Category: Academe

In Addition to Everything Else, Benjaman Netanyahu Could Not find his Ass with both Hands

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Netanyahu decided on some political meddling on the judging panel for the Israel prize for Literature, and in response, the judging panel resigned en mass:

The Education Ministry fears the Israel Prize in literature may not be granted this year, after the entire judges panel resigned this week to protest efforts by the Prime Minister’s Office to intervene in its composition.

Now literary lions are likely to shun the panel, making it hard to establish a replacement, ministry sources warned.

In an unusual move, the Prime Minister’s Office vetoed two people originally nominated as judges for the prize – professors Avner Holtzman and Ariel Hirschfeld. After Haaretz reported this on Sunday, all five of the people ultimately appointed to the panel resigned, to protest “the clear politicization of the prize and the vote of no confidence in the professionals’ professional judgment,” as one of the five, Prof. Nissim Calderon, put it.

Moreover, Prof. Yigal Schwartz, who was one of the candidates for the prize in the field of literary research, announced Tuesday night that he is withdrawing his candidacy in protest.

“This is an unparalleled scandal,” said Schwartz, a professor of literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and editor-in-chief of the Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir publishing house. “I’m withdrawing my candidacy and urge other candidates to do the same. This isn’t a mistake; it’s a continuation of Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu’s deliberate policy of undermining Israel’s elites to gain votes from other groups. This is sabotage that it’s impossible not to oppose. Even this institution, the Israel Prize, which had remained untainted, they have sabotaged.”

“No such thing has ever happened before,” Calderon agreed.

Tuesday, it emerged that Netanyahu’s office had also vetoed a nominee to the judges’ panel for the Israel Prize in film – producer Chayim Sharir. Another member of that panel, producer Ram Loevy, has also resigned in protest.

Over the past few weeks, Education Ministry staffers had repeatedly warned Netanyahu’s aides against intervening in the panel’s composition, but the bureau dismissed these warnings, they said.

Now, the ministry is awaiting “instructions from the prime minister’s bureau” on how to fill the judges’ panel, they said.

Aside from Calderon, the other judges who resigned were Prof. Nurith Gertz, Prof. Ziva Ben-Porat, Prof. Ephraim Hazan and Dr. Uri Hollander. Author Gail Hareven had resigned earlier, after learning independently of the veto imposed on Hirschfeld and Holtzman.

In their resignation letter, the five scholars said the intervention by Netanyahu’s bureau constituted “politicization of Israel’s most important prize, which is supposed to be granted solely on the basis of professional and artistic considerations,” and raised fear that extraneous considerations would taint the award.

At first, the bureau declined to say why it suddenly decided to veto Hirschfeld and Holtzman after the two had already begun work. Tuesday, it said in a statement that it “decided to review the panel’s composition” after discovering that Hirschfeld supported refusal to do army service. The statement did not say why Holtzman was nixed.

Note that Bibi is minister of education in addition to being PM.

He took the portfolio when the previous minister, and his party, left the coalition government.

Netanyahu is claiming that the panel contains, “Too many anti-Zionist extremists.”

I call bullsh%$ on this.

If Netanyahu really had issues, they could have been presented 2-3 months ago, at the start of the process.

This is not a firm stand on his principles (as if he had any), this is yet another case of him fomenting conflict for political gain:   He is going for the Nixonian option of campaigning against academics to create the illusion that he cares for the ordinary Israeli.

Or, to quote Spiro Agnew, he is playing the, “Effete intellectual snob,” card.

Why are People are Missing the Old The New Republic?

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I really don’t get it.

It was reflexively, and stupidly, counter-intuitive in all the time that I was aware of it, it hasn’t broken a major story in decades, and it has appeared to see its mission as a way for country-club liberals to excuse their own privilige and entitlement. (It’s also been affirmative action for white Ivy Leaguers with degrees in English)

One of the things that its supporters have pointed to is the dense literary writings of the magazine’s now former literary editor Leon Wieseltier.

I never read his stuff.  While I read some (not enough) literature, I have no urge to read people who write about literature.

It just seems to be an exercise in solipsism to me.

But Atrios pointed me to this bit of Graphorrhea that Mr. Wieseltier wrote for the New York Times:

Amid the bacchanal of disruption, let us pause to honor the disrupted. The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of bookstores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the greatest thugs in the history of the culture industry. Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind. Everybody talks frantically about media, a second-order subject if ever there was one, as content disappears into “content.” What does the understanding of media contribute to the understanding of life? Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability. As the frequency of expression grows, the force of expression diminishes: Digital expectations of alacrity and terseness confer the highest prestige upon the twittering cacophony of one-liners and promotional announcements. It was always the case that all things must pass, but this is ridiculous.

