Planet Harvard

Seeds of a Mess

2008-08-27T15:14:22+00:00

A reader calls my attention to this article from 2003:

New Agency Proposed to Oversee Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae
The Bush administration today recommended the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago.
Under the plan, disclosed at a Congressional hearing today, a new agency would be created within the Treasury Department to assume supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac....
Among the groups denouncing the proposal today were the National Association of Home Builders and Congressional Democrats who fear that tighter regulation of the companies could sharply reduce their commitment to financing low-income and affordable housing.
''These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis,'' said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ''The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.''

Meet the Obamas.

2008-08-27T14:00:55+00:00

Michelle Obama gave a pretty wonderful speech at the DNC the other night. Hillary did, too, but let's focus on the nominee and his family, for a moment. Watching Michelle give her speech and the "Meet the Obamas" moment (featuring Barack on mega-screen) that ensued afterward, it occurred to me that perhaps Barack and crew are playing up the "We are the Obama family" thing too much. It's cute,

Feldstein on the Housing Market

2008-08-27T07:59:31+00:00

Marty thinks he has a plan to keep underwater homeowners from defaulting without either burdening taxpayers or abrogating existing contracts.

I have proposed a programme of “mortgage replacement loans” that I believe would stop the downward spiral of house prices. The basic idea is to provide an incentive to stop defaults among those who now have positive equity but are vulnerable to a further price decline. The federal government would offer every homeowner with a mortgage the opportunity to replace 20 per cent of that mortgage with a low interest government loan – up to a loan limit of $80,000 (€55,000, £44,000) – that reflects the government’s lower borrowing rate. Creditors would be required to accept this partial mortgage pay-down and to reduce the monthly interest and principal by the same 20 per cent. That mortgage replacement loan would not be collateralised by the house but would be a loan that the government could enforce by lodging a claim on an individual who does not pay.
With the mortgage replacement loan, people who now have a mortgage equal to 90 per cent of their house value would see that mortgage fall to just 72 per cent of the house value, implying that it would take a very unlikely price fall of more than 28 per cent to push those individuals into negative equity.

Sounds like a free lunch? As far as I can tell, his "mortgage replacement loan" scheme involves tricking homeowners into accepting a deal that is not really in their self-interest. For very little in return, they give up the option of future default. So count me as skeptical.

But I agree with Marty when he says, "This is a difficult problem and there are no easy solutions."

Dynamic Scoring

2008-08-27T07:19:30+00:00

Bob Carroll reports:

Recent research on President Bush's tax relief in 2001 and 2003 has found that the lower tax rates induced taxpayers to report more taxable income. In particular, the reduction in the top two tax rates induced taxpayers to report more taxable income—an increase in the size of the tax base—to such an extent that this positive behavioral response likely offset roughly 25 percent to 40 percent of the static revenue loss of lowering the top two tax rates.

Volatility is up

2008-08-26T17:06:07+00:00

The New Yorker's James Surowiecki writes about stock market volatility. One tidbit:

Since the beginning of July, there have been six days on which the S. & P. 500 has gone up or down by at least two per cent....Not that long ago, stock-market volatility appeared to be a thing of the past; between the end of 2003 and the end of 2006 there were only two days with moves of two per cent.

Feeling Her Pain

2008-08-26T13:32:29+00:00

News from Scrappleface:

The Democrat National Convention speaker line up will feature a number of “real people” talking about the pain of living in these tough economic times, including an Indiana railroader, a Michigan truck driver, and an ordinary working mother from New York who’s saddled with $24 million in campaign debt.
The woman, who spent that money in an effort to get a better job, saw her hopes and dreams crushed because of sex discrimination in the Democrat party during the Bush administration.
Her husband has no regular paycheck and must often travel hundreds of miles to find work, so the high price of fuel has cut deeply into their monthly budget.
While she has tried to “pull herself up by her own bootstraps” by asking supporters of presidential nominee Barack Obama to pay off her debt, near-recession conditions have kept them from being able to help.

Reports from Jackson Hole

2008-08-26T10:06:02+00:00

I have skipped the Fed's Jackson Hole event in recent years. (I prefer to spend the waning days of summer on Nantucket with my family.) But reports suggest that this year's meeting was more interesting than average, which, I suppose, is the upside of financial turmoil. Read about some of the sessions here and here.

Better With Age?

2008-08-25T23:00:00+00:00

Last week I watched Casablanca for the first time. Perhaps this is blasphemy, but: I was seriously unimpressed. Humphrey Bogart's jaded ex-pat routine came off as too self-pitying for me to feel particularly compelled by it, the shooting wasn't interesting, the plot felt claustrophobic, etc. etc. etc. Certainly I appreciated that, in hindsight, many movies and films that I admire a great deal (

A Reading for the Pigou Club

2008-08-25T09:11:08+00:00

High gas prices drive down traffic fatalities

Summers on Trade

2008-08-25T08:24:17+00:00

Larry says the global consensus is unravelling.

I Believe the Word You're Looking For is "Jaded."

2008-08-24T16:28:46+00:00

gchat conversation. Me: i need a fuckbuddy.AStray: sorry. Me: generally i love being singleMe: but that's one detractor. AStray: based on the way most people conduct their relationships, sex is not guaranteed in relationships either. Me: that's sad. Me: how do most people conduct their relationships, then?AStray: sexless and loveless. AStray: obligatory. Jaded, indeed.

Friedman on Nudge

2008-08-24T11:59:28+00:00

My Harvard colleague Ben Friedman reviews Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.

Biden on International Trade

2008-08-24T09:04:39+00:00

Here is a useful summary of Joe Biden's votes as Senator on trade barriers and trade subsidies. (Also, here is the same for Barack Obama and John McCain).

Does money undermine community?

