Planet Harvard

2010-03-10T17:14:18+00:00

Sorry, sunshynie2 has chosen not to publish an RSS feed. Please visit their Xanga site here: http://www.xanga.com/sunshynie2

The Problem with Deficit Neutrality

2010-03-09T20:34:34+00:00

Imagine you have a friend who has a budget problem. Every month he spends more than he earns. His credit card bills are piling up. He is clearly on an unsustainable path. Then one day he comes to you with an idea.

Friend: I am going to take off a few days from work and fly down to Bermuda for a quick vacation.

You: But isn't that expensive? Won't that just add to your growing debts?

Friend: Yes, it is expensive. But my plan is deficit-neutral. I have decided to give up that half-caf, extra-shot caramel macchiato I order at Starbucks twice every day. I really don't need that expensive drink. And if I give it up for the next three years, it will pay for my Bermuda trip.

You: Well, then, how are you going to solve the problem of your growing debts?

Friend: I am going to figure that out as soon as I return from Bermuda.

You: But in light of your budget problem, maybe you should give up Starbucks and skip the Bermuda vacation. Giving up Starbucks could be the easiest way to start balancing your budget.

Friend: You really aren't any fun, are you?

This conversation is meant to illustrate why claims of deficit-neutrality in the healthcare reform bill should not give much comfort to those worried about the U.S. fiscal situation. Even if you believe that the spending cuts and tax increases in the bill make it deficit-neutral, the legislation will still make solving the problem of the fiscal imbalance harder, because it will use up some of the easier ways to close the shortfall. The remaining options will be less attractive, making the eventual fiscal adjustment more painful.

“Competition for Careers” Leaves Princetonians Dripping in Sanctimony

2010-03-09T17:33:35+00:00

While we mentioned this in yesterday’s RagTime, we had to say a little bit more on the Princeton students who really want you to know about how very hard they’re working for jobs in banking — and their altruistic reasons for doing so. Says future finance intern Sean Pi, whom the Princetonian writer introduces taking a $300 cab ride from JFK to Princeton:

It’s extremely stressful… It does become a very precarious balancing act, trying to go to all your classes and making sure you get to all the interviews. And being prepared for the interviews, too — that’s a big thing.

Yes, carrying a multitude of responsibilities is stressful! We appreciate Pi’s difficulties — and his race into his French classroom from the airport cab [seriously, $300, though? He could have used, like, NJ Transit or whatever...] Especially given that he is trying to convey a totally disparate reality than the one that exists in his job interviews:

‘[Money] is a very, very big reason’ for entering investment banking and consulting, Pi said. ‘But in interviews, [students] will try very hard to convey that they’re not in it for the money.’

Young Timothy Koby ‘11, applying for a Goldman internship, disagreed, and made us want to chew on a wall:

I mean, sure, if some people do it [for money], fine — but that’s definitely not why I’m doing it.

Why he is doing “it” is never explained! The impetus is, we guess, money, but also the same love of prestige that makes prospective financial interns leap at the chance to tell their stories to a listening reporter, to show off. This isn’t a new problem. The Ivies may have future statesmen and artists, but they also have future versions of your parents’ annoying friends who boast about their new boat. Be warned!!

HerCampus to Sell HerStuff/Silverware?

2010-03-09T07:15:23+00:00

Sometimes we get tips too acerbically bitchy not to post. It’s certainly interesting that HerCampus, Harvard’s fem-mag founded by Windsor Hanger, is expanding into a shop by teaming up with Sasha Rhett. And it’s definitely hysterical that most of Harvard thought their grand announcement email was a silverware advertisement. Just as Editor eye-catching, however, was this sassy rhetorical:

Will Sasha Rhett actually sell a watch(a feat it has not managed up to this point), or will Windsor’s website get any traffic besides Windsor constantly refreshing her page and trying desperate to click her own ads in order to make her site the next Perez Hilton/Daily Candy for the unwitting college girl?

Sweet mother of sass… So, what do you think of HerCampus?

poorly written college women’s magazine founded by Windsor Hanger (Harvard 2010), which usually acts solely to expand its branches to numerous college campuses without producing original content and use endorsement deals to host parties (only Jack Wills would fall for that).

So not the most glowing of reviews. Final thoughts?

If this is the state of ideas coming out of Harvard, God help them.

Well, “Anonymous,” you sound like quite the Mean Girl yourself. Maybe HerCampus should hire you?

Full tip after the jump:

Her Campus, the poorly written college women’s magazine founded by Windsor Hanger (Harvard 2010), which usually acts solely to expand its branches to numerous college campuses without producing original content and use endorsement deals to host parties(only Jack Wills would fall for that), is now expanding into a shop.

What could this shop be selling, you might ask? Who would be willing to sell on this site where the current top article is on the hottest freshmen at UCSB(EW Windsor aren’t you like 22, stop cougaring now)?

The answer is Sasha Rhett, starting by another Harvard grad looking for a pet project that will get her in to HBS. Well, the joke is on founder of Sasha Rhett, Alexandra Daum. Half the student population thought that she was selling silverware when she sent out a mass email to the Harvard campus.

Now that these two less than mediocre fashion and gossip powerhouses have teamed up, what comes next? Will Sasha Rhett actually sell a watch(a feat it has not managed up to this point), or will Windsor’s website get any traffic besides Windsor constantly refreshing her page and trying desperate to click her own ads in order to make her site the next Perez Hilton/Daily Candy for the unwitting college girl.

If this is the state of ideas coming out of Harvard, God help them.

Anonymous

RagTime: Political Edition

2010-03-08T15:59:08+00:00

Brown: Mayoral candidate banned from campus after “tossing pro-life video” — only in Providence, I guess?
Columbia: Or maybe not only there: New York state politics — it just keeps getting better!
Dartmouth: Senior starts his political career really early, hoping to become either Chris Young or Charles Rangel, depending.
Harvard: Extra! Extra! Rich people, or students, or something, should spend more money, because that’s “honest”!
Princeton: “This is the first in a three-part series on careers in investment banking and consulting.”

Who pays for conference reviews?

2010-03-08T08:14:54+00:00

Why not make authors pay to submit papers to conferences?

Serving on a program committee takes a tremendous amount of time. So, one of the frequent complaints that TPC members make is when authors submit half-baked, clearly below-threshold papers a conference just to get some reviews back on their work. Personally, I feel little responsibility to write detailed reviews on papers that are clearly in the "Hail Mary" category, but I still have to read them, and that takes time. Not to mention the long-term psychological damage incurred by having to read a slew of crappy papers one after the other... I'm still in therapy after IPSN 2007 :-)

The problem is that submitting a paper to a conference is free: all it takes is a few clicks of the mouse to upload your PDF file. (Of course, I'm not accounting for the cost of doing the research and writing the paper itself.)

Let's estimate the costs associated with serving on a program committee and reviewing a stack of papers. I spend about an hour reading and writing a review for each paper that I am assigned. A highly competitive conference will assign 25 papers (or so) across one or more reviewing rounds to each TPC member, equating to roughly 25 hours of my time. At my current salary, that is worth around $1900 (give or take). Then there is the PC meeting itself. This will typically involve two days' worth of work plus travel -- let's estimate 3 full days of labor, plus airfare and hotel, adding up to another $2500.

So, with a program committee of 18 people, that works out to around $79,000 to review something like 150 paper submissions. In other words, to recoup its costs, the conference should charge authors $500 just to submit a paper. This seems to make a lot of sense.

Of course, imposing this kind of a fee would no doubt drastically reduce the number of papers that are submitted. But this seems like a good thing: it would reduce the workload for TPC members, allow conferences to operate with smaller, more focused program committees, and vastly improve the quality of the submitted papers. It would potentially also improve the quality of the reviews, since TPC members would now be paid for their time. Although the financial incentive is not that great (e.g., my hourly rate for consulting is something like 5 times my regular salary), getting paid should encourage TPC members to take the process more seriously.

The only downside I can see is people who sign up for a slew of program committees and become "professional paper reviewers", but TPC chairs would clearly have to balance this against the research credentials of the people being asked to serve. Note that many journals impose author fees for publication of the paper, but presumably you are willing to pay once you have done all the work to get the paper accepted. And conferences expect authors to show up at the conference to present the paper, which can get to be pretty expensive as well. But it seems crazy to me that the research community provides this free paper reviewing service with no negative ramifications for submitting totally unpolished work.