And I thought that reading a ponderous translation of Immanuel Kant in high schoolwas a tough row to hoe.

It gets worse as it goes on. ……… and on. ……… and on. ……… and on. ……… and on.

I think that if translated to Frankenstein-speak, it translates to, “Paper publications good!  Internet Bad!”, but I can only give a confidence that I actually understood that bit of purple prose with about 27.3%.

Why anyone ever bought a copy of The New Republic in the past 40 years is beyond me.

Seriously.  If this weren’t Leon Wieseltier, I would think that this was a parody of academic writing.

H/T Atrios

It’s all Just Weather, Longhair

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A recent dendrochronology study has shown that California’s drought is the worst in at least 1200 years:

Scientists studying the severe drought that has beleaguered California for the past three years estimate that this drought is the worst one in the past 1,200 years. The new estimate comes from data they compiled on tree ring growth and soil moisture. Low (but not unprecedented) precipitation and record high temperatures are the main factors driving this drought, the scientists say. An online edition of the journal Geophysical Research Letters published this work on December 3, 2014.

It should be noted that the study primarily used the Blue Oak (Quercus douglasii) which are particularly good at showing rainfall, though, 1200 years is a lot longer than the typical life span of this tree.

My guess would be that they used other (probably less accurate) trees, and perhaps some other indicators.

It is not clear from the abstract whether there was a worse drought 1200 years ago, or if it’s just the worst in the 1200 years, and perhaps more.

If it is the former, that drought corresponds to the Mayan collapse, which many (though by no means all) archaeologists attribute (at least in part) to an extended drought.  (The Mayan collapse is a matter of some dispute in academe.)

In either case, the fact that this drought is worse than 300 year long drought that destroyed Anasazi civilization between 1150 and 1450. 

What is going on here is, to use the technical term, seriously weird climate sh%$, and it requires willful ignorance not to consider anthropogenic climate change as a primary factor.

String Theory Taken to Its Logical Conclusion

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Proponents of the controversial theory have taken to arguing that their theory is so elegant that it should require no experimental verification:

This year, debates in physics circles took a worrying turn. Faced with difficulties in applying fundamental theories to the observed Universe, some researchers called for a change in how theoretical physics is done. They began to argue — explicitly — that if a theory is sufficiently elegant and explanatory, it need not be tested experimentally, breaking with centuries of philosophical tradition of defining scientific knowledge as empirical. We disagree. As the philosopher of science Karl Popper argued: a theory must be falsifiable to be scientific.

I agree wholeheartedly.

BTW, that sound you hear is Richard Feynman spinning in his grave.

Chief among the ‘elegance will suffice’ advocates are some string theorists. Because string theory is supposedly the ‘only game in town’ capable of unifying the four fundamental forces, they believe that it must contain a grain of truth even though it relies on extra dimensions that we can never observe. Some cosmologists, too, are seeking to abandon experimental verification of grand hypotheses that invoke imperceptible domains such as the kaleidoscopic multiverse (comprising myriad universes), the ‘many worlds’ version of quantum reality (in which observations spawn parallel branches of reality) and pre-Big Bang concepts.

 These unprovable hypotheses are quite different from those that relate directly to the real world and that are testable through observations — such as the standard model of particle physics and the existence of dark matter and dark energy. As we see it, theoretical physics risks becoming a no-man’s-land between mathematics, physics and philosophy that does not truly meet the requirements of any.

My knowledge of string theory is minimal, coming from my (PhD in physics) brother who mocks it for its lack ability to make meaningful predictions. (There’s also the representation in pop culture in Big Bang Theory, but I do not take my lead from such)

On the other hand, I know bullsh%$ when I hear it, and the idea that an unprovable theory should be accepted on the basis of its aesthetics is definitely bovine scatology.

This is an indictment of those string theorists who are calling for its acceptance on pure faith, but it is more than that: It is a searing indictment of string theory by those who are its greatest proponents.

H/T DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

This is Kind of a Big Deal

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The National Institute of Mental Health has withdrawn its support for the DSM-5, the 5th edition Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the massive update of the American Psychological Association’s encyclopedic, and controversial, diagnostic manual:

Just two weeks before DSM-5 is due to appear, the National Institute of Mental Health, the world’s largest funding agency for research into mental health, has indicated that it is withdrawing support for the manual.

