial debt forgiveness is prudent if the risk of financial distress really is a serious problem—an unlikely eventuality. But there must be an assurance that the country does not borrow up again from private creditors and game the system to get further debt relief.

The Africa question is daunting, as more and more advisors become frustrated and calloused with the lack of progress after pouring in so much and receiving so little. The story dates back as far as the end of WW2, when parts of Africa were seen as better prospects for economic growth than Japan. The Economist writers want us not to abandon all hope. We haven't, but we would like to be sure first that we do no harm.

Phil Miller, on the math he needed to get into graduate school:

I am not a math jock. In fact, through my undergraduate years, I never took a math class beyond college algebra although I was exposed to some essentials of calculus in a mathematical econ course. I was also exposed to more calculus in the footnotes of the intermediate micro text that I used.

...During the winter of 1992-93 and the spring and summer of 1993, the time immediately prior to the beginning of my graduate studies, I spent my time reading a calculus book and a linear algebra book. My time at UNO told me that to be successful in a graduate program, I needed to know that stuff. I read and took notes from every section of the calc book that covered material typically covered in calc 1 and 2 and the material on partial differentiation. I read and took notes from nearly the entire linear algebra text. ... In short, I taught myself calc 1, 2, parts of 3, and linear algebra in the space of about 9 months. In my life, this was one of the best investments I made.

That's almost exactly the advice I give my students. There's no way around the calculus, even when the guy who taught me micro in graduate school, Dan Vandermeulen (the first economist at Claremont McKenna), did his entire set of course using linear programming and set theory. If you have linear algebra, linear programming isn't hard, and set theory struck me as akin to my formal logic course as an undergrad, a course that should be taught far more often than it is. But even that didn't help, because when it came time for qualifying exams that odd way of writing economic problems was all I knew. I had technique, but no insight. Insight actually didn't come for me until I taught principles myself, something which most students at Claremont didn't do because GAs were not used to teach there.

I see many of my students nowadays not only taking the calculus and linear algebra but thinking they need a minor in mathematics or a double major to get into graduate school. That might be true -- grad schools will look to see what math you've had and will use it as a screen. But as John Palmer points out, that's not what makes you an economist.

First Ringer's post of the suit filed against the StarTribune for inflated circulation figures interested me for a few reasons.

1. I had no idea that there's a non-profit company keeping track of circulation figures, and that advertisers and papers were using that company's information to decide ad rates;
2. Advertising is 84% of revenues for the paper.
3. I had no idea the Fraters had such foresight as to have said on NARN last week many of the charges in the suit.

Plaintiffs believe and allege that Defendants charged them higher advertising rates based upon manipulated, inflated circulation figures, which upon information and belief were derived from various programs designed to manipulate circulation figures, including (1) requiring independent contractor distributors to leave newspapers at residential addresses that do not subscribe to the Star Tribune; (2) requiring distributors to dump unsold newspapers; (3) refusing to credit retailers with unsold newspapers and instead reporting unsold papers as sales; (4) implementing programs designed to inflate circulation numbers at schools and hotels; (5) "buying down returns", whereby the Star Tribune gave agents incentives not to report returns accurately.

4. The suit discusses "grace period" deliveries, so that when The Elder cancelled his subscription but continued to find the paper on his doorstep, the STrib "reports circulation revenue on its books from these unsold, freely delivered papers, but classifies them as ciruclation bad debts if subscriptions are not regained."

I'm not shocked to hear this has happened, and as the suit points out, inflated circulation figures are not a unique problem at the STrib. Newsday is going through its problems with circulation inflation right now. But it would be interesting to see what the actual, uninflated numbers were for the STrib, since it tends to boast its growth. Having driven a delivery truck for the Manchester Union Leader back in the 1970s as one of those independent contractors, I can say I saw none of these activities during my time.

Side note: My uncle used to complain about returns at the Dover (NH) News, a distributor where he was a manager. But the best thing about that business was that they also distributed comic books, and all they had to return for credit was the cover. The rest ended up often at his apartment, where I would read the innards. This was also true with magazines -- I'm willing to bet he had some uncovered Playboys, as it were.

One of the really troubling things for me when judging a young scholar's ability to teach is when he or she is not a native English speaker and has a heavy accent. I travel overseas a good bit but normally conduct business in English -- my Russian, French and Armenian are good enough to order food and get through the customs line at the airport, not much more -- and so I am used to hearing many different accents and learn to work with them. I adjust fairly quickly to a new accent.

Students, particularly from smaller cities and towns, have no such experience. So it is rather common now for them to come to me, as an academic chair, to complain about accents for the non-native English faculty I have. (We don't use our graduate students in the classroom because our programs are applied programs for people going into business fields, not academia.) I was therefore fascinated by an article in the IHT on graduate assistants with limited command of English.

Valerie Serrin still remembers the feeling of helplessness. After getting a low grade on a lab report in an introductory chemistry course, she went to her teaching assistant to ask what she should have done for a better grade.

The teaching assistant, a graduate student from China, had a heavy accent and a limited grasp of spoken English, so he could not explain to Serrin, a freshman at the time, what her report had lacked, Serrin said. "He would just say, 'It's easy, it's easy,"' said Serrin, who recently completed her junior year at the University of California at Berkeley. "But it wasn't easy. He was brilliant, absolutely brilliant, but he couldn't communicate in English."

Some writers think this is just students being, well, students.

Some in the academic world believe that the complaints can be a reflection of insularity and laziness. "Is there some low-level carping? Absolutely," said Dudley Doane, director of the Center for American English Language and Culture at the University of Virginia. "Is it justified? At times it may be. However, we have some students who aren't used to stretching."

Some foreign teaching assistants said that, in addition to their own studies and the rigors of grading papers, overseeing labs and leading discussions, they must deal with what some might consider intolerant undergraduates.

"I had students come into my class mimicking the accent of a friend of mine, who is a teaching assistant in math," said Atreyee Phukan, a graduate student in comparative literature at Rutgers University, in New Jersey, who was born in India, raised in Bahrain and has a slight accent.

Students can be cruel, too, and some stretching is a good idea. The point here though is that, as someone who's evaluated potential professors for some time (and remember, most of these are foreign-born scholars who received English-language instruction and earned a Ph.D. with a thesis written in the language), there is a serious attempt to try to be sure the people we put in the classroom can speak the language too. However, too much of an attempt can sometimes run afoul of campus diversity crusaders who think your evaluation of an accent is a thinly-veiled attempt to keep, say, an African scholar off the faculty. Particularly at larger state institutions of second- or third-tier status, that pressure can be quite severe.