Hooray!

2010-03-08T06:09:20+00:00

A Life in Finance

2010-03-07T16:45:02+00:00

The great financial economist Eugene Fama offers a retrospective.

CBO on the President's Budget

2010-03-07T08:22:50+00:00

In my most recent Times column about the President's budget, I wrote,

Making matters worse, these bleak budget projections are based on relatively optimistic economic assumptions. The administration forecasts economic growth of 3.0 percent from the fourth quarter of 2009 to the fourth quarter of 2010, followed by 4.3 percent the next year. By contrast, the Congressional Budget Office predicts growth of 2.1 percent and 2.4 percent for these two years. Lower growth would mean less tax revenue, larger budget deficits and a more rapidly increasing debt-to-G.D.P. ratio.

The CBO has now reestimated the budget effects of the President's proposed policies, and indeed the CBO forecasts larger budget deficits. The CBO's total deficit projected over the decade-long budget window is $1.2 trillion larger than the administration's estimate.

The administration projects that the federal government debt held by the public would rise to 77 percent of GDP in 2020 (from 53 percent in 2009). The CBO forecasts a debt-GDP ratio in 2020 of 90 percent.

Economics in One Picture

2010-03-05T13:59:20+00:00

Source. Thanks to Joshua Gans for the pointer.

Rogoff on Japan

2010-03-05T08:59:39+00:00

Ken says it is not a pretty picture.

The Paperless Tourist

2010-03-04T18:26:00+00:00

I recently spent a week in Portugal for EWSN'10 and spent a few days in Lisbon and Porto on either end of the conference. I decided this time to go entirely paperless -- that is, not take a paper guidebook. Rather, I was going to rely entirely on my iPhone for all of the travel information. As an experiment it was largely successful, with some caveats.

Normally I take a Rough Guide or Lonely Planet guidebook with me when I travel, but this has two big disadvantages. First, I have to lug the book around wherever I go, which usually means also having a bag or something else just to carry the book when I'm out on the town. Second, having the guidebook out in a bar, restaurant, or on the street immediately pegs you as a tourist and I hate being so conspicuous. I'm all about blending in, as the picture on the right should make absolutely clear. (Pop quiz: Which one is me? Hint: I don't smoke.)

This time, I decided to rely on the iPhone Kindle app and bought the Rough Guide to Portugal for Kindle. So the entire text of the book was in my pocket at all times, and reading the book on the iPhone just makes me look like another cell-phone-obsessed tech junkie, which is fine by me. (At least in most places that I travel, although I have been to some pretty dodgy places where messing with an iPhone in public is likely to garner some unwanted attention.)

The big disappointment was that the resolution of the maps in the Kindle Rough Guide is not good enough to actually read the street names and markers -- even when zooming in on the map. I am not sure if this is unique to the iPhone or whether I'd have the same problem on a proper Kindle (I don't have one so I can't tell). I can say it isn't a problem when using a paper guidebook. So I could not really use the maps in the guidebook at all.

Of course, Google Maps is great on the iPhone and the GPS feature is a huge help when you're trying to get your bearings. However, this requires use of your data plan, which is expensive overseas. I bought a 50MB international data add-on which costs about $60. Other than having to monitor my usage it was a pretty good investment, though I really wish it were not necessary.

There are a couple of iPhone apps allowing you to download maps for offline viewing, including OffMaps (and quite a few rip off apps that simply take the same data and package it for a single city and sell you that alone for 99 cents.) They also permit use of GPS without incurring data charges. Unfortunately, they use free map sources that are much less accurate and complete than Google Maps -- the map for Coimbra was just terrible and only showed a couple of major highways, and none of the smaller back streets of the city. So the quality varies a lot.

The best iPhone app by far was the Lonely Planet Lisbon City Guide, which includes a great map with all of the restuarants, bars, etc. listed and linked to a little page telling you about the place with its hours. You can even search the guide, unlike the Kindle app which has no search capability. It's pretty terse but for a few days in a city was more than adequate. I also like how Web links can be tapped directly -- in case you want to dip into your data plan, say to check out the website for a restaurant or hotel -- the same is true in the Kindle e-books as well.

The final caveat was the limited battery life of the iPhone. The Kindle app does not eat a lot of power (I've read for hours on it with hardly a dent in the battery) but use of the GPS is pretty energy-intensive. While traveling I was using the iPhone a lot more than I usually do, and found that by late afternoon or early evening I was getting into dangerous territory, necessitating a quick recharge at the hotel if I was going to last the evening. Fortunately this coincides with my usual tourist siesta so it was not a problem.

If it were not for the poor resolution of the maps in Kindle Rough Guide, this combination of apps would have been an ideal solution for travel without a paper guidebook. If they can just fix that I'm ready to conquer the world without a book.

UPDATE: “White People… PRETTY White People” – Yale’s 50 Most Beautiful List is, well, Racist

2010-03-04T06:54:35+00:00

There was something about Rumpus’ recently released 50 Most Beautiful list that seemed a little off. No, not the typos, falsifications, or numbers accidentally written in Arabic (seriously). We couldn’t quite put our finger on it. Something about the gradient: white after white after white. Maybe their printers ran out of black ink? If only…

Apparently, in the gossip rag’s esteemed opinion, a disproportionate number of Yale’s pretty people are, well, of the Caucasian variety. We’ll let the ‘50 most’ numbers speak for themselves.

For comparison’s sake, here are the racial demographics of Yale as a whole, courtesy of Questbridge:

Caucasian: 68%

African American: 9%

Asian American: 14%

Hispanic: 8%

Native American: 1%

(FYI, 20 out of the 29 Rumpus-ites who worked on the issue are white… yup, about 68%)

So, using the power of math, our crack quants at IvyGate HQ have calculated that Rumpus’ 50 Most Beautiful List is 21.6% whiter than Yale in general. Ouch.

So much for the post-racial America, Barry.

RagTime: Club Plan and Cheerios Edition

2010-03-03T16:07:40+00:00

Brown: “Brown Dining Services’ new Club Plan meal option, which allows seniors to enjoy gourmet food at the Faculty Club, kicked off this year and attracted four subscribers.”
Columbia: This blurb on an Italian restaurant has — so far! — 51 comments. Welcome to the internet, Spectrum!
Cornell: “Wind turbines. PRETTY WIND TURBINES.” -Cornell Daily Sun
Harvard: Faust indicates that she is literally the opposite of Larry Summers — like, if they were in the same room, the room would explode.
Princeton: The image accompanying this article, of a Princeton girl buying Cheerios at the supermarket in lieu of an eating club is poignant. Very penultimate-scene-of-Hurt Locker. It’s after the jump!

Gorton on the Financial Crisis

2010-03-03T13:14:52+00:00

Yale economist Gary Gorton offers a very readable Q&A explaining his view of recent events.

That Depends On What the Meaning of “Class Day Speaker” Is

2010-03-03T02:23:31+00:00

Hide your co-eds. Noted badass, saxophonist, and first black president, Bill Clinton, LAW ‘73, will be delivering Yale’s 2010 Class Day speech.

His wife (also a Senator) Hillary did the honors in 2001. This year, Harvard, having settled for Christiane Amanpour, has definitively lost the fame-game.

But after Christopher Buckley’s deliciously sassy 2009 speech, the former prez will have his work cut out for him. Maybe he’ll bring those two cute Korean journalists he rescued. Maybe he’ll inhale.

At the very least, he’d better not fall asleep.

The True American Heroes: Harvard Undergrads

2010-03-02T19:50:17+00:00

Harvard Magazine brings us the very special story of a group of people who don’t get the credit or respect they deserve. We’re talking about Harvard undergraduates. We connect you to their second-person singular, for some reason?, account of the life of Becky Cooper ‘10, pictured.

You wake up each morningwith a fever; you feel like a shadow of yourself. But no time for sickness today—the Adams House intramural crew has one of its thrice-weekly practices at 6a.m., and you…will…row. Some mornings, you watch the sunrise from Lamont Library after hitting your study groove there around 11 the night before and bushwhacking through assignments during the quiet time between 3 a.m. and 5.