2008-08-24T07:39:43+00:00

Reported by Princeton's Peter Singer:

In a series of experiments, Vohs and her colleagues found ways to get people to think about money without explicitly telling them to do so. They gave some people tasks that involved unscrambling phrases about money. With others, they left piles of Monopoly money nearby. Another group saw a screensaver with various denominations of money. Other people, randomly selected, unscrambled phrases that were not about money, did not see Monopoly money, and saw different screensavers. In each case, those who had been led to think about money – let’s call them “the money group” – behaved differently from those who had not.
When given a difficult task and told that help was available, people in the money group took longer to ask for help.
When asked for help, people in the money group spent less time helping.
When told to move their chair so that they could talk with someone else, people in the money group left a greater distance between chairs.
When asked to choose a leisure activity, people in the money group were more likely to choose an activity that could be enjoyed alone, rather than one that involved others.
Finally, when people in the money group were invited to donate some of the money they had been paid for participation in the experiment, they gave less than those who had not been induced to think about money.
Trivial reminders of money made a surprisingly large difference. For example, where the control group would offer to spend an average of 42 minutes helping someone with a task, those primed to think about money offered only 25 minutes. Similarly, when someone pretending to be another participant in the experiment asked for help, the money group spent only half as much time helping her. When asked to make a donation from their earnings, the money group gave just a little over half as much as the control group.
Why does money makes us less willing to seek or give help, or even to sit close to others? Vohs and her colleagues suggest that as societies began to use money, the necessity of relying on family and friends diminished, and people were able to become more self-sufficient. “In this way,” they conclude, “money enhanced individualism but diminished communal motivations, an effect that is still apparent in people’s responses today.”

The Democratic Swingers

2008-08-24T02:36:21+00:00

As long as we're on the topic of political leaders in compromising poses, there's a great picture on the Drudge Report right now:

Corporate Taxes Here and Abroad

2008-08-23T16:56:44+00:00

From the Tax Foundation.

Now Powered by Django

2008-08-23T10:03:31+00:00

Part of the reason that it has been so quiet around here is because I have been rewriting the website from scratch. For the last four years, I have been using WordPress to run this blog. While the rapid pace of development and community of users have been great (I think the only other piece of software that I have consistently used for such a long period of time is Firefox), I have increasingly found myself dissatisfied with it.

One of my major concerns right now is server resources. My slice only has 256 MB of RAM, but is running email, my MySQL databases, and this website. Occasionally, I try to access it only to find that it has run out of memory and is inaccessible. I am not certain that this is the result of WordPress, but I have tried to control every other variable (changing my Apache configuration, etc.) with limited success. Either way, my future development plans do not currently include working with PHP, and WordPress was the last PHP application running on my server.

Writing a weblog from scratch means that some of the features that were available in WordPress are no longer present. Among the changes:

Comment submission is currently disabled. To tell the truth, I have not coded it yet, since I would like to make it more elegant than the previous model.
I am not longer producing RSS standard syndication feeds, just Atom.
I have 410'd a number of RSS feeds which I had previously deprecated.
The feed for this website is now located at http://www.marteydodoo.com/feed/ instead of http://www.marteydodoo.com/feed/atom/.

Although Wired is reporting on the impending demise of the personal website, I am bucking the trend, I guess.

“Most Overrated” University Overcomes Princeton in US News Rankings

2008-08-23T06:42:53+00:00

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been sitting around wondering, “When will Harvard get the recognition it deserves?” The wait is over, my friend. In US News and World Report’s 2009 “National University Rankings,” Harvard surpassed Princeton for the top spot, ending 8 straight years of New Jersey rule. This comes on the heels of Princeton’s first-place finish in the flawed but entertaining Forbes.com best college list.

Harvard, incidentally, was just ranked “Most Overrated” in Radar Magazine’s guide to America’s worst colleges. The guide cites Harvard’s 25% virgin rate. But would you really want to have sex with that twenty-five percent? In other news, Cornell is listed as the runner-up to “Most Overrated.” When you think about it, it’s kind of a compliment. That is, until you read on and get to the part about Cornell’s status anxiety and Ithaca’s geographical advantages. To wit: “Thankfully, rocky gorges surrounding the campus continue to provide the sweet release of death for those Cornellians who just can’t take it anymore.”

But enough about suicide: following her venerable leader, Columbia advanced in the US News rankings. Yale and Dartmouth stayed the same. UPenn, Brown and Cornell all lost ground. The Liberal Arts Colleges are still unimportant.

Here’s how the Ivies fared:

1. Harvard (ranked 2nd in 2008)

2. Princeton (ranked 1st in 2008)

3. Yale (ranked 3rd in 2008)

6. Penn (ranked 5th in 2008)

8. Columbia (ranked 9th in 2008)

11. Dartmouth (ranked 11th in 2008)

14. Cornell (ranked 12th in 2008)

16. Brown (ranked 14th in 2008)

After the jump, Harvard tells you she’s embarrassed by all the attention.

In an email statement, Harvard spokesman John Longbrake said:

It is always nice to be recognized as one of the top universities. However, our admissions officers always tell prospective students that they should select a college or university that best suits their needs, not by its position in a ranking.

That’s just like Harvard, being all modest. Overrated? Not in my heart, Big H.

We're not in a recession

2008-08-22T22:10:13+00:00

says Ed Leamer. The abstract of his latest paper:

Monthly US data on payroll employment, civilian employment, industrial production and the unemployment rate are used to define a recession-dating algorithm that nearly perfectly reproduces the NBER official peak and trough dates. The only substantial point of disagreement is with respect to the NBER November 1973 peak. The algorithm prefers September 1974. In addition, this algorithm indicates that the data through June 2008 do not yet exceed the recession threshold, and will do so only if things get much worse.

The Bestselling Economics Books

2008-08-22T08:27:28+00:00

At Amazon, updated hourly.

More on Obamanomics

2008-08-22T08:03:16+00:00

"Homonausic"

2008-08-21T23:33:42+00:00

I know I'm a little late (ie, several years) in posting this video, but I think it is pretty hilarious and worth a replay. From The Daily Show:

Florida State Representative candidate Ed Heeney has issues with talented, pool playing lesbos stealing all the straight women in Fort Lauderdale.

Charlie Rose interviews Austan Goolsbee

2008-08-20T22:11:27+00:00

What's This Shit?

