Someday, someone is going to have to write a history of front organizations and their role in 20th century culture...

"Another way of putting this idea might be to say that the individuals who got things wrong—the ones who saw few problems in financial deregulation, anyone who thought derivatives eliminated risk, anyone who counted on markets to police themselves—were “one of us.” There can be no consequences for them because they merely expressed the consensus views of the time. Like John Maynard Keynes’s “sound banker,” they might have failed, but they failed in the same way that the rest of “us” failed. To hold them accountable for what they said and did would expose the rest of “us” to such judgment as well. And obviously that can’t happen.
"A résumé filled with grievous errors in the period 1996–2006 is not only a non-problem for further advances in the world of consensus; it is something of a prerequisite. Our intellectual powers that be not only forgive the mistakes; they require them. You must have been wrong back then in order to have a chance to be taken seriously today; only by having gotten things wrong can you demonstrate that you are trustworthy, a member of the team."

"I think he is right about these kids being comfortable with the “formal process” of applying to investment banks etc., but I don’t think he dives deep enough into why this is true. The fact is, the kids who get into Harvard nowadays are, generally speaking, professional test takers. They are moreover dependent on outside metrics for evaluating themselves. If you took away tests and grading systems, these kids would be desperately unhappy, because that’s how they’ve been trained all their lives to think about their self-worth.
"When I was a tutor at one of the undergrad houses at grad school, I was incredibly impressed with the international group of undergrads I was in charge of; their credentials, even at the age of 20, were amazing, and their knowledge and self-possession were stunning. Same with the high school kids I taught at math camp last summer. But one thing I saw time and time again was how much they needed to please some outside authority. It’s like they never decided whether they themselves liked their major or whether it was a good fit- it was instead about whether they’d be successful and whether it would be an impressive path for them. So, external metrics of success.
"Here’s my diagnosis. These kids are vulnerable to Wall Street investment firms and to things like Teach for America because they have application processes at all. But life, normal adult life, doesn’t have an application process. You actually, at some point, need to figure out what you want to do and what makes you happy. You need to take a leap of faith that your native talents and desires will end you up at a reasonable and interesting place.
"Actually you don’t ever have to decide that, you could just keep doing what you think looks good to other people and pleases your parents or friends, without regard to whether it fulfills you at all. That’s kind of what’s happening I think with the 36% of the Princeton undergrads going to finance."

"Just as the financial system has to be changed to serve the needs of the people before the needs of the bankers, the drug trial system has to be changed to lower the incentives for cheating (and massive death tolls) just for a quick buck. As I mentioned before, it’s still not clear that they would have made less money, even including the penalties, if they had come clean in 2000. They made a bet that the fines they’d need to eventually pay would be smaller than the profits they’d make in the meantime. That sounds familiar to anyone who has been following the fallout from the credit crisis.
"One thing that should be changed immediately: the clinical trials for drugs should not be run or reported on by the drug companies themselves. There has to be a third party which is in charge of testing the drugs and has the power to take the drugs off the market immediately if adverse effects (like CVT events) are found. Hopefully they will be given more power than risk firms are currently given in finance (which is none)- in other words, it needs to be more than reporting, it needs to be an active regulatory power, with smart people who understand statistics and do their own state-of-the-art analyses – although as we’ve seen above even just Stats 101 would sometimes do the trick."

"As recently as the early 1970s, the news media was one of the most respected institutions in the United States. Yet by the 1990s, this trust had all but evaporated. Why has confidence in the press declined so dramatically over the past 40 years? And has this change shaped the public's political behavior? This book examines waning public trust in the institutional news media within the context of the American political system and looks at how this lack of confidence has altered the ways people acquire political information and form electoral preferences.

Jonathan Ladd argues that in the 1950s, '60s, and early '70s, competition in American party politics and the media industry reached historic lows. When competition later intensified in both of these realms, the public's distrust of the institutional media grew, leading the public to resist the mainstream press's information about policy outcomes and turn toward alternative partisan media outlets. As a result, public beliefs and voting behavior are now increasingly shaped by partisan predispositions. Ladd contends that it is not realistic or desirable to suppress party and media competition to the levels of the mid-twentieth century; rather, in the contemporary media environment, new ways to augment the public's knowledgeability and responsiveness must be explored.

Drawing on historical evidence, experiments, and public opinion surveys, this book shows that in a world of endless news sources, citizens' trust in institutional media is more important than ever before."

"In reality, however, the numbers show that wage inflation is — literally — the least of the problems when it comes to university cost inflation. Check out this excellent report, for instance, entitled “Trends in College Spending, 1999-2009″. The first thing to note is on page 26: spending on faculty compensation is never more than 40% of total spending, and “has remained steady or decreased slightly over time”. Then have a look at the numbers.

Overall, if we exclude for-profit schools, which were a tiny part of the landscape in 1999, we have seen tuition fees rise by 32% between 1999 and 2009. Over the same period, instruction costs rose just 5.6% — the lowest rate of inflation of any of the components of education services. (“Student services costs” and “operations and maintenance costs” saw the greatest inflation, at 15.2% and 18.1% respectively, but even that is only half the rate that tuition increased.)