Good thing none of “your” commitments sound as if they’re exactly… um… non-skippable. The indefatigible Cooper has

hosted a two-hour weekly jazz show on WHRB, and as a freshman acted in Ivory Tower, the long-running Harvard TV soap opera viewable on YouTube. (Last summer, she also acted in an independent film shot by a friend in Miami, learning American Sign Language for the part.) In the summer of 2007, Cooper tasted some ravishing ravioli di zucca (pumpkin)—“I was in heaven”—and determined to learn Italian and cook in Italy.

Where does she find the time… to be totally self-indulgent, all the time! Like, ugh, maybe if you’re “constantly sick,” take it as a warning sign and call off your food column in the Crimson rather than bragging to an alumni magazine about how scattered and distracted your attentions constantly are? You’re already into Harvard. There’s nothing to prove, dear. And this continues for SIX PAGES. I think I’m the one with the fever — I am out of things to say, so I am but a shadow of the blogger I once knew. And I slept the normal, human amount last night!

IvyGate Presidential Fame Caucus: Drew Faust

2010-03-01T16:58:06+00:00

This is the seventh installment of a series studying the persona of each Ivy League president—their bank accounts, their haircuts, and the extent to which they’re known and loved. Here’s Harvard President Drew Faust, who may or may not have made a deal with the devil in exchange for knowledge.

It feels wrong to do anything but to cut to the chase and just start talking about money, seeing as that’s really the story of anything Harvard these days. Drew Faust doesn’t seem to have wanted to be the main character in this particular story, but them’s the breaks. I submit for the record this charming little snippet of dialogue:

Charlie Rose: Is anything different about the job than you expected?

Drew Faust: Well losing, as you said, $11 billion dollars of the endowment was certainly a surprise.

Drew Faust Catherine Drew Gilpin Faust is an academic’s breed of university president who was picked in large part for that reason after he who shalt not be named said that thing about women and science that time which shalt not be repeated (so yeah, the fact that Faust is woman is relevant here, too). But now, the fact that she’s not All About the Benjamins is what’s really relevant. This is really just the right time to say: “mo money, mo problems.”

So this is the inconvenient truth:

[Note: Graph removed at the request of Harvard Magazine, who are probably mad we made fun of them. The image is of a plummeting-downward graph.]

Doesn’t it totally look like Al Gore’s graph in reverse, lol! Except this isn’t the world, this is Harvard. (Yes, Harvard students, there is in fact a very distinct difference.)

Anyhoo, when the endowment tanked by about 30 percent—that’s $11 billion— a year after she came into office, this became her story. And that Vanity Fair article about it this summer captured problem in a sentence:

Harvard is not a business, nor is it being run like a business; it’s a distinguished, high-minded research university, arguably the greatest university in the nation.”

So that’s dumb because it’s both. Like, there’s that whole thing called Harvard Corporation, which runs the university and, you know, the business. Like say, the clothing line, “to combine the power of Harvard with the power of a plaid shirt.” Obviously a university is a business—that’s why it’s got an accountant and a lawyer, right? (Good luck with the IRS, you guys!)

And yeah, Harvard has Drew Faust, the academic’s breed of president, overseeing the piggy bank. The author of six books, Faust’s latest, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer and National Book Award in 2008. (Look on the bright side, right?) Yep, she’s a total Civil War buff, which she said was destined from her time growing up in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley:

“I played Civil War as a child. My brother made me be Grant because he had to be Lee. It took me a long time to realize that I actually won. He didn’t tell me that part.”

But Faust isn’t really a war hero herself, she’s actually pretty mellow. As Boston Magazine reported:

…she does not compel attention. A tall, angular woman, Faust can look stern when she is not smiling, and despite her southern roots (she’s from Virginia) she projects a Puritan austerity. She was wearing dark slacks, a black blouse, and a gray jacket. A publicity shot of Faust while Radcliffe dean showed her decked out in funky, oversize hoop earrings. Now she was uniformed in discreet gold hoops, a gold necklace, and gold wire-rimmed glasses. …Drew Faust would love to spend her tenure teaching graduate students, promoting the arts and the environment, ribbon-cutting at new dance and theater spaces—an NPR presidency, you might say.”

So she didn’t sign up for what is arguably the worst financial debacle in Harvard’s history. And her mellow academic demeanor isn’t necessarily the kind of president an anxious university would go for in a moment of fiscal crisis. And the Boston article quoted “a professor who knows and likes Faust, ‘Being president is not a natural fit for her. She has to work at it.’”

But if Faust really is just what Harvard needed after Larry Summers, then this dramatic economic challenge might be just the thing for Faust to prove it. Forbes seems optimistic, naming her a power woman of 2009 for laying off 275 staff members, denying raises to 9,000 faculty and non-union staff, and offering 1,600 people early retirement. You go, girl!

Nope, Faust is not afraid to make deep cuts—even the deepest cut of them all: cookie time. No more cookies at faculty meetings, no more bacon for upperclassmen in their dorms, “it could be anything next; nobody really knows.”

Her salary is on the low end of the Ivy League spectrum—prompting former Harvard Dean Harry Lewis to say, “Of all the lists we top, I’m glad Harvard is not number one on this list.” According to the latest count from the Chronicle of Higher Education, she gets a $640,000 paycheck plus $53,739 in benefits, and then there’s the $81,304 expense account, which all adds up to $693,739.

And here’s the super legit math on Faust:

[Salary - (expected cost of haircut + Civil War action figures) + Google hits + books published)] / years in which Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences expects a $130 million deficit =

[$693,739- ($15 + $50) + 958,000+ 6)] / 2 =

825, 840 Ivy President Points!

Last but not least: Dartmouth President Jim Yong Kim!

Life Expectancy at Retirement

2010-03-01T16:48:57+00:00

Source: The Economist. Click on graphic to enlarge.

Americans, as well as citizens of many other advanced nations, now spend about twice as many years in retirement as they did a generation or two ago. During that time, they expect the government to provide them with income support and healthcare. Is it any wonder that we face serious fiscal problems?

I hope the president's fiscal commission makes raising the age of eligibility for these programs one of its main recommendations.

Ivy Players Shoot For The NBA

2010-03-01T15:53:49+00:00

There’s about a 10-percent chance that an Ivy Leaguer is headed to the NBA next year. Senior Jeremy Lin of Harvard, along with Seniors Jeff Foote and Ryan Wittman of Cornell have all accepted invitations to compete in an NBA pre-draft invitational tournament at which 200 NBA managers and scouts will be watching closely.

The tournament, which originated in 1953, will be taking place April 7-10 at Churchland High School in Portsmouth, Virginia. Suitably, it’s called the 2010 Portsmouth Invitational Tournament. For four days, the players will compete in a 12-game tournament while simultaneously crossing their fingers behind their backs, searching for four-leaf clovers and rubbing rabbits feet. In the past, the tournament has kick-started the professional careers of players like Dennis Rodman and Scottie Pippen. Last year six players from the tournament were selected in the draft; so basically Lin, Foote and Wittman will only have to be better than the 58 other amazing basketball superstars to get the job they’ve always been dreaming of. Well, good luck, boys!

Just a Spelling Lesson

2010-03-01T11:23:56+00:00

Quite a few readers have emailed me comments on my new paper Spreading the Wealth Around: Reflections Inspired by Joe the Plumber. I appreciate the input.

The most frequent comment is to point out an alleged error: "just deserts" should be "just desserts," I am told.

So here I am with a spelling lesson: In the expression just deserts, the word deserts means that which one deserves. It may be pronounced like the sweet things you eat after a meal, but it is spelled like the spans of dry land.

For example, consider this dialogue:

Father: If you eat all your vegetables, Bobby, you can have a cookie and ice cream after dinner.

Bobby: Will you also pay me a dollar, Daddy?

Father: No, Bobby. If you eat all your vegetables, your just deserts are just desserts.

By the way, another reader points out that yesterday's Doonesbury is related to the topic of Just Deserts Theory.

