Class Issues
drorzel | January 26, 2010Kevin Drum checks in with the latest from the class wars:
In the middle of a rant about healthcare reform and the compromise over the Cadillac tax, one of Andrew Sullivan's readers says this:
The idea that public employees make less than those in the private sector is a myth that needs to die. Most already have cadillac plans and in most places their salaries are ahead of private workers whose taxes go pay for their income. On top of that they get much better benefits and pensions, so to let them out of a tax that private industry workers will have to pay who work at the same income level is…
drorzel | January 18, 2010One of the less attractive features of the New York Times is its tendency to feature little profiles of horrible people. They're not presented that way, of course, but that's the effect-- I read these articles, and just want to slap everybody involved.
Today's story on marital tensions caused by environmental issues is a fine example of the form:
He bikes 12 1/2 miles to and from his job at a software company outside Santa Barbara, Calif. He recycles as much as possible and takes reusable bags to the grocery store.
Still, his girlfriend, Shelly Cobb, feels he has not gone far enough.
Ms. Cobb…
drorzel | January 14, 2010Regular readers will know that I have a bit of a Thing about bad graphs used in the media and on blogs. When people use stupid presentation tricks to exaggerate features of data to make their argument look stronger, it bugs me. But what really irks me is when people use stupid presentation tricks to trample their own arguments.
Today's exhibit for the prosecution is this graph by Mike Konczal via Kevin Drum comparing median wages to household debt over the last thirty years:
The blue line is debt, the reddish one income (adjusted for inflation, I believe). Both data sets are normalized so…
drorzel | December 21, 2009Janet has a typically thoughtful post about tuition benefits, following on a proposal to eliminate tuition benefits for employees of the University of Illinois. Janet does a great job of rounding up the various pros and cons of the benefit and its possible elimination.
It takes no time at all for the "Tuition benefits are unfair to people without kids" argument to pop up in comments. This is, as always, pretty stupid, because the same logic leads to thinking that health insurance benefits are unfair to people who don't become catastrophically ill. Tuition benefits are basically kid insurance…
drorzel | December 9, 2009Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber has a very good post about schools that appear to "beat the odds", getting good results with populations that don't typically do well in school. It does an excellent job of laying out the problems with the vast majority of attempts to determine which schools are "beating the odds," let alone what methods are best to use for this. It turns out to be a lot harder to measure than most people think-- I was particularly struck by this bit:
It gets worse, thanks to my colleague Doug Harris, in his paper, “High flying schools, student disadvantage, and the logic of…
drorzel | December 3, 2009As a companion piece to Steve Albini's famous rant about how the pop music industry systematically screws its artist, theToo Much Joy blog provides a look at their royalty statement:
I got something in the mail last week I'd been wanting for years: a Too Much Joy royalty statement from Warner Brothers that finally included our digital earnings. Though our catalog has been out of print physically since the late-1990s, the three albums we released on Giant/WB have been available digitally for about five years. Yet the royalty statements I received every six months kept insisting we had zero…
drorzel | September 17, 2009Theorem: The worthiness of a blog post on a political or social topic is inversely proportional to the number of times derisive nicknames are used to refer to the author's opponents.
drorzel | September 10, 2009A couple of things that I'm not excited to blog about, but sort of feel like I ought to say something about:
1) The Washington Monthly article about StraighterLine, an online program that lets you take college courses for $99/mo. The article is all breathless excitement about the revolutionary transformative power of technology, but it leaves me cold.
The stories of working people putting themselves through accelerated degree programs through self-study are inspiring, and all, but there's nothing really new here. There has never really been any question about whether hard-working and…
drorzel | September 8, 2009Like every other blogger with a political opinion, I read Paul Krugman's essay on economics last week, and tagged it for Saturday's Links Dump. And while I appreciate Eric Weinstein calling me out as part of the "high end blogosphere," I'm not sure I have much to say about it that is useful. But, since he asked...
Twitter's interface makes it almost impossible to go back and figure out what the hell was going on even a few days ago, but going through Eric's feed, the crux of the matter seems to be that he takes issue with Krugman's claim that "the economics profession went astray because…
drorzel | August 21, 2009The Dean Dad had a great post about staff yesterday:
Politically, hiring office staff is a harder sell than hiring faculty. Faculty are conspicuous, and the tie to the classroom is obvious. Back-office support staff are inconspicuous, and show up in public discussion as 'overhead' or 'administrative bloat.' But their work is necessary, as anyone whose financial aid package got lost in the shuffle can attest. And the relative lack of romance in back-office work means that good people aren't willing to accept adjunct-level wages to do it; adding staff means full-time salaries with benefits. (…
drorzel | July 19, 2009The New York Times has a habit of publishing these loathsome little profile articles that either belie the paper's liberal reputation, or are a stealthy attempt to bring about the Red Revolution by stoking class hatred. These generally take the form of profile stories about wealthy suburbanites in Westchester County or Connecticut, who have more money than taste, and whose sense of entitlement can be detected from distant stars through its gravitational pull on the sun.