The real reason why tuition has been rising so much has nothing to do with Baumol, and everything to do with the government. Page 31 of the report is quite clear: “except for private research institutions,” it says, “tuitions were increasing almost exclusively to replace losses from state revenues or other private revenue sources.”

In other words, tuition costs are going up just because state subsidies are going down. Every time there’s a state fiscal crisis, subsidies get cut; once cut, they never get reinstated. And so the proportion of the cost of college which is borne by the student has been rising steadily for decades.

There are other culprits, too, behind the rise in tuition costs. Surowiecki touches on one when he talks about “the arms-race problem”, where “colleges compete to lure students by investing in expensive things, like high-profile faculty members, fancy facilities, and a low student-to-teacher ratio”. Another is simply the ever-increasing amounts of money being spent on administration rather than instruction. And a third is the fact that administrators at many high-profile universities have no incentive to decrease costs, and in fact have an incentive to increase costs, since total spending outlay tends to show up as an input in university-ranking algorithms.

But of all the reasons why tuition’s going up, teacher productivity is — literally — at the bottom of the list. Whether or not teachers today are or are not more productive than they were in 1980 (and I suspect that actually they are more productive), that’s not the reason student debt in America is approaching one trillion dollars."

What was the Joan Didion line?  "Surprising absolutely no one who had bothered to think"?

"I stand before you repentant..."

Barry Eichengreen on what is (and what is not) wrong with economics.

Oh yes, an oldie-but-goodie: how to make $800k as a stock-tout in high school. Whatever became of young Mr. Lebed?

... is being shaken down by the police.

I feel like this can be endorsed pretty wholeheartedly (though these criticisms do not apply with full force to the "saltwater" school, that's been pretty absent in shaping policy, especially as regards to finance).

While substantially disgusted, I do have to admire the elegance of the racket: first as judges you shut down the public juvie detention as unsafe, then you sentence every kid possible to the private jail which just so happens to have opened up, and which just so happens to be paying you millions.

This sounds exactly right. But what is _not_ worth praising is the fact that so many people are so lost, and so far up the creek, that they need someone like this.

Preach it, Brother Yglesias!

"The United States isn’t a poor country dealing with some objective shortfall of national resources. And yet across a whole variety of dimensions—from broadband speed to train quality to the cleanliness of streets to life expectancy to the crime rate—we fall far short of standards that are reached elsewhere. What we do have, on the other hand, is the richest multi-millionaires in the world. And an awful lot of people’s first instinct is to try to explain these things away or explain why it would be impossible to bring some of these quality of life features to the United States. It seems to me people would do better to get more upset."

"One thing I've learned from the current episode is not to automatically trust that the most well-known economists in the field have done due diligence before speaking out on an issue, even when that issue is of great public importance, or even to trust that they've thought very hard about the problems they are speaking to. I used to think that, for the most part, the name brands in the field would live up to their reputations, that they would think hard about problems before speaking out in public, that they would provide clarity and insight, but they haven't. In fact, in many cases they have undermined their reputations and confused the issues. "

Recommended by James Fallows.

Yglesias has seen Finland, and it works. Meanwhile, "we’re trapped in a frustrating circle of passive acceptance of the idea that we just have to live in a country where public services are ill-funded and poorly delivered. And it’s not just that conservatives block reforms — progressives have let their horizons slip incredibly low. A country that once built transcontinental railroads and sent people to the moon has decided that for some reason it’d just be impossible to solve our current social problems." Perhaps one might say our problem is, to coin a phrase, being beholden to "hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit"?

Brad, tricked into appearing with Grover Norquist, loses his temper with the entire establishment.

Bacevich uses memoirs by Feith and Sanchez to reflect on What Went Wrong.

Aaron explains one reason why we don't, in fact, have a better press corps: the threat of being sued for things like "breach of loyalty" [!]

I like the passing mention of "UC Sunnydale".

Loud and prolonged applause.

Lessig contemplates a Congressional run on a good-government platform.

"To say that contemporary politicians form cults of personality means to say that they distract the public from the mechanisms of governance because that is how they gain the authority to rule."

"when hospitals actively hunt for carriers of MRSA and beef up precautions to prevent its spread, they can dramatically reduce serious infections and deaths. But despite 30 years of research showing that these “search and destroy” tactics can stop MRS

Short but sane. "The more we give in to defense contractors and build pointless weapons systems while yelling "China threat! China threat!" the more likely it becomes that people in Beijing are going to start saying "holy crap, look at this giant anti-Chi

"We know, in politics, how to talk abut problems in our policies, how to speak of the uninsured and the deficit. We're much worse, however, at diagnosing failures in our systems."

Articulates something I've been feeling, but not able to express well, for years

White House Office of Legal Counsel lawyer has _himself_ water-boarded to see if it is in fact torture; concludes that it is; writes opinion to that effect; gets fired by Gonzalez.

Review of Priest's book, which I have and now goes higher in the queue

On sex discrimination and the like, and using security as an excuse to evade the issues. "'What I think is wrong is an entire fucking security structure that is obsolete and needs to be changed,' says one retired senior officer. 'Not just for the goddamn"