RagTime: Filthy/Gorgeous Edition

2010-03-01T08:40:59+00:00

Cornell: “I feel that an event that cost $27,000 and took 11 months to plan speaks for itself.” Um, right!
Dartmouth: SO IT BEGINS. (Student Council, we mean!) Life is about to get sooo much more irritating, you guys.
Harvard: There’s a new Egyptology professor — does this mean Indiana Jones is like real life now?
Princeton: Ivy Council to meet at Princeton, will accomplish a great deal, probably.
Yale: Student scores $666 on Jeopardy!, the real version for adults even! (Your IvyGate blogger feels a bit amateur now.)

A New Member of the Pigou Club

2010-03-01T06:10:03+00:00

Thomas Friedman reports:

[Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican,] proposes “putting a price on carbon,” starting with a very focused carbon tax, as opposed to an economywide cap-and-trade system, so as to spur both consumers and industries to invest in and buy new clean energy products.

Now who’s a flip-flopper?

2010-02-26T19:43:27+00:00

Good news: the House voted yesterday to extend unemployment benefits for another 30 days.

Bad news: Jim Bunning stayed up well past his bedtime to block the Senate from extending unemployment until they specified how they would pay for it.

Hilarious news: Remember when the Senate voted to re-establish pay-as-you-go rules on budgetary measures? Jim Bunning voted against it.

Well played, Senator. Well played.

Spreading the Wealth Around

2010-02-26T17:30:02+00:00

Over the past few years, I have done some thinking and writing about the distribution of income and optimal tax policy. I have collected some of my thoughts in this new paper, which later today I will be presenting as my presidential address to the Eastern Economic Association.

Thank God for Bill Nye

2010-02-26T05:27:15+00:00

If you’ve been watching YouTube trends over the past few weeks (me? procrastinate? never!) you may have noticed a familiar face. BILL NYE! Yes, the nerdy and lovable bowtie-wearing science geek has been everywhere from The O’Reilly Factor to the Rachel Maddow Show and, not surprisingly, has emerged as the voice of reason against an increasingly indignant body of climate change skeptics. If you don’t remember him, here’s the old theme song to refresh your memory.

Recently, Bill has been the go-to guy for news networks in need of someone to defend the view that humans activity is causing climate change. Most recently, he was on Fox News debating the topic with a meteorologist named Joe Bastardi (what an unfortunate name). Here’s the dispute:

No offense to meteorologists, who do a wonderful job of telling me just how screwed I am when I arrive at the airport to see a foot and a half of snow on the ground. But put up against a career science educator, the discussion is comical. The ‘climate change guy’ has spent his entire life explaining abstract scientific ideas (most of which are difficult to observe and measure) to a demographic with little or no background in science. He has a BS from Cornell in Mechanical Engineering and three honorary PhDs, and along with making cheeky science videos on PBS, he found time to invent a “hydraulic pressure resonance suppressor” that is still being used on Boeing 747s (can anyone translate that into humanities-speak?).

The skeptic? Oh, he’s known for being a bad weather forecaster. To be fair, Bastardi has a BS in Meteorology from Penn State. But I don’t know if that makes you expert enough to discredit the 20-year-long record of scientific work done by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Bastardi’s arguments are terrifying. He ends the piece by discounting long-term planning, asking, “What are we worried about right now?!” Bill, in perfect form, responds:

The world is getting warmer. Carbon dioxide is a very strong greenhouse gas. It has a very long residence time in the atmosphere. It is making the world warmer, along with methane and other human activities. In whose best interest is it to deny this stuff?

This isn’t the only time Bill’s gotten feisty. On Rachel Maddow, he called climate change skeptics “anti-patriotic.” This kind of language is desperately needed in reframing the debate over what to do about climate change. Now, I’m not advocating for intellectual despotism – if a respected scientific organization offers a legitimate, peer-reviewed study that says that we have nothing to fear from climate change, I’ll probably have to shut up. The fact is that (even after accounting for the, frankly, idiotic choices of the ‘ClimateGate’ scholars), the vast majority of scientific findings indicate that we are damaging our environment at a horrifying rate.

If we really want to get past the obstructions of the climate change skeptics who want to maintain the status, we need more people like Bill Nye who have the courage (and the pure intelligence) to reframe debate. You go, Bill Nye, the Science Guy. I’m glad you’re back.

More on Ranking CEAs

2010-02-25T14:59:18+00:00

The Economist takes up the challenge.

Don’t want that pregnancy? Don’t try falling down the stairs

2010-02-25T04:17:07+00:00

Utah, in response to a case where a woman hired a man to punch her in the hopes that she would miscarry but couldn’t be charged under any laws at the time, has recently passed legislation that groups miscarriage under the heading of illegal abortions. The law would prosecute those who knowingly engage in risky behavior while pregnant (even if they didn’t intend for it to result in a miscarriage), which could potentially include domestic violence victims who stay with their partners. State Senator Margaret Dayton, the Republican who sponsored the bill, said that the law wouldn’t target victims, but would try to prevent other forms of illegal abortion. Still, there’s no knowing what exactly would count as risky behavior and how far the law would reach.

You can read more about it here, here, & here.

An Interview

2010-02-23T21:48:13+00:00

With my favorite economist.

IvyGate Presidential Fame Caucus: Shirley Tilghman

2010-02-23T19:54:14+00:00

This is the sixth installment of a series studying the persona of each Ivy League president—their bank accounts, their haircuts, and the extent to which they’re known and loved. Here’s Princeton President Shirley M. Tilghman, who overcame the odds to become a highly successful scientist and Ivy president despite having been born in Canada.

Meet Shirley Tilghman, not to be confused with Wild West gunslinger Bill Tilghman. You can distinguish her by her Meryl Str eep circa Devil Wears Prada hairdo, though she is also partial to green hair and sky-high mohawks. Tilghman can be spotted in “lucky orange shoes,” complemented by an orange blazer.

Tilghman knows what she likes: the movie All About Eve, and the jazzy jams of Duke Ellington. She knows, too, what she doesn’t like: improper word usage—including the use of “impact” as a verb—and when students Bicker (not the argument kind, the eating club exclusivity kind). Despite the resolute tenacity of club officers who hold their tradition of weeding out Princeton’s apparently existent lamebrains by a process too elite to go by the name of rush, Tilghman said :

I think the Bicker process is one that divides the student body, that it causes a lot of pain for students who are unsuccessful. If we could evolve into a system where there is a less divisive way for students to become members of eating clubs, that’s what I would like to see…

She may sometimes take a controversial stance, but Tilghman is full of ideas. To confront binge drinking on campus, she wrote in the Daily Princetonian:

I have often thought that the single most effective thing we could do to discourage high-risk drinking is to film students while they are drunk and then force them to watch the videos when they are cold sober the next day. It is not pretty.

And though some students found her approach to be “out of touch,” she has at least one vote: “I think it would be hilarious if we filmed drunk people and made them watch their videos. What a sick idea.”

On the other hand, Tilghman isn’t about to rule out fun altogether. When asked if the university would sponsor a center for chastity, her response was “a firm ‘no.’”

When she landed the gig in 2001, she took over for a president who was too aloof for most students’ tastes, and Tilghman set out to connect with the campus. She’s sort of done that, but not as much as she could—especially given some of her unpopular calls on student life and admissions.

So she does have her critics on campus and off—including Ann Coulter, who blogged:

And what is Obama’s justification for keeping Shirley M. Tilghman as president of Princeton University…That university is clearly teetering on the brink of moral bankruptcy.

But Tilghman also has fans, like the student who shaved her initials “SMT” into the back of his head at the end of a semester in her class. Plus, she’s a two timer at Charlie Rose’s roundtable and she gets a tip of the hat from Stephen Colbert, who spoke at Princeton’s Class Day in 2008.

But who cares what they all think anyway? Tilghman says she’ll be out by 2013, so she may as well spend these last few years:

Recklessly transforming Princeton into what they think it should be, no matter how many alumni they piss off, no matter how many generations of students they have to ignore, and certainly no matter how many of the over 250 years of the history they have to demolish to succeed.

It pays well regardless. She makes $783,459 at prosperous Princeton, according to the latest count from the Chronicle of Higher Education. The breakdown: a $738,432 paycheck, $45,027 in benefits, and an expense account totaling $74,810.

And for more numbers, here’s another entirely legitimate formula to calculate this Ivy president’s worth:

[Salary - (expected cost of haircut + orange shoe shine) + Google hits + expense account)] / years until expected retirement =

[$738,432 - ($80 + $25) + 1,110,000 + $74,810)] / 3 =

641,045.67 Ivy President Points!

