May 21, 2012
Xi Wang
Sorry, sunshynie2 has chosen not to publish an RSS feed. Please visit their Xanga site here: http://www.xanga.com/sunshynie2
May 17, 2012
May 16, 2012
IvyGate
The New York Times Has Discovered How to Get into Harvard: Be Male, and Write for The New York Times
For the past few years, The New York Times’ college blog “The Choice” has profiled several high school seniors as they make the journey from boys to men, girls to women. Each year, six to eight aspirant collegians guest blog about their school search in a feature called “The Envelope, Please.” These youngsters come from a range of backgrounds, and are looking at schools all over the map. However, as we at IvyGate recently noticed, men who write for The Choice tend to have a little boost with a certain Cambridge based school.
That’s right, despite Harvard having one of the lowest admission rates in the country, out of the five young male contributors who applied, four got in. To put that in perspective, Harvard’s regular decision acceptance rate this year was 3.8%, but if you look at The Choice’s male guest bloggers, Harvard has taken 80% of them. Even factor in the two women who applied but didn’t make the cut, that’s still 57% of the applicants getting in to Harvard, a school that has prided itself on their single digit acceptance percentages.
So how did this happen? Is Harvard’s admissions office reading The Envelope, Please? Does The Choice have some magic crystal ball to find future Harvard admits? Or, is writing for the most famous newspaper in the world the answer to an increasingly competitive college application process everyone is trying to game?
Whatever the reason, it doesn’t actually seem to be working in Harvard’s favor. While Harvard’s yield for the class of 2016 was 81%, only one of their four chosen bloggers over the years decided to take the Crimson up on their offer. Again, to break it down into numbers, 81% for 2016ers, 25% of NYTers. Ouch. The other three decided to take their talents to Stanford, Yale, and, double ouch, Vanderbilt.
May 15, 2012
Greg Mankiw
California Fact of the Day
"A ballot initiative this November would give California a whopping 13.3 percent top marginal rate for state income taxes."
Source.
Source.
by Greg Mankiw (noreply@blogger.com) at May 15, 2012 11:57 AM
May 14, 2012
IvyGate
New York Times Data Tells Us That Ivy League Tuition on the Rise, Debt Varied
Over the weekend, The New York Times released some nifty graphics about the state of student debt in America. Although the numbers only go from 2004 to 2010, a couple things are pretty clear. For one, Ivy League tuition is going up pretty steadily, with no sign of slowing. Secondly, debt at graduation is fairly varied by Ivy institution, with Harvard, Yale, and Princeton at the low end, and Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, and Penn straddling high student debt levels (Columbia’s data wasn’t available). Click on to see some graphs detailing Ivy League tuition and debt.
May 12, 2012
Greg Mankiw
Geanakoplos on the Leverage Cycle
Yale economist John Geanakoplos discusses his view of the financial crisis. It takes about an hour. 
by Greg Mankiw (noreply@blogger.com) at May 12, 2012 10:05 AM
May 10, 2012
May 09, 2012
May 08, 2012
Greg Mankiw
Fact of the Day: CEO Pay
The relative pay of CEOs skyrocketed during the 1990s and has since fallen by about half.
by Greg Mankiw (noreply@blogger.com) at May 08, 2012 10:57 AM
IvyGate
The Columbia-Harvard Blogger War Begins Now
Last week, a Crimson blogger wrote that Columbia has the worst athletics program in the Ivy League. Which is a bit like saying that Purdue has the worst comparative literature program in the Big Ten. (If it has one.)
Amazingly, a Spec blogger seems to have taken the jab completely seriously, and has written a crazy-insane bulleted list about how terrible Harvard is. A sampling:
2. Most racist law school students. “Today are are lots and lots of extra blacks on campus.”
3. Largest number of university presidents who have been forced to resign over sexist remarks. In 2006, Harvard president Lawrence Summers resigned his position after suggesting that there aren’t many women in the science and math fields because…uh, because women aren’t good at science and math. Whoops!