In a humiliating blow to the American Psychiatric Association, Thomas R. Insel, M.D., Director of the NIMH, made clear the agency would no longer fund research projects that rely exclusively on DSM criteria. Henceforth, the NIMH, which had thrown its weight and funding behind earlier editions of the manual, would be “re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.” “The weakness” of the manual, he explained in a sharply worded statement, “is its lack of validity.” “Unlike our definitions of ischemic heart disease, lymphoma, or AIDS, the DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure.”

That consensus is now clearly missing. Whether it ever really existed remains in doubt. As one consultant for DSM-III conceded to the New Yorker magazine about the amount of horsetrading that drove that supposedly “evidenced-based” edition from 1980: “There was very little systematic research, and much of the research that existed was really a hodgepodge—scattered, inconsistent, ambiguous.”

According to Insel, too much of that problem remains. As he cautioned of a manual whose precision and reliability has been overstated for decades, “While DSM has been described as a ‘Bible’ for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each.” And not even a particularly good dictionary, apparently. Of the decision to steer research in mental health away from the manual and its parameters, Insel states: “Patients with mental disorders deserve better.”

I’m wondering how much of this is a generational thing.

The people who have been in charge of the DSM since at least the late 1970s are all roughly of the same age, being in their 40s back then, and being in their ate 1970s now, and as such, advances in genetics, neurochemistry, and imaging allow for a far more quantitative approach to the discipline.

University of California Study Reveals the Obvious

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Rather unsurprisingly, when protests occur, police frequently provoke violence:

The violence that turns a small-town protest into a fiery national spectacle like the one that has played out this month in Missouri is often unwittingly provoked by police, according to researchers at UC Berkeley.

The research team, which studied clashes between police and activists during the Occupy movement three years ago, found that protests tend to turn violent when officers use aggressive tactics, such as approaching demonstrators in riot gear or lining up in military-like formations.

Recent events in Ferguson, Mo., are a good example, the study’s lead researcher said. For nearly two weeks, activists angered by a white police officer’s fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager have ratcheted up their protests when confronted by heavily armed police forces.

“Everything starts to turn bad when you see a police officer come out of an SUV and he’s carrying an AR-15,” said Nick Adams, a sociologist and fellow at UC Berkeley’s Institute for Data Science who leads the Deciding Force Project. “It just upsets the crowd.”

Adams said many law enforcement agencies aren’t aware that they set the tone of a protest and end up inflaming it.

I disagree with the last point.

I think that police are very aware that militarized responses encourage protests to turn violent, and that this violence gives a justification to engage in kinetic action to break up the protests.

This has been the norm for police-protest interactions ever since the mid 1800s, when police were used to crush organized labor.

So Not Shocked

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The claims by people like Art Laffer, and organizations like ALEC, that “pro business” policies produce an improving economy are not only wrong, but actually counter to the data which shows that the tax-cutting, rich fellating policies that they endorse actually make economic performance worse:

Conservative economic pundits just love to justify “business-friendly” policies to state governments as keys to job growth, which after all is the whole ballgame in economic policy-making.

As Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin has now shown, the problem is that pro-business policies don’t really contribute to economic growth. They just make the rich richer, which is not the same thing at all.

The index measures 15 state policy “variables,” such as top marginal income tax rates, property taxes, public employees per capita, state minimum wage, right-to-work law, and whether there’s an estate tax. You can guess what a state has to do to rank high in all these factors and therefore shine in the index–low taxes, small government, anti-union policies, no estate tax are virtual requirements.

But does a high ALEC ranking translate into high growth? That’s the question Chinn asked. He started by measuring private nonfarm job growth in four states–California, Wisconsin, Kansas, and Minnesota–dating to January 2011, when all four got new governors. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Sam Brownback of Kansas were extremely ALEC-friendly, Jerry Brown of California and Mark Dayton of Minnesota were not.

………

Indeed, when Chinn mapped the ALEC rankings for all 50 states against their economic growth, he found that, if anything, a higher index score correlates with a worse economic performance. That won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the ALEC follies over time: The Iowa Policy Project found the same negative correlation in 2012.

Of course, much like Trotskyites, conservative Chicago School-type economists, and rich parasites, are impervious to the facts, so it is unlikely that this will translate into actual policy.

H/t Kevin Drum.

Why a French Economist has So Many Wingers Terrified

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Paul Krugman has an interesting OP/ED on Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Picketty makes the assertion that capital demands rates of return greater than that of the underlying economy, and that, over the long run capital will extract more and more of the overall economy, to the detriment to wages and labor.