Next up: Harvard president Drew Faust!

Sex and the Spiegel

2010-02-23T16:10:27+00:00

Evil Daystar, a German blog, concurs with my argument that Der Spiegel was sexist in their depiction of me. The recap: the German newsmagazine, which is considered progressive, described me in a mini-skirt, which 1) did not exist, and 2) served only to distinguish me from my sexually chaste counterpart.

Granted, the male writer of the article definitely found True Love Revolution, Harvard’s abstinence club, a little silly and had no qualms about poking fun at co-president Rachel Wagley. German commenters have pointed out all week that perhaps my criticism is unwarranted in light of the fact that the article is more on my side than on TLR’s. (And despite my very basic German knowledge, I did realize that much.) But you know what the writer should’ve done in that case? Lay off the sexist remarks. If there are substantive arguments against preaching no-sex-until-marriage as the golden standard, then one doesn’t need to resort to sensationalism to get the point across.

I have no idea if the rest of the content on Evil Daystar is this progressive, but I found this commentary incredibly refreshing. If you understand German, check it out.

Financing Healthcare Reform

2010-02-23T11:10:25+00:00

Today's Washington Post reports:

Obama's proposal takes the more modest Senate bill as his basic framework. But, in what is perhaps his proposal's most notable feature, he scales back the Senate bill's main revenue source, a tax on high-cost insurance that he has strongly supported. Instead, he would impose a new tax on the unearned income of the wealthy.

In my view, this is a step in the wrong direction. The tax on so-called Cadillac health plans made sense as a way to reduce the existing tax incentive toward excessively generous health insurance, which in turn encourages excessive use of healthcare. That reform is, apparently, now gone. Instead, the current administration proposal is to increase the tax on capital income, reducing the incentive for saving and investment.

In other words, the new proposal would do less to bend the curve of rising healthcare costs and more to impede long-run economic growth. This change was probably made to attract more House Democrats. It will likely make the plan even less attractive to congressional Republicans.

By the way, according to CBO director Doug Elmendorf, the new administration proposal has too few details for the CBO to provide cost estimates. Perhaps more details will be available in the days to come.

EWSN 2010 Keynote Video

2010-02-23T08:07:04+00:00

I've posted the video for my keynote at EWSN 2010 below. You can check out the full resolution version at blip.tv.

How Not to Stop Healthcare Inflation

2010-02-22T21:10:33+00:00

The NY Times reports:

President Obama will propose on Monday giving the federal government new power to block excessive rate increases by health insurance companies, as he rolls out comprehensive legislation to revamp the nation’s health care system, White House officials said Sunday.

Very, very strange. You would think that all those future Nobel-prize-winning economists working for the President would explain to him the history and economics of government price controls. Imposing price controls certainly wasn't President Nixon's finest hour.

Maybe President Obama should instead follow in President Ford's footsteps and start wearing a WHINE button on his lapel, for Whip Healthcare Inflation Now, Egads!

Feckless would be one step better than counterproductive.

The Second Annual Progressive Soiree

2010-02-22T19:44:42+00:00

When: Thursday, March 4th, 7-9PM

Where: Kirkland JCR

What: Join us to celebrate the progressive community on campus with food, drink, and general merriment. There’ll be plenty of liberal- ism and (non-tariffed) tea to go around, so come to meet and mingle with like-minded Harvard students!

The ERP

2010-02-22T17:54:06+00:00

CEA Chair Christy Romer blogs about the new Economic Report of the President. She also provides the link to the report itself.

One of my former staff at the CEA takes note of this sentence:

This past year, the Council has been blessed with staff of a caliber not seen since the glory days of the CEA in the 1960s, when future Nobel laureates Robert Solow and Kenneth Arrow were senior economists and James Tobin was a member.

Really? I am impressed with the current CEA staff as well, but this seems a bit of an overstatement. I wonder who on the current staff is expected to win a Nobel prize.

I am proud of the staff I put together when I was CEA chair, and I am sure other CEA chairmen are as well. Yet I would venture a guess that the post-1960s peak in the caliber of the CEA came in 1982-83. I was a junior staffer then, along with University of Chicago economist John Cochrane, but put that aside. Martin Feldstein was the chair, and the senior staff included Larry Summers and Paul Krugman. That makes three winners of the John Bates Clark Award--a feat that, I suspect, has not been repeated since.

Here is a project for some ambitious blogger: Go to old ERPs, which list the CEA members and staff, and collate them with data on citations. That would provide one way to judge objectively (albeit imperfectly) the quality of CEA economists over time.

Update: Here.

RagTime: Ice Dancing Edition

2010-02-22T14:31:01+00:00

Princeton: You get a Kindle! You get a Kindle! Everybody gets a Kindle!… and they won’t help you study.
Brown: You may get Rashid Khalidi for a lecture, Brown, but Columbia gets him every day.
Harvard: Famous figure skater makes her classmates feel even more inadequate.
Dartmouth: You guys, distribution requirements are really hard to complete!
Yale: “[The vegan options] take room away from other food that tastes better,” says the whiniest Yale undergraduate in the world.

Highlights from EWSN 2010

2010-02-22T09:46:19+00:00

I was invited to give the keynote speech at the European Wireless Sensor Networks conference in Coimbra, Portugal. This was a fantastic location for a conference -- Coimbra has one of the oldest universities in Europe, over 700 years old. It's a beautiful city. EWSN is the European counterpart to conferences such as SenSys and IPSN. It is a very different crowd than typically attends those events. I learned a lot about a couple of the big EU-sponsored sensor nets projects including CoNet and GINSENG. Interestingly, the Contiki OS seems to be pretty popular amongst the European research groups, in contrast to the TinyOS-dominated US landscape.

My keynote was entitled "The Next Decade of Sensor Networking" and I tried to argue that the field is running the risk of becoming stagnant unless we define some big research challenges that will carry us for the next decade. I've blogged about these themes here before. I delivered the talk in "Larry Lessig" style -- having written the "script" as an essay and then making slides to highlight the key points, rather than starting with the slides and ad libbing the voiceover as I usually do. I'll post a video here soon - the slides are more than 50 MB and don't really go well on their own.

A couple of highlights from the conference, though I had to miss the last day.

Jayant Gupchup from Johns Hopkins gave a talk on Phoenix, an approach to reconstructing the timestamps for sensor data after the fact. The idea is to not use a time synchronization protocol, but rather have nodes log enough data that can be used for post-hoc time correction. This is an interesting problem that was motivated by their experiences running sensor nets for more than a year, in which they observed a lot of node reboots (which throw off simple timing approaches) and extended periods when there was no suitable global timebase. The Phoenix approach collects information on nodes' local timestamps and beacons from GPS-enabled nodes at the base station, and performs a time rectification technique, similar to the one we developed for correcting our volcano sensor network data. Phoenix achieves around a 1 sec data accuracy (which is acceptable for environmental monitoring) even when the GPS clock source is offline for a significant period of time.

Raghu Ganti from UIUC gave a talk on "Privacy Preserving Reconstruction of Multidimensional Data Maps in Vehicular Participatory Sensing." The title is a bit unwieldy, but the idea is to reconstruct aggregate statistics from a large number of users reporting individual sensor data, such as their vehicle speed and location. The problem is that users don't want to report their true speed and location, but we still want the ability to generate aggregate statistics such as the mean speed on a given road. Their approach is to add noise to each user's data according to a model that would make it difficult for an attacker to recover the user's original data. They make use of the E-M algorithm to estimate the density distribution of the data in aggregate.

Although the paper considered a number of attacks against the scheme, I was left wondering about a simple binary revelation of whether a user had recently left their home (similar to PleaseRobMe.com). One solution is to delay the data reporting, although one would be able to learn the approximate time that an individual was likely to leave home each day. The other approach is to perturb the timing data as well, but this would seem to interfere with the ability to ask questions about, say, traffic levels at certain times of day.