4. Longest amount of time a university community was willing to tolerate their sexist president. This category is like a breath-holding contest, except instead of timing how long people can go without breathing, we see who can ignore sexism the longest! Harvard wins! Summers made his controversial remarks in 2005, and stayed on as president for another year (and then got a paid, year-long sabbatical after that).
Yeah.
What’s even stranger is the Spec’s supposed awareness that nobody cares:
Bragging about being the second-best sports program in the Ivy League is like boasting that you had the second-hottest prom date at your homeschool. It may be true, but it’s nothing to be proud of.
Maybe not, actually. The article’s irony is also kinda betrayed by the author’s unusually specific vitriol, which leans heavily on “official” parenthetical statements: “(official nickname: “If I wanted to be called Alex, I would have gone to a state school”)”; “(official slogan: “All of my favorite sportswriters were born in the nineteenth century”); “(official drinking game rule: “Nothing that’s not poured from a decanter”).”
Yowza. This sounds personal! Did these two gentleman have a senior year falling out at Groton, or wherever? Lacrosse camp in Maine? A South American NOLS expedition from hell? (We’re using our imagination here.)
May 06, 2012
Greg Mankiw
Laura Tyson on the Corporate Tax
She says we should reduce it, financed by a tax increase on dividends and capital gains at the personal level.
by Greg Mankiw (noreply@blogger.com) at May 06, 2012 12:41 PM
May 04, 2012
May 03, 2012
May 02, 2012
IvyGate
Harvard Instructor Pleads Guilty to Elaborate International Pot-in-Underwear Smuggling Bust
Harvard instructor Mey Akashah was busted Friday trying to sneak marijuana into Bermuda for a weekend trip with her husband. Airport police were alerted by drug-sniffing dogs to 6 grams of pot wrapped up in a plastic bag in her underwear. Good to know this foolproof method made it past United States airport security. According to the Boston Herald, Akashah claimed that a doctor prescribed her the pot to treat nausea following a colon operation.
However, at a court hearing Monday, Akashah pleaded guilty to illegally transporting the pot into the country and failed to produce any documentation of her prescription, which Bermudian Senior Magistrate Archibald Warner candidly termed “strange.” Akashah said she knew the pot was illegal, but “responded illogically due to the amount of pain I was in.”
The judge declined to sentence Akashah, stating that a conviction would have an “overwhelming effect” on the fragile Harvardian.
Akashah received a doctoral degree from the Harvard School of Public Health last year and now holds a temporary position as an environmental health instructor at HSPH set to end May 31. According to The Crimson, a Harvard administrator declined to comment as to whether Akashah would receive any disciplinary action.
May 01, 2012
April 27, 2012
April 26, 2012
Dani Rodrik
Ideas, interests, and a video
This has been a long-standing concern of mine: what are the respective roles of ideas iand interests in shaping policy outcomes?
The most widely held theory of politics is also the simplest: the powerful get what they want. Financial regulation is driven by the interests of banks, health policy by the interests of insurance companies, and tax policy by the interests of the rich. Those who can influence government the most – through their control of resources, information, access, or sheer threat of violence – eventually get their way.It’s the same globally. Foreign policy is determined, it is said, first and foremost by national interests – not affinities with other nations or concern for the global community. International agreements are impossible unless they are aligned with the interests of the United States and, increasingly, other rising major powers. In authoritarian regimes, policies are the direct expression of the interests of the ruler and his cronies.
It is a compelling narrative, one with which we can readily explain how politics so often generates perverse outcomes. Whether in democracies, dictatorships, or in the international arena, those outcomes reflect the ability of narrow, special interests to achieve results that harm the majority.
Paradoxically, economists tend to operate within a worldview that ascribes paramount role to interests, as when they complain about the role of powerful banking lobbies in driving bad/inadequate regulation. Yet, banks' and policy makers' conception of where their interests lie is powerfully shaped by ideas that economists generate and disseminate.
More generally, ideas play a crucial role in helping define who we are, what our interests are, and how those interests are best realized.
More here. You get a video on this and other matters as a bonus.