2008-08-20T18:23:10+00:00

Music, in my mind, has two primary and basic functions. 1) To intelligently provoke thought and/or a particular mood. Think: mulling spirituality while listening to "A Love Supreme." 2) To be catchy/entertaining. Think: shaking my ass to the beat on the dance floor. Pretty simple. So what do we do with something that calls itself music but satisfies neither of the above? Personally, I get

Pindyck on Energy Policy

2008-08-20T07:07:06+00:00

From the MIT News Office (via Mark Thoma), econ prof Bob Pindyck is interviewed about the two candidates' energy policies. An excerpt:

Q: Would either candidate's energy proposals make much impact on energy costs in the short term?
A: Neither of the candidate's plans would have any impact. The one exception would be McCain's proposal to eliminate tariffs on the importation of Brazilian ethanol. It would immediately reduce the cost of ethanol.
Q: How so?
A: We have a tariff on imported ethanol from Brazil, which is made from sugar cane. Ethanol here is usually made from corn. Sugar cane ethanol is about eight times more efficient than that made from corn. By removing the tariff, Brazilian ethanol becomes cheaper and will make ethanol-gasoline blends cheaper.

The favorite sentence of the Pigou Club:

Look, what are going to be needed ultimately is a tax on carbon and a tax on gasoline -- a large one.

The Art of Begging

2008-08-19T13:13:26+00:00

All over the developing world problems of poverty rage on and the greatest developments seem to not be in a solution, but rather in the strategy of begging. In cities all over places like India and Egypt there exist the “cripple-makers” a modern day beggar’s pimp who literally cripples or handicaps a beggar in some way in order to make him more pitiful towards passersby and thus more likely to receive donations. In sub-Saharan Africa beggars dress in their dirtiest of rags to line up outside churches on Sunday afternoons and outside mosques on Fridays in hopes to catch people when they are feeling their most generous. More and more children are being sent in to beg for money and are often able to cry on command and can be significantly more relentless and persistent than adults when it comes to begging for money. Children and adults even try and sell little things like tissues, prayer pamphlets, and especially gum for some extra change and sympathy.

The greatest moral dilemma an individual most often faces when coming across a beggar is how to help. Westerners are more likely to take on a pretentious approach refusing to donate money thinking that handouts only make the problems worse and remove the incitement for beggars to find their own jobs. While this approach certainly has merit, refusing to spare any extra change, but then forgetting to help out in any other way does nothing but promote the status quo and deny a beggar the opportunity for a lunch or even a mere piece of bread in a day.

With the worldwide food shortage and rampant inflation daily life is becoming more difficult for most people, but the poor are suffering the hardest. When obtaining food has become so difficult that one feels as though the best solution is amputating an arm or a leg it may be time for the international community to revaluate their goals and refocus their attention.

Dr Doom

2008-08-19T05:09:00+00:00

A profile of economist (and Harvard PhD) Nouriel Roubini.

Weird Moments in Horror: the Glorious Girl Army of the Free Women's Republic of Somaliland

2008-08-19T00:02:25+00:00

I've just been rereading the Monster series of zombie horror novels - Monster Island, Monster Nation, Monster Planet - and I re-encountered one of the most unusual things I've ever found in a horror piece: the Glorious Girl Army of the Free Women's Republic of Somaliland.

There are several things that make the Glorious Girl Army of the Free Women's Republic of Somaliland unique. First, the book notes that the places with the most per capita gun possession would best survive a zombie holocaust. This means Somalia, which hasn't had a government in 20 years, would essentially shake off zombies like they never rose from the dead while the First World nations just get eaten.

Second, the plot is put into motion because the leader of the Glorious Girl Army of the Free Women's Republic of Somaliland, "Mama Halima", needs HIV drugs. Third, Mama Halima's group is an Islamic group formed to protect women from rape, murder and mutilation. One woman comments that she'd wade into post-Apocalyptic New York City - home to 10 million cannibalistic corpses - just to help Mama Halima because the eminent shaikhah protected girls from suffering infibulation like she had.

It's not earthshaking, but I thought that it was unusual for people of colour to surface in horror, never mind non-English-speakers. The main character is a white American male former UN employee whose (half-Kenyan) daughter was taken and protected by Mama Halima and in return has to fetch her HIV meds.

Popular Insecurity

2008-08-18T19:35:09+00:00

Last Friday, the Mexican government released results of a survey that it applies to affiliates of the Popular Insurance program, or Seguro Popular. The people who affiliate to Seguro Popular are those who are not covered by another public insurance program, which in Mexico, is always tied to the kind of employment one has. Government workers are covered by one insurance scheme, some private-sector workers by another, and so on.

The survey results show that 96 percent of SP users are satisfied with the program. Let’s put aside the fact that numbers that high rarely occur in honest surveys. It is worth asking how important high levels of user satisfaction are in the first place. Of course, it is a good thing if citizens like government programs. On the other hand, a government program should surely aspire to more than high approval ratings.

Imagine we create a public program that redistributes one dollar to all affiliates. We then go out and sign poor people up for this program. All they have to do is sign their name, and they receive a dollar. After receiving the dollar, I ask them if they are satisfied with the program. Plausibly, almost everyone will be satisfied with a program that demands nothing of users, and gives out free money. But does such a program actually make any difference? Obviously, it does not. Even someone who lives on a dollar a day, a common international poverty baseline, cannot live for more than one extra day with such a program.

This is, to be sure, an extreme example. But the point is that programs can achieve popularity by being easy and providing little without actually affecting the poverty rate, or the health of citizens. More important than citizen popularity, then, is the abysmal statistic, from the same survey, on how many people are actually getting all the medicines they are supposed to be getting. This number, on average, is 78 percent. It falls to 68 percent in the state of Chiapas. And in the state of Guerrero, one of Mexico’s poorest, only 50 percent of affiliates receive the medicine they have been prescribed. Perhaps more alarming, 34 percent of affiliates in Guerrero do not receive a single medication from the program. Nationally, that number is about 9 percent, less alarming, but hardly encouraging.

When an insurance program doesn’t insure people against medical expenses, we should be concerned. No popularity contest can change that. The program’s high approval ratings may indicate that poor Mexicans had such low expectations from the government before entering the program that anything is better than nothing. For example, maybe affiliates save a couple dollars on a consultation with a doctor. They are satisfied because they expected no help at all, even though they continue to have to pay out of pocket for their medication. Something is always better than nothing.

It is good to know that the Popular Insurance program is better than nothing. It would be nice to know that it was better than that.