As Krugman notes, this work has the apologists for the rent seekers apoplectic:

“Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” the new book by the French economist Thomas Piketty, is a bona fide phenomenon. Other books on economics have been best sellers, but Mr. Piketty’s contribution is serious, discourse-changing scholarship in a way most best sellers aren’t. And conservatives are terrified. Thus James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute warns in National Review that Mr. Piketty’s work must be refuted, because otherwise it “will spread among the clerisy and reshape the political economic landscape on which all future policy battles will be waged.”

Well, good luck with that. The really striking thing about the debate so far is that the right seems unable to mount any kind of substantive counterattack to Mr. Piketty’s thesis. Instead, the response has been all about name-calling — in particular, claims that Mr. Piketty is a Marxist, and so is anyone who considers inequality of income and wealth an important issue.

I’ll come back to the name-calling in a moment. First, let’s talk about why “Capital” is having such an impact.

Mr. Piketty is hardly the first economist to point out that we are experiencing a sharp rise in inequality, or even to emphasize the contrast between slow income growth for most of the population and soaring incomes at the top. It’s true that Mr. Piketty and his colleagues have added a great deal of historical depth to our knowledge, demonstrating that we really are living in a new Gilded Age. But we’ve known that for a while.

No, what’s really new about “Capital” is the way it demolishes that most cherished of conservative myths, the insistence that we’re living in a meritocracy in which great wealth is earned and deserved.

For the past couple of decades, the conservative response to attempts to make soaring incomes at the top into a political issue has involved two lines of defense: first, denial that the rich are actually doing as well and the rest as badly as they are, but when denial fails, claims that those soaring incomes at the top are a justified reward for services rendered. Don’t call them the 1 percent, or the wealthy; call them “job creators.”

Needless to say, the defenders of oligarchy are unamused by this.

The book, which, if reports are true, uses rather traditional economic tools, makes a compelling argument that excessive wealth is not synonymous with virtue.

I’m putting Capital in the Twenty-First Century on my summer reading list.

The First Law of Holes is………

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If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. (This is generally attributed to British politician Denis Healey)

Well two weeks after Randa Jarrar wrote a bigoted screed on non-Arabs belly dancing, and was pilloried for this, (I called her a bigoted moron) she writes a followup where she doubles down on her repellent thesis.

Rather uncharitably, my first reaction was a bit of smug self-satisfaction when she appeared to specifically mention my blog, “Other men on racist blogs called me a moron.”

Needless to say, I stand by my analysis of her earlier post, and her most recent article further reinforces the truth behind the Denis Healey quote.

The interesting thing is that from an aesthetic perspective we generally agree on the aesthetics of Middle Eastern dance, we both agree that the westernized cartoonized version of Middle Eastern dance, what I call “Cabaret”, is crap. (Of course, 90% of everything is crap [Sturgeon’s law])

Further we would agree that many, probably most, of the public performances of Middle Eastern dance in the west are crap.

I would go a bit further, and note that the same applies to public performances in Egypt, Turkey, Lebanaon, Syria, etc.

But there is a difference between objecting to the Disneyfication of an art form and saying that some ethnic group should not be allowed to practice that art.

Furthermore in she goes there, and explicitly states that, “It’s not possible,” for her to be a racist, one would assume because she is an Arab.

Bigotry much?

Finally, one of the commenters on this thread posted a Scribd document describing the history of Middle Eastern dance.  It’ is worth a read.

I’ve attached it after the break.

Rule Number 1: Do Not Piss off Jon Stewart

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Rule number 2:  Going on The Daily Show to show what you are really nice guy.

Jim Kramer of Mad Money’s evisceration was, until last night, the reigning champion of this, but his take down last night of former judge Andrew Napolitano’s ignorant and bigoted spew of Neo-Confederate talking points about Abraham Lincoln mad that look like a tea party.

I’ll not show you an interview, I’ll just show you the (I sh%$ you not) game show segment.

It is unbelievably brutal:

Funny, but unbelievably brutal.

Books to Read: Grounded: The Case for Abolishing the United States Air Force

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I’ve got to read this book. Professor Robert Farley, an assistant professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce at the University of Kentucky has written a book calling for the abolition of the US Air Force as an independent branch of the service:

The United States needs airpower, but does it need an air force? In Grounded, Robert M. Farley persuasively argues that America should end the independence of the United States Air Force (USAF) and divide its assets and missions between the United States Army and the United States Navy.