April 25, 2012
Greg Mankiw
Ben and the Bound
There has been a lot of chatter lately about monetary policy under Ben Bernanke's leadership and how his Fed has dealt with the zero lower bound on interest rates. One of the more thoughtful analyses of this topic I have seen is this paper by Larry Ball.
by Greg Mankiw (noreply@blogger.com) at April 25, 2012 09:28 PM
The President's Economic Rhetoric
As seen by Jim Capretta (with whom I had the pleasure to work when I was in DC some years ago).
by Greg Mankiw (noreply@blogger.com) at April 25, 2012 09:48 AM
April 24, 2012
Dani Rodrik
What Turkey’s political-military trials reveal about the country’s democracy
To understand what is happening in Turkey’s murky world of judicial politics these days, it helps to imagine you are watching the closing scenes of a Hollywood courtroom drama.
The movie’s protagonist stands accused of attempted murder. The prosecutor has produced a set of elaborate plans that the defendant allegedly drew up to poison an opponent. The plan was aborted, the prosecutor says, when a friend of the defendant got wind of the plot and alerted the intended target.
The defendant proclaims his innocence and denies vehemently that he had made such plans. He says the materials on which the prosecutor rests his case are forgeries. He submits to the court several reports from technical experts that conclude the documents were prepared on computers whose system clocks and usernames had been altered to frame him.
He also produces evidence that his hand-writing was forged. He shows that prosecutors concealed from the court exculpating evidence recovered during their investigation. He points out that the friend who supposedly uncovered the plot was never questioned by prosecutors or in court, and has in fact denied knowledge of the alleged plot in his public comments.
The prosecutor offers no counter-evidence but sticks to his guns. The judge disregards the forensic reports produced by the defendant. He rejects the defendant’s request that the friend be heard in court. A trial that should have long ended in acquittal – followed by the filing of charges of prosecutorial misconduct – instead moves towards an almost certain conviction. The defendant’s lawyers walk out of the courtroom in disgust, which prompts the judge to file charges against them in turn.
It could be a movie, but it is not. It is the reality of the Sledgehammer trial in which more than 360 officers are accused of having plotted to overthrow the government back in 2003.
Never mind that there is no evidence for the coup plot beyond unsigned Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents full of inconsistencies. Never mind that these documents have never been authenticated or traced to real military computers. Never mind that the names on the digital documents would never stand in a proper court of law as evidence, as they could have been easily manipulated by anyone with a modicum of computer knowledge. Never mind that the documents contain hundred of anachronisms that leave no doubt they were not produced on the alleged dates by their alleged authors. Never mind the numerous forensic reports – including two from American experts – that expose the digital evidence and “hand-writing” as forgeries. Never mind the public comments of the military higher-ups that contradict prosecutors’ claims.
The Sledgehammer case’s absurdities are just the tip of the iceberg. Since 2007, Turkish prosecutors have launched a series of mass trials against alleged members of a terrorist organization, Ergenekon. The defendants – military officers, journalists, politicians, academics, lawyers -- are accused of plotting to destabilize the country and preparing a coup. Scores of defendants have been jailed for three years or more, yet the existence of Ergenekon has never been established. The prosecutors’ evidence ranges from the circumstantial to the fabricated, as in Sledgehammer.
Even worse, it is evident that it is the police who have been planting evidence and framing the defendants in at least some of these cases. One defendant was able to prove that police had downloaded contacts from a terrorism suspect onto his mobile phone to establish a link between the two. In a couple of instances, key incriminating documents turned out to have been in the possession of the police prior to the raids in which they were allegedly recovered from defendants’ premises. In one episode reminiscent of Keystone Kops, police searched the wrong house and still located evidence against the intended target.
What keeps the travesty going is the support it gets from the country’s two dominant political forces. On one side is the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which through its control of judicial appointments ensures the Sledgehammer trial moves to its inevitable conclusion. Erdogan has adroitly exploited the case for maximum political advantage, using it to sideline and reshape the army.
On the other side is the Gulen movement, whose sympathizers in the police and judiciary bear primary responsibility for staging the Sledgehammer and Ergenekon trials. Gulenists have a history of peddling forged documents to frame military officers and other perceived opponents (1 and 2). The powerful Gulenist media have been the leading champion of the cases, publishing non-stop one-sided, often downright false accounts about the defendants and the evidence.