Obama's Top Marginal Tax Rate

2008-08-18T03:31:48+00:00

My friend Bob Carroll does the math:

Senator Obama would raise the top individual tax rate back to 39.6 percent, impose an additional 2 to 4 percent tax on earnings for some over the existing Social Security wage cap, and bring back the phase-out of the personal exemption and certain itemized deductions for higher-income taxpayers. When added up, the top effective marginal tax rate rises...from 37.9 percent to roughly 48 to 50 percent. "High" is in the eye of the beholder, but these are tax rates not seen since before the Tax Reform Act of 1986.
Note: These calculations work as follows: (1) 37.9 percent equals the current 35 percent top income tax rate plus the current 2.9 percent Medicare tax rate; and (2) 48 to 50 percent equals Obama's 39.6 percent top income tax rate plus the 2.9 percent Medicare tax rate plus his additional 2-to-4 percent hike in the Social Security tax rate plus an additional roughly 4.5 percent for the phase-out of personal exemption and certain itemized deductions.

I suppose that, for thinking about work incentives, one should add on a few percentage points for state and local taxes as well.

Harvardian of Montreal Hates Yale, Loves Princeton?

2008-08-17T22:41:16+00:00

An “Ivy Montrealer” recently informed us of a juicy bit of hypocrisy: Canadian and McGill graduate Padraic Scanlan, whom we covered last November for penning a damning critique of Yale and other privileged American universities in the McGill Daily, is now going for his PhD in history at Princeton. To refresh everyone’s memory, here are a few excerpts from Scanlan’s column:

New Haven reminded me vividly of Detroit - class and race are lashed together in a widening spiral of systemic oppression in both cities. Both cities are scarred with bombed-out buildings and condemned lots. In both cities, black and Hispanic Americans are crushed by the combined weight of a decimated economy, mounting personal debt, and pervasive, systemic racism. The only difference between Detroit and New Haven is that in New Haven, Yale sits, gleaming and gated.

Likening New Haven to Detroit is legit, and surely Yale is “gleaming” compared to the city that abuts it, but saying New Haven is filled with “pervasive, systemic racism” seems, well, a bit hyperbolic. Scanlan continues:

You have to visit to really appreciate how obscene the divide is between the rich and the poor in New Haven, Connecticut. Yale is vastly wealthy - I can see now (having never actually visited an Ivy League school before) why McGill’s administration slavers after the prestige and wealth of that select clique of New England universities. It is enormous, full of granite and sandstone, gleaming new electronics, and huge College Gothic piles.

One final quote by Scanlan and some commentary after the jump.

At the end of the piece Scanlan concludes that McGill is neither Harvard nor Yale, and decides that is perfectly fine because

McGill is more equal-opportunity - Yale is a mansion on a hill, Yale is a lyric in a Phil Ochs song, and Yale is a monstrosity of extreme wealth floating in a sea of poverty. McGill has problems, and inequality, and Montreal has racial and socioeconomic disparities, but at least Montreal isnt a city that physically inspires visitors to join the Communist Party.

Princeton, for those who don’t know, has a higher per capita endowment than Yale or Harvard. But maybe the proletarian-cum-Ivy Leaguer justified it all because unlike Yale, Princeton is a monstrosity of extreme wealth floating in, well, the heated pool of an exclusive seaside resort.

And finally, a parting shot by our tipster: “Apparently he’s only a commie when it suits. Hypocrite.”

Before He Was a Campaign Liability, Mark Penn Was a Crimson Reporter

2008-08-17T19:48:05+00:00

A man who has been likened to Karl Rove if Karl Rove were far less cautious with his private emails, Mark Penn is possibly heading toward the nadir of his political career. But Penn wasn’t always infamous. Back in the early seventies, Penn was just a reporter for the Harvard Crimson.

Rick Perlstein writes that Penn, ‘76, displayed an early interest in public relations in a profile of a traveling encyclopedia salesman. Of the salesman, Penn wrote:

He refused to call selling ‘manipulation,’ preferring the term persuasion. Describing his sales technique as ’showing them the goods and seeing if they’ll buy,’ he compared it ‘to asking a girl out on a date.’

In this excerpt there is a glimpse of the man who told Bill Gates that “Being human is overrated.” This is kind of like what Penn told Hillary when he wasn’t telling her to attack Obama for his lack of “roots to basic American values and culture.”

In addition to writing the usual college news stories (a series of articles on where the JFK Library would be located, an article on the student government running out of beer money, and other such articles), Penn wrote several essays arguing against the impeachment of President Nixon. Like many Republicans at the time, Penn believed the Democrats were angling to install a Democrat in the White House (this was after Agnew’s resignation but before Ford was vice president). According to Penn, JFK, were he then still alive, would side against his party and support his old opponent. Penn writes:

The late President John F. Kennedy ‘40, would have condemned a political impeachment of Nixon just as he abhorred in Profiles in Courage, the attempt to oust Andrew Johnson. Whether the issue is over secret bombings of Cambodia or a militarily imposed reconstruction of the South, the public and Congress should oppose an impeachment which places the opposition party in power.

After the jump, a young Penn’s vision of the future.

Speculating about the outcome of Nixon’s then pending impeachment hearings, Penn writes:

Conviction should be avoided not only because it is rash and precedent-setting, but also because it raises serious political questions. Carl Albert would be a weak executive, under the control of the Democrats in Congress. Gerald Ford would be incompetent, especially in international affairs. Perhaps what will finally keep Nixon in office will be the reluctance of Congress to replace him with either of these men.

And thus began Penn’s career in political forecasting, a career that may continue under the Obama campaign. What? That’s the craziest shit you’ve ever heard of? Well, consider this: if Obama taps Indiana Senator Evan Bayh for vice president, Bayh may bring along his long-time advisor Mark Penn.

Mixed Messages.

2008-08-17T14:50:01+00:00

Friend sent me this. Yes, it's an abstinence ad. Shiver, shiver. But at least they've given a black person the benefit of wanting to be something other than a grocery store clerk. Seriously -- this may actually be, in some way, a step forward for black representation in media. Sad, though. Encouraging a young scientist to resist sex? This is how 30 year-old geek-virgins are born.

