The graph below is from the Brookings Institute in a blog post, Rising Inequality in Postsecondary Education. But I found out about it via Matt Yglesias who is on a mini-jihad against those who would donate to the top tier “name” schools, Seriously, Don’t Give Money To Fancy Colleges. What the graph shows is that poor kids are under represented even in the moderately competitive schools, much less the elite institutions.

My opinion is that one is likely to get a worse education at the elite colleges. The only reason they are thought to be good is only the very best and and best prepared students are allowed in. I suspect you could take that subset of students, have them do nothing but drink beer for four years, and they would turn out quite well. That’s especially true given that the vast majority of them are from well-to-do families, their careers would be set regardless. The fact is that having a diploma with “Harvard” printed on it means a whole lot more than having a Harvard education.

The larger point is that the elite institutions perpetuate the existing social order by giving further advantages to the already advantaged. Yet they do it in such a way as to give themselves plausible deniability. Just as the Republican Party can trot out a few black conservatives as an argument that it isn’t racist, Harvard can trot out a few poor students as an argument that their primary mission is something other than reinforcing the status quo.

As Yglesias puts it:

This all comes back to a point I have made many times before: democracy cannot exist in an economy that isn’t reasonably equitable. One of the primary uses of a person’s wealth is to improve the prospects of his children. There’s nothing wrong with that; we are mammals, and that’s how our brains are built. But when one man has billions and another man has nothing, there can’t be any notion of equality of opportunity.

Look at that graph again: 70% of the students at elite colleges come from the upper class. That isn’t just because those in the upper class can afford the prices at these schools. It is also a reflection of the fact that the upper classes have given every other advantage to their children for two decades before that. It starts even before they are born, in the form of better prenatal care. So it’s no surprise that most of those 70% also have high SAT scores—they’ve been invested into their whole lives in ways that simply aren’t available to poor children.

All of this comes from hedge fund manage Kenneth Griffin’s recent $150 million gift to Harvard. Seen clearly, this isn’t about helping the rich; it’s about oppressing the poor. But what would you expect from a Wall Street billionaire?

As you’ve probably heard, the 2008 transcripts of the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee (FOMC) were released last week. They allow us to see for the first time what all the Big Thinkers thought about the financial crisis and housing bubble in real time. And the picture is not pretty. It is also not surprising. As always, most of the people on the FOMC were primarily interested in inflation, even as the economy was in free fall.

I think it is best to think of the Fed in sociological terms. All the people on the board are members of the power elite. They never have to worry about losing their standard of living. But even more important, they don’t have any friends who have to worry about theirs either. As long as the Fed members keep inflation low, they will always be welcome at the parties of the power elite. Unemployment is something that only affects the commoners. The power elite only cares about it in as much as a very high unemployment rate would hurt profits and possibly start a revolution. So the Fed pretty much only cares about inflation, regardless of its mandate to keep unemployment low.

The reason that the financial crisis was so damaging to the economy is that it brought on the bursting of the housing bubble. But apparently, few at the Federal Reserve were aware of this. MarcusCMarcellus put together this video of clips from the years leading up to the crisis in which Ben Bernanke repeatedly claimed that there was no housing bubble:

But as Dean Baker points out, even as the housing crisis was upon us, the Fed was mostly ignorant:

This is like watching storm clouds gathering and ignoring them. But it is important to remember what’s really going on. The storm clouds were gathering, but not for the power elite. So the safest thing for the Fed to do was to ignore the signs that thing were getting bad for the working class and concentrate on making sure that nothing would harm the wealth of the elites. And history bears this out. What is much more surprising is that people like Janet Yellen and Eric Rosengren had any interest in what was best for the economy overall.

Alex Roarty wrote a really interesting article over at National Journal, The GOP’s Talent Gap. It’s about how the Republican Party has too many chiefs and not enough braves. All the people working on Republican campaigns are doing it only as a stepping stone to those high paid pundit gigs in the Breitbart empire. To their credit, may people in the Republican Party are worried about this. But it isn’t a problem that is easily fixed. The Republicans have a culture of “looking out for number one” and they rebel against calls to work for the common good.

The article doesn’t go into this, but this is actually quite a recent development in the Republican Party. At one time, conservatives believed that the government should not force people to work for the greater good by, for example, making them pay taxes. But working for a common good of one’s choosing was perfectly fine. It is not anymore. This is a direct result of the dominance of Ayn Rand’s philosophy. By it, people are expected to be selfish because that does the greatest good. As I’ve discussed before, Rand created a great loophole in the form of enlightened self-interest. This is the idea that you shouldn’t just do whatever feels good; you should look at your whole life and see the best way to maximize your happiness. But among modern conservatives, I don’t see much “enlightened” in their self-interest.

This year, the Democratic Party is trying something new. They are trying to push back against the off-year election problem where Democratic leaning voters don’t come out to the polls. The idea is to focus on get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts. I’m on board with that. For years, I’ve argued that since people are very consistent in their voting patterns, we should stop trying to shape our message and put all of our work into getting the people who think like we do to vote. That’s the great thing about being a Democrat: most people agree with us.