Then there are the country’s liberal intellectuals, who have embarrassed themselves by buying into the Erdogan-Gulenist line uncritically and failing to stand up for due process. It was a supposedly liberal paper, Taraf, that first published the bogus Sledgehammer documents without corroboration. (Taraf’s editor, Yasemin Congar, would later justify her decision by saying the plans were too detailed not to be real!) Adding insult to injury, the paper repeatedly, and falsely, reported that the documents carried the officers’ signatures.
Leading liberals such as Ahmet Altan, Etyen Mahcupyan, Hasan Cemal, and Alper Gormus have defended the authenticity of the coup plans, in total disregard of the facts of the case. Others who have become convinced of the forgery have preferred to maintain their silence in public. A common attitude is that the military must have been planning something, given its history of coups, even if the Sledgehammer plot is fabricated. Effectively, defenders of the trial have been saying: “Yes, the murder weapon may have been planted on the defendant, but no matter, he is not a nice guy anyhow.”
Predictably, cases against these prosecutions have been piling up at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The ECHR, however, has limited room to issue judgment until all domestic legal avenues have been exhausted. In the meantime, the prosecutions’ fabrications are spilling over to the Turkish government’s filings before the Court. In one case, the Turkish government submitted a forged document attesting that a detainee did not need medical attention. In another, it reported falsely that explosives were found on the premises of a journalist.
The cost of all this to the future of Turkey’s democracy is incalculable. Erdogan and his supporters contend that he has restored the rule of law by vanquishing the military and civilianizing the political system. Every new political order needs a founding narrative, and that is Erdogan’s. Rarely, however, has the narrative been erected on such a patent forgery as Sledgehammer. As the case unravels, sooner or later, Erdogan and his successors will have to grapple with the unhappy consequences.
UPDATE (April 25, 2012): Today's New York Times has a long, and overdue, account of what the Gulen movement is up to in Turkey.
Greg Mankiw
Price Controls in Venezuela
From the NY Times, a great article for teaching Chapter 6 of my favorite textbook.
by Greg Mankiw (noreply@blogger.com) at April 24, 2012 08:35 AM
April 23, 2012
Rebecca Rojer
May Day: Demand JOBS FOR ALL
Join the Rally and March on May Day for JOBS FOR ALL!
Join a large, visible presence advocating job creation and an end to unemployment:
JOBS FOR ALL
Dignified work at good union wages for everyone who wants a job.
TRABAJOS PARA TODOS
Trabajo digno con sueldos buenos de escala sindical para cualquiera que quiera un trabajo.
TUESDAY MAY 1
Mayday 2012 Rally & March
Union Square, NYC
4:00PM
Join us at the corner of Union Sq. West & 14th St.
(By the dry fountain)
We demand a democratically-controlled public works and public service program, with direct government employment, to create 25 million new jobs at good union wages. The new jobs will be to build the facilities and provide the services needed to meet the needs of the 99%, including in education, healthcare, housing, transportation, and clean energy. The program will be funded by raising taxes on the banks, corporations and the wealthiest 1%, and by ending all U.S. wars. Employment in the program will be open to all, including immigrants and persons formerly incarcerated.
Demandamos obras públicas y un programa de servicios públicos democráticamente controlados, con empleo directo del gobierno, para crear 25 millones de nuevos empleos con sueldos buenos de escala sindical. Los nuevos empleos serán para construir las instalaciones y proveer los servicios necesitados para satisfacer las necesidades del 99%, incluyendo en educación, cuidados de la salud, vivienda, transporte y energía limpia. El programa será financiado aumentando los impuestos a los bancos, las corporaciones y el 1% de los más ricos, y poniendo fin a todas las guerras por los Estados Unidos de América. Empleo en el programa estará disponible para todos, incluyendo a los inmigrantes y a las personas anteriormente encarceladas.
www.jobsforallny.org
Facebook Event
NY JOBS FOR ALL COMMITTEE • www.JobsForAllNY.org • twitter: @JobsForAllNY
For more information, or to endorse the demand, email: info@jobsforallny.org
Para mas información, o para apoyar la demanda, email: info@jobsforallny.org
A couple illustrations for Jacobin Magazine
I have two illustrations in the latest issue of Jacobin Magazine, a provocative, beautifully-designed lefty mag you should subscribe to.
