In less than two minutes after we suggested the creation of a blog called the Persistent Burrito, it appears, and has comments.

Captain Ed threw us a nice reference to push the meter on this blog (established almost from the outset three years ago) over 500,000 hits. Many thanks to him and to all our readers for the new year.

Random thoughts as we prepare for the new year:

We're violating the usual quiet New Year's Eve celebration tomorrow thanks to a colleague who couldn't use tickets to a benefit for the St. Cloud Symphony. Mrs. S and I will dress up and go out on a New Year's Eve for the first time in about ten years. I intend to sneak back home in time to set off some fireworks with Littlest at midnight, a tradition we started last year.

Captain Ed's first mate is having some medical problems. Give up a prayer for her tonight and into the New Year. If you haven't given out all your gifts for the year, there was a neat editorial featuring WorldVision and the Heifer Project in the STrib. Give thanks.

I enjoy reading other people make predictions for the new year, since it's something I do much more regularly (though not as much as Bob, who's the go-to guy for St. Cloud weather.) I think in terms of probabilities and not inclined to say "X will happen in 2006". But I will say this much: While the national economy is unlikely to enter a recession in 2006 (I'll set the probability at 5%), there is a substantial probability that the housing industry will suffer some stress in several parts of the country, including St. Cloud. I make it a 20% probability that house prices nationwide fall by more than 5%.

We'll do resolutions and other year-end activities tomorrow on the Northern Alliance, which we'll do live 12-3pm. Barring more heavy snow, I'll be there. I'll be off the air the following two weekends for travel to conferences and back on the show on 1/21. With all that driving, I may not be back here until Monday, and so HAPPY NEW YEAR!

The Boston Globe reports that some faculty want punishments handed down in the false story on the government seeking out a UMass-Dartmouth student who asked to read Mao's Little Red Book. There are some details in the story that are news to me, in particular the behavior of the two faculty members who went public with the story, Professors Robert Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand:

It was Williams who first told the Standard-Times about his former student's claim after the reporter called him for comment about President Bush's approval of a controversial domestic spying program.

After expressing his concerns about government surveillance, Williams told the reporter as an afterthought about the purported visit by Homeland Security agents, and that became the thrust of the story, Williams said.

When the story created a media storm, Williams said, he resolved to check its veracity. Last Friday, he said, his former student confessed it was a fabrication.

...Pontbriand, a lecturer in the history department, said he never initiated any calls to reporters and merely confirmed that the student in his seminar on totalitarianism had asserted that he had been visited by federal agents.

''I have never used the classroom or the public forum to promote any personal political ideology, and I certainly have not done so in this case," he said.

Assuming Pontbriand's story is accurate, what appears is a student who told a story to two faculty who chose to believe the fabrication. When others pointed out the rather obvious holes in the story, Williams went to check it out, found the story fake, and alerted the reporter of the fabrication. I think it's fair to surmise that Prof. Williams was predisposed to believe the story, and likely as well to have retold it to the reporter to bolster his "concerns about government surveillance". I don't think that's grounds for a reprimand as others at the campus call for, but some commenters on this board think we should be harsher. I think we'll just have to disagree on that.

Categories: higher_ed

I always repay debts, and since I once used the signal for a KAR fisking of some student's silly screediness I stand ready to help out my brethren. (Note: KAR fiskings tend to the PG-13 side of things, if you get my drift. And please don't ask them about chaps.) And they have signaled for a close shave on this STrib editorial. As it turns out, this one I'd do for free.

I don't do the line-for-line thing much in this, because the problems with this thing are threefold, and you can pull many quotes to the one or more of the three. The first part is the usual sort of thing: Republican Congress and President have given us tax cuts, four of them in fact, and they're planning a fifth. (The scoundrels! Giving taxpayers their money back! We must stop them!) And all of it going to the rich. You can't swing a dead cat around the blogosphere without hitting two or three posts in this meme.

Actually, the STrib doesn't say the "all going to the rich" part. That comes from their claimed source, a report by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Don't worry that it's a liberal think tank, says the STrib -- the Economic Report of the President says the same thing.

The first error that it makes is in comparing this recession to nine others while skipping over the fact that this recovery looks quite a bit like the last one on a majority of scores. The STrib offers a single sentence that draws a comparison:

...on key measures such as job creation, wage growth and business investment, the current expansion even lags behind the expansion of the 1990s -- when Congress and President Bill Clinton were raising taxes to reduce deficits.

Clinton raised taxes in the 1990s? Let me remind you. There was a tax hike in 1993. There was a tax cut in 1997. Guess which half of the Clinton years GDP grew faster in?

And what that clip does is cherry-pick the only three elements of that expansion that are different from the current one. By folding the 1991-99 expansion into the prior eight, the STrib ignores the following.

A comparison of the current period with the economic cycle of the early 1990s yields a more mixed picture, whether measured since the trough of the downturn or relative to the last economic peak. (Again, see Table 1.)
· GDP and personal consumption expenditure growth differed little during the two periods.
· Net worth has grown modestly faster during this period than in the early 1990s.
· Corporate profits have increased roughly twice as fast during the current period as in the earlier period.
· But labor market indicators have been significantly weaker during this period. For instance, during this economic recovery, job growth has occurred at just one-third of the pace that it did during the comparable part of the economic recovery of the early 1990s.
· Fixed non-residential investment also has grown significantly more slowly during this economic cycle. During this recovery, it has grown at a 3.7 percent annual rate, well below the 5.7 percent annual rate at which it grew over the comparable portion of the early 1990s recovery.

That, by the way, isn't from the Bush administration's ERP but from the CBPP report itself (p. 5). (Here's the full version.) If the STrib had actually bothered to read the ERP, it might know as well that consumption spending was never an issue in this recession.

In the prior recessions, on average, consumption growth moderated starting six quarters before the recession’s eventual trough, did not actually fall until two quarters before the trough, and began to rise in the quarter before the trough. In the 1990-1991 recession, consumption rose rapidly until two quarters before the trough, dropped sharply until the trough, and mostly grew thereafter. The most recent recession stands out as different in that consumption continued to grow throughout. This likely reflects the important role of fiscal and monetary stimulus in supporting demand and the unusual extent to which the recession resulted from a collapse in investment following the bubble of the late 1990s. (pp. 51-52, emphasis added.)

Here then is a second important point. The weird behavior of consumption and investment result from those tax cuts. The reason consumption doesn't rise rapidly in this expansion is because it never slowed down in the recession. You may wish to argue that the tax cuts had little to do with keeping consumption strong; I don't see how you avoid the conclusion that the recovery would have been much slower without the cuts.

That leaves two areas of concern over the current expansion. First, the slowness in investment is real, though if you look at the 2005 data and most projections for 2006, we see a turnaround in the making. It is absurd, in my view, to think that investment would rise as fast as other elements of GDP in this recovery when the recession was set off by a collapse in investment following the tech bubble of the 1990s. (See, for instance, this 2003 letter by San Francisco Fed researcher Kevin Lansing, esp. Figure 3.) If there was excess capacity generated by the late 1990s bubble, it would be expected to take time to unwind the excess investment. It would be hard to blame the Bush administration for that bubble bursting; it's also hard to imagine that any tax cut or spending program would fix it.