Finally, Christos Koninis from the University of Patras gave a talk on federating sensor network testbeds over the Internet, allowing one to run testbed experiments across multiple testbeds simultaneously, with "virtual" radio links between nodes on different testbeds. So you could combine a run on our MoteLab testbed (around 190 nodes) with the TWIST testbed (220 nodes) to get a virtual testbed of more than 400 nodes. This is a very cool idea and potentially extremely useful for doing larger-scale sensor net experiments. Their approach involves routing data over a node's serial port through a gateway server to the other end where it is injected into the destination testbed at the appropriate point. They can emulate a given packet loss across each virtual link, not unlike Emulab. Unfortunately they did not really consider making the cross-testbed packet transmission timings realistic, so it would be difficult to use this approach to evaluate a MAC protocol or time sync protocol. It also does not properly emulate RF interference, but I think this is still a very interesting and useful ideas. Another cool aspect of this project is that they can add virtual simulated nodes to the test
bed, allowing one to run mixed-mode experiments.

BREAKING: Yale Gets Gender-Neutral Housing for Seniors

2010-02-22T01:31:36+00:00

Yale College Council President and GoodCrushDarling Jon Wu just emailed all undergrads with some surprising and promiscuous (in the old-timey sense) news: Yale will offer next year’s seniors the option to live in Mixed Gender Suites. Not too much of a shocker, given that every other Ivy has already taken the gender-neutral plunge. Regardless, the email has been met with campus-wide celebration and student declarations of “victory” (after all, these kids camped out in the New Haven cold to rally for the program).

And, just like the Hanover Police, the man finally caved in. Yale’s Class of 2011 will get to mingle in unisex common-rooms and blur meaningless, culture-imposed gender lines as “part of a pilot program,” which the YCC hopes to extend to the rest of the College after a year of review. But don’t worry kids, this won’t be a complete free-for-all. The new policy:

1. Each bedroom within a suite must be single sex. A man and a woman may not occupy a double bedroom, but they can elect to live in separate single bedrooms within a suite.

So no hetero-roomie-sex, for now…

2. No student will be assigned to a mixed-gender suite against his or her will.

…or imprisonment (?).

3. Mixed-gender housing groups will get no advantage or disadvantage in the housing selection process. If they are not able to select a suite that can accommodate them, they may need to break into different groups that may or may not be mixed gender.

Plus, ostensible fairness! And finally,

4. Students in intimate relationships are strongly discouraged from entering into a shared suite arrangement.

So, basically, you can’t be like this girl... for many reasons.

The new policy found unanimous approval from the Yale Corporation (in the wake of a successful and liberating Sex Week), as well as our friends over at The Bullblog. Here at IvyGate, we’ll be reserving judgment until we see how the pilot program fares. Questions remain… Will it coax back the unwashed off-campus hordes? Will Jesse Morrell make an angry return? What will become of the fine art of sexiling? How will the trannies respond? How will Jesus respond? And has noone considered the cooties?

This breaking news brought to you by a very tired and midterm-addled IvyGate EIC. For our past coverage of Yale’s housing sturm und drang, check out this excellent analysis from our predecessor, Adam (he lives on!).

And, for what it’s worth, read the full, earth-shaking YCC email after the jump.

Dear Yalies,

We are proud to announce that after a two years of advocacy and a very positive meeting this weekend between the Yale College Council Executive Board and the Yale Corporation, Yale University will be providing seniors the option for Mixed Gender suites in the 2010-2011 academic school year. It is our hope that after a year of review, this option will be extended to juniors and sophomores.

Yale University has adopted a modified version of the Fall 2009 Yale College Council proposal stipulating the following conditions:

1. Each bedroom within a suite must be single sex. A man and a woman may not occupy a double bedroom, but they can elect to live in separate single bedrooms within a suite.
2. No student will be assigned to a mixed-gender suite against his or her will.
3. Mixed-gender housing groups will get no advantage or disadvantage in the housing selection process. If they are not able to select a suite that can accommodate them, they may need to break into different groups that may or may not be mixed gender.
4. Students in intimate relationships are strongly discouraged from entering into a shared suite arrangement.

History

In December 2007, the YCC created a committee to explore the option of Mixed Gender Housing.

In January 2008, the Yale College Council voted 24-2-1 to officially support a Mixed Gender Housing option.

Then Dean (now Provost) Peter Salovey appointed an ad-hoc committee to take up the consideration of Mixed Gender Housing.

In February 2009, the Council of Masters reviewed the Committee’s recommendations and endorsed them.

The Officers of the University and the Yale Corporation requested that action be tabled pending gathering of further data.

At that time, Dean Mary Miller appointed Deans Marichal Gentry and John Meeske to serve as a task force to continue study of similar housing policies and programs at other institutions.

In September 2009, using information from peer student governments, the YCC performed a comparative study of housing policies across the Ivy League.

In October 2009, upon the recommendation of Dean Mary Miller, the YCC also ran a case study of the senior class of one residential college to examine the potential effects of Mixed Gender Housing at Yale on a microlevel.

At the same time, the YCC approached the Residential College Deans and Housing Committees to learn more about how a mixed gender option could fit into the respective housing processes

In November 2009, the YCC reported its findings to Dean Mary Miller and Nina Glickson (Assistant to the President)

Last Friday, the YCC presented its findings to members of the Yale Corporation. The proposal was met with unanimous approval from all members present.

This new housing policy will be evaluated during its first year; a committee of masters and deans will report to the Yale College Deans Office, Council of Masters, and University Officers in January 2011. The program for rising seniors will be launched in the room draw to take place in colleges after break.

If you have any questions, please feel free to email us at ycceboard@panlists.yale.edu.

Thank you,

Your 2010-2011 YCC Executive Board

President- Jon Wu
(SY’11)
Vice President- Abigail Cheung
(TD’11)
Treasurer- Adam Thomas
(BR ’12)
Secretary- Mike Bronfin
(JE ’11)
Events Director- Mathilde Williams
(SM ’11)
UOFC Chair- Erin Fackler
(JE ’11)

What unions are getting...

2010-02-21T19:42:58+00:00

....from the Obama Administration, according to The Economist:

Union leaders such as Mr Trumka and Andy Stern, the leader of the more moderate Service Employees International Union, are regular guests at the White House. Mr Obama has revoked some Bush-era executive orders that unions hate and issued a few they adore. He has appointed union insiders to top jobs, allowed Congress to add “buy American” provisions to the stimulus bill, risked a trade war with China to please tyre-workers, let other trade deals wither and brazenly favoured unions when bailing out car firms.

But his biggest favour has been green, foldable and borrowed. For example, he encourages the use of “Project Labour Agreements” on big federal construction projects, whereby contractors must recruit through a union hiring hall. Such agreements inflate costs by 12-18%, according to David Tuerck of Suffolk University, and were banned under Mr Bush. Even where PLAs are not in force, federal contractors are obliged to pay “prevailing” wages. That actually means something close to the union rates, which is nice for the workers in question but means that taxpayers get fewer roads and schools for their money.

What I've Been Reading

2010-02-20T19:11:25+00:00

I enjoy good memoirs. At their best, they can give you a sense of what it would be like to lead a different life, to walk in another's shoes. Political memoirs are usually a disappointment, as the writers typically have an agenda, such as establishing a place in history or angling for the next job. They seem more like spin than truthful self-assessment. Memoirs by nerdy academics, rare as they are, are among my favorite, in part because I can easily see myself in them and in part because the authors are often brutally honest.

All this is a prelude to a book recommendation: My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance, by Emanuel Derman. I have never been a physicist or worked on Wall Street, but this book gives a good sense of what both career paths are like.

The book was written, by the way, before the recent financial crisis. As a result, one does not get a sense of how the author would put recent events into perspective. But by the end of the book, the author is skeptical enough about the use and abuse of financial models that I suspect he would not be terribly surprised when they went awry.

The Robin Hood tax

2010-02-19T22:18:35+00:00

There are a few things that suddenly ignite my urge to blog again. This piece a couple of days ago by Dominique Strauss-Kahn urging nations to coordinate their approaches to financial regulation almost did it. Here is a little excerpt:

Imagine a financial holding company that owns a commercial bank, an investment bank, an insurer and a derivatives dealer. In good times, only the consolidated entity matters. In bad times, each subsidiary in trouble must be sorted out individually with rules and procedures that vary by the legal form of the subsidiary and that might work to the detriment of the consolidated entity, financial system and economy. Now imagine trying to deal with a conglomerate with 100 subsidiaries across numerous jurisdictions and you will be closer to the complex reality that was Lehman.