With all the Supreme Court rulings out there driving folks around the bend, one that's fallen through the cracks is the Seventh Court of Appeals' decision that even college newspapers can be censored. John Wilson of Inside Higher Ed is quite concerned. The court's majority opinion includes this whopper:

Let us not forget that academic freedom includes the authority of the university to manage an academic community and evaluate teaching and scholarship free from interference by other units of government, including the courts.

Sounds like quite a license to run amok in the hallowed halls. One wonders if the ruling has any bearing on the case of former dean Richard Lewis here at SCSU, who was denied the opportunity to sue the university for libelous claims in its student newspaper.

Why, the cads!

The state Commerce Department is accusing Midwest Oil of Minnesota of more than 160 violations of a state law that requires stations to charge at least 8 cents more per gallon than they pay. Midwest Oil faces a potential fine of up to $1.6 million.

...A Minnesota law bars retailers from selling gasoline below cost. That amounts to at least 8 cents above the total of wholesale prices, plus taxes and fees. For instance, [MN Dept. of] Commerce said the minimum price on March 25 was $2.05 per gallon, but Commerce said it paid $1.96 at Midwest Oil's Anoka station. Two days later, with the minimum still at $2.05 a gallon, Commerce said it paid $1.98.

Commerce also alleged that Midwest Oil charged less at the pump than the prices posted on its signs and that the company offered illegal discounts if customers paid inside rather than at the pump.

The law, passed in 2001, has typically not been enforced and when it has the fines were much smaller than the one proposed. But Commerce is cracking down in an attempt to protect competitors, they admit.

"Any time prices increase there's more sensitivity to what people are charging at the pump. Competitors are also very sensitive because margins are very thin. Our complaints come from competitors, not consumers." -- spokesman Bruce Gordon (the old WJON Bruce Gordon?)

So even if some guys are taking advantage of futures markets to smooth price swings, they can't make use of the savings to pass on to customers. A similar law in Maryland is preventing Walter Williams from getting a cup of free coffee.

H/T: Policy Guy.

It was bad enough for me to read Joanne Jacobs' report that in Virginia, prospective teachers will not have to take a test on math knowledge unless they are planning to teach math. What was unintentionally hysterical was a commenter who tried to show the test was flawed and instead showed why we probably need that test.

That reader, it turns out, would have probably been in the 3% that can't pass the test.

Remember when I blogged last fall about community yellow bicycles on campus? Fraters Libertas reports it's moving into cars now, though the market-clearing price might be lower than the organizers think.

A reminder to read the economics lesson that goes with this.

Caroline Baum, maybe the best economics reporter you haven't heard of:

If I could pick one graph in the entire field of economics to illustrate my columns, be they on the Federal Reserve, the yield curve or oil, it would be the supply and demand curves.

I would draw a vertical axis marked P (price) and a horizontal axis marked Q (quantity). Then I'd draw a downward- sloping demand curve and an upward-sloping supply curve. I'd mark the point where they intersect ``E,'' for equilibrium: Supply and demand are in balance.

Economics textbooks are very good at explaining this stuff. Really. Economists are equally good at forgetting it.

Mahalanobis has an illustration. Baum is trying to figure out why people who thought $50 oil would take some of the growth out of the economy are now saying demand will be strong even at $60. RTWT.

Douglas Bass has been tireless in covering the case at Cumberland College, now University of the Cumberlands, and he now reports that the AAUP has censured the school. Not that they care.

The response of President James Taylor to the decision was consistent with his responses during the entire proceedings; a stiffarm to the AAUP, and relying on weasely legalese to justify his actions. Since Dr. Taylor referred to the censure as 'a badge of honor,' University of the Cumberlands may be on the AAUP's list of censured administrations for a long time.

If university administrators choose not to care about AAUP censure, there is little available as a remedy outside of the courts, alas. As the two faculty concerned have both left the school are are "moving on" in Douglas' words, there's no pressure to reform.

MOBsters Douglas Bass and Heavy Handed are wondering about foreign aid too. And in Douglass' post Heavy wonders about the relationship between foreign aid and infant mortality. Knowing where they keep that data, I thought it worth drawing. Here's your answer for Africa, year 2000.

In words, if aid is reducing infant mortality, it isn't by much and it isn't significant.

I haven't printed critiques of too many St. Cloud Times editorials lately, not for lack of targets of opportunity, but because they aren't nearly in the class of the turds the Minneapolis StarTribune drop with regularity. But I'll take this one, because I had a hand in part of this. It is on the critically important issue of ... pet licenses.

75 percent of about 20,000 dogs [in the area] are not licensed even though each city requires it. Considering the primary purposes of a license are to protect public health and keep track of the pet, it's astounding that 15,000 dogs remain unlicensed.

Why? This editorial board believes it's because, beyond doing the right thing, there is little motivation for pet owners to follow the law. After all, buying Buddy an ID tag and a rabies vaccination is probably good enough, especially if Buddy sticks to your property or stays on a leash.

Unlicensed pets may not be a pressing issue, but dealing with them and other pet-related issues does require public resources. St.Cloud spent $186,249 on animal control efforts for fiscal 2004. Yet pet licenses and fees brought in only $47,858, leaving city taxpayers to cover the $138,000 difference.

OK, first time out. Those latter two paragraphs don't connect. Either animal control efforts aren't an issue because Buddy sticks to his property or on a leash, or they are because he doesn't. Which is it? Also, the entire cost of animal control is supposed to be paid by pet owners? How much of animal control is for feral cats or dogs, or for the stray deer or wolf that wanders in? And again, context: The city's general government revenue is about $31 million.

Given those numbers and the area's rapid growth, cities should consider one of two options. Either find ways to compel people to buy pet licenses, or scrap the entire licensing system. As it stands now, clearly most pet owners don't abide by — or benefit from — it anyway.

One way to compel compliance would be to require a dog to have a license before it gets a rabies vaccine. Right now, it's the opposite in area cities; it takes a rabies tag to get a license.

The down side would mean area veterinarians, who are simply trying to run a business, would become the enforcers. This approach also might lead to people skipping vaccinations, which is the one outcome the area doesn't want.

