Maggie's Farm

It's about bubbles - things with form but lacking in substance.

Most "homeowners" have mortgages, if not second mortgages, or at least lines of credit against their homes. If you have a mortgage, you are essentially a renter - but a renter with the capital risk and the maintenance costs and risks. The ownership is an illusion and, if the place is paid off, you lose your interest deduction and so what have you gained by that process of eliminating your leverage? Well, if you are retired with lower income, you have gained the ability to remain in the house if you can cover the property tax.

For economic reasons, more people are renting: Homeownership Rate Falls to Lowest Level Since 1997; The Homeownership Bubble Is Still Deflating.

The American Dream of home ownership is and has been a foolish ideal. However, it was an ideal which expert salesmen sold us since the 1950s. A sentimentality sales job, like cars. Chances are, you ain't buying no family estate that your grandkids would want to own.

Expert salesmen, again both in government and out, also sold us the college degree bubble. Once a meaningful social marker, it has become so diluted that it no longer means anything at all, or, I should say, can mean a lot or can mean nothing, depending on what was learned. I know, because I interview people for jobs. I have seen college grads who don't know what it means to graph a f(x), don't know the difference between RNA and DNA, and have never read Chaucer. Oh, I see. They have a BS in Business Administration. Is that "college"? Oh, somebody wrote a term paper about Virginia Woolf? Wow. I guess they can write a sentence. What is meaningful is a rigorous High School degree. From that, you have the foundation to learn anything you want to.

Is a college degree job training, a few additional High School years, a social marker, an expensive prolonged adolescence, a merit badge, a haven for dedicated scholars, or what? Nobody knows anymore, but it is widely sold as a necessary qualification. Hence a piece like this in the NYT: Why go to college at all?

My theory used to be that a college education should prepare you to understand, in depth, every page of the Sunday New York Times. I don't buy their paper any more, which is their loss. Mine also, to some extent.

Guys just say "You pissed me off." Women harbor grievances as precious possessions.

Anon.

What don't "they" want to regulate? Call for Sugar to Be Regulated as a Toxin. That is not from The Onion. Well, I suppose if "they" want to regulate CO2, a basic and necessary ingredient of air, then why not sugar?

Why the sudden interest by the Food Nazis in regulating this most basic and appealing of carbohydrates? From this article: Sugar Should Be Regulated As Toxin, Researchers Say:

Some researchers argue that saturated fat, not sugar, is the root cause of obesity and chronic disease. Others argue that it is highly processed foods with simple carbohydrates. Still others argue that it is a lack of physical exercise. It could, of course, be a matter of all these issues.

Oh, so the scientists are not sure? So what? It's the precautionary principle, and we brain-dead masses can not be left alone with their own food. I can regulate my own sugar, thank you very much. And my own body, too. What do the Feminists say: "Government's hands off my body."

You can't make this stuff up.

Also, see this: Government regulation is one of the nation’s few growth industries, making a mockery of the assertions and predictions of the Obama administration.

"Give me Social Security and Medicare, or give me death."

Not Patrick Henry

One must wonder how people survived and thrived here in America for hundreds of years without food stamps, government benefits, or a maternal government. Perhaps they had a different mind-set.

Good news: Revolutionary education reform

We are considering putting up one of these Country Carpenters pre-fab post and beam barn/garages up at the top of the driveway, perhaps with a small apartment upstairs.

I was told they can be put up in a week, or less, once the slab is laid down. Installing a septic field would be an additional expense that I am not sure I want to take on right now. I think we will also need a well.

Every American needs a barn. Were I running for President, that would be my promise.

Here's a pleasant New England homestead they did:

I'm with VDH on this: What We Do Not Want to Hear Anymore. By way of correcting the drivel many of us are tired of, he concludes:

Human nature and the laws of physics, not technocratic liberalism, are still the best guides to the madness around us. Money borrowed has to be paid back or the debt eaten by someone, period. Poverty is defined by a want of material necessities, not by lacking the appurtenances that someone else better off enjoys. Gas and oil are miracle fuels and it is very hard to find alternate energies at comparable costs and reliability. And as a rule, the green class of environmental elites usually uses more fossil fuels per capita than do the muscular classes who mine and drill them out of the ground — and who do not jet, drive, or live in the comparable fashion of their critics. The content of our character alone matters; those who are not so confident in their own, usually demand that their tribal affiliations be essential and not incidental to their personas. Most accept that culture, not race matters, but it matters still more not to say that. Most of the political class has no interest in history; dogma is their creed. They assume that everyone (far less noble than themselves) in the past would have agreed with them, or now can be postfacto made to agree with them.

Listening to Bill Whittle's video we posted yesterday reminded me of his Katrina-era post titled Tribes.

As you may recall, it's about sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs - and about the Pink and Grey tribes.