In the wake of World War I, advocates of the Air Force argued that an organizationally independent air force would render other military branches obsolete. These boosters promised clean, easy wars: airpower would destroy cities beyond the reach of the armies and would sink navies before they could reach the coast. However, as Farley demonstrates, independent air forces failed to deliver on these promises in World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the first Gulf War, the Kosovo conflict, and the War on Terror. They have also had perverse effects on foreign and security policy, as politicians have been tempted by the vision of devastating airpower to initiate otherwise ill-considered conflicts. The existence of the USAF also produces turf wars with the Navy and the Army, leading to redundant expenditures, nonsensical restrictions on equipment use, and bad tactical decisions.

I certainly agree with this idea.  The raison d’être for an independent air force is Douhet’s theory about how strategic bombing could win wars.

History has shown this to be completely false.  Strategic bombing with the possible exception of the use of nuclear weapons against Japan, have never won wars, nor do they appear to have shortened wars.

H/t War is Boring.

Bigoted Moron of the Day

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Randa Jarrar, who just penned, “Why I can’t stand white belly dancers,” on Salon.

Seeing as how I know about 1 half dozen white who have made a study of traditional, as in pre 1600, Middle Eastern dance. Somehow Ms. Jarrar, the product of Sara Lawrence and UT Austin, believes that their interest is somehow inauthentic.

Art is supposed to be universal, and cross cultural art can produce some amazing things.

Feh.

I did Not Expect this From the New York Times

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The Times when writing about the debate about raising the minimum wage, calls out a so called “think tank” as being a subsidiary of the hospitality industry:

Just four blocks from the White House is the headquarters of the Employment Policies Institute, a widely quoted economic research center whose academic reports have repeatedly warned that increasing the minimum wage could be harmful, increasing poverty and unemployment.

 But something fundamental goes unsaid in the institute’s reports: The nonprofit group is run by a public relations firm that also represents the restaurant industry, as part of a tightly coordinated effort to defeat the minimum wage increase that the White House and Democrats in Congress have pushed for.

 “The vast majority of economic research shows there are serious consequences,” Michael Saltsman, the institute’s research director, said in an interview, before he declined to list the restaurant chains that were among its contributors.

 The campaign illustrates how groups — conservative and liberal — are again working in opaque ways to shape hot-button political debates, like the one surrounding minimum wage, through organizations with benign-sounding names that can mask the intentions of their deep-pocketed patrons.

Those are the first 4 paragraphs.

Seriously, the New York Times led with the fact that that a lot of the think tanks are little more than whores for their donors.

And then they name the lead pimp:

………

 The Employment Policies Institute, founded two decades ago, is led by the advertising and public relations executive Richard B. Berman, who has made millions of dollars in Washington by taking up the causes of corporate America. He has repeatedly created official-sounding nonprofit groups like the Center for Consumer Freedom that have challenged limits like the ban on indoor smoking and the push to restrict calorie counts in fast foods.

 ………

 The sign at the entrance is for Berman and Company, as the Employment Policies Institute has no employees of its own. Mr. Berman’s for-profit advertising firm, instead, “bills” the nonprofit institute for the services his employees provide to the institute. This arrangement effectively means that the nonprofit is a moneymaking venture for Mr. Berman, whose advertising firm was paid $1.1 million by the institute in 2012, according to its tax returns, or 44 percent of its total budget, with most of the rest of the money used to buy advertisements.

 Disclosure reports filed by individual foundations show that its donors in recent years have included the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a longtime supporter of conservative causes. Mr. Berman and Mr. Saltsman would not identify other donors, but did say they included the restaurant industry. But its tax return shows that the $2.4 million in listed donations received in 2012 came from only 11 contributors, who wrote checks for as much as $500,000 apiece.

I am not sure why the New York Times has decided to stop channeling Claude Rains, but it is a refreshing change for the “paper of record”.

Normally this sort of “business as usual” is studiously ignored by the Washington press corps(e).

Just a Reminder: Big Ag is Evil, Not Just Monsanto, and it is US Policy to Subsidize them Through International Agreements

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You really need to read this account of a systematic program of harassment and libel against Tyrone Hayes for his research showing that Syngenta’s herbicide atrazine was dangerous:

In 2001, seven years after joining the biology faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, Tyrone Hayes stopped talking about his research with people he didn’t trust. He instructed the students in his lab, where he was raising three thousand frogs, to hang up the phone if they heard a click, a signal that a third party might be on the line. Other scientists seemed to remember events differently, he noticed, so he started carrying an audio recorder to meetings. “The secret to a happy, successful life of paranoia,” he liked to say, “is to keep careful track of your persecutors.”