It may indeed. And that gets us to the other part and my hand in the current regulation. But think about this first: What would be the cost of compelling licenses? It is substantial, because it would take time away from veterinarians doing other things they need to do. If you are interested in pet health, why would you do this? It raises the cost of their services, quite possibly by more than $138k, but of course taxpayers won't see this. And, note, here's a city that has always complained about "unfunded mandates" in essence conscripting vets to be tax collectors for them.

Another way might be to boost the fees and fines charged for licenses and citations. For example, St. Cloud charges a minimum of $7.50 to license a spayed or neutered dog. Late fees of $5 a month are applied after May 31. What if those fees doubled?

If you double those fees, like with the rabies shots, you get fewer animal spayed or neutered. St. Cloud, like several cities, has a two-tier price for licenses, charging $21 for "intact" dogs (their phrase, not mine. Talk about scare quotes!) The two-tier system came about through an effort of some people working in animal welfare groups, which included Mrs. Scholar and myself. It was my idea to put that two-tier price in there, because we want to encourage spaying and neutering. If you double the price, you would encourage people not to take their animals to be spayed and neutered, leading to more unwanted pets. For the very same reason we wouldn't want to make the rabies vaccine depend on a license -- we would rather have unlicensed, vaccinated pets than licensed, unvaccinated ones -- so to would we prefer neutered and spayed pets. We left pet owners with a choice.

If the $138,000 is due to abandoned dogs and cats from unwanted pregnancies, you might consider increasing the size of the step between spayed/neutered and intact pets. But that again may simply lead to intact animals being unlicensed. It's a question of the elasticity of demand for licenses.

Or what if fines for loose dogs were increased substantially? In Sauk Rapids, that can yield a $25 fine for first-time offenders. It doubles for every violation. If the animal is not licensed, it is impounded. To recover the animal, the owner must pay a $31 redemption fee, a $31 impounding fee and an $8.50 daily boarding fee, and buy a license, which can cost up to $20.

Other cities have similar fee structures. However, officials in each city said it's rare for someone to be cited more than once.

Yes, because if you've paid all that money to get your dog out of the pound, you probably reveal yourself as someone able to take care of your pet. What the article doesn't say is how many owners lose pets and choose to not recover them because of the cost. I'll let you figure out on your own what happens to those pets. Dogs typically adopt out well -- only seven were euthanized in St. Cloud last year; cats do much, much worse. It is rare that a cat is reclaimed by his or her original owner; the adoption rate is around 50%. Details. I can tell you those numbers were much higher in my family's days of working with local animal welfare groups. (Mrs. S continues to keep up on this.)

I wouldn't have really bothered to blog this editorial except for this weasel paragraph.

Overall, the intent of this editorial isn't to push for a police crackdown on unlicensed pets or shame people into getting Buddy licensed. Rather, it's simply to ask if these licensing systems are effectively achieving their intended purpose.

Given that you haven't come up with a reasonable alternative nor come up with a rationale for why the current system doesn't work, all you've managed to accomplish is to cast aspersions on a system that is actually working pretty well.

I've loaded a copy of the new Quarterly Business Report (published in ROI Central Minnesota and discussed in yesterday's St. Cloud Times) onto my university page. It should be up at the site of the St. Cloud Area Partnership, one of our gracious and generous sponsors, with the archive in a few days.

The Times ran a separate feature on our speculations about Electrolux. I agree with most of the commenters -- while they haven't said for sure what's happening and I don't know anything more than what I read in the company's financials, I'd be surprised to find Electrolux still in business here next summer. I just did a radio interview with WJON in the last two hours which covered the question.

Bryan Caplan is thinking about housing bubbles. The problem most economists have with bubbles is that in a market that functions well, arbitrage opportunities should cure bubbles. But, Caplan says,

What would I actually do if I knew for sure that my house was going to plummet in value one year from today? My ideal solution would be to sell my house to someone, rent it from them for a year, then buy it back. But that would be very hard to arrange. In practice, I'd have to sell, rent whatever's available for a year, then use my nest egg to buy a comparable (or better home), pocketing the difference.

There's a lot of transactions costs built in there. For starters, there's moving costs x2, plus all the pain and suffering of changing my address and phone number twice, plus the loss of sentimental value in my current house. And don't forget opportunity costs - I'd say that 100 hours each for me and my wife is a conservative estimate.

So how much money would I have to net to make me sell, rent, and buy again after the crash? Frankly, it would take $200,000 just to pique my interest. And that's with certainty. Maybe I'm unusually averse to moving, but I can easily see people with kids in school being even less mobile than I am.

And if the difference is really that large, that creates a big hole in "no $20 bills on the ground in the housing market" story.

Willie Sutton could have learned from the rulers of Nigeria.

The scale of the task facing Tony Blair in his drive to help Africa was laid bare yesterday when it emerged that Nigeria's past rulers stole or misused £220 billion.

That is as much as all the western aid given to Africa in almost four decades. The looting of Africa's most populous country amounted to a sum equivalent to 300 years of British aid for the continent.

Not to pick too much at my NARN brother Captain Ed, but I believe I get a 'toldja' for this one. Instead, while admitting this is a problem, Ed still thinks the problem is ours.

The Nigerian scam shows the absolute necessity of on-the-ground verification of aid distribution and a requirement for the positive political reform that will make future aid unnecessary, not just for Nigeria but for all African aid. It also demonstrates that Africa's problems aren't due to Western neglect, although Western exploitation certainly didn't do anything to help. The reason why an entire continent can't feed, clothe, or shelter itself is because of the political corruption that Western aid ironically enabled. It doesn't absolve us of our need to get Africa on its feet now, but it does demonstrate that just throwing money at the poorest continent won't do anything but make the situation worse.

McQ links to an interview of Jeff Sachs, noted debt relief tout, and George Ayittey, a Ghanaian who thinks there's a real problem here that debt relief is not going to help. Ayittey says,

The big elephant in the room is African governments. Africa has been totally mismanaged and misruled in the past decade, but nobody wants to talk about that because of political correctness. Africa's begging bowl leaks horribly. As a matter of fact, the African Union itself estimated that every year corruption alone costs Africa $148 billion. If African leaders could cut that in half, they'll find more money than what Tony Blair is trying to raise for them.

But in the past we entrusted money to the government sector and the government sector simply did not spend the money wisely. And that is why we need reforms, but the government sector is not being reformed. So in the meantime, people are dying. We want to save the people especially those, the children who are dying of malaria. If there's a way by which we can...as a matter of fact, if we can get to the people directly rather than passing through these corrupt governments, it would be better for the people.