In case readers didn't take the time to read the WSJ  opinion piece this week by prominent scientists, here it is: No Need to Panic About Global Warming -There's no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to 'decarbonize' the world's economy.

The brief video interview with the Princeton Physics prof there is interesting too. He says they would have had many signatures if they had taken the time.

These fellows are saying what we have been saying here for years, but they have more street cred than we have. Indeed, the story of the AGW hysteria is a fascinating story of the politicization of scientific inquiry coupled with governmental and academic greed for money and power. It is a cautionary tale.

Furthermore, I think many of us would welcome a little global warming. I think it would improve the planet, overall. It certainly did so in the past.  Watch, over the next year, more scientific organizations and agencies find the courage to publicize these politically-incorrect views.

At Maggie's Farm, most or all of us are Environmentalists and Conservationists. We want land and water and air to be protected. We do not even approve of urban sprawl because we may need all of our farmlands someday and, as pleasant as urban hiking can be, we need the woods too. But at the same time, we like to live in reality.

A propos yesterday's post on Fishtown: Apple's Jobs to Obama: "jobs aren't coming back" to U.S:

Apple's executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their U.S. counterparts that "Made in the USA" is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.

A friend of mine told me he is taking this trip this winter, with his two brothers through the Strait of Magellan and then up north along the coast of Chile.

He said they decided that they wanted to bond and reconnect before they get old. Sounds like a very cool trip, and cheap. He said he was going to take photos of Albatrosses. I warned him not to shoot one because nothing good comes of it.

From Girl Meets Gun:

Shooting a gun is like smoking a cigarette or drinking espresso in a café in Paris or having sex on a Caribbean beach: You’ve watched it so many times on-screen that you experience your own actions as an echo. It’s impossible not to feel like a cliché.

I have been asked by readers why I can sound so harsh about education and our current educational systems. The answer is that I care about learning so much. For me, learning new things is relaxing, recreational, and a gift (and does not need to be expensive), but I accept that not all feel the same way. I am a teacher at heart, even though I do not teach although I do help train our young associates. If I were as tough on students as I am on our associates, I'd be fired in a New York Minute.

Here's Walter Williams: Schools of education protect ignorance in the classroom. He concludes:

Schools of education represent the academic slums of most any college. American education can benefit from slum removal.

Sounds true, although those pathetic standards certainly do not apply to my town in CT where, unions aside, the public school teachers are well-educated, enthusiastic, demanding, and dedicated. However, our local school system avoids hiring teaching school graduates.

Is Algebra ll too difficult for most high schoolers? It's a big debate in California.

I honestly do not know the answer, but it seems basic to me. If you can't master Algebra and Trig, and use them to hone the brain, it's tough for me to figure out how you graduate from high school.

Somewhat related, The College-Degree Mania in Ohio. As Leef says:

Sorry, governor, but colleges don’t graduate students. Students graduate themselves if their efforts are sufficient, and the sad fact is that many who enroll are so academically weak and unmotivated that they don’t amass enough course credits to get their degrees within six years. That isn’t the fault of the institutions.

Maintaining standards is an endless and possibly a losing battle with today's credentialism. Someday, we'll have to admit that most people are not scholars (even to the level of Algebra ll), and that learning how to do something useful and practical might be more important. That view, however, runs right up against the Big Education lobbies.

There is no market for Sociology Majors, but there is a big market for Master Plumbers and Gunsmiths. They make more money, too. But they need to know some math to do their work.

We have rreported so many scientific frauds in the past couple of weeks, I thought I would highlight some commonly-used "data-management" tricks designed to dishonestly influence people.

1. "Clustering." We have all heard about cancer clusters - Why does my town have triple the breast cancer of towns two miles away? There must be someone I can sue about this. Such claims have an emotional appeal, but they are nonsense. Random distribution is not even - it is uneven. Just try flipping a quarter, and you will get little runs of tails. Clustering is a natural effect of randomness, but trial lawyers are always busy trying to track them down: they can get rich before anyone figures out the game.

2. "Cherry-picking."  Cherry-picking is a frankly dishonest form of data presentation, often used by newspapers to create alarmist stories about the economy, the environment, food safety, etc. It fools people without some decent science education. What it entails is combing through, say, 60 pieces of data, and then using the three points that support your argument, and ignoring the rest. Presenting random changes as meaningful facts is a lie. Environmentalists use this all of the time, as do other agenda-driven fact-handlers. A casual use of this fallacy is characteristic of The New York Times typical headline: Despite Good Economic Statistics, Some Are Left Behind - and then they scour NYC to find some single black mom in the Bronx who cannot support her kids - and she becomes the "story".

3. "Anectdotal evidence." The above example could also be termed "anectdotal evidence." If you look around, you can always find an exception, a story, and example - of ANYTHING. But anectdotes are compelling, and Reagan used them to the best effect. And how about those swimming Polar Bears! (I always thought they liked to swim.)