That leaves us with the dilemma macroeconomists have wondered for years now, which is where are the jobs while we're experiencing this expansion? For that we can look to Atlanta Fed researcher Julie Hotchkiss' paper on labor force participation and the level of job creation needed to keep unemployment falling. What we don't know is why fewer people are participating in the labor force.

Categories: economics, Minnesota

Students in principles macro learn -- or at least they should -- that per capita GDP rises either by increasing the amount of capital invested in each worker or by increasing the productivity of each worker with the capital they have. When we look at productivity data, we don't necessarily know which of those has happened. Paul Mirengoff agrees with Arnold Kling that we cannot tell whose policies increase or decrease capital.

But we can point to a couple of items. First, the 'capital' I'm using should be described as broadly as possible -- it includes human and physical capital. For example those policies that make education more efficient, insofar as they increase human capital for the same years in school, increase our living standards. would help, for example.

Second, agreeing with Kling, productivity changes take time but we know what matters most are institutions and incentives. Consider Mahalanobis' dismay over how Austrians view their own future. Austria and the US are rich countries, have been for quite some time and are likely to continue to be so. But look at his graph and see Argentina, a country that at the end of World War II had per capita GDP (adjusted for purchasing power parity) at European standards. How did the European productivity gains elude them, so that their per capita GDP is now less than 40% of the USA? They aren't any less smart, and they have access to the same technology.

It is a matter of policy. It's just that it takes a damn long time for the differences to become as stark as modern day Argentina. A good read that my students get is Mauricio Rojas' The Sorrows of Carmencita (available as a pdf from this link, though I hope you'll thank Timbro and buy a copy.)

Categories: economics

Courtesy of Anoka Flash, we find that the People's Republic of St. Paul is looking at a fee on college students.

St. Paul's colleges and universities may feel the jolt of a tax revolt if an idea being floated by City Council Member Jay Benanav becomes a reality.
Benanav, whose ward includes the University of St. Thomas and Hamline University, is researching whether the city should charge institutions of higher education a per-student fee of $25 to pay for police and fire services. State law exempts schools and other nonprofit organizations from paying property taxes.

"Not that colleges don't add to the quality of life," Benanav said. "But we provide all sorts of public safety services that they don't pay for and that get paid for by property owners and businesses."

There are six private schools in St. Paul and five public ones. The move could net $800,000 per year. The schools of course will complain, but given the size of tuition increases recently, exactly how big a hit would they take? Benanav's move looks to me like the old Colbert adage of plucking the goose with minimum squawking and hissing.

Categories: higher_ed

University Diaries makes a very good point discussing a tenure case at Yale that didn't turn out well. Anyone taking the time to think about the academic job market -- as most new PhDs must, as they enter it -- knows that different schools have different probabilities of achieving tenure. And anyone taking time to research the question knows that the probabilities of achieving tenure from a tenure-track position at an Ivy League school is quite low. Think of it like the Yankees -- if you are a young player in their system you might wear the pinstripes, but since they can pay so much and their history gives them cachet with every free agent, the chances of being a Yankee regular are small for a Yankee farmhand. On the other hand, if you are a minor league player for the Royals, there's a good chance you'll be a starter if you're good. Ivy League schools have that opportunity to purchase talent -- lots of it -- that's already established. The SCSUs of the world can't.

So I agree with Margaret Soltan that it's hard to feel much sympathy for David Graeber and his story in today's New York Times. He has six years of exposure to colleagues, students and resources that most of us would dream of, and as she says, should have taken advantage of to find a good job elsewhere. It's so well known, you wonder why this is a story. She explains,

...this vague story remains compelling to newspapers because it seems to fit a perennially attractive conflictual scenario -- the one between bold revolutionary spirits and conventional repressive institutions. At the end of its article, the NYTimes trots out Stanley Aronowitz to announce that "places like Yale are not for people like David Graeber. He's a public intellectual. He speaks out. He participates. He's not someone who simply does good scholarship; he's an activist and a controversial person." But there are plenty of such people at Yale.

Categories: higher_ed

I got a lovely note thanking me for a C last night. So much better than the "I have a question about my grade and was wondering when and where I could meet with you to discuss it" emails I normally get. And now I have more to worry about. From CNN:

A college student upset about a failing grade followed his professor to her Cambridge home and allegedly stabbed her in the neck, police said.

Nikhil Dhar, 22, of Lowell, pleaded not guilty Friday to charges of armed assault with intent to murder and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. He was held without bail pending a hearing Wednesday.

Mary Elizabeth Hooker, an assistant professor of clinical lab sciences at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, was hospitalized with a stab wound to her neck.

Hooker told police Dhar approached her at her home and wanted to talk about "not obtaining a passing grade in her class," Cambridge police officer Edward Frammartino wrote in his report.

The 54-year-old assistant professor of clinical lab sciences offered to meet him at a coffee shop, but Dhar "became very irate and abusive towards her," Frammartino wrote.

Dhar dragged her out of the house, hit her and slashed her neck, according to the police report.

Neighbors called police after they heard screaming and saw Hooker struggling with a man in her front yard. A neighbor chased Dhar and cornered him until police arrived. They found a knife at the scene.

Dhar's attorney, Stephen Hrones, described it as a "complicated situation."

"There's two sides to every story," he said.

Well, I cannot wait to hear the student's side of this. It's worth noting that Lowell is about 20 miles from Cambridge, so this wasn't just a spur of the moment thing.

I also am glad SCSU lets me send in grades after Christmas. Story via Cranky Professor, who gets similar types of email to mine.

Categories: higher_ed

is baseball. And one of the things I enjoy most is listening to baseball playes talk. They have a language all their own, as the year in quotes shows. Here are a few examples with local flavor:

"If I'm going to get chased around the shower, it's going to be by my wife."
--Twins manager Ron Gardenhire, on how he won't shower in the clubhouse with Johan Santana and Carlos Silva around (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) [we need the backstory here people! I smell a Brokeback Mountain scoop! --kb]

"Yes, he offended everyone in the Bay Area."
--Giants manager Felipe Alou, when reminded that A.J. Pierzynski is a more offensive catcher than the defensive-minded Mike Matheny (Sacramento Bee)

"Everybody knows I'm an everyday player. I know I'm not a bench player."
--Washington Nationals shortstop Cristian Guzman, who was hitting .187/.228/.277 at the time (Washington Times)

"I would appreciate it if you identify us as Loyola Marymount University Los Angeles By The Sea Near Marina del Rey."
--Frank Cruz, Loyola Marymount University baseball coach, commenting on the Anaheim Angel's name change (L.A. Daily Breeze)

"Strikes."
--Dodgers pitching coach Jim Colburn, when asked what pitches Kaz Ishii has the most trouble throwing (Bergen Record)

OK, those last two aren't local, but they got the biggest laughs from me. And if you aren't a Baseball Prospectus regular reader and subscriber, well, you should be.