How to Prop Up the Housing Market

2008-08-17T07:44:00+00:00

A proposal from Alan Greenspan:

He did offer one suggestion: "The most effective initiative, though politically difficult, would be a major expansion in quotas for skilled immigrants," he said. The only sustainable way to increase demand for vacant houses is to spur the formation of new households. Admitting more skilled immigrants, who tend to earn enough to buy homes, would accomplish that while paying other dividends to the U.S. economy.
He estimates the number of new households in the U.S. currently is increasing at an annual rate of about 800,000, of whom about one third are immigrants. "Perhaps 150,000 of those are loosely classified as skilled," he said. "A double or tripling of this number would markedly accelerate the absorption of unsold housing inventory for sale -- and hence help stabilize prices."

Medal Count: Who’s Winning What

2008-08-16T15:44:49+00:00

The Olympics are already halfway over and our Ivy brethren have fared admirably against all the non-Ivy athletes in the world. As we wait to find out whether Michael Phelps will be tapped for vice president, here’s a running count of how our brave lettermen and women are doing:

Fencing: Sada Jacobson, Yale ‘06 and a member of the US women’s team, took home the Silver for individual sabre and Bronze for team sabre.

Tennis: Tennis phemon and Harvard drop-out James Blake, a member of the US men’s team, almost advanced to the finals after a stunning victory over winning-machine Roger Federer. Unfortunately, Blake lost to Fernando Gonzales of Chile in a close match.

Track and Field: Ivygate’s own angelic Anna Willard, a member of the US women’s team, qualified for the semi-finals in the women’s 3000m steeplechase, coming in 6^th in the third and final heat of round 1.

Women’s Gymnastics: The US women’s team was within striking distance of the Gold when a high risk maneuver by Brown rising junior, the violent and beautiful Alicia Sacramone, backfired and left them trailing the Chinese girl’s women’s team. The US brought home the Silver.

Rowing: Nikola Stojic, Brown ’93 and a member of the Serbian team, earned the fastest time in the men’s pair “B” final.

Ivygate’s own Susan Francia, Penn ’04, helped the women’s eight to a victory in last Monday’s heat.

Harvard’s supertwins, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, class of ‘04, raced to a first place finish in the repechages after a disappointing fifth in their first compeitition.

Canadian men’s eight, anchored by Malcolm Howard, Harvard ‘05, and Dominic Seiterle, Dartmouth ‘98, drew the top slot in Heat 1.

Medal-counting continues after the jump.

Great Britain’s men’s eight rose to the top spot in Heat 2 on the back of Josh West, Yale ‘98.

Helped along by Steve Coppola, Princeton ‘06, the US men’s eight finished second in Heat 2.

Paul Teti, Princeton ’01, helped lead the US men’s four to a third-place finish in the “B” final.

Ken Jurkowski, Cornell ‘04 and a member of the US team, finished fifth in the “B” final for single sculls.

Stay tuned to find out the fates of your favorite athletes.

Most of the results announced here are taken from Iviesinchina.com.

Farewell Musharraf?

2008-08-16T12:00:40+00:00

Amid all the hoopla surrounding the Russia-Georgia war, the spectacle of Parvez Musharraf’s impending impeachment or removal has largely gone unnoticed. I’ll direct you to two somewhat contradictory NYTimes articles here and here which cover the unfolding story. The first asserts that Musharraf is likely to resign within the next two days in order to avoid impeachment; the second insinuates that he’s likely to fight it out to the bitter end. I’ll believe the first—that Musharraf will indeed resign—since even the second article contains the following explanation:

Politicians across all parties, however, characterized the public insistence by Mr. Musharraf, a former military man, as a kind of last stand, a bravura performance that could not be maintained under the political reality that almost all of his support had evaporated.
If Mr. Musharraf does not step down voluntarily very soon, the man who succeeded him last year as army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, will quietly make it clear he has to leave, said two senior Pakistani figures who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the situation.
The army, which remains the most revered institution in Pakistan, does not want impeachment proceedings to begin, fearing it would be tarnished, several politicians said.

So we’re looking at a cornered politician in his last days. The deck is truly stacked against him; as the Times mentions, Musharraf was demolished in voting in the four provincial assemblies. Both sides had been looking at these votes are as a preview of Parliamentary impeachment voting. And the results aren’t good for Musharraf: in Sindh, for example, Musharraf didn’t even get one vote, and the ~~Islamist~~ MQM, who are his main allies, abstained.

Finally, as the above quote indicates, Musharraf has lost his last bastion of support, the army. Which means that the descriptions of Gen. Kiyani—quiet, apolitical—that we read last November must have been fairly accurate. (From Kiyani’s BBC Profile, 27 November 2007: “Some observers had also contended that Gen Kayani was too much “his own man” for Gen Musharraf to place faith in him. But Gen Musharraf chose to ignore these doubters when naming his successor in early October”).

This is not, however, by any means a substantial revision of Pakistan’s long-term status quo. Kiyani’s unwillingness to let Musharraf drag the army down with him simply reaffirms what we’ve seen repeatedly in Pakistan: The military protects itself. Not its individuals per se, but its institutional status and the many privileges that accompany that status. And this is particularly important when you consider how divided the civilian government is likely to be in the event of Musharraf’s departure. Asif Zardari, whose PPP has the majority in the anti-Musharraf coalition, seems to want the post. That’s a change from his apparent plan, as I discussed in March, to eventually become prime minister. Either way, he’ll face a challenge from Nawaz Sharif, who commands much of the remainder of the coalition. Sharif is unlikely to contest Zardari’s ascendancy, but the Times reports that he’ll insist on stripping the presidency of much of its power. Ironically, some of that presidential authority is power that Musharraf gave the office in just his final years.

What we may be looking at, then, is a restored civilian government that’s hopelessly divided on a number of key issues, and a military that, having shed Musharraf, once again has a free hand. That harks back to Benazhir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif’s experiences in the 1990’s, being constantly undermined by the army, but even they didn’t have to deal with intra-government challenges to their authority. Expect a lot of disappointment all around in the new government.

Finally, worth mentioning is that the United States, having firmly thrown its lot in with Musharraf, has found that it’s reduced to asking for a “dignified exit” for Musharraf. This doesn’t bode well for the US influence in the next government, who will surely remember how America held onto its puppet Musharraf until the last possible moment. I wrote the following in November, “I think the US has to decide, now, that our long-term chances for a relationship with Pakistan, which will eventually tend toward civilian rule, depends on us backing off from our support for Musharraf.” Forgive me then for reasserting this, and for stating that the US would be in much better standing with Pakistan’s new government had it displayed just a bit of evenhandedness about the situation.