Reality TV And Flexible Future by Gavin Mueller
Against Law, For Order by Mike Konczal
IvyGate
Poor People Don’t Go to Brown, The Coolest College Ever
Brown University, the tropical island to which celebrities deport their children, doesn’t have poor people:
Under 50 percent of students receive financial aid, and a majority of students pay full tuition — $53,136 in the current academic year — which itself is more than the median U.S. household income.
But but but! That has nothing to do with Brown’s ubiquity in substantial, thoughtful television shows which refuse to fetishize the lives of wealthy teenagers for the aspirational attention of their flyover peers:
The O.C., FOX’s hit drama running from 2003 to 2007, heavily featured Brown. In the first three seasons, main character Seth Cohen — a pot-smoking, geeky, comic book lover with a witty sense of humor — had his sights set on Brown. Yet in a plot twist, Seth is denied admission, and instead, Summer Roberts — his superficial, valley-girl girlfriend — is offered a spot.
They’re completely different issues, really. Consider Brown’s portrayal in the hard-hitting documentary series, Gossip Girl:
Blair, who wants to go to Yale, calls Brown “an enclave of trustafarians” — a portmanteau of Rastafarian and trust-funder — “and children of celebrities that major in drum circles and semiotics.” When Serena reminds her that Brown is part of the Ivy League, Waldorf responds that “the only real Ivies are the holy trinity: Harvard, Yale and Princeton.” Before leaving, Blair tells Providence-bound Serena, “Maybe you can get your hair dreadlocked while you’re there.”
The fact that the Brown Daily Herald—the extant embarrassment of Ivy League daily newspapers, and the only one to employ College Media Networks’ trademarked “we-give-up-lol” website template—bothers to ask why poor people neither attend nor even apply to Brown, while at the same time gleefully embracing their school’s service to aspirational entertainment, really is the perfect way to explain not just the Herald, but Brown itself.
April 22, 2012
April 20, 2012
IvyGate
Harvard Fashionistas Digitally Alter Body Images in the Name of Fashion
As Heidi Klum likes to say, in fashion, one day you’re in and the next day you’re out. The fashion industry can be tough, and you have to be competitive to keep up. So when it came out that Harvard fashion show Eleganza was digitally editing promo photos for its show this weekend, all was ok, because guys, it’s fashion. But actually, The Crimson is reporting that some philistines are pissed, because Eleganza is a charity event focused on promoting diversity and stuff like that.
They’re not wrong. According to Eleganza’s website, “The event’s mission is focused on diversity and charity, celebrating different cultures, backgrounds, and forms of expression.” Previous coverage in The Crimson reveals that “Each show independently seeks to redefine fashion from the Eurocentric and narrow-minded industry that it has been.” Past shows have proudly included models of various races and body types.
However, according to The Crimson:
Some students who have seen the photos said they appeared to be significantly altered with photo editing software to make some women look thinner, enhance some men’s muscles, and possibly lighten the skin tone of some models.
One student model told The Crimson that while the organizers told him they would be doing some photoshopping, he was surprised by how much digital work was done to pronounce his muscles. “To me, it was sort of funny, because anyone who knows me knows I’m not that guy,” he said. “But it’s weird, because the message of the show is to redefine beauty, but they’re conforming to fashion magazines.”
Another student who modeled in the show chose to ask the photographer to digitally modify her body, and said that everything but her face was touched, although it was to the “right extent.”
Even though Eleganza seems to stand for diversity and acceptance, they’re conforming to industry standards to make people look how they want them to. Ironically, money from the event will go to the very worthy Teen Empowerment charity in Boston. But after all this modification, it’s not entirely clear who is being empowered.