Let's see here. We are:

• not nominated for any postings as best of MOB;
• not listed as influential blogs by the PioneerPress (or even a takedown of the list);
• not a friend of Andy's able to be a place to publish spleen about my own damn town;
• not on a list of the ten worst Americans;*
• not even correctly linked by Instadaddy and my own co-host on NARN!!!**

Forget "selectively outraged". I think I will be "indiscriminately outraged" from now on. That way I'll seem fair.

But still won't get any love.***

UPDATE: You think I'm having a bad day? Yes, I am. Want to know why? Because he'll never come to St. Cloud now. I'm stuck in a city that can't even support a KK, let alone the mighty double-D. Three Caribous within a mile of each other on Division, yes. Honey-dip and a regulah cahfee? Twenty years I've waited in vain. And now he's gone.

*-- This morning my pastor tells me he was at a meeting for a non-profit organization and met another SCSU professor. Asked him if he knew me. Pastor says, "I've learned that it isn't always the best thing to ask people at your school if they know you." Forget the rest of the snubs -- my own pastor is slamming me!
**--there are two links, Ed, and only the first one is right. The blogspot site has been unmanned since 9/04.
***--but if you'd like to make that little sitemeter turn to 500k by the end of 2005, we'll adjust the meds.

Categories: MOB, blogging

It's probably not too cold in Ukraine and Russia right now, because there's a lot of heated air being exchanged between the countries. Ukrainian prime minister Yury Yenukharov is refusing to pay the price for Russian gas, and this has broader implications for Russian defense programs. President Yuschenko has at least agreed not to threaten the Crimea naval base Russia leases for access to the Black Sea.

The Russians are even having problems with meat going through the country, while accusing Ukraine of planning to steal gas. Yesterday an important member of the Russian cabinet quit after angering Putin with comments like this,

He said that Dutch disease was replaced in Russia by Venezuelan disease and since then by Saudi disease. The economy has become rent-oriented, the development model is corporate and the regime undemocratic. ... Illarionov also for the first time made direct reference to the business interests of Putin's closest associates, saying that the heads of state-owned companies do not act in the interests of the state.

The Ukrainians, meanwhile, are starting to increase energy prices.

This pas de deux is a usual feature of post-Soviet relations between the two countries. But Anders Aslund and Adrian Karatnycky in the WSJ put this episode at a new level, and say it is meddling by Russia in Ukrainian affairs.

The Russian government makes sure that Gazprom maintains low prices of $48 per mcm for Moscow-loyal Belarus while Georgia and Armenia -- two other ex-Soviet republics with a more independent, pro-Western policy -- are to pay $110 next year. Indeed, if, as President Putin now insists, all this is a matter of economics, why has Russia eschewed quiet and pragmatic negotiations and been so vocal in fanning disagreement? There are three political reasons.

First, Russia seeks to influence Ukraine's March 2006 parliamentary elections by suggesting to Ukrainian voters that the current government in Kiev is economically incompetent and its pro-Western tilt harmful to consumers.

Second, the Kremlin seeks to discredit Ukraine's "Orange" government among Russian citizens in order to inoculate its population from the contagion of democratic revolution.

Third, Russia seeks to drive a wedge between Europe and Ukraine by painting the Kiev government as reckless and unreliable.

If Russia is trying to influence the Ukrainian elections, who does it wish to see come to power? The losers of the last election, the Kuchma-Yanukovych crowd? I doubt that. They will have no credibility. So perhaps it will be deposed prime minister Yulya Tymoshenko.

See also Vladimir Socor for a detailed analysis from last week.

This is a linky post that is meant to ponder, not draw strong conclusions, because it's anyone's guess. I am only drawing attention to the fact that this may be more than the normal jousting between Russia and its neighbors. Or it may be a lot of hot air that leads to nothing at all.

Categories: economics, Ukraine, politics

This will make for quite the discussion on campus when I post it on the discuss list, but it's too juicy to ignore. Here is Freeload Press, a company willing to give e-textbooks away in return for displaying advertising. They will also sell bound paper copies with or without ads, without ancilliaries. So far it appears they have four books available in accounting and finance. But students will find this, and they will use it. My principles course last semester had the option of an e-book for 2/3 the price of a print copy (or about the same $30 that Freeload is charging for print) and a little less than half chose that option.

So while my colleagues are debating why ads are allowed on classroom building bulletin boards while ads for their favored political candidates are not, they may find that their own students are agreeing to view ads in return for lower textbook prices. Says the company's FAQ:

The idea will be too much of a cultural leap for some, and they'll opt out. Others will make decisions strictly as they have done in the past, basing them on coverage, writing style, level, ancillaries, relationship with a sales rep, and the like. However, the issue of price is now so pervasive that many instructors will be drawn to our model because of the price/value consideration alone.

We shall see.

(h/t: Jim Mahar.)

Categories: higher_ed, economics

The local paper last weekend carried an article on SCSU's exploration of going to Division I in athletics. It is portrayed as a decision forced upon SCSU by the defection of other programs to D-I from the North Central Conference in which SCSU plays.

North Dakota has assembled a task force that will study whether the school should move to Division I for all of its sports teams. The task force has been asked to do a survey on the issue and make a recommendation by the end of this academic school year.

If the Sioux decide to move up, one of St. Cloud State’s options would be to follow, having all of 21 of its teams compete at the Division I level. Currently, the men’s and women’s hockey teams are the St. Cloud State teams competing at that level.

“We love Division II, we love the North Central Conference — that has never changed,” Kurtz said. “We have seven very solid members in the conference, but scheduling is continuing to get more difficult. We have problems scheduling nonconference games.”

For example, we have a twenty-seven game basketball schedule. Playing each team in the conference twice means finding fifteen non-conference opponents. Because of this our schedule includes two games against independent Upper Iowa, which went D-II only two years ago, and Wayne State College. (There are several games against the Northern Sun conference or NSIC, long considered a lower level of competition to the North Central.)

I'm told that if UND should decide to jump to Division I, Nebraska-Omaha would also leave the NCC, leaving the choices as going to D-I ourselves or joining another D-II conference, most likely the NSIC. Jerry Henkemeyer, an SCSU Hall of Fame football and baseball player, says in the Times' article, that the costs are not just the $4.5 million additional we would need to pay.

“You have to have student support and the faculty has to play a bigger role in it.”

Henkemeyer said that that support is not only in terms of attending games.

“Student fees would have to go up and the faculty would have to have more understanding of athletics and that they want to work with the athletes in the programs,” he said. “There would be more scholarship players, so you’re going to have to have the faculty keep an eye on these students that they are doing their studies and keeping up their grades.”