The Republicans have no such advantage. And I think this is more important in explaining why the Republican Party has been so slow to focus on GOTV. They simply don’t have as much to gain from it. The base of the Republican Party is made up of older and richer voters. These are people who already vote in very high numbers. Reminding them or providing them with rides will not make them more likely to vote. So given there isn’t as much to gain, it isn’t surprising that GOTV efforts are not a high priority at any level inside the Republican Party.

Just the same, the Republicans do need to do it if they are going to stay competitive. But even with people who understand the issue, it must be disconcerting. The Democrats will always win at this game because they will always have a much larger group from which to draw. And so the Republican number cruncher will sit in front of his computer, not giving 100% because part of him is is bitching that his work will at best limit the vote margin bleeding, and another part of him is fantasizing about writing for Breitbart.

I have a six-year-old son. His name is Jin-Gyu. He lives off me, yet he is quite capable of making a living. I pay for his lodging, food, education and health care. But millions of children of his age already have jobs. Daniel Defoe, in the 18th century, thought that children could earn a living from the age of four.

Incentives, however, are only half the story. The other is capability. Even if Jin-Gyu were to be offered a £20m reward or, alternatively, threateded with a bullet in his head, he would not be able to rise to the challenge of brain surgery had he quit school at the age of six. Likewise, industries in developing countries will not survive if they are exposed to international competition too early. They need time to improve their capabilities by mastering advanced technologies and building effective organizations. This is the essence of the infant industry argument…

—Ha-Joon Chang
Bad Samaritans

Good morning. I thought we would start with this nice video by French Rescue of Jacques Brel’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas.” As they note, the English translation is meant to be accurate and not poetic. For example, they translate the refrain “Don’t leave me.” They do, however, mention (on the YouTube page) that Dieter Kaiser wrote a more poetic translation with “Don’t forsake me now.” Personally, given the music, I think it works better to translate it, “Do not leave me now.”

I don’t think the lyrics really matter. The listener gets the meaning clearly. Brel’s performance is what really does it. He’s more an actor than a singer. That’s always been the problem when his songs are performed here by pop singers. All the depth and subtlety are ripped out of them. As in this song, I can’t really imagine an American male showing this level of vulnerability. Sure, there’s a lot of faux vulnerability—always with a wink to the audience. But then, Brel was a real man, not one of these pretend American men who are too worried that someone might think they are gay to ever be genuine.

Regardless, Brel is the real deal:

There seems to be a problem with Republicans and plagiarism. They have this tendency to just stick other people’s work in their speeches and bills without a thought. We saw a whole bunch of this with Rand Paul recently. And in the end, he didn’t even seem to understand what was wrong with what he had done. He made it out like other people were academic with their insistence of “footnotes.” He didn’t get the fact that saying something that was a direct quote without noting it is the definition of plagiarism.

Of course, some might bring up Joe Biden in 1988 when he plagiarizing part of a speech by British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock. Actually, there are mitigating circumstances in this. Primarily, he normally did directly quote Kinnock, but simply forgot that time. He claimed to be exhausted and I believe him. The fact is that love him or hate him, Joe Biden is the most authentic politician around. But the main point is that Biden was embarrassed about the incident and withdrew from the race.

Recently, we got another Republican plagiarizer: New York State Senator Greg Ball. Like me, Ball was deeply affected by the documentary Blackfish. So he put together a bill to make it illegal for aquatic parks to keep killer whales in captivity. The problem is that the bill lifts a paragraph wholesale from a blog post by high school student Donald Rapier.

This is unfortunate, because while Ball is a Republican, I agree with the bill he is trying to get passed. It is also unfortunate because he decided to rip off this high school student rather than me. Of course, the biggest problem is the plagiarism. And to his credit, Ball seems to understand that plagiarism is actually wrong and something to be embarrassed about. So he fired one of his staff members, who supposedly did the plagiarism.

But the whole thing shows how writing has been devalued. I would think that everyone who works in a state (Or federal!) level office would at least be a competent writer. But instead, it looks like Republicans are forced to hire people who scraped out of English Composition with a C-. Or if they aren’t forced, they think that ideology trumps competence. As much as I admire what Senator Ball is trying to do, I think he must ultimately be held responsible. It isn’t enough to say that your staff did it when you are the one hiring people who can’t write and don’t value those who do.

Last night, I watched The Incredibles. It is a feature length animated film about a family of super heroes. Think: Fantastic Four meets Roseanne. It was written and directed by Brad Bird, and like most of his work, it is a hell of a lot of fun. The first half of the film is a parody of the super hero genre. And as such it is brilliant. The second half of the film is straight super hero genre, but still works pretty well. I think it is a mistake to think of The Incredibles as anything other than a romp. But there is a thematic schizophrenia in the film that I can’t help but discuss.