4. "Omitted evidence".  You tell me how common this is! A first cousin of Cherry-picking, Omitted Evidence is also a lie. All you do is ignore the evidence and data that disagrees with your bias or your position. Simple.

5. "Confirmation bias".  People tend to remember evidence which supports their opinion, belief, or bias, and to dismiss or forget evidence which does not. It's a human frailty. Humans have to struggle to be rational.

6. "Biased Data".  "A poll at a local pre-school playground in Boston at 2 pm today indicated that 87% of likely voters will vote for Obama." Picking your data sources, like picking the questions you ask, can determine your results with great accuracy. As pollsters always say, "Tell me the answer you want, and I will design the question."

7. "Data mining." Data-mining is used by unscrupulous academics who need to publish. Because it is a retroactive search for non-hypothesized correlations, it does not meet criteria for the scientific method. Let's say you have 10,000 data points from a study which found no correlation for your hypothesis. Negative correlation studies are rarely published, but you spend a lot of time collecting it - so you ask your computer if it can find any other positive correlations in the data. Then you publish those, as if that was what you had studied in the first place.

Image: two good varieties of cherries for picking; Stella on the left, Lapins on the right, from Miller Nurseries

At UNC, The Diversity Mania

Why does this sound creepy to me?

The cost of one bad teacher for one year on an average classroom of students is a whopping $266,000 in that class's collective lifetime earnings, which is over $2.6 million which that lousy teacher will cost society over ten years, or possibly $7.8 million over the teacher's tenure.

That's just one bad teacher. Multiply that by the possibly tens of thousands of wretchedly bad teachers whom the teachers' unions protect, and you realize the cost to society of our monopolistic public school system.

We linked this by Gelinas yesterday: A man’s home is the government’s castle

Also, American Thinker's Seizing the Wealth of Landlords, One District at a Time

Both cities' rent control laws began as emergencies to meet temporary housing crunches (you always need a "crisis" to create an opportunity for government control). Then your "emergency" action becomes permanent due to its newly-created constituency. That is how Leviathan grows.

If rent control were eliminated in NYC today, in short time there would be tons of new middle class rental housing built; supply up, prices down. The moral issue, though, is that these controls do constitute a form of government theft from the owners.

Did the Founding Fathers make an error? As much as anything else, this Robinson interview with Paul Rahe (that's #5 of 5)captured most of the key political issues with which we Maggie's Farmers are concerned today.

Some people desire to run other peoples' lives for their own good. I wish those Rahe interviews were on YouTube. They deserve to be.

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, many are asking questions about how much freedom most people really want. How much freedom will the average person trade for a bowl of lentils? In other words, for security or for free money?

When I was in 6th Grade, our school had a speech contest, the title being "What Freedom means to me." Mine came in second. If I were doing that speech today, I'd probably come in last. Freedom from involuntary servitude - slavery - is of course basic, but freedom from government power is the beseiged freedom of today, just as it has always been.

At Vanderleun, Comment of the Week So Far: "You know how you can tell that 'everyone wants freedom' is baloney?"

A good debate: Are Too Many People Going to College? (link fixed)

I tend to agree with George Leef in that debate, but of course I think anybody ought to go if they want to. Some of my points, as readers know, are these:

- college does not equal education
- very few people are natural scholars
- for many people, it is just an extended adolescence, with credential-buying, beer, and sleeping til noon
- many young people would rather work than study

and so on.

Rich girl explains poverty to the greedy and benighted.

In America, the poor do not stay poor, and the rich do not remain rich. Overall, in the US, both great wealth and difficult poverty seem to be transient. I am opposed to the death tax because it discourages people from building a secure and independent future for their kids and grandkids.

Of course, death taxes seem not to affect the very wealthy.

From the latter link:

...if upward mobility is so common, why are there still plenty of poor people in this country? In a recent video about income mobility hosted by the Institute for Humane Studies, economist Steven Horwitz of Saint Lawrence University explains:“Immigrants and young people entering the labor force come into that income distribution at low levels of income. They become the new poor when the old poor slowly move their way up.” Horwitz concludes that “even though a first glance at the data may make it seem as if the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, the reality of the United States in the early 21st century is that everyone is getting richer, poor and rich alike.”

"Bullshit" is the title of a well-known 1986 essay by Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt, now expanded into a short book.

Two of Frankfurt's main points seem to be that, 1, the bullshitter is more motivated to create an impression of himself rather than to communicate substantial true material and 2. bullshit may be more insidious than lying. From a review of the book here:

...bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

Besides being a very bright fellow, his life as an academic gives him unique experience with the world of bullshit. We are all bullshitters, to some extent, but some make a career of it.