Update: Careless research, or lack thereof, led me state that the MQM is Islamist, when in fact they are firmly secular. Thanks to our readers for catching this.

A Portrait, in ASCII

2008-08-16T08:44:00+00:00

From a former ec 10 student.

Ivy League Scores Low in Forbes’ College Rankings

2008-08-16T02:05:59+00:00

Everyone is getting into the college rankings game these days, and everyone - it seems - has the same goal in mind: to dethrone the juggernaut that is the U.S. News & World Report. But while students and alums of certain liberal arts colleges and lesser-known universities are probably reveling in Forbes.com’s inaugural rankings, the newest kid on the block is unlikely to find much support among the non-Princeton Ivy set this year.

Of the 569 schools included in the rankings, here’s how the Ivies stacked up:

1. Princeton
3. Harvard
9. Yale
10. Columbia
27. Brown
61. Penn
121: Cornell
127: Dartmouth

Brown at 27 already seems like a stretch, but Penn at 61, Cornell at 121, and Dartmouth at 127? How vulgar, indecent, cruel! Some quotes and commentary after the jump.

The article accompanying the rankings by Forbes only pours more salt on the wound:

Small liberal arts schools shine in our rankings, probably due to both the quality of their faculty and the personal attention they can provide. Williams and Swarthmore both rank in the top five, while Pomona, Smith, Middlebury and Amherst all come in the top 20, ahead of such schools as Stanford (23rd) and Brown (27th)…

The list also suggests that some schools–the University of Pennsylvania (61st), Georgetown (76th), Cornell (121st) and Dartmouth (127th)–may be living a bit off of their reputations. Graduates of these schools typically ran up large debts; at most of them, notably Dartmouth, students are not particularly happy with the quality of instruction.

Ouch. Maybe Forbes has a point about the attention liberal arts colleges can provide their students, and about certain schools floating comfortably on their reputations, but saying Dartmouth students “are not particularly happy with the quality of their instruction” smells a bit fishy. Indeed, an article on Forbes’ new rankings by The Dartmouth notes a 2006 survey by the Consortium on Financing Higher Education that seems to contest this claim:

96.4 percent of Dartmouth graduates were very or generally satisfied with the quality of instruction at Dartmouth; 97.8 percent were very or generally satisfied with the out-of-class availability of faculty, and 92 percent were overall satisfied with their undergraduate experience…

So what explains this disparity? If you poke around Forbes‘ complete methodology, it turns out that 25% of a school’s ranking comes from professor ratings on Ratemyprofessors.com (Really, Forbes, this is the best you could do?). Nice try; see you next year!

P.S. We know that there’s a Forbes College at Princeton, and that the magazine has been run by generations of Princetonians.

Toward, and Away From, Bipartisanship

2008-08-15T14:04:29+00:00

Obama economic advisers Jason Furman and Austan Goolsbee described the Obama tax plan in yesterday's Wall Street Journal.

A notable sentence:

The tax rate on dividends would also be 20% for families making more than $250,000, rather than returning to the ordinary income rate.

That is, Senator Obama appears to embrace the principle that dividends should be taxed at a much lower rate than ordinary income. (Recall that this income has already been taxed at the corporate level.) This principle was a fundamental premise behind the 2003 tax bill, signed by President Bush and opposed at the time by a vast majority of Democrats in Congress. If we can now achieve bipartisan consensus to limit the tax burden on corporate capital, that would be a significant step in the right direction.

On an unrelated issue, however, the Furman-Goolsbee piece seems to take a surprising step away from bipartisanship. They take a swipe at Senator McCain's proposal to replace the tax exclusion for employer-provided health insurance with a more flexible health insurance credit. When President Bush suggested a similar idea last year, Furman and coauthors called it "a step in the right direction," and many other commentators agreed. It is too bad that Team Obama is now dissing the proposal.

The Obama Tax Plan

2008-08-15T08:16:27+00:00

As analyzed by Alex Brill and Alan Viard. Click through to read the thousand words, but here is the picture:

Update: Alan Viard asks me to post this note:

Given some confusion on the blogosphere, I want to reiterate that my and Alex' article does not find an increase in average tax rates, or in tax payments, at the income ranges shown in the chart. On the contrary, our article makes clear that Obama's proposed tax cuts would cause average tax rates and tax payments to decline throughout this income range. The point of our article is that Obama's tax cuts are designed in ways that raise marginal tax rates (the extra tax paid on an extra dollar of income) and therefore reduce incentives to earn income. The marginal rate rises because the size of the tax cut falls as income rises. The design of his tax cuts also increases the complexity of the tax system. To avoid confusion, anyone posting our chart should also post (and thoroughly read) our article.

Follow the link above to the article.

Olympic Gymnasts and Age

2008-08-14T14:03:35+00:00

"It's a bike race. A completely arbitrary set of rules that everyone complies with, for no other reason than that some committee says that they should."

- House, Season 2, Episode 6

I've been thinking a lot about the recent controversy over the ages of the Chinese women's gymnastics team. Gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi has alleged that up to half the team is underage and the New York Times published an article at the end of July alleging that previous Chinese state records showed the ages of several gymnasts to be as young as 13 or 14, under the required minimum age of 16. The NBC commentators have brought up the age controversy during coverage of almost every women's gymnasts event.

I think it's interesting to see the way that people are reacting to the accusations, both online and in NBC's coverage. Here's an example of the a blog discussion on the subject. There are also interesting ethical questions, since the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has refused to investigate the situation further, even after the publication of the Times article, and questions raised by journalists, because the Chinese government supplied passports where the girls' ages were all above 16.

Personally, I agree with Cameron from House. That's the point of a sport. It's a set of rules that everyone agrees to follow. If some teams don't follow, the sport falls apart, and it's not a sport anymore - it's just cheating. If the girls are all actually 16, fine. If they're not, they are illegally competing in the Olympics.