And that is the problem -- how do you as a government bypass the governments of Africa to get aid to people? And more importantly, how do you fix corrupt governments like Nigeria's? What's to say they won't do it again?

In context: Corruption may have cost Nigeria $400 billion. Current external debt of Nigeria is about $34 billion. Nigerian proven crude oil reserves: 33 billion barrels. They are not bankrupt by any stretch, and they aren't poor. Most of the $400 billion stolen is siphoned oil money. Maybe rather than pay off the debt, we should just collect 2 billion barrels as collateral and call it even.

For further reading: New non-technical report from the IMF: Can Debt Relief Boost Growth in Poor Countries?

*...of a damn long list. I'm smarter than you think.

Senior administrators often have backup positions, something that doesn't happen usually in the private sector, as Owen notes. Stephen Karlson, however, puts the matter in some context.

Traditionally, deans, provosts, and chancellors (using the Wisconsin terminology) are senior members of the faculty given additional responsibilities that they might hold by virtue of their long experience and wisdom ... who might hold such positions for a few years before returning to faculty.

...mid-level university administrators (holding positions other than department chairman, dean, provost, chancellor) sometimes are failed scholars, frequently from disciplines with large reserve armies of the underemployed, and sometimes hired for purposes that may or may not be central to the university's mission. Whether those mid-levels ought to be accorded the same protections as accomplished faculty (who sometimes deserve it; there is a reason one traditionally greets the newly seated chairman or dean with condolences) is another matter.

When one is hiring someone who has tenure, it is customary to ascertain whether the person would warrant tenure at your institution -- and if not, why hire him or her? -- and then grant it on arrival or after a usually perfunctory review a year or two later. This frequently happens for faculty, and there's no reason why it wouldn't happen as you took a dean who was tenured in his or her university to be a dean in yours. Unfortunately, the state system in Minnesota does not permit us to tenure an outside dean. Thus the ones we get are either insiders -- who deserve either condolences or condemnation for masochism, or those who have decided that administration is more rewarding than teaching and research -- or outsiders who most likely were failures elsewhere (otherwise, why go from a job with tenure to one without?)

Another point, however: A dean or a chairman has additional power in the system by dint of having a retreat home. Senior administrators come and go, and tenured faculty who become deans and chairmen usually survive them. They have a greater stake in the institution, and also the ability to oppose itinerant careerists who want to impose, say, mandatory diversity training to feather their resumes for their next posting. Firing me as a chairman for being a royal pain in the tuckus isn't much help to the president. I go down the hall and open up a second blog like SCSUPRESIDENTMUSTGO.blogspot... or something.

It is with great hope that I note I have only two more years in my term as a department chairman.

During his drive out to the upper Midwest, Jeff from Quid Nomen Illius stumbles into a life lesson.

Unshaven and surly, I fill up my car at the station next to the seedy Denny's where I ate dinner last night, a wondrous place where nearly all of the patrons are perfect spheres, and half a tank into my business I glance up from the gas-fumes to discover that the world, the whole world, has stopped. Police cruisers block the intersections, and only a group of Harleys and a long line of flag-bearing SUVs are allowed to use the one route back to the interstate and I think: Aw, hell. My friends say I have a knack for stumbling into things; leave it to me to drive right into a goddamn parade.

But then I shake off my remnant sleep and I realize: The crowds of people waving flags along the side of the road--they're not cheering. In fact, they're eerily silent.

And then I see: That's not a black station wagon passing in front of me. It's a hearse.

I'm mortified by how disrespectful I've been, and immediately I stand up straight next to my car and join the many Ohioans who have come out of KMart and other nearby stores to stand on the curb and pay their respects to a fallen Marine. It's hot, and everyone is in shorts, tank-tops, sandals, whatever they'd wear on a normal June morning. I shouldn't feel underdressed, but I do. The cars pass, and pass, and pass, and I'm no longer worried about rushing toward the interstate. I wish I had a hat to remove.

I'm reminded of the Zen saying that when you need a teacher, one will be presented to you. I have noticed that when I remove my hat, place it over my heart, and sing the national anthem at a ballgame, nervous glances often are replaced by others joining me. Sometimes you're the student, and sometimes you're the teacher.

I'll miss NARN tomorrow to be in the WWW.fest parade here in St. Cloud. (BTW, Spass Tag last week was fun -- even saw the Singing Saints in the parade, which includes Psycmeister.) We're fortunate to have Christina Hoff Sommers on the show this week to discuss her book with Sally Satel, One Nation Under Therapy:How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance. Tune in 12-3pm on AM1280 the Patriot (there's a radio stream there if you're out of range.)

MOBster Matt Abe is wondering about news that liberal blogs are more popular because they're more like communities.

The "next big thing" in the political blogosphere is already underway in its liberal regions, but apparently not in conservative areas. Liberal bloggers (most notably Daily Kos and MyDD) are leading the way with a new kind of web site that combines group blogging and social networking. The most popular platform for this right now is called Scoop.

The thesis is that new liberal bloggers are found through more interactive platforms, while conservative bloggers find each other only via blogrolls, meaning the top-level blogs carry huge blogrolls and third- and fourth-level conservative blogs suffer from low traffic and have trouble being found. These newer platforms are supposed to be collaborative and reader-driven.

Like conservative blogs aren't?

The thesis fails, I think, on two levels. First, it is quite difficult to tell on community blogs who is good and who is bad if you are an outsider. I spend a good deal of time on bulletin boards and some posters will have credibility versus other posters. But that credibility is only for others who are members in the community of frequent posters (or lurkers, I suppose.) To outsiders there isn't much credibility. What makes a conservative blog fly is its credibility. You acquire it by building a brand. But once established, the brand can be marketed to other readers to expand readership. These are very different marketing tools. And a blogger with his or her own brand has a greater incentive to bring new information to the blogosphere because he or she can profit from it, either through ego from having many eyes reading or through Blogads. (It's noteworthy that most bloggers trying to make a living from their blogs are lefties, who therefore are more aggressively marketing their blogs to advertisers. It's my impression from talking to Captain Ed and Powerline that they do not actively seek blogads, for example; in the latter case it isn't necessary -- being in Time will draw advertisers to them.)