Three years earlier, Syngenta, one of the largest agribusinesses in the world, had asked Hayes to conduct experiments on the herbicide atrazine, which is applied to more than half the corn in the United States. Hayes was thirty-one, and he had already published twenty papers on the endocrinology of amphibians. David Wake, a professor in Hayes’s department, said that Hayes “may have had the greatest potential of anyone in the field.” But, when Hayes discovered that atrazine might impede the sexual development of frogs, his dealings with Syngenta became strained, and, in November, 2000, he ended his relationship with the company.

………

[Former student Roger] Liu and several other former students said that they had remained skeptical of Hayes’s accusations until last summer, when an article appeared in Environmental Health News (in partnership with 100Reporters)* that drew on Syngenta’s internal records. Hundreds of Syngenta’s memos, notes, and e-mails have been unsealed following the settlement, in 2012, of two class-action suits brought by twenty-three Midwestern cities and towns that accused Syngenta of “concealing atrazine’s true dangerous nature” and contaminating their drinking water. Stephen Tillery, the lawyer who argued the cases, said, “Tyrone’s work gave us the scientific basis for the lawsuit.”

Hayes has devoted the past fifteen years to studying atrazine, and during that time scientists around the world have expanded on his findings, suggesting that the herbicide is associated with birth defects in humans as well as in animals. The company documents show that, while Hayes was studying atrazine, Syngenta was studying him, as he had long suspected. Syngenta’s public-relations team had drafted a list of four goals. The first was “discredit Hayes.” In a spiral-bound notebook, Syngenta’s communications manager, Sherry Ford, who referred to Hayes by his initials, wrote that the company could “prevent citing of TH data by revealing him as noncredible.” He was a frequent topic of conversation at company meetings. Syngenta looked for ways to “exploit Hayes’ faults/problems.” “If TH involved in scandal, enviros will drop him,” Ford wrote. She observed that Hayes “grew up in world (S.C.) that wouldn’t accept him,” “needs adulation,” “doesn’t sleep,” was “scarred for life.” She wrote, “What’s motivating Hayes?—basic question.”

………

In January, 2001, Syngenta employees and members of the EcoRisk panel travelled to Berkeley to discuss Hayes’s new findings. Syngenta asked to meet with him privately, but Hayes insisted on the presence of his students, a few colleagues, and his wife. He had previously had an amiable relationship with the panel—he had enjoyed taking long runs with the scientist who supervised it—and he began the meeting, in a large room at Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, as if he were hosting an academic conference. He wore a new suit and brought in catered meals.

After lunch, Syngenta introduced a guest speaker, a statistical consultant, who listed numerous errors in Hayes’s report and concluded that the results were not statistically significant. Hayes’s wife, Katherine Kim, said that the consultant seemed to be trying to “make Tyrone look as foolish as possible.” Wake, the biology professor, said that the men on the EcoRisk panel looked increasingly uncomfortable. “They were experienced enough to know that the issues the statistical consultant was raising were routine and ridiculous,” he said. “A couple of glitches were presented as if they were the end of the world. I’ve been a scientist in academic settings for forty years, and I’ve never experienced anything like that. They were after Tyrone.”

………

Michelle Boone, a professor of aquatic ecology at Miami University, who served on the E.P.A.’s scientific advisory panel, said, “We all follow the Tyrone Hayes drama, and some people will say, ‘He should just do the science.’ But the science doesn’t speak for itself. Industry has unlimited resources and bully power. Tyrone is the only one calling them out on what they’re doing.………

The Supreme Court has said that corporations are people in the Citizens United case.

Why isn’t Syngenta being criminally prosecuted for stalking?

H/t The Washington Monthly.

Economists Unconnected to Reality

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You know the ones, the “fresh water” economists, the free-market mousketeer conservatives for whom the rational actor acting in an unconstrained laissez-faire system is king.

It is a matter of faith, completely unsupported by reality, that regulating a market will always be counter productive.

As it pertains to consumer protections for credit cards, to paraphrase the Bard, “There are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in their philosophy.

Much to ths shock of right wing economists, adding consumer protections to credit cards worked:

Four years ago, Congress decided to force down the hidden fees that credit card companies collect from their customers. It passed a law called the 2009 Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act — a name chosen so the law would be known as the Card Act.

When Neale Mahoney, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, set out to evaluate the effect of that law, he was confident he knew what he and his colleagues would find: It didn’t work.

“I went into the project with this sort of conventional wisdom that well-intentioned regulators would force down fees and that other fees and charges would increase in response,” he told me this week, comparing hapless rule makers to the carnival visitors playing the game known as Whac-a-Mole, where a mole springs up somewhere else as soon as one is knocked down.