In the first half of the film, the guiding idea is that people ought to be allowed to be who they are. What happens is that Mr Incredible (voiced by Craig T Nelson) hurts a man who he saves from suicide. The man sues him and this opens the floodgates for lawsuits against the “supers” who do have a tendency to cause a lot of damage in their crime fighting activities. The government passes a law granting them all immunity, but they have to stop being super heroes. So 15 years later, we find Mr Incredible working in an insurance company under a very annoying boss (voiced by Wallace Shawn) who is also offensively short.

But as the film progresses, it stops being about the oppression of those who are different. It becomes instead about the limitations placed on the great. At one point, Edna, the fashion designer who once made the fabulous costumes for the supers, laments, “I used to design for gods!” And indeed, as I’ve written about before, the modern action genre is nothing so much as demigod mythologizing. Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone don’t play humans, they play gods. And this has been a problem for our society where true heroism is devalued at the expense cinematic action that would kill any real man. At least the super heroes are demigods, unlike the Johns McClane and Rambo.

So, much of the second half of the film involves Mr Incredible grousing about the fact that greatness isn’t valued. For example, in an argument about their son Dash (!) whose super power is that he runs really fast, Mr Incredible says, “People keep coming up with new ways to celebrate mediocrity, but if someone is genuinely exceptional…” And then he proposes to his wife (the humorously sexist Elastigirl, voiced by Holly Hunter), “You want to do something for Dash? Well, let him actually compete! Let him go out for sports!” By the end of the film, he gets to do just that.

This brings up a fundamental problem, however. Dash may look like a little human boy, but he isn’t. He is a super or a demigod. Having other boys run a race against him is like having them run a race against a cheetah. (Note: I believe a human would beat a cheetah in a marathon.) After the race, father says to son, “I’m proud of you.” For what?! When Dash was born, he could run a hundred times faster than the fastest man on the planet. Is Mr Incredible proud that he just happened to be born with that ability?

That gets to the issue of free will. We are, all of us, the products of our genes and our environments. We are exactly whatever we were programmed to be. Now I understand that a society needs to pretend that this is not the case in order to provide an environment in which people will make the best of their lives. But we also shouldn’t lose perspective. The fact that I’m smart and knowledgeable is not something that I should give myself credit for. It is something that I should be grateful for. And so should Dash be grateful for his ability to run really fast.

The Incredibles gets confused about this. But it doesn’t matter. It is a fun and silly movie with a lot of laughs and action. And if you take it seriously, you are doing it wrong. Because it leaves a lot of unanswered plot questions. For example: when the super heroes retired, why did the super villains retire? But no one should care—not when we get to hear Wallace Shawn and Holly Hunter yell at Craig “No one helped me when I was on food stamps and welfare” Nelson. I suspect you will be having too much fun to notice any of these things. Regardless, you have no choice; you have no free will.

Yesterday, the White House announced that Obama would remove Chained-CPI from his next budget. Chained-CPI is the way of raising the cost of living more slowly so that Social Security benefits would be cut over the course of a worker’s retirement. Although it is not reported as much, it would also increase the taxes of lower and middle class people. So it is a good thing that the administration is officially giving up on it.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said, “There was a point in time when there was a little bit more optimism about the willingness of Republicans to budge on closing some tax loopholes, but over the course of the last year, they’ve refused to do that.” This was always the idea: Chained-CPI would entice the Republicans into a Grand Bargain of entitlement cuts and tax increases. Economically, this is a stupid idea. Cutting spending in a depressed economy is bad. Raising taxes in a depressed economy is bad. So other than the thoroughly repudiated idea of “expansionary austerity,” there was never a good economic reason for a Grand Bargain.

But I understand that politicians aren’t economists and often do things that make no sense in that regard. However, they ought to be smart from a political standpoint. Unfortunately, the Grand Bargain never made any political sense. A standard political compromise is where each side gives up something to get something else they want. But that doesn’t describe the Grand Bargain. It was making compromises to get something each side could deal with losing. Republican voters don’t want entitlement cuts and they really don’t want tax increases. Democratic voters don’t want tax increases and they really don’t want tax cuts.

Of course, there is a group that wants to raise taxes and cut entitlements: Washington centrists. These are the Very Serious People of legend. What makes them Serious? Being in favor of policies that no one likes! And if the policies are objectively bad for the economy, so much the better! What’s especially sad about this is that the Republican elite never really fell for this. But among the New Democrats who now control the Democratic Party, such Serious Thinking is all the vogue. This is the biggest problem with the party going forward.

Sadly, I don’t think this decision by the White House shows any growth either in terms of their political or economic thinking. Obama still pines for a Republican Party that will make deals the people hate. And he still thinks that the deficit is an important economic issue. (It is, of course, but in the opposite way he thinks.) Instead, I suspect his advisers are telling him that he’s already cut the deficit in half and it continues to go down. What’s more, it is getting hard to deny that all the cuts (especially the Sequester) are the cause of our weak recovery. But it is good that after four years of debt obsession, the White House is giving up. For now.