And it's worth noting that we discussed this before last fall during Rathergate. Joe Carter has noted that there is a hierarchy of news, and it may be that interactive aggregators would fit on Joe's third tier than at the level of Powerline or Kos. But the value of these things as I wrote at the time comes from their ability to gather specific knowledge for others to use for their own decisionmaking. Trackback, Technorati and other linking features act as votes that the information at such a place has value. (Even though my trackback is manual, I try to ping whenever I can.) The problem Scoop is that while it allows for voting, it doesn't indicate whose vote it is. Someone with a highly visible and reliable blog leaves a strong mark when he or she tracks back to a third- or fourth-level blog.

I watched the dreadful NBA final Game 7 last night, and wish instead I had seen Declining by Degrees, a PBS documentary asking how good is higher education in America. Viewing the trailers we see it discusses the lack of preparedness of entering students, the size of classrooms, the lack of academic rigor, and the lack of rewards academia gives to good teachers. It has the kind of slant you might expect from PBS: It's about the money.

"Declining by Degrees" also highlights the impact of market forces in higher education today. The reality of the college experience today often depends on the bottom line: money. As one university president described it, "The state taxpayer support for public universities is eroding. That creates financial stress that we all understand and we just manage it. We just deal with it the best we can."

The two-hour documentary examines the public and government's decreasing financial commitment to higher education. Sixty years ago our country entered into what amounted to a social contract to ensure access to college for all despite family income. States supported public colleges and the federal government helped with money for the poor. Today, the funds and the support for the social contract are diminishing.

As Pat Callan, President of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, explains, "The federal Pell Grant program is the nation's largest program that focuses on the lowest income students who actually get to go to college. In the early 80's, that program had about 3 or 4 billion dollars in it, and it covered over 95 percent of the average tuition at a 4-year public college or university." Today it's about 57%.

But the documentary is making some schools nervous. The University of Arizona is one school the documentary focuses on, and they're not happy.

While UA administrators agreed that a comprehensive look at higher education was overdue, they don't agree with the way the 37,000-student UA campus is portrayed.

"It plays on the stereotypes of huge universities," said UA spokesman Paul Allvin, who has seen the documentary's first hour. "There is more to the UA than what these people have chosen to highlight."

Cade Bernsen, UA's student body president, agreed.

"I've had great professors who enjoy the time they get to have one on one," said Bernsen, 25, a political science major whose professors have invited him and his peers for coffee to discuss assignments. "You can go to any campus and find people who are disgruntled or skating through the system."

John Merrow, the documentarian, also has an article from the New York Times (but use this link rather than the one on the PBS webpage -- thanks to William Polley), which plays up a quote from UA President Peter Likins that the school's environment is "Darwinian".

The show is replaying here in the local market on Channel 17 Sunday at noon. Readers outside the Twin Cities area should check their listings.

Teaching is hard, and teaching to the children of the urban poor is many times harder. So when you hear a story of great teachers turning around a district in New York City, you have to wonder how it is done. Nicole Gelinas explains that it's hard work:

It’s no mystery why scores are going up: a gifted, determined manager who motivated teachers to succeed. The district’s leader, Kathleen Cashin, established clear expectations for principals and teachers, and pushed the schools in the district to meet them. P.S./I.S. 41 principal Myron Rock enthuses that his teachers worked evenings, Saturdays, and vacations to push students.

But, Gelinas explains, the teachers had to do it only for pride because they could not get additional money for the extra hours and effort they put in. Gelinas draws on a paper from 2003 by Caroline Hoxby and Andrew Leigh that shows a relationship between the compression in wages for female teachers and teacher aptitude. The reason, they explain, is that in other occupations, the wage gap between men and women of higher aptitude declined (not so for those of lower aptitude).

When we began this study, our prior was that pay parity would play the major and pay compression the minor role. We had not recognized the implications of the fact that pay parity changed similarly for college women of all aptitudes, which makes its smaller role predictable. Put another way, outside of teaching, high aptitude college women did not gain dramatically relative to low aptitude
college women: they all gained over time. However, in teaching, high aptitude women experienced substantial relative losses.

As a result, the share of teachers in the lowest aptitude category rose from 16% to 36%, of which 2/3 of the increase was due to pay compression.

To induce better teachers -- those with higher aptitude -- that pay compression needs to be released. That's what merit pay does. Merit pay pulls in higher-aptitude teachers from alternative forms of employment.

SCSU does not have merit pay. What this means for the quality of the faculty is quite clear: It makes it quite difficult to retain top faculty. The issue is under debate in the current round of contract negotiations.

Scott Clark is blogging in Ukraine with someone playing a Ukrainian accordion outside his flat. I love old Ukrainian folk music, and I'm pretty sure he's listening to a harmoshka. I recall it seeming more like a concertina than an accordion. There was an open-air restaurant in the park below Marinskyy palace in Kyiv where I ate once, and they had one of these. Gorgeous sound.

One of these days I picture Mitch Berg with a bandura. Maybe he can grow a handlebar mustache to complement. It has been my pleasure lately at church to sing with a band that recently added a wonderful mandolin and violin player, but a bandura? That would be to die for.

Gary Miller got Cheri Yecke to play book tag with us. Her "last book I read" is a good addition to my own collection that I should make soon.

The Thernstroms were the pioneers in analyzing the achievement gap and bringing national attention to this issue – an issue that we cannot ignore and have a moral obligation to address.

UPDATE: Saint Paul checks in. I'll grant his using Shelby Foote's trilogy as three books. I knew he was an inveterate magazine reader, but 25 books? Does he stack magazines in the corners of his house?

My whole argument about the Academic Bill of Rights has been that it's never been about passing a law but about getting higher education institutions to value intellectual diversity. This is what happened in Colorado, and it's what you'd hope for everywhere else.

A first step seems to have been taken. The American Council on Education, the largest of the organizations representing higher education, along with 25 other such organizations, issued a supporting statement today. It asserts five principles, including this:

Colleges and universities should welcome intellectual pluralism and the free exchange of ideas. Such a commitment will inevitably encourage debate over complex and difficult issues about which individuals will disagree. Such discussions should be held in an environment characterized by openness, tolerance and civility.

The language is loose elsewhere, allowing for individual institutions to define academic freedom and intellectual diversity based on their own institutional missions. For private institutions this seems quite right. My one concern from the statement is that it does not make a stronger statement about intellectual diversity for public institutions, at which I believe the arguments for intellectual diversity are stronger than, say, a church-run college.

David Horowitz calls it "a major victory". Well, the devil is always in the details, but undoubtedly this is a large step forward.