But his expectation was wrong. The study came to a conclusion that surprised Mr. Mahoney and his colleagues: The regulation worked. It cut down the costs of credit cards, particularly for borrowers with poor credit. And, the researchers concluded, “we find no evidence of an increase in interest charges or a reduction to access to credit.”

The study, whose other authors are Sumit Agarwal of the National University of Singapore, Souphala Chomsisengphet of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Johannes Stroebel of New York University’s Stern School of Business, estimates that the law is saving American consumers $20.8 billion a year.

There are a number of theories as to why this occurred, but the most likely is that regulation, when properly executed, simply works, though an argument could be made (though probably not by the credit card companies) that this worked because much of the credit card companies’ business model is parasitic, and as such they are unwilling to walk from “free” money.

Economists Finally Get a Clue

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I called for this at the start of the financial crisis, and finally many economists have begun to realize that there is such a thing as inflation is too low:

Inflation is widely reviled as a kind of tax on modern life, but as Federal Reserve policy makers prepare to meet this week, there is growing concern inside and outside the Fed that inflation is not rising fast enough.

 Some economists say more inflation is just what the American economy needs to escape from a half-decade of sluggish growth and high unemployment.

 The Fed has worked for decades to suppress inflation, but economists, including Janet Yellen, President Obama’s nominee to lead the Fed starting next year, have long argued that a little inflation is particularly valuable when the economy is weak. Rising prices help companies increase profits; rising wages help borrowers repay debts. Inflation also encourages people and businesses to borrow money and spend it more quickly.

 The school board in Anchorage, Alaska, for example, is counting on inflation to keep a lid on teachers’ wages. Retailers including Costco and Walmart are hoping for higher inflation to increase profits. The federal government expects inflation to ease the burden of its debts. Yet by one measure, inflation rose at an annual pace of 1.2 percent in August, just above the lowest pace on record.

 “Weighed against the political, social and economic risks of continued slow growth after a once-in-a-century financial crisis, a sustained burst of moderate inflation is not something to worry about,” Kenneth S. Rogoff, a Harvard economist, wrote recently. “It should be embraced.”

Low inflation favors the rentiers over the producers.

Of course, the economists, are talking about maybe moving the targeting from 2% to 3%, and I think that we should target 6%, but I’m an engineer, not an economist, dammit!*

*I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!

Missing the Point

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Julia Ryan at The Atlantic observes that when correcting for demographics, public schools outperform private schools:

Sarah Theule Lubienski didn’t set out to compare public schools and private schools. A professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she was studying math instructional techniques when she discovered something surprising: Private schools—long assumed to be educationally superior—were underperforming public schools.

She called her husband, Christopher A. Lubienski, also a professor at the university. “I said, ‘This is a really weird thing,’ and I checked it and double checked it,” she remembers. The couple decided to take on a project that would ultimately disprove decades of assumptions about private and public education.

Studying the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, they have found that, when controlling for demographic factors, public schools are doing a better job academically than private schools. It seems that private school students have higher scores because they come from more affluent backgrounds, not because the schools they attend are better educational institutions. They write about these conclusions—and explain how they came to them—in their book, The Public School Advantage: Why Public Schools Outperform Private Schools. Here’s an interview with the Lubienskis about their work, edited and condensed for clarity and length.

This is not a surprise, but it does not matter for two reasons:

  • The quality of an educational experience is largely determined by the abilities of the students.
  • It creates social connections which serve to preserve a de facto aristocracy.

The biggest determinant of school quality has always been the “quality”, for lack of a better term, of the students.

To the degree that you put good students together in a self contained environment, their educational experience will likely improve, though this will be at the expense of those students, frequently poorer and more heavily pigmented, on the outside.

As to social connections, just look at Harvard, whose undergraduate program is widely considered to be one of the most overrated in academe,* they remain very exclusive.
The reason for this is the quality of the student body, and the social connections that are created by going there. 

It seems like half of the Wall Street banksters went to Harvard, for example.

Nothing binds like those old school ties.

*So says my Radcliffe (Harvard) graduate, former college president, step-mom.

This Says More About the University of Chicago Than They Would Like

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I’ve always wondered if the University of Chicago economics department was little more than than an attempt to engage in, “One of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness,” to quote John Kenneth Galbrath.