Frankfurt's original 6-page essay can be read here. One quote:

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

"But, by an inference as false as it is unjust, do you know what the economists are now accused of? When we oppose subsidies, we are charged with opposing the very thing that it was proposed to subsidize and of being the enemies of all kinds of activity, because we want these activities to be voluntary and to seek their proper reward in themselves. Thus, if we ask that the state not intervene, by taxation, in religious matters, we are atheists. If we ask that the state not intervene, by taxation, in education, then we hate enlightenment. If we say that the state should not give, by taxation, an artificial value to land or to some branch of industry, then we are the enemies of property and of labor. If we think that the state should not subsidize artists, we are barbarians who judge the arts useless."

Frederic Bastiat, 1848 (h/t Coyote)

Modern-Day Prohibition - The eternal temptation to ban things that give people pleasure. Stier begins:

The new Ken Burns and Lynn Novick documentary Prohibition is a five-and-a-half-hour missed opportunity to demonstrate why bans on substances are doomed from the start. Fortunately, for those who want to understand the irresistible lure of all types of prohibitions, there is Christopher Snowdon’sThe Art of Suppression: Pleasure, Panic and Prohibition Since 1800. Although Snowdon’s comprehensive history will never reach as many people as the PBS series, The Art of Suppression makes the case that Burns seems to go out of his way to avoid: that prohibition of products that people desire, whether alcohol a century ago or Ecstasy today, is bound to fail miserably.

The world is full of cranks and zealots who want to make you do whatever they think they should do. From my standpoint, I tend to want people to make up their own minds, and if they want to spend their lives half-stoned on heroin or pot, or fat from ice-cream and pastries, so be it. It's their life and their body.

The list of things of which I disapprove is long, but the list of things I would chose to apply power to prohibit is very short. Murder and theft, for starters.

Have you ever bothered to see what happens to your town's recycling? Those bins and things you put out there - where do they go? And are you charged for this extra effort of yours?

In my home town, we have to lug cardboard to the dump excuse me, recycling center. Newspapers, too. We are also supposed to separate glass from metal, and colored glass from clear glass, and plastic from glass.

For all of this self-applauding virtuously annoying pleasure, my most recent research reveals that ours all goes to a landfill in upstate New York, some is trucked to West Virginia to be dumped in a swamp or something, and some is burned by a subsidized power plant. There is no market for this "garbage" other than the marketplace for meaningless virtue. Glass, plastic, and newspaper, for starters, are far cheaper to make new than to recycle. Who is making money from this scam which makes naive soccer moms feel better about themselves?

Do me a favor and find out the facts about your local recycling - where does it all finally end up, and whether you pay extra for the privilege. Let us know. I think there's a news story in it.

Charles Murray on Belmont Vs. Fishtown, about social class in America and the Founding Virtues: marriage, industriousness, honesty, religiousness.

It's a major essay. One quote:

...if you live in an affluent suburb, an upscale neighborhood of a large city, or in a college town, you do not need to read (David) Brooks to know what I’m talking about. You live in that culture. But it is also possible (depending on the circumstances in which you grew up) that you are no longer familiar with what everywhere else in America is like. The problem is not the lifestyle of the members of America’s new upper class, which in many ways is attractive, but the degree to which the new upper class has become sealed off from the rest of America.

Sometimes the isolation is geographic as well as cultural. In major cities and their surrounding areas, those top-ranked zip codes in which the members of the new upper class live are surrounded by other top-ranked zip codes that form elite clusters consisting of tens or hundreds of thousands of people, creating large bubbles within which life can go on without reference to anywhere outside the bubble. Even when the geographic isolation is not extreme, the differences in culture often are...

Study the whole thing. It rings true to me. Even in a small town where we know all sorts of people, we tend to hang out with people who play tennis and golf, own guns, read lots of books, discuss Plato, Marx, Freud, Adam Smith and Hayek, go to church, have gardens, and love opera. Otherwise, what is there to talk about except the weather? It's not defined by financial status, but rather by common interests and, sometimes but certainly not always, similar backgrounds and similar world-views (but excluding political views, generally, untiil one is clear about where one's companions are coming from).

"Pat Moynihan once encountered Nixon in the hall of the White House and said ‘Mr. President, James Q. Wilson is the smartest man in the United States. The president of the United States should pay attention to what he has to say.’"

The Sinatra of Social Science:

... if you do good research on how the world really works, if you have the right data and the right assumptions, and you make the right arguments, and (even) if you do this in a nonpartisan and objective way, it will lead in the great majority of cases to conservative conclusions, because good research amplifies that the world operates, when it operates successfully, on principles that conservatives embrace. It reinforces our commitment to free enterprise, personal freedom, and military strength.