The real question is, what can be done about it? Bela Karolyi has said that the only solution is to remove the minimum age requirement, allowing all countries to use younger gymnasts, who many think have an advantage due to their small size and lack of fear. But if the goal of the minimum age rule is to protect young gymnasts from injury or exploitation, then do the IOC and others have a responsibility to look into whether these young women are being exploited?

Thoughts?

Also, on a lighter note, what is Michael Phelps listening to on his iPod, and where can I get some of it?

Summers on the Economy

2008-08-14T04:19:01+00:00

The latest from Larry.

Egotistical Princeton Freshman Wants to Rule the World

2008-08-13T22:59:18+00:00

It’s a fact of life: Facebook has made incoming Ivy League freshmen retarded - at least until they arrive on campus and reveal how awkward and un-cool they truly are. Meet “Stephany Her RoyalHighness,” Princeton ‘12, author of a ludicrous post on the discussion board of the Princeton 2012 Facebook group. She writes:

Dear Class of 2012,

I only hold you to the same standards I hold myself to and I HATE being disappointed.

Having said that, do not let ANYONE tell you that you are not better than them, because you are. We are the elite, we are the 0.0000001% of the world who have spent the last four years of our lives either blackmailing or working our asses off. There was something that got you here—whether it was daddy’s money or your #1 ranking in the nation, you are here and you are better. You have mercilessly beaten out your friends, your girlfriends, your boyfriends, your brothers, your sisters and every one you have loved. Don’t apologize for it, revel in it. YOU. ARE. BETTER. Why deny it?

Don’t be held back now—you are in your prime. Starting from the first day you step on campus, there is no past, there is no judgment. You are beautifully brand new. Wherever you came from, whatever you have been through, whoever you knew: that counts for nothing now. It only matters who you are now.

Try everything once: Pilates, squash, open mic night, tantric sex. What do you have to lose? When you risk everything, you have anything to gain.
If someone says you can’t. Don’t answer. Walk away and prove them wrong.

Princeton is famous for its elitism and for fostering loyalty among its students and alumni but “Stephany” - if there’s really an incoming Princeton freshman behind that facile alias - is someone different altogether. Read her post in its entirety after the jump.

Laws are nothing but restrictions: break every one you possibly can. The only order is the one that you make. The only resolution you’ll ever find is within yourself. The only satisfaction you’ll ever discover is the one you create. Never look to others for leadership, take control yourself. Never have regrets, because at some point, what you did is what you wanted. Don’t just take responsibility for your actions, take pride in every little mistake, every little stumble because it just means it won’t happen again.

We all have weakness, accept it. But to be able to overcome it—that’s where we’re different. We don’t let it hold us back. Pain is weakness leaving the body. That ache in your muscles? The ripped papers? The taste of blood on your lips? The broken condom? The fatigue in your bones? Those are the victories. Life is a beautiful game and you sure as hell are winning. Just make sure it stays that way.

You beat out everyone else’s best. Now, it’s about beating you own best. I know it’s not weakness or failure you fear but your own brilliance, your own divinity. You ask yourself, who are you think to that you are beautiful? Extraordinary? You have every right, because that’s exactly what you are. Never fear your potential. Never fear your pinnacle.

Don’t take things so seriously, but don’t take them so lightly either. You trip up and fall? Don’t lick your wounds—display them. It means you’re a competitor. You’re bleeding? You better hope you’re not anywhere close to carpet because there’s a lot more cuts where that came from. This is life— you fall down seven times, you get up eight. This is life—there is no such thing as failure, only a 100th try. This is life—no one gets out alive anyway, so you better hope you fucking live before you’re dead.

Power cannot be given, only taken, for the taking of power is empowerment itself. Power is only tiring to those who don’t have it, so make sure you always have the upper hand. Neither fatigue nor excuses are weaknesses that we allow. You think Duke Wellington said “I’m too hung over to go to battle” the morning of Waterloo? You think D-Day was on June 6th because someone procrastinated from May 30th?

You don’t like something? Stop bitching. CHANGE it.
You’ve conquered all? Stop wondering. RAISE the bar.
Someone beat you? Stop rolling in self-pity. Get back up and OBLITERATE them.

Indulge. Enjoy. Fester.

Boys and Girls, there are no rules to this game. Someone crosses you? It’s BURN BITCH BURN. But remember there are very few people out there worth an excess of energy or emotion. Pick the right ones.

This is the death of dynasty. The authorities may make the rules, they may think they have control, but we cannot forget we are Princeton. We are her blood and her bile. And we are the generation they have never seen before.
We are the anti-Christs to save the world from the mercy of God, the self-pity that festers within the masses. Religion is the opiate of the masses, so drug them until they are nothing but slaves at your will. You have deserved this. You are Hitler the fourth, Alexander the Great the Second, Napoleon the Fifth, here to destroy the world we know.
We are history because we are the winners.

And don’t let them forget it.

My love now and forever,

Your highness.

Is this a call to arms? Against Harvard and Yale and the rest of the Ivy League? Will we soon see the rising of a Princetonian-only nation state? The enslavement of the rest of the world? Or is this simply a brilliant satire against the inanity of Princeton’s freshmen? Quick, someone friend Stephany Her RoyalHighness and find out the truth.

Obama Vs. McCain: A Dancing Queen Showdown

2008-08-12T22:31:16+00:00

Blender magazine asked the two hopefuls to name their ten favorite songs, for the sake of harmless (but telling) comparison. The results? A friend writes: "Well-- they both cite Sinatra so that cancels out. McCain has the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations," which is the greatest pop song ever recorded, but Obama has the Stones' "Gimme Shelter" which is the greatest rock song ever recorded, so that's

Luis Martinez Was Formerly a Member of ‘11

2008-08-12T19:40:36+00:00

Okay, okay. So maybe we rubbed off as a little mean in our previous post on Luis Martinez, organizer extraordinaire for Harvard’s incoming class of 2012. But we felt slightly vindicated after receiving this anonymous tip from a self-described “IvyGate superfan”:

Hi IvyGate!

I don’t know if this is any use to you anymore, but as an IvyGate superfan I felt obliged. Luis Martinez was in the Class of 2011 and started the year. He also friended everyone in that class and proceeded to join about every organization on campus, or “205 or so” according to him. I know him personally and have been friends since high school with his former roommate. He happens to be a pathological liar so you can’t really be sure of anything he says. Before leaving Harvard, he claimed to be writing a history book about racial relations in the south in the 1920s and 30s for which he was receiving advice from Drew Faust herself (and who he refers to by her first name). As dubious as this sounds I do believe that the part about being advised by President Faust is true, although he might have duped even her about his history book.