Now it appears that the whole damn school is exclusively structured for the purpose reinforcing privilege:

Back in May at the University of Chicago, this happened:

Two locksmiths with medical conditions were told to repair locks on the fourth floor of the Administration Building during the day. Stephen Clarke, the locksmith who originally responded to the emergency repair, has had two hip replacement surgeries during his 23 years as an employee of the University. According to Clarke, when he asked Kevin Ahn, his immediate supervisor, if he could use the elevator due to his medical condition, Ahn said no. Clarke was unable to perform the work, and Elliot Lounsbury, a second locksmith who has asthma, was called to perform the repairs. Lounsbury also asked Ahn if he could use the elevator to access the fourth floor, was denied, and ended up climbing the stairs to the fourth floor.

Clarke and Lounsbury were told they had to haul their asthma and hip replacements up four flights of stairs because the University of Chicago has had a policy of forbidding workers from using the elevators in this building, which houses the President’s office, during daytime hours. As the university’s director of labor relations put it: “The University has requested that maintenance and repair workers should normally use the public stairway in the Administration Building rather than the two public elevators.”

The problem is not just that the divide between rich and poor is too extreme, it is that we are going balls to the wall feudal as well.

Must Read

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It’s a PDF, and it’s 22 pages, but John Quiggen of the University of Queensland makes the fascinating point that the great financial centers of the world, primarily New York, London, Paris, and Tokyo, exist because the concentration of the financial industry facilitates corruption and cronyism of the managing class:

Recent developments in the global system of cities present a curious paradox. With the cost of communications declining almost to zero and substantial, though less dramatic reductions in transport costs, there is now little technical requirement for most kinds of production to be undertaken in any particular location, or for elements of production chains to be located close to each other. This fact has had dramatic consequences for the organisation of manufacturing industry. Simple production chains involving the import of raw materials, usually from developing countries, for processing in a specialised centre, have been replaced by far more complex structures.

Yet, in important respects, the dominance of a small number of ‘global cities’has never been greater. In this paper, it is argued that the dominance of global cities reflects a desire for clustering on the part of finance sector professionals and corporate executives. It seems likely that such clustering provides private benefits by enhancing the value of personal contacts, but reduces the efficiency and profitability of the corporate sector

 ………

 These concerns are even more pronounced in relation to personal networks connecting financial enterprises with their clients. It is reasonable to assume that such personal networks facilitate the development of business relationships between the firms in question, leading to flows of payments on services based on relationships of personal trust and shared interests, rather than on formal and transparent contractual relationships.

Such a system is commonly referred to as ‘relationship capitalism’ or, more pejoratively as ‘crony capitalism’. In general, it is viewed favourably during booms, when the disregard of process tends to facilitate rapid generation of wealth, and less favourably during recessions when the exchange of personal favours and the evasion of formal controls tends to be reclassified (often retrospectively) as corrupt.

Basically, if you are in an environment where you can run into a potential co-conspirator at a restaurant, or at a party, where small talk can allow you to tease out a deal that will benefit you, and your friend, but not your clients without the sort of transaction trail that you would see with phone calls, and emails, etc.

Essentially, it turns out that centralized financial district are a particularly criminogenic environment in terms of control fraud.

A few casual conversations at a party with, for example, a stock analyst, and that IPO you are pumping up, or the stock price of the company in which your stock options have just vested, and Ka-Ching, there you are with a vacation home in the Hamptons, a yacht, and a Ferrari.

Remember that WSJ OP/ED Written by a Paid Agent of the Syrian Rebels?

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I posted a link to this a few days ago.

Well, she just got fired for a non-existent PhD on her resume:

A young researcher whose opinions on Syria were cited by both Senator McCain and Secretary of State John Kerry in congressional testimony last week has been fired from the Institute for the Study of War for allegedly faking her academic credentials.

The institute issued a statement on its website concerning the researcher, Elizabeth O’Bagy:

The Institute for the Study of War has learned and confirmed that, contrary to her representations, Ms. Elizabeth O’Bagy does not in fact have a Ph.D. degree from Georgetown University. ISW has accordingly terminated Ms. O’Bagy’s employment, effective immediately.

O’Bagy and her op-ed drew scrutiny last week when the Wall Street Journal failed to disclose O’Bagy’s ties to an advocacy group backing the Syrian opposition and lobbying the U.S. government to intervene in Syria. The Journal was forced to post a clarification that “in addition to her role at the Institute for the Study of War, Ms. O’Bagy is affiliated with the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a nonprofit operating as a 501(c)(3) pending IRS approval that subcontracts with the U.S. and British governments to provide aid to the Syrian opposition.”

What a surprise.  Another right wing “expert” is a fraud.