I don't understand this comment at all. We have not had a problem with scholarship students in the past. Coaches have by and large recruited athletes who can meet our academic standards (we're not exactly Stanford here). You can bet that quote will show up in discussions on campus if the decision is made to move up.

Also,

The Sioux have the largest budget in the NCC and are fearful of proposals to cut the maximum number of football scholarships offered from 36 to 24. North Dakota also is hearing about not playing North Dakota State, which was its biggest rival before the Bison moved to Division I before the 2004-05 school year.

SCSU is at 28 scholarships, it says (I have heard from fans that it is less than this but cannot confirm that.) As I said before, while the D-I limit is 65, you can go for a non-scholarship program. But doing so would mean we would still not play the Dakota schools -- as they are going to up their scholarships. And those are the games the boosters of SCSU athletics, particularly football, want to see most. If you want to play, you have to pay.

Categories: sports, economics, higher_ed

The two DFL candidates in District 15 have won. Not even close.

I just threw up in my mouth.

And then I read this, and this, I am off to wash the vomit down, before these people figure out how to tax my Scotch out of my hands.

Newsday reports that Jeff Reardon, who was arrested earlier in the day for allegedly robbing a jewelry store, was under the influence of depression medication.

Reardon has fallen on hard times in recent years, apparently beginning with the death of his 20-year-old son in February 2004 because of what Beers called a drug overdose.

Beers said Reardon, in addition to being on medication for depression, underwent a heart angioplasty last week.

"He asked me to apologize to his fans and friends," Beers said. "This bizarre incident is completely uncharacteristic of Jeff Reardon."

From the Palm Beach Post, he told this to the police rather quickly after arrest:

Reardon made off with $170 but was followed outside by the store manager, according to an arrest report. In the mall parking lot, a Palm Beach Gardens police officer stopped him and placed him under arrest.

Police say Reardon admitted, "I am taking medication and am sorry for what happened." He added: "I completely lost my mind and tried to rob (a) jewelry store. I flipped on my medications and didn't realize what I was doing," according to an arrest report.

One sixth of the public takes antidepressants and most of them are not knocking over jewelry stores. But I feel bad for the guy. I wonder if there's any way the meds for his depression and anything he'd take for angioplasty would mix to create this reaction?

I was reading Hindrocket's post today on the Quinnipiac poll. I find this fascinating that we had Republicans much happier in 2005 than Democrats. I went back and dug up a Pew poll from 1997, which would be the same (fifth) year of the Clinton Administration, though it's in January. There the results are quite reversed: Optimism won out 52-21 with Clinton voters, but 30-41 towards pessimism with Dole voters, similarly with Perot voters, and about even for nonvoters and independents. Does optimism depend on who our leaders are?

I also thought these Quinnipiac results were interesting:

In 2006, do you think the world will be a more peaceful or less peaceful place?

Republicans
More peaceful 42%
Less peaceful 45%

Democrats
More peaceful 30%
Less peaceful 55%

So Republicans aren't necessarily more optimistic due to expectations of victory in the GWOT. And there's little difference in optimism for 2006 between the two groups. Could it be because both sides expect political victory next November?

Categories: politics

The yield curve on Treasury securities inverted today, meaning you got a higher rate of return on a two-year note than a ten-year note. Ten-yeras are typically .9% higher. Should we be concerned? Opinions differ:

Bear Stearns Cos. expects any inversion to last ``several'' months, according to David Boberski, head of interest rate strategy at the New York-based firm.

``It will stay inverted until it's clear we're at the peak of the business cycle and rate hikes are done,'' Boberski said Dec. 20. ``Whether we're coming up to that peak in the next few quarters is unclear.''

An inversion would still likely be viewed as an ``ominous sign'' for the economy and be followed by an economic slowdown, or even a recession, said Tony Crescenzi, a bond strategist at Miller, Tabak & Co. in New York.

He wrote a book called ``The Strategic Bond Investor'' and taught classes on the bond market at Baruch College's executive MBA program.

Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan said in congressional testimony in July that there is ``a misconception'' of the importance of the yield curve. The curve's ``efficacy as a forecasting tool has diminished very dramatically.''

The Bloomberg article shows five inversion periods since 1980. A masters thesis I just supervised supports Greenspan's view -- the yield spread's predictive powers have diminished since the 1970s. James Hamilton thinks differently.

David Altig looks at Fed Funds futures markets and thinks the Fed may be done raising short-term rates. Are they moving to neutral too late to avoid a recession later this year? Our new Quarterly Business Report from SCSU shows local businesses are pretty optimistic that 2006 will start off strong. I don't think this inversion is a sign of an upcoming recession ... but it bears watching.

Categories: economics

Of the twenty most-blogged-about books according to the New York Times, I've read six this year and four others prior to 2005. Tipping Point is at the top of the pile right now (I enjoyed Blink greatly), and Kurzweil is down there somewhere. (h/t: Monsieur le Bumble.)

I finally watched (on Christmas Eve afternoon, no less), Fred Barnes' interview of Thomas Sowell. As much as I love Sowell's writing, I had the impression he would be rather arrogant. He's not. If you can watch it some time, do so. If you can make me a tape of it, I'd use it.

I had no idea Edward Castronova would become so famous for studying online universes. I should have played more games and blogged less. (Mrs. S would agree.)

The Twins and my Red Sox have had their share of players who played for both teams. One of them was Jeff Reardon, who was arrested in Florida Monday trying to hold up a jewelry store.

According to a news release from the Palm Beach Gardens Police Department, the 50-year-old former All Star entered a Hamilton Jewelers store in shopping mall and handed a clerk a note demanding money. The clerk, believing Reardon had a gun, filled a bag with an undisclosed amount of cash.

Reardon fled the store with the cash and was followed by the store manager. Police arrived and arrested Reardon without incident outside a P.F. Chang's restaurant. The money was recovered at the same time.

Reardon was born in Massachusetts and pitched for the Twins in the championship season in 1988 1987 and for the Red Sox in one bad post-season loss in 1990 to Oakland and part of the 1991 collapse (lost 11 of their last 14) after a 12-1 win over the Yankees put them within a half-game of the lead against Toronto. We never should have traded Lee Smith for Tom Brunansky (how's that for a Red Sox-Twins connection??)

He didn't have much of a chance to make the Hall of Fame, even though he had more saves in his career than Rollie Fingers, Bruce Sutter or Goose Gossage. Instead he robs a jewelry store and goes to a Chinese restaurant? At least he picked a good one.

UPDATE: "1987, you idiot!" Thanks a lot.

Mark Steckbeck points out a new study showing a sharp drop in adult literacy rates among college graduates. And this isn't like reading Adam Smith:

The test measures how well adults comprehend basic instructions and tasks through reading -- such as computing costs per ounce of food items, comparing viewpoints on two editorials and reading prescription labels. Only 41 percent of graduate students tested in 2003 could be classified as "proficient" in prose -- reading and understanding information in short texts -- down 10 percentage points since 1992. Of college graduates, only 31 percent were classified as proficient -- compared with 40 percent in 1992. Schneider said the results do not separate recent graduates from those who have been out of school several years or more.