The rest of the email and some more commentary after the jump.

Around the end of first semester, one of Luis’ professors sent an e-mail to his friends and proctor about several concerns she had about him. Apparently he was rather insolent in calss and was doing quite horrible- probs because of his involvement in 250 groups. As a result he left school during Winter break and never returned. The next time I saw him was during Visiting Weekend as a member of the Class of 2012. When he left, he claimed to be leaving to work on the McCain campaign. At that time, McCain seemed to be going nowhere.

After doing some googling we discovered that Martinez was indeed a former member of the class of 2011; a small picture of him wearing a gold crown, a title (Muse), and his concentration (history), appears on the staff section of On Harvard Time, HRTV’s weekly comedy show. Whatever the reason for his leave-of-absence, however, we hope that he’ll find better academic and social success in the upcoming school year.

The New Censorship

2008-08-12T16:34:44+00:00

Three days ago, the New York Times published a thought-provoking piece entitled “Today’s Kremlin: Too Elusive for a Solzhenitsyn?” Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, who died on August 3, was one of Russia’s greatest intellectuals. His novels criticizing Soviet labor camps got him imprisoned and exiled, as well as won him the Nobel Prize in 1970, and to an entire generation of Russian intellectuals he served as an emblem of what it means to speak truth to power.

His light, however, went out with not a bang but a whimper. Though reported widely in the mainstream Russian and Western presses, there was no national day of mourning, and many people either failed to recognize his name or ignored the coverage. Why should such a seemingly instrumental figure seem unimportant, and is there any space on the world stage for a public intellectual like Solzhenitsyn today?

These are the questions the Times article explores. Solzhenitsyn’s fame was certainly bolstered by his country’s history of an established intellectual class that views literature as a form of rebellion, but his Russia was also drawn in more clearly defined, Manichean lines than today’s. He was faced with an authoritarian government that shut down dissent in brutal ways, and his subject matter, his outspokenness, and his exile all served to make him a martyr to westerners. The crucial thing was that his work was read, both by his supporters and by those he decried. Writers with his kind of views in the Soviet days could count on a reaction of some sort, for the good or for the bad.

The link between literature and current events today, however, can seem more specious. The tendency is to think of books as something to analyze or read for pleasure and international politics as what’s happening in the real world. There are certainly many Russians with profound complaints against the current Putin administration (more will likely be added to their ranks in the wake of Russia’s recent invasion of Georgia), but there are no real leading lights among them, nor is there much public demand for a Solzhenitsyn-like figure.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was plunged into a period of almost undiluted capitalism. This shock therapy resulted in mass privatization, a huge gap between the rich and poor, corruption, and a confusion of values. In this “New Russia”, one would expect that ideas, like goods and services, could for the first time compete in a free market. This, however, has not been the case. The state still has something of a thumbhold on reigning ideas, using soft power to suppress. As the Times puts it:

“Mr. Putin’s system uses — or at least holds in reserve — methods that recall the old days. But it has been careful not to create martyrs. The chess genius Garry Kasparov, a respected intellectual who tried to found an opposition and pro-democracy movement, was not exiled, executed or sent to Siberia. He was simply sidelined by being effectively banned from state television, while being allowed to speak on the radio to like-minded liberals.

Similarly, while authors who explore Russia’s dark side, like Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin and Viktor Erofeyev, have been branded “dangerous” by a pro-Putin youth group that flushed Mr. Pelevin’s books down the toilet, their books are still widely available. The journalist Anna Politskaya was assassinated after challenging the government — but by unknown gunmen rather than with the trappings of a show trial.”

The new censorship has nothing to do with banning books or sending rebels off to the gulags. It works instead by condemning dissidents to quiet irrelevancy. Liberals talk to fellow liberals, angry books languish in bookstores, and nothing gets done.

It would be naïve to try to stick it all to Putin, though. His government’s main tactic is to throw dissidents to the market, composed of ordinary citizens. It’s the citizens themselves, and the peculiar nature of the modern Russian economic system, that are responsible for most of the apathy, irony, and emasculation of the Russian opposition. As a frustrated young reader of Solzhenitsyn complains of his money-driven peers to another reporter, “The problem is that now, it’s all about consumption — this spirit that has engulfed everybody… People prefer to consume everything, the simplest things, and the faster, the better. Books are something that force you to think, reading books requires some effort. But they prefer entertainment.”

A Refugee’s Story

2008-08-12T14:09:33+00:00

Aside from his seven-foot stature, David Ngaruri Kenney’s life as an immigrant in the United States appears to be quite standard. He seems to be a first-generation pioneer who came to this country to work and is doing so successfully. Yet underneath the surface there is so much more to his story, and that is precisely why it needed to be told.

Over these past few months, I have had the privilege of working with Mr. Kenney during a summer internship. His life story affirms everything that is great about America’s promise, and everything that is broken with America’s immigration system. His memoirs trace back to his days as a simple tea farmer in central Kenya, through his violent persecution for leading a popular protest of fellow tea farmers against price controls and government regulation, and finally into his struggle to remain in his adopted home, the United States. The account of US Immigration Policy in Kenney’s autobiography is top-notch, with real-world context and analysis spelled out in simple language that the untrained can easily understand. Kenney’s account of his struggles alone have opened my eyes to the confusing and often confounding world of immigration law.

What makes Mr. Kenney’s struggle so awe-inspiring, though, is not his time as a heroic martyr in Kenya, his improbable escape to America, or even his courageous stand against myopic immigration officials. What stands out to me is the fact that this man, who barely knew English coming to this country, eventually studied his way to college and law degrees, all while going through his immigration ordeal. Needless to say, reading this book refreshed my resolve to take advantage of all that this country has to offer.

After working next to his office all summer, I now have a real understanding of Mr. Kenney’s life and his struggles, and I’m all the richer for it. Even if you don’t know Mr. Kenney personally, you cannot help but be depressed, inspired, saddened and thrilled all at once by his incredible story.