Tyler Cowen and Bryan Caplan are discussing career advice. I agree with Caplan that most of the time referees suffer from anal-cranial inversions. They take very little time to read and understand articles; those that do are quite young and haven't yet developed enough sense to just read the articles they really can help referee. Given they are unpaid, there are no incentives that help you get good reports. (Note to other academics: There is NO law that says you must referee every article an editor sends you. My life has improved dramatically since I've started saying no.)

On Cowen's point five, returns to quality are high, but tenure is often a function of quantity, as Caplan points out. Deans in fact do count -- oftentimes, so too do departmental tenure and promotion committees. Understand the counting rules, use them in your favor. Once you reach tenure, you can have the luxury of just aiming at top-40 journals.

However, never pass up an opportunity to get your writing out before other people, even if it's in a non-top-30 journal. Working papers are great. If your field has something like SSRN, use it. Store your paper online everywhere you can. Your readers use Google.

Last, economists tend to eschew writing books because they learn books don't count as much in promotion and tenure. That's true, so maybe don't write one before then. But my year writing my first book was one of the most professionally gratifying years I've ever had; you control the product much more than that paper you had to revise and resubmit, including comment three which blew out the point you really wanted to make. You don't have to compromise with a book.

You could dig through my archives and hear of how much I wanted the Bush Administration to stick to its guns and generate support for personal retirement accounts. While Bush holds fast on John Bolton, it appears he is surrendering his leverage for PRAs by allowing a fix-it Social Security bill to come from the Republicans. So now the House Republican leadership will be seen supporting bigger government. If Bush had paid any attention to Tim Pawlenty's current travails, you'd have to expect he'd think twice before doing this.

But at least it appears the estate tax repeal is heading towards a satisfactory ending, if not a complete victory. Senator Jon Kyl has issued a report and is planning a vote in the Senate to make the repeal of the tax permanent. People will tell you we can't afford it with the current deficit, but point out back to them that it's about 1% of the budget, and that meanwhile it's both distorting economic choices and voluntary for the rich to pay (but not, say, for a farmer with a large parcel of land.)

And given this quote, it has a decent chance at passage.

"You ought to be able to leave your land and the bulk of your fortunes to your children and not the government."

That's right, Hillary Clinton, during her election run in 2000.

I suppose as the economist of the NARN that this duty falls to me. Captain Ed blogs about an investigation of ties between an Ecuadorean drug ring and Hezbollah. Ed admonishes:

People who use cocaine and other recreational drugs should see this as a wake-up call in more ways than one. That little vial or baggie you buy to feel hip and cool doesn't come out of nowhere. Even without the Middle Eastern connections, most "distribution channels" rely on extortion and murder for market control. Add in the Hezbollah funding, however, and you can draw a direct line between the party animals who do a little blow and the pro-democracy activists getting blown up.

I've heard this meme applied to oil: "If Big Oil wasn't supressing the secrets of engines that get 300 mpg, we'd not have to be in Iraq" or "Drive your SUV and you support the terrorists".

Making any good illegal to consume (or restricting its consumption) creates a black market and an opportunity for those willing to accept risk in return for high profits. This can be illegal drugs or even legal ones (I am waiting for the first black market in Sudafed); Prohibition funded the growth of La Cosa Nostra in the 1920s. The simplest way to stop Hezbollah from earning large profits from drug importation isn't to run more commercials with frying eggs and dumb analogies but to end the prohibition on cocaine use. If you want to keep prices high to discourage consumption, tax it legally at a rate sufficient to keep street prices where they are.* This will not do a thing to stop ancillary crimes committed by addicts seeking a fix, but it will stop funding narco-terrorists and their friends in the Middle East.

If it's good enough for Milton Friedman, it's good enough for me.

*--Maybe you can call it a health impact fee.

Liz, who reads and comments here regularly, has decided to return to blogging. It's not like she's ever stopped, it's just that I've been a beneficiary of my former student's good letters during A Blonde Moment's hiatus. Hope we'll continue to see her 'round, but in the meantime please enjoy her writing.

Looking for economics to blog I found Bob Subrick arguing on Spin's Top 100 albums of the last 20 years that Radiohead's OK Computer, which came in #1, won't top the list in five years. I'd have to disagree. Indeed, this reminds me that Quid Nomen Illius, which I tagged for books the other day not seeing he already had been tagged, also did music. Since I probably spend more time listening to new music than reading new books, this would be a good place for me to do so.

Total number of music files on your computer: At home I'm over 1400. At the office about half that. Mostly rock, pop, electronica/chillout/trip at home; more blues, jazz and classical at the office. My iRiver mp3 player has mostly the homebased stuff.

Last CD bought: Two new ones. Turin Brakes JackInABox, and New Order Waiting For the Sirens' Call. Both, by the way, are excellent, particularly the latter, which might be the best thing they've done Power, Corruption and Lies.

Song playing at the moment of writing: Here are the last five I played:
Goldfrapp, Utopia
New Order, Guilt is a Useless Emotion (Mac Quayle Vocal Mix -- from the new CD)
Blue Merle, Burning in the Sun
Delerium, Love
The The, Love is Stronger than Death
(if I had written this at the office it would be completely different)

CDs that absolutely must be with me on my desert island (invented my own category)
5. Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense
4. Bill Nelson's Red Noise, Furniture Music
3. Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Pictures at an Exhibition
2. George Thoroughgood, Live (have to take one blues CD, and it was this or SRV)
1. Radiohead, OK Computer

This kind of story is just creepy.

"How often does your 6th-grade daughter have oral sex?"

If the question offends you, then talk to the school officials at Shrewsbury, Mass. But don't expect a sympathetic response.

When Mark Fisher protested quizzing his 12-year-old daughter about oral sex (among other topics), the school authorities asserted their right to gather such information without his consent.

The other questions on The Youth Risk Behavior Surveilance System concerned drug and alcohol use, and included questions that would self-incriminate respondents of criminal charges. Wendy McElroy continues:

That is what Fisher is demanding of the Massachusetts' Department of Education: active parental involvement. At this point, state law requires parents to explicitly exempt their children from programs involving sexuality. Fisher is fighting for a bill that requires parental permission before children are included.

Explicit permission is particularly important in situations where parents seem to be — in Fisher's words — "kept in the dark."

School committee President Deborah Peeples reportedly explained that parents are permitted to view the survey but they are not allowed to take a copy home. Why? "It might be misinterpreted or misunderstood or they could use it to direct their children's responses," Peeples said.

In short, parents might discuss the sexual (and other) topics with their children.