The results were based on a sample of more than 19,000 people 16 or older, who were interviewed in their homes. They were asked to read prose, do math and find facts in documents. The scores for "intermediate" reading abilities went up for college students, causing educators to question whether most college instruction is offered at the intermediate level because students face reading challenges.

Steckbeck looks at alternatives to education, and says school choice isn't the panacea others would make it out to be (though in the end he decides to say "opt for the voucher program and hope for the best").

Fully privatizing education such that every child (up to a certain age) receives a voucher to be used at a private school is the most appealing from a market perspective. Kids are segregated based on talent and demands, but also based on ideology. As Coulson from Cato argues, a voucher allows me to send my kid(s) to a school promoting creationism if I'm a creationist or one promoting evolution if I believe in evolution. But it also allows me to send my kid(s) to an Islamic school that might promote anti-Americanism and encourage terrorism, or a white supremacist school that promotes violence against blacks or hispanics or jews. Who knows? Some schools might emerge to serve the demand for drug abusing or alcoholic parents.

My libertarian instincts are to say "so what? It's your money, so you should do what you want." But Steckbeck stipulates to public financing and with that comes some oversight. So the question becomes: Do we overstep our Constitutional limits in agreeing to public financing of education? There's no necessary reason why a good that has public goods qualities should be paid for with public funds. Are we supporting public financing of education to censor pernicious education?

Fishsticks needs to come home soon, so he can read about this.

Categories: education

The local paper headlined this AP story wherein a deposition of the head of AIDS research for the National Institute for Health says private firms are underinvested in R&D in combatting the disease:

"We had to spend some time and energy paying attention to those aspects of development because the private side isn't picking it up," Dr. Edmund Tramont testified in a deposition in a recent employment lawsuit obtained by The Associated Press.
...
"If we look at the vaccine, HIV vaccine, we're going to have an HIV vaccine. It's not going to be made by a company," Tramont said. "They're dropping out like flies because there's no real incentive for them to do it. We have to do it."

"They will eventually – if it works, they won't have to make that big investment. And they can make it and sell it and make a profit," he said.

The pharmaceutical industry is in denial. But it makes sense to me that there would be a lack of investment when the intellectual property rights to an AIDS vaccine are under threat constantly by international policymakers.

Interested readers are invited to read this short paper by Webber and Kremer on orphan drugs, and Chapter 7 of the 2005 Economic Report of the President for policies designed to address these issues.

Categories: economics

I got a note this morning from a brother-in-law, regarding lighting around my house.

I was in St. Cloud Saturday evening driving around trying to find your house. [he's only been here a half-dozen times or so. --kb] I think I was very close but every house looked the same because of all the Christmas lights. So I gave up and went back to my brother's ...

Littlest will have to have her gift mailed instead.

And to those who wonder why I didn't post a "Merry Christmas" message, well, I was trying to actually enjoy a Merry Christmas while having a back spasm. Two muscle relaxants and several glasses of wine later, I'm doing OK.

John Palmer, Phil Miller and Don Boudreaux all wonder about the popularity of self-service checkout stands in retail stores. I've used one regularly at a local grocery for about a year. In an attempt to answer some questions, here's what I've observed.

1. Don notes that one big user of the scanners are foreign speakers. The one at the grocery store and at our Home Depot are both bilingual Spanish/English. It would make sense, over time, to introduce other languages. The discomfort or uncertainty in dealing with a language problem at checkout is removed. I know I would have loved one in grocery stores in, say, Macedonia or Ukraine.
2. Most of these machines handle the theft problem by sensing when something moves into the bagging area without first being scanned. And it's not unusual for a store employee to stand watching three or four self-service lanes. As Phil notes, this also cuts down one source of employee theft.
3. Self-service means also self-bagging. More savings.
4. It entertains the kids. Littlest Scholar insists on using the scanner and bagging. I just sit there and wait to run my debit card through the machine.

One of my colleagues sent me a link to the NY Times article yesterday that discusses the Pennsylvania legislature's discussion of the academic bill of rights. These hearings were mandated by a bill that passed the Pennsylvania earlier in 2005. As you would expect, these hearings are meeting great resistance from academia, as the Times article notes:

"Mechanisms exist to address these glitches and to fix them," said Joan Wallach Scott, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and former chairwoman of the professors association committee on academic freedom, in testimony at the Pennsylvania Legislature's first hearing. "There is no need for interference from outside legislative or judicial agencies."

In a debate with Mr. Horowitz last summer, Russell Jacoby, a history professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, portrayed Mr. Horowitz's approach as heavy-handed. "It calls for committees or prosecutors to monitor the lectures and assignments of teachers," he said. "This is a sure-fire way to kill free inquiry and whatever abuses come with it."

The American Association of University Professors is attempting to kill the debate on ABoR. The Pennsylvania bill, however, does exactly what conservative critics of academia want -- get hearings before official committees that can hear of abuses of power. So AAUP says no specific examples have been brought to the hearings, and therefore there's no fire to put out here.

This is a specious argument, since the leftist bias on campus is pervasive and systemic. What AAUP is criticizing is that there isn't specific victim of a specific attack. Noindoctrination.org has some examples from Penn State, however (SCSU readers will remember this fellow as one of our diversity trainers). They could look at Shippensburg State's suppression of student speech rights. Or look at Bucks County CC's loyalty oath to diversity as a job requirement. If AAUP wants to maintain its credibility in criticizing ABoR -- a bill I am not a fan of myself -- it should at least try to get its facts straight. The point Steve Balch and David French have made at the hearings is that there is a culture that suppresses. Were we brought only a few isolated cases, of course AAUP and the legislature would argue that schools should be allowed to their own devices to deal with these 'aberrations'.

More specious still are arguments that conservative students are just the new PC activists who are whining that they can't take hostility from faculty. Most of us have argued the opposite -- Ann Coulter, for example, argues that it is leftist students who are unable to articulate their opposition to conservative views and who resort instead to pie-throwing. The argument for ABoR comes not from a single class where someone, say, draws Venn diagrams suggesting how to show Republicans are stupid, incompetent yes-men, but from a pervasive culture that embraces a leftist political agenda and makes it part of their job description and creates whole departments towards forwarding that view. (Quick, name me a conservative professor of social work!)

If the Pennsylvania hearings are getting play in the NYT, that's all to the good. Even if they are misrepresented by many (and here I'm not criticizing the Times itself, whose reporter does a fair job), the exposure of what happens on campuses will be worthwhile.

(cf. new conservative student networks and their critics -- h/t reader jw.)

Categories: higher_ed

Via Balloon Juice:

The UMass Dartmouth student who claimed to have been visited by Homeland Security agents over his request for "The Little Red Book" by Mao Zedong has admitted to making up the entire story.

The 22-year-old student tearfully admitted he made the story up to his history professor, Dr. Brian Glyn Williams, and his parents, after being confronted with the inconsistencies in his account.