A piece from author and Harvard Prof David Weinberger on his new book: To Know, but Not Understand: David Weinberger on Science and Big Data. A quote:

The problem -- or at least the change -- is that we humans cannot understand systems even as complex as that of a simple cell. It's not that were awaiting some elegant theory that will snap all the details into place. The theory is well established already: Cellular systems consist of a set of detailed interactions that can be thought of as signals and responses. But those interactions surpass in quantity and complexity the human brains ability to comprehend them. The science of such systems requires computers to store all the details and to see how they interact. Systems biologists build computer models that replicate in software what happens when the millions of pieces interact. It's a bit like predicting the weather, but with far more dependency on particular events and fewer general principles.

Models this complex -- whether of cellular biology, the weather, the economy, even highway traffic -- often fail us, because the world is more complex than our models can capture. But sometimes they can predict accurately how the system will behave. At their most complex these are sciences of emergence and complexity, studying properties of systems that cannot be seen by looking only at the parts, and cannot be well predicted except by looking at what happens.

This marks quite a turn in science's path.

It's generally a good idea not to over-train one's palate, if only because life becomes too expensive if you do. Fine wine, for example, or fine dining and fine ceegars.

I did have an excellent cup of after-dinner coffee recently, and was advised that it was Royal Kona. "Not Kona - Royal Kona."  They made it with a French Press. Coarse grind only, for the French Press.

I drink coffee black and hot. Chef told me that Royal Kona is the best coffee in the world, and Jamaican Blue Mountain is second. I see that they can be purchased online.

I'm not particular about coffee, but that was damn good, with just the right touch of bitterness.

What coffees do our readers drink? Our sponsor's Dunkin? Maxwell House? Whatever the minimart has in the pot? Royal Kona? Or, God forbid, Starbucks? (I know we have some closet Starbucks fans out there.)

My Doc, a fine fellow, a med school Prof, a solo practitioner, and a non-golfer, is getting frustrated with the direction of medical practice these days and, along with that, feels a little frustrated with his patients too. He has too many of them, but just wants to be an old-time doc and friend to his patients instead of an Obamacare industrial doc on an assemby line.

She Who Must Be Obeyed forces me to get a "physical" every three years or so, just to annoy me. A gallon of blood, a total body scan, stress test, colonoscopy, fully poked and prodded, finger up the butt, etc. Costs a fortune. Doc also insists on a half-hour interview about how my life is going, Diet, happiness quotient, work, friendships, exercise, sex life, how are the kids, future plans, fun and recreation. Thinks he's a shrink, and likes to talk to people about their lives, while I would rather leave my body off for a check-up like leaving the car at the shop.

Actually, I think he's a very fine, caring Doc who happens to hold the strange, idolatrous and heathen belief that health is life's priority. (Plumbers feel the same way about your plumbing, don't they?) He does a good job at never appearing to be in a hurry, so I feel lucky to have him in case I develop a problem. We all will, sooner or later. Eventually, it will be a fatal problem. We can all count on that.

I put it all off as long as I can because I am allergic to doctors, much as I respect them. Anyway, last week he told me that, for my age and build, he wanted me to achieve a 36" waist. He also said, in all care and kindness, something like "If you don't want to follow my advice, I invite you find another doctor." Almost that, anyway. He was also rough about my cigar pleasure, but figured that 2/day was OK with him. Maybe 3. When I pressed him, he confessed to a few per week himself.

My question is always "What good is one's health if you don't have a fun, stimulating, adventurous, satisfying, and somewhat decadent life?"

And I am not even Medicare age. He opted out of Medicare a couple of years ago. He says Medicare reimbursements cannot cover his staff's wages as a solo guy. What it means is that he'll still take on Medicare-age patients, but they will have to pay him themselves from their piggy-banks. If truly poverty-stricken, he'll offer a break but no freebies. He doesn't "take" any insurances either.

He also told me that, when he decided to opt out, Medicare patients comprised 30% of his practice population, consumed 90% of his time, and comprised 25% of his income. He figures he donates a day per week at a teaching clinic, and that that is enough charity for him. How many people donate 20% of their work time and income to charity?

Like most doctors these days, he prefers not to bother with people who do not want to take decent care of themselves. The price you pay to have him available to you if you get in trouble is the occasional exam and sanctimonious health lecture. For me, every few years, stretched out as long as possible.

New Hampshire Ends Affirmative-Action Preferences at Colleges:

Roger B. Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, which opposes racial and ethnic preferences, said, "When these things come to a vote, and people have to give a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, I think a lot of politicians conclude that they do not want to be on record as favoring this kind of preferential treatment."

I am strongly in favor of preferential treatment for skills, talents, achievement, and potential.

Everybody knows what they are doing. They are trying to run a guild in a post-guild society. One aspect of that is keeping prices high - the prices for the schools, and worse, the prices for the poor clients and to hell for those who cannot afford a lawyer but are not poor enough to get a cynical, burned-out Legal Aid person.