McElroy suggests gettng your kids out of public schools. Short of that, getting involved and being "a genuine pain in the tuckus" is a good idea.

(h/t: reader jw)

Your IQ Is 140

Your Logical Intelligence is Genius Your Verbal Intelligence is Genius Your Mathematical Intelligence is Genius Your General Knowledge is Genius

Sorry for my lightness today, but many cool things today including taking LS to golf and lunch, a consulting contract gained, and some inspired principal component analysis. (I know that last doesn't look like fun to most of you, but it is.) And now it's dinner time for this genius...

(h/t IQ Test: Sandy at MAWB Squad. Thankee!)

What with all the graduation speakers out there who sometimes say really stupid things, and seldom sensible, The Eclectic Econoclast is offering his services for free. Benefits include

1. I have a cap and gown that have been described as cool or sexy (click here to see a photo).
   
2. I look very professional and academic with my gray beard and glasses.
   
3. I have considerable experience listening to bad commencement addresses, so I know what not to do or say.
   
4. I am an award-winning professor, with considerable acting and speaking experience.
   
5. I promise not to cuss.
   
6. ...You have your choice of opening lines (and topics):
   
   • "Never apply latex paint over glossy alkyd enamel," or
     
   • "There are no refunds for losing lottery tickets."

Hella deal. I'd get into this myself, but I can't beat John on price.

Loyal reader jw noticed an article in the Las Cruces Sun-News that someone who is head of the ACLU chapter in that town is also a leader in the Minuteman Project. The Las Cruces chapter was suspended by its state board.

“The suspension of the chapter was a technical move to make certain that the Minuteman claiming to be an ACLU chapter board member no longer had authority to act or speak on behalf of the ACLU,” said Gary Mitchell, president of the New Mexico ACLU board of directors. “We will not tolerate racism and vigilantism in the leadership structure of our organization. They (the Minuteman Project) are repugnant to the principles of civil liberties and the mission of the ACLU.”

Alford recently announced that he would lead a group termed the New Mexico Minutemen in patrolling the U.S.-Mexico border between Santa Teresa and Columbus. A second group, aligned with the Minuteman Project and led by a Farmington man, then said it also would begin patrols in New Mexico. The two leaders have since met and reportedly plan to work together.

Peter Simonson, executive director of the New Mexico ACLU, said the suspension was needed because of Alford’s affiliation with the Minuteman Project and the ACLU.

“We denounce both Minutemen efforts and we denounce Clifford Alford,” Simonson said. “The ACLU believes that both of the Minutemen projects are absolutely antithetical to the principles of civil liberties.”

ACLU is a private organization and entitled to act according to its preferences. There's nothing that says, or should say, that this suspension cannot be done. Nevertheless, the state chapter's actions assume that Mr. Alford is going to act beyond his legitimate position of expressing his Frist Amendment right to assemble a group that wishes to enforce immigration laws. Isn't Alford protected by the First Amendment too?

And more telling is that Alford is part of a split group of Minutemen who seem to have peaceful intentions.

Alford said Saturday he was scouting the border, trying to figure out where he would place his 40 New Mexico Minutemen volunteers. Their members will distinguish themselves by offering food, water and medical aid to illegal immigrants but at the same time report them to the U.S. Border Patrol, Alford said.

"If someone breaks down on the border, we can help them,'' he said. "We're not wearing uniforms, and we don't carry assault weapons.''

Alford, who lives in Organ, said he met Thursday with state police and Border Patrol officials to tell them that his group wants to help secure the border while showing compassion.

It seems the ACLU of New Mexico may be overreaching.

Margaret from Our House blog tags me to review books.

Total number of books owned, ever: I cannot say well, because I tend to give books away almost as fast as I get them. I'm up to seven bookcases right now, mostly economics, politics and history. Fiction holdings are relatively few because I tend not to use them much. I read them and give them away.

Last book I bought: I tend to buy in bunches, and last time I bought three: Freakonomics, Black Rednecks and White Liberals, and The Tipping Point. I've already started the first and put it down, and am now getting to the second one.

Last book I read: The Wisdom of Crowds, in part because of David's interview with Surowiecki. As you'll see to the next question, one of the key questions I read about is how information and knowledge is processed in society, which for me started when I first read Hayek's Use of Knowledge in Society. Had I read that before I finished my PhD, I'm quite sure my life would have turned out differently; it completely messed with the type of economic models I was building at the time. But I couldn't tell you what I'd've done instead.

Anyway, Wisdom of Crowds is a great book because what he actually demonstrates isn't crowd behavior at all but market behavior. That is, when people have incentives to bring their own information to a decision and can communicate it to the group at relatively low cost and without interference, the resulting outcome tends to be better than using experts or some other decisionmaking mechanism. The brilliant part of Surowiecki's thesis is that the size of the profit that someone needs to make to offer his or her own little bit of information is quite small and often non-monetary. Sometimes it's just a desire to help or to look good to others. Somebody who's read Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments would understand that desire.

Five Books that mean a lot to me: That could be tough to limit to five, and I somewhat answered this question when Doug asked me to list the top five books. Now that's somewhat different, and I'll vary a few, but certainly Hayek's Road to Serfdom and the Bible have to remain, because they are the two books that mean the most to me. I said The Fountainhead in that interview, which certainly was a book of great meaning to me about for about ten years. But it has fallen aside -- I tried watching the movie again this spring and actually didn't finish it, for the first time ever. Likewise Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was the book of my twenties, as The Fountainhead was the book of my thirties and early forties. But do they mean a lot to me now? I think not. I'm actually re-reading ZAMM right now for a book group my church has just formed. It will be interesting to re-experience Pirsig. Maybe at the end of the month I'll want to put the book back on the list!

So what would be three through five? Huckleberry Finn has to stay. I still believe it to be the greatest American novel ever written. I would prefer to believe that children still play this way. More importantly, I would like to think the world was as complex then as it is now; it certainly struck me as being complex as Huck experiences life on the Mississippi.

The next is simply a placemarker for a series of books where I tried to understand the evolution of data, something Margaret alludes to in her choice of Tufte's Visual Display of Quantitative Data. For me, though, it's summarized by James Gleick's Chaos. It drove home for me the importance of non-linearities in the world, that the world not only isn't linear but can't be described by a Taylor series either. In short, I had to start confronting the origins of the data I was taking off (back then) magnetic tapes and treating as gospel. This led to some other wonderful books like Nicholas Nassim Taleb's Fooled by Randomness, or evolutionary biology like Richard Dawkins or Robert Axelrod, thinking about brains with Steven Pinker and John Searle, all kinds of reading about financial crises, panics and crashes, and Thomas Sowell's underappreciated (in relation to his other work) Knowledge and Decisions. And in the middle of that comes Hayek.

