CapitalistImperialistPig

Or so claims Megan McArdle . It seems that McArdle read Sean Reardon's NYT article on the growing gap in educational achievement between the wealthy and the rest of America - though based on the internal evidence of her article, it's a little hard to believe she read beyond the first paragraph. It's obvious, she says, heredity and true breeding of IQ account for all the effect. In support of that she cites some stuff she seems to have invented out of whole cloth. In particular, she pointedly ignores all the evidence gathered by Professor Reardon and his students. I didn't like McA (AKA Jane Galt) even before I found that she had been forged in the Koch brothers version of Mordor, and sent out on the world with more or less only their slime trail by way of credential. Some of her Kochtopus history is documented here . What Reardon actually found was that the rapidly growing difference in educational achievement with income is closely correlated with both growing ec...

Paul Krugman takes yet another look at why the austerians are so entrenched in the face of data, theory, and common sense and finally mentions the one that I think is key: the interests of the 1% don't coincide with those of the rest of the nation. On the first question: the dominance of austerians in influential circles should disturb anyone who likes to believe that policy is based on, or even strongly influenced by, actual evidence. After all, the two main studies providing the alleged intellectual justification for austerity — Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna on “expansionary austerity” and Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff on the dangerous debt “threshold” at 90 percent of G.D.P. — faced withering criticism almost as soon as they came out. And the studies did not hold up under scrutiny. By late 2010, the International Monetary Fund had reworked Alesina-Ardagna with better data and reversed their findings, while many economists raised fundamental questions about Reinhart-R...

Lumo does some flacking for Gordon Kane's update on his book on supersymmetry: Supersymmetry and Beyond: From the Higgs Boson to the New Physics. Not sure what new there is to report. Maybe just an attempt to get another book out before the supersymmetry sell by date. I read one of his more technical books and it was pretty good.

Americans, and apparently a lot of other people, seem to be remarkably forgiving of former leaders who left in some disgrace. That seems especially true in the case of George W. Bush. Paul Krugman reminds us of some of the reasons why Bush was a really terrible President: But it does need to be said: he was a terrible president, arguably the worst ever, and not just for the reasons many others are pointing out. From what I’ve read, most of the pushback against revisionism focuses on just how bad Bush’s policies were, from the disaster in Iraq to the way he destroyed FEMA, from the way he squandered a budget surplus to the way he drove up Medicare’s costs. And all of that is fair. But I think there was something even bigger, in some ways, than his policy failures: Bush brought an unprecedented level of systematic dishonesty to American political life, and we may never recover. Think about his two main “achievements”, if you want to call them that: the tax cuts and the Iraq war, bot...

Conservatives love to rail against the "Nanny State" - the kind of government that seeks to protect you from buying poisoned food, getting typhoid from infected servers, or provide you with an old age pension. Students of human nature, or at least YHC, think that's a really bad idea. Humans are designed for a society in which we have each other's backs. Family, clan, and tribe provide that function in simpler societies. If you want to live in a more complex society, something is needed to take their place. The nanny family, clan, or tribe can be very intrusive. It tells you how to dress, how to talk, how to behave, and circumscribes you with a whole list of behavioral imperatives. In return for that, it has your back, and helps you when you are in need (usually), defends you against enemies, revenges your murder, and probably even helps you find a mate. That's the kind of life our genes designed us for, and a modern state which can't manage to incorpor...

With the exposure of the errors and other flaws in Reinhart-Rogoff and other papers, the theoretical basis of austeriean economics is in ruins. Meanwhile, the devastating consequences of austerian policies continue to wreck havoc on much of the world. Once again, Keynes prophecy about the powers economists for evil as well as good is confirmed. Astronomers errors probably mostly affect only their own community, but the mistakes of economists spread national, continental, or global catastrophe. Paul Krugman points out that the reaction of the architects of disaster to the collapse of their predictions and theories has been to get hurt feelings, protest that nobody understands economics, and that the people who got it right - Krugman, Wolf, and bunch of others, includes Keynes - are a bunch of meanies. When it comes to inflicting pain on the citizens of debtor nations, austerians are all steely determination – hey, it’s a tough world, and hard choices have to be made. But when they or...

It's not too surprising that faculty, parents, students, and boards of governors all have somewhat different visions of the mission of a university.  The biggest stick in this four-cornered fight is held by the boards of governors, and the people who control their money.  Frank Bruni has an NYT story on the version of this fight currently being waged in Texas, where conservative regents appointed by Governor Rick Perry are battling the UT President Bill Powers. The regents’ apparent animosity toward Powers, whose most recent request for a modest in-state tuition increase they denied, reached a point where state lawmakers passed several resolutions in February making their support for him clear. That was a slap at the regents — and, by extension, at Governor Perry. And while it reflected political factionalism, it also tapped into a philosophical divide. The regents, Perry and a conservative think tank with great sway over the governor have all called for, or mused publicly ab...