Justice is exorbitantly - and unjustly - expensive and, as I have often said here, I think a better case could be made for socialized legal coverage than for socialized medicine, because equal justice is an American ideal, but illness is just human fate. In my view, the American legal system is a broken and often piratical mess run for the benefit of the lawyers (most politicians are lawyers). Just consider how many people settle unjust and annoying claims simply to avoid legal fees.

Via Bader in Minding the Campus:

... there is simply no reason to require people to attend law school before sitting for the bar exam. As law professor Paul Campos notes, legal education is a rip-off, since the typical law professor "knows nothing about being a lawyer. Hence, he must bullshit -- he does not lie to his students about how to be a lawyer (doing so would require him to know how to be a lawyer, while attempting to deceive his students regarding the substance of that knowledge); rather, he 'talks without knowing what he is talking about,'" when it comes to discussing the legal system or how to be a lawyer.

Law schools' lack of interest in preparing students to be lawyers is illustrated by Tulane's recent decision to give a murderer a scholarship to attend its law school, even though he most likely will never be admitted to the Bar given his criminal record. Law schools lie about whether graduates find jobs: two law schools are being sued for fraudulentplacement data. Law schools have increased tuition by nearly 1,000 percent since 1960 in real terms.

Meanwhile, student loan debt is rising at an exponential, ever-increasing rate, harming students' ability to buy homes (and thus, the housing market), and increasing federal spending on student loans is driving up college tuition and also harming the economy in other ways.

Of course, if you want a Big Job in a Big Law Firm, you will want a Big Degree. It's just one more example of greedy Big Education's monopoly on credentials. Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Government, Big Education, Big Farming, Big Tort Law. Same old story. Just follow the money.

Some readers felt that my last post about Maine was Maine-bashing. Not at all. I am simply curious about their politics.

This scenic and rugged rural (woodsy and rocky, post-glacial or should I say "pre-glacial") state, often proudly referred to as "The West Virginia of the Northeast," has more welfare recipients than taxpayers. 

That is a problem, isn't it? I wondered whether it was an official policy. A legal vote-buying policy. It sounds like it is.

From recent morning links, I get the impression that the goal of the Maine legislature is to put everybody in the state on Welfare, and to have nobody working except them.

Well, as if a job in a state legislature were "work." Let's face it - it's a title, not a job.

They happen to have elected a semi-revolutionary governor. That might help. Politically, Maine is a strange little state. It has papermills, gigantic tree farms aka forests, a bit of lobstering, marginal potato farms and berry farms, a hundred dead old mill towns, the town of Portland which contains more doctors than people (big retiree town for Yankees who reject Florida ways), a fancy recreational coastline for prosperous New Yorkers and yachtsmen. Fair fishing and hunting, too.

Nobody moves there except drug dealers. And our friend theEditor of the Rumford Meteor. Perhaps he can explain to us the state of mind of the State of Maine sometime.

The government of the state would be in fine shape if they could tax meth and pot.

Love that photo. All anybody needs for a good wedding.

Miniter envisions a world without schoolteachers. 

Tutors or parents, plus a Kindle, may be all that is necessary:

... the simplest tutoring approach often works magic. Years ago, a twelve-year-old foster child arrived in our home essentially unable to read after six or seven years of classroom "special" education. To the point where he didn't even know how to use a dictionary. Our oldest son, a prolific writer, happened to be visiting us at the time, saw the problem, and came up with a fix. He handed the boy the newspaper he read each morning, told him to sit on his bed, read it aloud, and circle every word he couldn't pronounce or didn't know the meaning of. Then, later, the two of them went over the circled words together. The first day, every fourth or fifth word was circled, but it wasn't very long before the number of circles began to decrease, and something clicked in the boy's mind. "Hey," he seemed to say to himself, "this is not such a mystery. I can get this reading and writing thing working on my own." And he went on to other material. Then, when he was ready to begin high school, the state and local school district sent a team to evaluate him in order to design a classroom program that met his "special needs." Only there wasn't any, because they were shocked to discover that he tested at or above -- and in a couple of subjects, far above -- his grade level.

A rambling and interesting essay by David Wemyss: Collectivist Dreams - The Russian Soul - A Turbulent Priest - Marx and Engels - Insouciance and Despair. One quote:

...charity and compassion are always the actions of autonomous people acting as individuals. And, however much intellectuals try to argue otherwise, socialism in the end has to trade on envy and resentment, just as surely as tentative lovers discover that they cannot after all confine themselves to just holding hands, or a stolen kiss. Soon enough people are taken to be good or kindly only if they espouse the correct socialist opinions - we see this all around us in the present age - and human sympathy gets redefined in doctrinal terms.

Yet although left-wing assumptions have captured the intellectual elites of the western world - the humanities are almost dead - they have had limited impact on older people untouched by the bureaucratic and academic caste.