Finally, I need a book that describes how I became interested in finding my own Armenian roots, which again is something that begat other books. As before, I'm listing the first and not the best of the bunch, but it was William Saroyan's My Name is Aram. He and I both named our sons that. It's a book of short stories about living in an Armenian immigrant family in Fresno. My own experience was much different, largely because I didn't grow up around other Armenian families, like Saroyan's Aram or Peter Balakian in Black Dog of Fate. But I wanted that experience as a child myself, and Saroyan gave me a chance to imagine it.

I guess the tradition now is for me to tag some other bloggers. Here are my five:

John Palmer at The Eclectic Econoclast. I mean, with a blog name like that...
Bryan "Saint Paul" Ward of Fraters Libertas. My NARN choice because I know less of what he reads than the others.
Jeff at Quid Nomen Illius? I bet he reads weird stuff, and he'll tag interesting people.
Sean Hackbarth at The American Mind. (He better start reading his fantasy football guides!)
Duane at Radioblogger. I want to know what the brain behind Hewitt is reading!

Ethnomathematics. I never even heard of it until I read Diane Ravitch's piece in this morning's WSJ (subscriber link; excerpt at Free Republic), but I don't know why I'm surprised. They cite a work by Williamson Evers and Paul Clopton showing how curriculum has changed in between a 1973 algebra text and one in 1998 for "contemporary math".

In the 1973 book, for example, the index for the letter "F" included "factors, factoring, fallacies, finite decimal, finite set, formulas, fractions, and functions." In the 1998 book, the index listed "families (in poverty data), fast food nutrition data, fat in fast food, feasibility study, feeding tours, ferris wheel, fish, fishing, flags, flight, floor plan, flower beds, food, football, Ford Mustang, franchises, and fund-raising carnival."

But the first link shows you that, as Ravitch points out, things have gotten much worse from there. Algebra is a form of oppression.

Now in the twentieth century, this distinction is manifested in the contrast between the "academic" mathematics that is taught in schools, which allows an elite to assume management of a society's productive forces, and the "everyday" mathematics, which allows individuals to function effectively in the world.

This is not just twaddle, but dangerous twaddle, as Ravitch points out.

It seems terribly old-fashioned to point out that the countries that regularly beat our students in international tests of mathematics do not use the subject to steer students into political action. They teach them instead that mathematics is a universal language that is as relevant and meaningful in Tokyo as it is in Paris, Nairobi and Chicago. The students who learn this universal language well will be the builders and shapers of technology in the 21st century. The students in American classes who fall prey to the political designs of their teachers and professors will not.

Every fact to the cultural relativists is subject to spin; no fact is neutral to them. There is no desire to teach anything beyond what is "everyday math" because they do not believe it is necessary for students to understand the vertical connections between fields of math, which is why we taught algebra before geometry before trigonometry before calculus. I don't know that it's because educators are trying to create borgs for social justice or if they simply haven't been educated well enough themselves to understand the reason traditional or "academic" math has been taught as it is.

If you've been reading here, you'll notice I've been a little miffed with our governor over taxes. This is not the only thing that has perturbed me; I've been surprised and disappointed with the Twins Stadium issue as well, for one. Eva Young summarizes some news coverage over the weekend which suggests that the Twins' argument that it makes economic sense has been dropped. Well, duh. My friends and sports economists Brad Humphreys and Dennis Coates have been saying this for years.

Our conclusion, and that of nearly all academic economists studying this issue, is that professional sports generally have little, if any, positive effect on a city’s economy. The net economic impact of professional sports in Washington, D.C., and the 36 other cities that hosted professional sports teams over nearly 30 years, was a reduction in real per capita income over the entire metropolitan area.

A baseball team in D.C. might produce intangible benefits. Rooting for the team might provide satisfaction to many local baseball fans. That is hardly a reason for the city government to subsidize the team. D.C. policymakers should not be mesmerized by faulty impact studies that claim that a baseball team and a new stadium can be an engine of economic growth.

MOBster Phil Miller of Market Power, writing at the most excellent Sports Economist blog (um, guys, you should see if Brad or Dennis will blog with you ... and I work for peanuts, just ask The Patriot), notes that the intangibles argument seems to have captured the Hennepin County commissioners, and Eva clips this from Twins President Jerry Bell.

"I don't think the economic argument turns it one way or another, so why go there?" said Bell, president of Twins Sports Inc. "If there are side benefits, great. If not, so what?

"You get into an economic argument, and the bottom line is, 'Do you want to build it or not?' " he said.

That is, do you want a team or not, because Phil also points out that the monopoly power that leagues have, by leaving out there a pool of other cities denied a major league team that act as leverage against the Twin Cities.

Las Vegas does not have a team in part because it provides leverage to the few teams left (namely Minnesota and Florida) who are still seeking public money for a new stadium in their existing regions. Proponents for public funding in places like Minneapolis and Miami can haul out Las Vegas as a viable threat point to opponents of public funding, just like Los Angeles is a viable threat point to proponents of public funding for NFL stadiums. Believe it or not, St. Petersburg, Fl, was once used in this manner to get public funding for stadiums such as US Cellular Field (Chicago White Sox). The basic threat is "if you don't give us what we want, we're going to take our ball to Las Vegas and play there."

How do you get out of this pickle? Well, one option is to simply call their bluff, as Minnesota has done with Pohlad in the past, a bet Minnesota won when Charlotte voters said no to expanded taxes. Teams can often have a larger "novelty effect" when they move to a new place, but Charlotte seems not to have an appetite, and the market lost its biggest lever when the owners of MLB collected their ransom to move the Expos to Washington DC. It's worth asking Bell and Pohlad, "If we say no, where you gonna go?"

Pawlenty, however, has had a longstanding interest in building stadia for the Twins and the Gophers. I'm not entirely sure why he has, as it doesn't appear to have been his position as a legislator. But nobody is making an economic case for this any more, not even the Twins.

UPDATE (6/22): Phil Miller adds more details.

I try not to do too many posts about me and my life, but this was the result of something I wrote and decided to address it here. I mentioned in my last post Friday that I'm exercising and working on diet to control cholesterol. A kind reader who is a doctor