Had the student stuck to his original story, it might never have been proved false.

But on Thursday, when the student told his tale in the office of UMass Dartmouth professor Dr. Robert Pontbriand to Dr. Williams, Dr. Pontbriand, university spokesman John Hoey and The Standard-Times, the student added new details.

The agents had returned, the student said, just last night. The two agents, the student, his parents and the student's uncle all signed confidentiality agreements, he claimed, to put an end to the matter.

But when Dr. Williams went to the student's home yesterday and relayed that part of the story to his parents, it was the first time they had heard it. The story began to unravel, and the student, faced with the truth, broke down and cried.

The original story had run around our campus on a day we were to debate an academic freedom statement in Faculty Senate and it caused a small uproar. Its timing during the debate over the Patriot Act certainly looked suspicious. But Professor Williams deserves credit for bringing the truth of this story forward. I didn't post before because I wanted to see if it was true or not. The American Mind was an early skeptic.
Categories: higher_ed

Permalink here.
Posted by King : 10:33 AM
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Captain Ed may or may not be kidding with this post -- I think he is. But the thought of someone calculating the quantity of methane gas emissions from reindeer hurtling around the world on Christmas Eve is funnier still. I hope that was good Scotch, and here's another toast.

JB Doubtless is one of those procrastinators, waiting until the very end to do his Christmas shopping. He wonders about supply and demand:

If the stores were smart, they would suspend all sales during these last few shopping days. Men are so desperate for something, anything at this point that we are willing to pay top dollar just to get it over with. 58 bucks for this scarfey thing? What the hell? $134 for a sweater with a wolf on it? Sounds good. $452 for this Danish Maple jewelry box? Ring it up!

We're bad shoppers. We admit it. We don't care. I'm just surprised someone isn't taking advantage of us.

Since businesses are not in the habit of leaving $20 bills on sidewalks, why don't firms do this and jack up prices as Christmas day nears? There can be three explanations:

1. They would jack them up for men, who are idiots, but the law prevents them. It would be easy to price discriminate -- sell the same good to different people at different prices -- if we could just tell who the idiots are. I propose Yankee caps.
2. The stock of gifts to buy is finite, so demand is actually dropping as Christmas day approaches. A variant of this is that the goods remaining in stores of Christmas Eve are probably just the crappy gifts the previous shoppers turned down, so it makes sense to lower prices. And given the price drops after Christmas so much, some will be tempted to provide late gifts if there's too big a drop in price on 12/26.
3. Demand drops as Christmas Day approaches, as more shoppers are buying for after Christmas, and other shoppers have already left for the holidays on planes, trains, and automobiles buses. A variant on this theme is that the gift bought in 12/24 is for the marginal recipient -- your Aunt Thelma for who you might not have bought anything save for that "scarfey thing" that's on sale for $5.

It's fun to think of these things, and part of what makes economics such a pleasure.

Categories: economics

David Friedman who wrote one of the most interesting books on anarcho-capitalism and some fascinating economics, has a blog now. He wonders:

Low volume toilets are supposed to save water. They also, at least in my experience, tend to get stopped up more than ordinary toilets. Someone should do a statistical study relating the fraction of low volume toilets in an area to both water usage and expenditures on plumbers. Assuming water is saved--the process of getting a toilet unstopped can require multiple flushes--it might turn out to be very expensive water.

And yes, this was written after yet another session applying a plumber's snake to a low flow toilet.

Ditto, a few hours ago.

Categories: economics

Kurt Peters at Writing History writes me.

Just watched an interesting round table about the future of Iraq on Cspan. One of the panelists talked about the effort to establish an Islamic economy. I know very little about economics other than I never seem to have enough money. I do know that economic practices set down by the Koran differ from Western style economies. Do you know what they are and could they work in a globalized world?

That question has interested me for a long time, as I went to graduate school during a period when many schools were loaded with students from the Middle East, sent by oil-rich governments looking to build a generation of technocrats. I had many discussions with them about usury. Kurt's email got me to looking around for the state of play in Islamic finance, and luckily a new article in Finance and Development covers just that.

Islamic financial products are aimed at investors who want to comply with the Islamic laws (Sharia) that govern a Muslim's daily life. These laws forbid giving or receiving interest (because earning profit from an exchange of money for money is considered immoral); mandate that all financial transactions be based on real economic activity; and prohibit investment in sectors such as tobacco, alcohol, gambling, and armaments. Islamic financial institutions are providing an increasingly broad range of many financial services, such as fund mobilization, asset allocation, payment and exchange settlement services, and risk transformation and mitigation. But these specialized financial intermediaries perform transactions using financial instruments compliant with Sharia principles.

There is an obvious parallel, to those familiar with financial history, to the prohibition against usury in the Church of medieval times. The drive for development led to the use of Jewish families as bankers. In the Ottoman empire of the 19th Century, the rulers relied on Jews and Armenians as proxies to negotiate loans from Europe (such loans were further helped by the lenders' recourse to secular courts based on Napoleonic rather than Islamic jurisprudence.)

Modern Islamic banks use a variety of instuments as described in the article to allocate risk of a project where the time money is put in and the time revenues are paid out differ. Islamic finance has a rather keen understanding of the nature of investment and creates instruments that allow participation at several different levels. But it has two problems that strike me as difficult to overcome. First, banks develop means of managing liquidity -- the ability to meet deposit outflows like the bank run you probably watch this weekend at the Bedford Falls S&L in It's a Wonderful Life. It does so by storing some of its deposits in debt instruments. In It's a Wonderful Life, the liquidity instrument is the money for the honeymoon that Donna Reed pulls out of her coat. These instruments don't exist well within Islamic finance, unless you think of oil revenues as being the money in Donna's coat. This prevents banks from growing very large; even when they do, they have to hold so much cash in the vault 'just in case' that they are rather unprofitable.

Second -- and on this point I invite comments because I am very interested in it and I am just barely past the point of pure speculation -- there seems to be a strong antipathy in Islam towards profit. It runs similar, in my basic understanding, to the Church's debate over just price and just wages -- how much should that doggy in the window cost? Over time the less free interpretations of the just price gave way to our modern understanding, culminating in Adam Smith. It does not appear that Islamic thought has made this advance yet. That the history of economic development of the world between 500 and 1500 AD was more Islamocentric than Eurocentric, and that it was at the end of that period that period that the just price debate began to be resolved, may be a coincidence, or it may be much more.

So what is holding Islamic economies back has existed for centuries in this view, and while some steps are being made, there is nothing less than a paradigm shift needed for those countries to gain the same level of economic and financial development.

Categories: economics

John Palmer has moved to EclectEcon. He offers some advice on Christmas light management.

With the invention of the little LED Christmas lights that use very little electricity, it probably makes no sense to buy a $30 outdoor timer that will turn the lights off during the day. I haven't done the calculations, but I can readily imagine that leaving even 120 of these lights on for an extra 16 hours a day for a month adds no more than a few dollars to the electricity bill. So why bother with a timer? In fact, if the prices represent the opportunity costs of using the scarce resources in various ways, it would downright anti-social and inefficient to buy a timer for these lights.