In my little old conservative Connecticut town, people help eachother every day. In fact, we do everything we can to assist eachother.  The beauty of collectivism, charity, mutual help, etc. lies in its voluntariness, its mutuality, and in its local-ness. When there are guns and jails behind it (as via government), all of the beauty and love are lost and it just devolves into political power and into legal, armed plunder.

Infantile utopian dreams, in real life, quickly turn into real nightmares. They scare the heck out of me.

Image is via our friends at Western Rifle Shooters

Tax the heck out of the 1% to reduce inequality? As a person happy to be in the 1%, albeit in the lowest reaches of it, I wonder how many people would simply decide that working doesn't pay? When 50% of your income is taken, are you really still working for yourself and your family? Or are you simply subsidizing political campaigns?

As Viking comments:

I suppose the Tiger Woods could retire for the year after winning a single golf tournament. Brad Pitt could make half-a-movie.

Or Derek Jeter could play in four games. In Canada, doctors have income caps but lawyers and accountants do not. Docs quit working for the year when they hit them, and open other businesses on the side. I have heard that wine shops are popular with them.

I see that the economics-challenged Charles Blow is on the same trail, agonizing over the data that most Americans are neither particularly envious of, or angry with, the prosperous. He also wants to tax the heck out of the prosperous, not for the cash, but for fairness. It would be more fair to lobotomize the rich. Why not?

Well, here's some similarly arithmetically-handicapped news, Shock: Half of Americans live below the median income level! By golly, the government ought to fix that.

My views are more like those of Jeb Bush in "Capitalism and the Right to Rise - In freedom lies the risk of failure. But in statism lies the certainty of stagnation": make it easier for people to pursue their dreams by getting the government out of the way. If it's lots of money a person wants, fine. Why should I care? Or whatever else they dream of doing with their lives.

I recently posted about the desirability of attrition in colleges due to substandard performance, expressing the view that low graduation rates are a good, not bad thing, and that they lend some credibility to an expensive piece of paper.

Competitive and highly-selective graduate schools, however, probably should have lower attrition rates as their standards for entry are so relatively high.

Here is some info on Medical School Graduation and Attrition Rates

Here's Law School Rankings by 1L Attrition Rates

A groundbreaking study of New York schools by a MacArthur "genius" challenges the typical understanding of what makes a good school.

It's a major short essay. Weissman begins:

Think of the ingredients that make for a good school. Small classes. Well-educated teachers. Plenty of funding. Combine, mix well, then bake.

Turns out, your recipe would be horribly wrong, at least according to a new working paper out of Harvard. Its take away: Schools shouldn't focus on resources. They should focus on culture.

Read the whole thing. Schools aren't about money. Excellent education is inexpensive, except for technical levels of science. All it takes is a heated room, a blackboard, a demanding and interested teacher, and some curious kids.

But where does the money go?  Not to faculty salaries.

Not to salaries in the Liberal Arts, anyway. A quote:

In general, the parental costs of college are spiraling upward, but the increases are largely not going into the pocket of the full-time faculty member. We drive a Honda Accord and a VW Jetta, respectively, and most of my colleagues drive similar cars.

The BMWs, the Lexuses, the Infinitis, and the sports cars belong to the students, at least those whose high-end parents most typically bemoan the costs of sending their students to us.

BMWs in college? That's lame. I sent all of my kids to college with Ferraris, didn't you? For their self-esteem.

Readers know that I am opposed to mortgage interest deductions. As I view it, these are mainly an indirect subsidization for the construction industry, with incidental apparent benefit to the homeowner - paid for by renters.

I say "apparent" because it is no real benefit to mortgage-holders. After all, without that tax deduction home prices would necessarily be lower to be affordable by your price range.

Same thing applies to all products: subsidies, subsidized loans, grants, favoring policies, etc. distort markets and make things more inefficient and, in the end, more costly more everybody. It's the Law of Unintended - Intended - Consequences.

Here's an example in the news: Real-World Evidence Showing that Unemployment Insurance Benefits Increase Unemployment. Big surprise there, right? I am not opposed to unemployment insurance, but my point is that markets, including labor markets, still work like markets no matter how much they are distorted by policies. Just boulders in the river until they become dams. If people want to take a lengthy sabbatical on unemployment, they will take it until it runs out. That's quite rational and legal, if undignified and exploitative.

Higher ed is a great example. Student loans, grants, and favoring policies simply make it feasible for schools to charge more and to spend more. But where is that money going?

You know where it is going. It's payola to schools. It is going to burgeoning highly-paid admin staff, slick new dorms, mindless PC programs, marketing, and other baloney which has nothing to do with the education which is supposedly being bought by feckless and sacrificing parents, and state-taxpayers.

Hot tubs and basketball teams? Give me a break. College is not supposed to be either High School or babysitting.