These typically turn up in the Style section or the Magazine, but today's made the front page of the print edition: Before…
drorzel | March 24, 2009One of the NCAA pools I'm in has a copy of Obama's bracket entered, and the last I checked, I'm a couple of games up on him. This means I'm as qualified as anyone else to offer a plan to fix the financial crisis, and I have just the plan we need.
On the question of the AIG bonuses, I'm pretty much in agreement with the people who say that it's not worth making too much fuss over less than a tenth of a percent of the total bailout funding they're received. Passing laws to punish specific individuals is a lousy precedent, and it's not worth corrupting our principles for such a pittance. Let the…
drorzel | March 17, 2009Over at Unqualified Offerings, Thoreau offers a provocative comment on class and higher education:
Today (OK, yesterday, but I didn't really sleep on the plane, so it's still yesterday, or tomorrow is also today, or something) a friend offered (without necessarily endorsing) the theory that one reason why we try to get everyone to go to college is because it legitimizes a class system: If everybody gets the chance to try college, then their failure to attain economic success must be their own fault.
It's an interesting idea. I'm not sure I agree with it (though I'm not sure I agree with…
drorzel | March 3, 2009Back before things went pear-shaped this weekend, Jonathan Zasloff had a good post about why "clean coal" is important:
I think it's terrific that the Coen Brothers are making funny, effective ads against relying on "clean coal" as part of the US energy program. But I worry that the clean energy community is really missing the boat here.
Clean coal research and development is absolutely crucial in fighting climate change not for us, but for India and China. India has the fourth largest reserves of coal in the world -- most of it very dirty, with high ash content. It currently imports 70%…
drorzel | February 4, 2009The big news of the day from the world of politics is that President Obama plans to cap executive pay at banks that take bailout money in the next round of emergency cash payments. This is not popular with the executive class:
"That is pretty draconian -- $500,000 is not a lot of money, particularly if there is no bonus," said James F. Reda, founder and managing director of James F. Reda & Associates, a compensation consulting firm. "And you know these companies that are in trouble are not going to pay much of an annual dividend."
Mr. Reda said only a handful of big companies pay chief…
drorzel | December 30, 2008Inside Higher Ed has an article on athletics and admissions based on an investigative report from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The report compares the SAT scores of football and basketball players to those of other students, but what it really highlights is the difference between science and journalism.
The basis of the report is pretty simple: the paper got the test score reports for 55 major colleges and universities, from data that they are required to file with the NCAA. They compared the average scores for football and basketball players to the scores of other athletes and students…
drorzel | December 10, 2008Will Wilkinson has some comments about an article by Malcolm Gladwell from The New Yorker. I basically agree with him about Gladwell, but I'm bothered by the last paragraph:
Now, there's no point in saying things that will make your readers think you are an evilcrazy person, so I can understand why Gladwell wastes words on quarterbacks instead of on the deeper mechanisms at work here. But why is it that "society devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?" The obvious answer is that care and patience are in greater…
drorzel | December 6, 2008As always, if you want penetrating analysis of the news, you need to go to a comedian. Jon Stewart explains why Congress is willing to bail out Wall Street, but not Detroit:
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The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c
Autoerotic Explanation
Barack Obama InterviewJohn McCain Interview
Sarah Palin VideoFunny Election Video
It's kind of sad that this is one of the best arguments I've heard for giving the car companies the money they want.
(As an aside, Comedy Central's embed code for their video player is just about the ugliest thing ever. It's four times the size of the…
drorzel | November 10, 2008Over at Slate, Daniel Gross has a really dumb piece on rich people voting for Obama "against their own economic interest". There are many dumb things about this article, starting with the fact that it doesn't even attempt to answer the question in its title, but the main thing that's dumb is the framing of the question:
While there has been job loss and economic anxiety throughout Fairfield County, I don't think that economic problems alone explain the big Democratic gains in the region. In Greenwich, economic stress for many people means flying commercial or selling the ski house (while…
drorzel | October 28, 2008The closing narrative of the McCain campaign is apparently going to be "Obama's a pinko commie socialist who wants to raise your taxes," which means it's time for all good liberals to bust out the graphs to show why this is false. Well, graph, singular. You know the one:
I don't remember who first posted it (I got it here), but it's been everywhere this campaign. It shows a head-to-head comparison of the consequences of the McCain and Obama tax plans for various income groups.
I hate this graphic.
Not because of the information it contains, mind-- that's fine. I hate this graph because it…