Sounds to me like a great argument for why we should not allow banks to turn into all those things and have 100 subsidiaries. Here is my argument against international coordination, and here is Stiglitz’s.

But on a more constructive note, everyone should see the delicious video that the Robin Hood Tax campaign has put together in support of a small financial transaction tax.

IvyGate Presidential Fame Caucus: Ruth Simmons

2010-02-19T18:04:09+00:00

This is the fifth installment of a series studying the persona of each Ivy League president—their bank accounts, their haircuts, and the extent to which they’re known and loved. I’ll be covering each president one by one, in order of who gets the most green for tending to the Ivy. Here’s Brown President Ruth Simmons—part time T.V. star, full time woman.

Ruth Simmons is a whole lotta woman.

For one thing, she used to be the president of Smith College, which is woman central in more ways than one. After having been named Newsweek’s “Ms. Woman of the Year” and Time’s best college president in America, the size of her stardom can easily be classified as double-D. I mean, this glamorous lady is BFF-status with India.Arie, with whom she shares the quality of not being the average girl from your video.

Simmons appeared with Arie at this year’s BET Honors—“looking absolutely radiant in a stunning and sexy black dress (64 and sexy? You show ‘em, Ruth!)”—and elbow rubbing with P. Diddy, Queen Latifah, and Whitney Houston. She also picked up an award for her achievements as an educator, including becoming the first African-American president of an Ivy League School.

But by no means is that the first time she’s been on T.V. She channel changes from CNN to the Tavis Smiley Show. And Brown students stay tuned in. As the Brown Herald reported:

“She is famous—you can see her on TV. I am proud…”

Indeed, Simmons has garnered the overwhelming affection of Brown’s students, who describe her as “a power woman,” “the greatest person in the world,” and “reminds me of my grandma.”

Seriously, though, she has lived an extraordinary life—growing up on a farm in Texas as the daughter of a sharecropper and part-time maid, Simmons attended a segregated public school in Houston, earned a scholarship to Dillard University, and went on to earn her Ph.D. in Romance languages at Harvard. Her inspirational story even earned her a spot among the ranks of “the best of humanity.”

The pay for being the best of humanity isn’t bad, either. In the 2007-08 academic year, Simmons raked in a grand total of $818,462—that’s $636,158 in pay and $182,304 in benefits, according to the latest tally from the Chronicle of Higher Education. But, given her divine goddess status, she graciously took a salary cut in the wake of the 2008 economic downturn. For the third year straight of decline in her paycheck, Simmons requested a 10 percent cut in 2009 and made $536,000 for the fiscal year that wrapped up over the summer.

But the best things in life are free. According to her Facebook fan page, her interests remain “being completely badass.” And Simmons has pretty much given up on shrimp cold turkey. As she told the Herald:

“We really don’t need to have shrimp at the faculty reception. What’s a shrimp or two?”

Though this IvyGate blogger and shellfish fan maintains that this may be a matter of debate, her intention is well-received.

And now, to satisfy our pseudo-mathematical intentions, here yet again is an entirely legitimate formula for us to calculate this Ivy president’s worth:

[Salary - (expected cost of haircut + limo fees) + Google hits + honorary degrees from Ivy schools received)] / BET awards =

[$536,000 - ($80 + $150) + 1,200,000+ 5)] / 1 =

1,735,775 Ivy President Points!

Next week: Princeton president Shirley Tilghman!

Harvard Students Go to a Nearby Private University, Are Shocked at How Un-Harvard It Is

2010-02-18T18:26:59+00:00

Bostonist alerts us to the sad, strange saga of two Harvard Crimsoners who decide to go on an expedition to that far-flung land of the Houyhnhnms Tufts Jumbos. Turns out, the party scene at Tufts on Valentine’s Day (huh?!) is no better than Harvard’s. Okay! Did the Crimson put two investigative reporters on the case, or were these two exciting, worldly people (who for some reason took a “$15 cab ride,” all right, Harvard, to a place that commenters note is easily accessible by T) just going to Tufts anyway? They may as well have written their article before they left Cambridge for the night; count the cliches in this excerpt alone!

Three girls pirouetted violently on the dance floor while a frazzled frat brother nursed a paper cup. A collection of listless sorority girls loitered in the hallway, coats on as if about to leave. We sauntered past lots of rooms, some with people in them, none with anyone even close to making out. Oddly it reminded us of Revenge of the Nerds.

The commenters at the Crimson site have been appropriately scathing. Our favorite concludes:

Yes, we may be the school of Harvard rejects, but we’re not fucking dumbasses. Open your fucking eyes, get out into the world more, and stop being so pretentious.

Here at IvyGate HQ, we promise never to write about our rare excursions off the manicured lawns of academe. And if we must go to another school and choose to write about it, we’ll take public transit.

RagTime: RagRoulette Edition

2010-02-18T17:46:02+00:00

Princeton students get bloggy, observant, and frustrated—“Today, Princeton has a $12.6 billion endowment, and the foosball table in Forbes is being held together by 2 plastic pens. FML.”
Brown seeks volunteers for “piloting boats, tending the fires, selling merchandise.”
Yale encourages eating Fritos in the library by rendering fines fiction.
At casino night, Columbia students rolle dice for the dough, fedoras fly.
Harvard dominates in the Rice and Bean Pot Burrito Eating Contest.
Italians come to Dartmouth, get “very involved with the Italian club.”
Penn students meet the internet, “About five clicks in, I see a screenful of penis all up in my grill.”

Fiscal Stimulus, One Year Later

2010-02-18T10:38:43+00:00

Pro and Con.

Dems establish new Service Chair to coordinate community engagement

2010-02-18T01:22:15+00:00

The Dems approved a series of constitutional amendments at their general meeting last night, all intended to change the structure of the organization and reinforce a commitment to public service. Approving the creation of a new Service Chair, Dems members overwhelmingly voted to install a new Executive Board member to lead a committee in organizing regular community service projects for members. This committee will spearhead the new DemsCorps initiative, providing a variety of public service opportunities that pertain to the progressive agenda. Additionally, the Service Chair and ServCom will build connections between the Dems and other campus organizations through coordinated service efforts.

The general meeting was held at 8:15 pm on Tuesday, February 16 in the Adams House Lower Common Room. Jason Berkenfeld ’11, President and Lindsay Garber ’11, Vice President presented three proposed constitutional to rename and redefine the outdated Political Chair and install in its place a Service Chair. After member discussion and the introduction of a supplemental amendment by former Treasurer Eric Hysen ’11, the three amendments were put up for a vote among the dues-paid members in attendance.

The members in attendance unanimously voted to approve the constitutional amendments and form ServCom. The amended organization constitution will soon be accessible on the Dems website, www.harvarddems.com. “Tonight the Harvard College Democrats have reaffirmed our commitment to public service,” said Berkenfeld. “We look forward to engaging with the Boston and Cambridge communities and continuing our fight for a progressive agenda.”

The Dems Executive Board have already begun distributing applications for the new position of Service Chair, and they expect to appoint their inaugural Service Chair soon. For information on the application, please contact Vice President Lindsay Garber at lgarber@fas.harvard.edu.

The Harvard College Democrats are the largest partisan political organization at Harvard University. Looking to the year ahead, the College Democrats are excited to focus their efforts on political advocacy, cultivate a progressive campus community, and renew their commitment to service. For more, visit www.harvarddems.com or contact Lange Luntao at lluntao@fas.harvard.edu.

Press release accessible at http://drop.io/harvarddems/asset/press-release-servcom-pdf

Thoughts about the Fiscal Commission

2010-02-17T20:53:22+00:00

Here is a question I have been pondering. If you were a member of the fiscal commission, what would you try to achieve?

The answer for liberals is easy: They want to raise taxes to fund the existing, and even an expanded, social safety net, while politically insulating the Democrats as much as possible from the charge of being the "tax and spend" party. President Obama can then campaign in 2012 that he did not break his no-taxes-on-the-middle-class pledge, but rather a bipartisan group broke it. That is, the President wants to take credit for fixing the fiscal situation but duck responsibility for having imposed higher taxes.