Around the Scholar manse, we have neighbors who so decorate their homes that buses pass through our street. I have noted the use of timers at a few (as some go off every day just as I take Littlest to school.) As to the cost of lights, Mrs. has decided that it is festive to have lights throughout the year, so we have five (by my count) different sets of lights to run throughout the year (Christmas, Easter, lighthouses for summer, leaves for fall, Halloween). As it is only 36 lights, the marginal electricity cost is only $1 extra. This has required us to turn off the ground lighting we put in a few years ago (at a cost of several hundred dollars) because they diminished the glow of the festive lamps, but John will tell you that cost is sunk ... and leads to fewer arguments with Mrs.

If this strikes you as fun, see Cheesy Lights. Suggestions for additional sets in comments please; Mrs. may get some more of these for her birthday next month.

UPDATE: Inefficient lighting. (h/t: Club for Growth)

Categories: economics

Minnesota Democrats Exposed has a flyer going around St. Cloud saying that Kay Ek cannot run for the House seat here in St. Cloud in the special election next Tuesday. The truth is she could not have her name printed on the ballot -- of course you can vote for her by writing in her name.

The DFL has dumped a great deal of money on postcards in this last week. Yesterday we got a disgusting one pretending to be a Christmas card from Dan Ochsner, the Republican senate candidate, which when opened screams that Ox has called St. Cloudites "morons" and SCSU "a disgrace". (Frankly, I've had occasion to agree with those comments from time to time, particularly the latter. So too have several of our faculty. If I had a morning talk show five days a week, I might have uttered those words on-air.) It's utterly meanspirited. When I mentioned this at breakfast, the DFLers at the table replied "oh, you should have heard the push-poll someone called me with last night." Um, that's fairly different, and I've had three DFL push-pollers call me this month too.

In the same mailbox comes a nice picture of DFL candidate Tarryl Clark with her family. You can pretend to have family values, Ms. Clark, but we can judge you by the company you keep as associate party chair.

Categories: politics, St._Cloud

Now comes a little recovery. Hasta manana!

On the other side of the planet, Russia is up to its old tricks of threatening neighboring countries who don't play nice with them with higher gas prices. Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova, three countries that have moved towards the West, are now facing double and triple prices for natural gas.

Scott Clark in Kyiv is saying it's blackmail, though in the long run he and I agree that if Russia wants to move to full price for its gas it is better to do so in graduated steps (and with the fees it pays to Ukraine, Georgia and other countries for trans-shipment royalties also raised slowly.) But, Dan McMinn notes, the timing of this, as close as it is to the parliamentary elections in Ukraine in March, give it the appearance of meddling.

Much of what is to be said, David already did. Particularly on what is seen and what is not seen (Bastiat should be on that reading list.)

First of all, it was the smokers who got reamed, and they won’t see a dime of this money. I assume it will be rebated back to the distributors, who will pocket it, as is their right.

Secondly, as far as I can tell, while this ruling strikes down the HIF on cigarettes, the so-called "other tobacco products" (OTP) will still be subject to the increased fee. So cigars and snuff, for instance, still have to suffer under a 100% increase in their taxes, while cigarettes will go back down to prior levels. Of course, cigarettes are by far the most dangerous of these products, although studies show that smokers already more than pay their fair share in taxes.

David goes on through the expected political analysis -- Gov. Pawlenty made a bad mistake; don't compound it with the threat to administratively shift the fee onto retailers; best to make lemonade out of these lemons by letting the fee die; we don't need the money with the surplus.

Fine. Cigarettes will be cheaper, but you still won't have any place to smoke them.

Here's what it won't do, though. It won't change the level of government spending. Indeed, it shouldn't be long now before we hear the lament from education officials that the governor's legere-de-main with the feetax means "the loan" the state took from education will not be paid back. (You probably haven't heard that these schools are desparately short of money.)

(Ooops, too late.)

If you ever promise that money might be available for a spending increase, any threat to that increase is a cut. Even promising them an increase that ends up not coming to fruition gives the proponents of bigger government more ammo.

Categories: economics, politics, Minnesota

Speaking of FIRE, Wendy McElroy summarizes its new book, Guide to First-Year Orientation and Thought Reform on Campus. If you have a child going to college next year, add it to the books I offered you before.

Categories: higher_ed

Back in October I wrote about the attempt to gag the DePaul University College Republicans' flyers protesting a visit to the campus by Ward Churchill to speak to student groups. The CRs were banned from a workshop Churchill held for other student groups, and told they could not post "propaganda". FIRE is now involved in protecting the CRs.

On November 23, FIRE wrote to DePaul President Dennis Holtschneider to protest the university’s actions, urging the Catholic institution to reject “policies that place students’ individual rights and personal integrity at the mercy of university officials who are free to censor students at will.” Holtschneider replied on December 12, incorrectly claiming that the word “propaganda” is not part of any policy at DePaul. Nevertheless, he defended DePaul’s policy, insisting that it “is enforced equally for all topics and positions. Advertisements of speakers are posted. Denunciations of speakers are not posted.” Yet FIRE’s research shows that the policy was amended to reflect this only after the College Republicans’ flyers were denied approval.

“It is immoral for DePaul to expect its students to abide by a policy that is selectively enforced, constantly shifting, and disavowed even by the university’s president,” said [FIRE director Greg] Lukianoff. “DePaul’s Orwellian attempts to rewrite history by changing its policies without notice—and then using the changes to retroactively justify repression—are also extremely disturbing.”

Enforced equally? Well, perhaps: There was a set of posters for student government in 2003 that included statements about kicking Coca-Cola off campus for its international labor practices, and these were reportedly taken down (source). But given the rest of DePaul's politics, it's hard to believe that DePaul wasn't taking a small peek at viewpoint when deciding who got to see Churchill.

As for Churchill? Must have been a fine time had by all.

Categories: higher_ed

Another story of university restructuring, but this time not forced by a hurricane. According to Inside Higher Ed, Post University is eliminating its liberal arts majors to focus on vocational education.

Post, in Waterbury, Conn., was founded as a private university in 1890, and has always had a strong vocational orientation. The university has seen some radical changes in governance. In 1990, Post became one of several American colleges that affiliated with the Teikyo Group, from Japan. Post became Teikyo Post University. Last year, when Teikyo pulled out, private investors purchased Post and it traded in its nonprofit status to become a for-profit (and profitable) entity.

Now the university — with about 1,400 students — plans to stop offering liberal arts degrees and to focus on academic programs directly linked to careers. No full-time faculty members will lose their jobs. But there will be shifts in priorities for adjunct hiring — and part-time faculty members teach a major proportion of classes at Post.

Jon Jay De Temple, president of Post for the last five years, said that he believes the institution needs focus. “We’re not big enough to do everything for everybody,” he said.