Sol Stern in City Journal:

NCLB’s accountability system led to another distortion, this one harming top students. Because the law emphasized mere “proficiency,” rewarding schools for getting their students to achieve that fairly low standard, teachers and administrators had an incentive to boost the test scores of their lowest-performing students but no incentive to improve instruction for their brightest. Robert Pondiscio, communications director for the Core Knowledge Foundation and a former New York City Teaching Fellow, describes how the process worked at his South Bronx elementary school. “Eighty percent of the kids in my fifth-grade class were scoring at the two lowest levels on the state reading and math tests,” he recalls. (Each student in New York State receives a test score from 1 to 4, with 1 signifying performance far below grade level, 2 below grade level, 3 grade level, and 4 advanced.) “Early in my teaching career, an assistant principal told me that the kids in my class already scoring a 3 or 4 ‘are not your problem.’ In other words, my goal should be to move the kids scoring at the lower levels up a few points on the scale. I was not specifically ordered to do this, but the message was very clear. My job was to get more kids over the lowest two hurdles, because that’s how the school was rewarded for good performance in the city’s accountability system.”

As a result, Pondiscio says, the few gifted minority students in his class didn’t receive any extra attention—attention that could have given them a better chance to pass the rigorous test for admission to one of the city’s elite specialized science and math high schools. That’s especially sad when you learn that the percentage of black students passing the admissions test for top-ranked Stuyvesant High School has dropped steadily over the past decade. Last year, it fell below 1 percent.

 

The classic Steve McQueen movie immortalized three tunnels at Stalag Luft III PoW camp, now astonished archaeologists have discovered a fourth called George  Good pics.

From my doc and from my reading, I think it is fairly well-established that total cholesterol levels have little to do with cardiovascular disease, but perhaps LDLs do (LDL bad, HDL good, supposedly, and all more heavily genetically-determined than dietarily).

Dietary LDL may or may not have a meaningful impact on cardiovascular disease. For what it's worth, LDLs are found in poultry (even lean poultry skinned), all dairy, fish, shellfish, and red meat. Docs like to recommend salmon because it helps HDLs. Heck, it's all theoretical, but I do like salmon (with the right LDL-laden sauce, of course).

In my view, obsessing about food is neurotic, and it's Christmastime too. Who would go to a party where they served "healthy" crap? Not me. Just take your damn Lipitor, skip the carbs, hope for the best, and live it up.

Eggnog is certainly evil, but I do not know a doc at my club who will turn it down. We make it with Wild Turkey bourbon, fluffed eggwhites floating on the top, with tons of freshly-grated nutmeg abundantly on top of that.

My family has traditionally made it a little too strong, but without some booze who would want to drink pre-cooked scrambled eggs? It's all about the fresh nutmeg.

What are our readers' favorite Eggnog concoctions?

From Tigerhawk's Mitt Romney's frugality as an example for the rich :

...the frugal wealthy understand that it is not wealth per se but rather its flamboyant display that erects barriers between the rich and the rest. Gated communities, private jets and the mass promotion of ridiculously expensive luxury goods -- all widespread only in the last generation -- have done more to provoke class division and remove the rich from contact with ordinary people than the actual increases in their wealth.

In the last generation, but also at many times in history. Let's face it. We have vulgar rich, vulgar poor, and vulgar in-between. There is no cure for vulgarity.

And from PJ O'Rouke, mainly about the economically-retarded Zero Sum Fallacy in If the 1% had less, would the 99% be better off?:

...it's upsetting that some people have so much while other people have so little. It isn't fair. But I accept this unfairness. Indeed, I treasure it. That's because I have a 13-year-old daughter. And that's all I hear, "That's not fair," she says. "That's not fair! That's not fair!" And one day I snapped, and I said, "Honey, you're cute, that's not fair. Your family is pretty well off, that's not fair. You were born in America, that's not fair. Darling, you had better get down on your knees and pray that things don't start getting fair for you."

Having the luck to be born in America is the most unfair thing of all. Where else on the planet do you have a wide open field to plan a life according to your own lights, interests, abilities, and desires, and run for it? Freedom of pursuit, but no guarantee of results on this planet. And still, some people bitch like babies.

Dalrymple's Barbarians on the Thames - A postmortem of the British riots.

No, it's not about the Moslem immigrants; it's about government-enabled cultural change. His piece contains too many good points for me to pick just one quote.

They won't - and they dare not, because it blows their credit rating. No, They Can't Renege on Student Debt.

One must be very careful and calculating about taking on debt, whether for school or anything else. I have seen many lives crushed by unnecessary debt.

Jim Manzi at NRO: How Elite Business Recruiting Really Works.

Sounds about right to me. Top 40 competitive schools, top SATs, top grades in the most challenging and rigorous majors.

Would You Kill One Person to Save Five? New Research on a Classic Debate.

Always an interesting topic, but I doubt any study can tell what people would do in the real situation.