What a surprise -- become a for-profit university and you "need focus". Why? Is it perhaps that a university that has no profit motive can indulge in its preferences for arts programs? Or is it that the full-time faculty there would not have taken their positions in lib arts fields if they didn't have their own majors? I recall economics faculty at Harvey Mudd College, which is the engineering school of the Claremont Colleges and a very high-ranking institution in its fields. Many of its students will take humanities courses at other Claremont colleges because HMC isn't "big enough to do everything for everybody.” By contracting out, in other words, HMC can devote more resources to what it does best.

Categories: higher_ed

Courtesy Newmark's Door, we find Alan Reynolds with a list of books on economics that he recommends. The list is awfully long, but it's hard to pick among them. Newmark does, and I can't disagree with the list. But, I suggest the following in general:

1. You can't do much without an understanding of economic history. How the West Grew Rich by Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdsell is the one I suggest. You could also benefit from Against the Tide by Douglas Irwin, describing the free trade fight over the ages, or The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David Landes. My students in development economics read the last one first.
2. If you're more into web sites than books, explore the Library of Economics and Liberty. Besides the cool blog EconLog, you also get online books, articles, study guides, etc.
3. I've often called Hayek's Use of Knowledge in Society the best journal article ever written in economics. I prefer it to Road to Serfdom for its integration of the insights of that book to a basic understanding of why humans are attracted to markets.
4. Lists seldom have a good book on financial crises. Charles Kindleberger's Manias, Panics and Crashes is the tops of that list, but I have re-read Walther Bagehot's Lombard Street as often as I've re-read any book.

Categories: economics

I am not a pollster -- my forecasting gets done with observable data, not surveys* -- but I tend to believe people can't read poll data any better than they read, say, GDP data. And I have to now address my friends at Kennedy vs. the Machine for slamming the SCSU survey. In short, they aren't reading it carefully enough and letting the STrib's spin represent what the poll actually says. Let me explain.

Their evidence is a new Survey USA poll that shows a job approval rating for Governor Pawlenty of 59% (35% disapprove). The 39% that KvM cites from the SCSU survey (here are the results slides) is for his re-election. What was not reported in the STrib was the survey's own question on Pawlenty's job performance and the fact that it was better than the results for "your own state representative" and for own senator.

Excellent 7.7%
Pretty Good 37.4%
Only Fair 29.9%
Poor19.6%

46.1% saying excellent or pretty good isn't too shabby. And you're comparing this to a Survey USA question that asks to approve or disapprove of Pawlenty's work. It is quite possible those two polls are measuring the same thing and the four-branch choice the SCSU survey gives sorts the answers of "approval" that would have been given to the Survey USA callers into some of the first three branches.

Andy thinks the Survey USA poll is a little off, too, citing 50% of pro-choice voters approving of Pawlenty (and 32% of self-described liberals). But I don't think that means very much either. As a personal example, if someone had called me and asked if I approved of the job my former representative Joe Opatz -- the DFL guy leaving the seat that has been the object of l'Affaire Ek -- I'd've said yes, I approve. Would I vote for him? I don't vote purely on party ID, but it's a pretty fair bet I voted against him a few times. (Sorry Joe!) Voting isn't just about one's job performance but also about the alternative candidates placed before you.

Likewise, using the "feelings thermometer" that the SCSU survey developed as a predictor is hazardous. I'm not particularly pleased with several GOP leaders right now, both nationally and locally, but my preferences don't lie on a single scale and I don't draw challengers from a jar at random. Or, as my old public finance prof used to put it, "a thing is neither good nor bad save the alternatives make it so." So too with politicians.

*--not that I can't do surveys: I just had a paper published on remittances that includes survey data. But I don't predict things using them.

Disclosure: One of the faculty directors of the student-based SCSU survey reads here. I have not run this by him. For all I know, he will disagree with it.

Categories: politics, St._Cloud, Minnesota

I will post later today. I'm in the middle of grading, and when I don't feel like grading I find myself wondering whether I can build an extra rung lower in Hell for Larry Lucchino. You didn't come here to hear me rant about the travails of Red Sox Nation.

But I will tell you what I wrote Liz this morning: Losing Jacque Jones to the Cubs isn't that big a deal because the Twins fan doesn't see him as part of their history. He was not respected up here (me included, because I have always hated his swing -- but he plays hard.) Johnny Damon could have remained a Red Sox for life, played two years longer than he should have, and never bought a meal in New England again.

Instead, he's a Yankee.

I'll be back in a while; I need to find some flame accelerator.

This would be the post-secondary education option or PSEO, which allows high school students to take courses at a university to complete their high school requirements and simultaneously have college credits to transfer. We see many such students at SCSU. Speed Gibson notes an editorial today in the StarTribune that gives muted praise for the program started by DFL Governor Rudy Perpich. SG thinks HS students are missing time on their own campuses that is needed to learn social skills, and that they are unprepared for the life of a college campus. I don't notice much difference in the social skills between the PSEO and regular students here, so I'm not sure I agree. He also thinks students are missing out on drama club and other activities; again, I see no evidence of this. A student in my class this fall who was PSEO also had extracurricular activities and active in track. My problem with most students, PSEO or not, is that they do too many things. I wish they'd make choices like SG suggests! They try to do it all.

One notable point though is his fourth:

...this is really the wrong approach - it goes the wrong way. If anything, the colleges should consider coming to the high schools. It's logistically much easier and far less disruptive to send a professor to the high school. Make that AP History class a Senior elective; don't hold it on campus. I know of one case where this is being partially done, and it's been very successful.

We do this; one faculty member goes out to four or five high schools each term and lectures once every other week or so to supplement the teacher on campus. (SCSU readers will know this as "senior-to-sophomore".) We assess that course, and it turns out those students are gaining knowledge in basic economics at or above the level our on-campus students gain. That's gain -- those students are normally good students, and they score higher on the pre-test of economic literacy than most students will. We're measuring the difference between tests administered before and after the course.

I agree that the model works really well. But you have to find teachers at the sites who can teach the AP-level course. That's hard, particularly outside the metro area. For those students, PSEO may be the only reasonable option.

Categories: education, higher_ed

Steven Horwitz has a story of a gas station in St. Lawrence county, New York, that is among 15 gas stations charged by AG Eliot Spitzer for price gouging during and after the Katrina price spike. The fellow orders gas from his wholesaler at one price, but the wholesaler delivered a day late to help the retailer by giving him gas at a price $.29/gal. lower. The retailer, not knowing he was getting the lower price, continued to charge customers based on the higher wholesale price. This tripped the price-fixing law in NY.

Markets work by letting people know when their prices do not match those offered by competitiors in the market, as Horwitz describes:

The owner of the store also reports that over the weekend when his price was at $3.80, his sales dropped significantly. He sold 1358 gallons on 9/2, 738 gallons on 9/3, and 429 gallons on 9/4. This was also Labor Day weekend, w