But what if you are conservative? This is harder. You can try to stick to your no-tax-increase position. The problem is that doing so would require spending cuts larger than are politically realistic. If I were king, I bet I could find sufficient spending cuts. But I am not expecting to be anointed any time soon. If the fiscal commission is going to succeed, tax increases will have to be part of the deal.

A reasonable position is, perhaps, that the commission should not succeed. After all, it is the president's responsibility to put out a budget. The one he just released is, as I explained in my recent Times column, not sustainable. He just passed the buck to the fiscal commission. Perhaps conservatives should not allow him to do that but, instead, should try to force him to put out a sustainable budget on his own. After all, isn't that Peter Orszag's job?

But let's suppose that you are a conservative and you want the fiscal commission to succeed. You will have to agree to higher taxes as part of the bargain. But what should you aim to get in return? Here is my list.

Substantial cuts in spending. Ensure that the commission is as much about shrinking government as raising revenue. My personal favorite would be to raise the age of eligibility for Social Security and Medicare. Do it gradually but substantially. Then index it to life expectancy, as it should have been from the beginning.
Increased use of Pigovian taxes. Candidate Obama pledged 100 percent auctions under any cap-and-trade bill, but President Obama caved on this issue. He should renew his pledge as part of the fiscal fix. A simpler carbon tax is even better.
Use of consumption taxes rather than income taxes. A VAT is, as I have said, the best of a bunch of bad alternatives. Conservatives hate the VAT, more for political than economic reasons. They should be willing to swallow a VAT as long as they get enough other things from the deal.
Cuts in the top personal income and corporate tax rates. Make sure the VAT is big enough to fund reductions in the most distortionary taxes around. Put the top individual and corporate tax rate at, say, 25 percent.
Permanent elimination of the estate tax. It is gone right now, but most people I know are not quite ready to die. Conservatives hate the estate tax even more than they hate the idea of the VAT. If the elimination of the estate tax was coupled with the addition of the VAT, the entire deal might be more palatable to them.

One thing is clear: The Democrats in Congress would hate the five demands above. But that is precisely the point. The fiscal commission is giving the Democrats something of very high value: political cover for a major tax hike. If Republicans are going to give them that, they should get something very big in return. If the conservatives on the commission could achieve my five goals above, it might be a deal worth talking about.

RagTime: Printing Quota Edition

2010-02-17T16:14:46+00:00

Brown: Which is easier, a fatwa joke or a Padma Lakshmi joke? Or a greatest-living-novelist-maybe can be reduced to two memes joke?
Cornell: Chief Investment Officer chooses perfect time to resign.
Princeton: Money has been saved, but no more printing out your own personal copies of Tristram Shandy.
Harvard: “Communism has been reduced to a losing strategy, from the day we can say ‘free parking’ or ‘go to jail.’“
Dartmouth: Wait, Hanover has FOOD now? Major step up!

The Information Super-Sewer – Chris Hedges’ damning critique of Free Culture

2010-02-17T03:16:17+00:00

The only income left for most of those who create is earned through self-promotion, but as Lanier points out this turns culture into nothing but advertising. It fosters a social ethic in which the capacity for crowd manipulation is more highly valued than truth, beauty or thought.

While the severing of intellectual property rights from their creators, whether journalists, photographers or musicians, means that those who create lose the capacity to make a living from their work, aggregators such as Google make money by collecting and distributing this work to lure advertisers. Original work on the Internet, as Lanier points out, is “copied, mashed up, anonymized, analyzed, and turned into bricks in someone else’s fortress to support an advertising scheme.” Lanier warns that if this trend is not halted it will create a “formula that leaves no way for our nation to earn a living in the long term.”

“Funding a civilization through advertising is like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from one’s anus to one’s mouth,” Lanier says.

Chris Hedges: The Information Super-Sewer – Chris Hedges’ Columns – Truthdig

As a founding (now lapsed) member of Harvard Free Culture and a former employee of Creative Commons, these are some pretty hard truths, thoughts I’ve been harboring for over 3 years now but reluctant to state publicly. But perhaps as a result of working on my thesis film— by far my most substantial endeavor to date— combined with getting ready to graduate— meaning next year not only will I no longer have institutional/financial support for making art, but I will have to actually earn a living— that I feel like it’s time to come out about my growing ambivalence towards “free culture.”

To be clear, I don’t blame the Free Culture Movement or Creative Commons. They exist in a fairly obscure corner of internet intelligentsia, pretty much irrelevant in the face of the powerful social and economic forces that have brought us to our current situation, where original content is little more than bait to capture eyes for advertisers.

Frustratingly, fear of this exact situation was the precise reason I originally became such a free culture zealot! Specifically, I was appalled by how record companies would debase great music by putting it into a car commercial. I hated the idea that something I made could be forever converted into commercial speech and used to peddle crap. And so the “non-commercial” option for Creative Commons license held great appeal for me.

More generally, I was impressed the elegance of the intellectual property compromise in the Constitution:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

The free culture movement, it seemed, was interested in restoring the balance between private interest and public good. This was a balance which, if harmoniously struck, actually served both parties better than either extreme: When creators are well-rewarded for their efforts during their lifetimes (or at the least make enough keep working, and maybe eat), the public benefits from their cultural and scientific contributions (if not immediately, then when the works enter the public domain). Likewise, a rich public domain benefits individual creators, in that they have an incredible foundation of work to build upon.

Of course, beginning in the 1970s if not earlier, this compromise had been seriously hijacked by the big media companies, who all but eliminated the “temporary” aspect of their monopoly. So when I first got interested (around 2004?) in the movement, CC/FC seemed like a clever, grassroots way to restore balance to copyright law: enable creators to legally share their work with the public, in a way that was consistent with the new realities of the Internet. The big media companies didn’t understand the new digital frontier, and it was ripe with Utopian potential. Never before has there been such easy access to public domain works! Let us enrich it, and surely someone will soon work out a way for creators to be rewarded!

But somewhere along the way, the fight became less about restoring balance, and more about promoting New Media ahead of Old Media. Google & the like were quick to make alliances with Creative Commons, which as a nascent foundation needed money. They were brought together by a common enemy, Big Media, which was embodied by groups like the RIAA and the MPAA, evil organizations that robbed grandmothers of their retirement savings by suing them for hundreds of thousands of dollars because their grand kid illegally downloaded a handful of songs.

“Don’t be evil” Google was exciting and hip and powerful! They ply their employees with free smoothies and sushi and cliff bars, back massages! Who could resist them as an ally? But one would have to be a fool to think they were fighting for creator’s rights. Was it not their duty as a corporate person to borrow the FC movement’s moral high ground so as to accelerate the inevitable elimination of their clumsy, Luddite competitors?

So as often happens, attempts to fix a broken system resulted in helping to usher in something arguably worse.

But is the situation actually worse? On the one hand, it’s awesome that I can put my short, diy, films online and have potentially infinite numbers of people see them. And I can watch and listen to all sorts of film and music that would be near impossible to access pre-Internet. On the other hand, going forward, it is unlikely I will ever actually get paid to create art or tell stories. Instead, if I find a job at all, I will be getting paid for my ability to capture the attention of consumers. Which I suppose, isn’t that different from before. Except that now consumers will be watching my films on their fucking phones.

Hedges’ column goes on to talk about the frightening implications of the angry, ignorant, digital Internet hive mind— a provocative read. But in light of the more personal nature this post has taken, I give Gillian Welch final word:

An Illogical Attack on the GOP

2010-02-17T02:00:03+00:00

The Democratic Party is attacking some Republican congressmen for both opposing the stimulus bill and also helping direct some stimulus spending into their districts.

I don't know the facts of the case, but the logic of the Democratic position baffles me. It seems perfectly reasonable to believe (1) that increasing government spending is not the best way to promote economic growth in a depressed economy, and (2) that if the government is going to spend gobs of money, those on whom it is spent will benefit. In this case, the right thing for a congressman to do is to oppose the spending plans, but once the spending is inevitable, to try to ensure that the constituents he represents get their share. So what exactly is the problem?

Let me offer an analogy. Many Democratic congressmen opposed the Bush tax cuts. That was based, I presume, on their honest assessment of the policy. But once these tax cuts were passed, I bet these congressmen paid lower taxes. I bet they did not offer to hand the Treasury the extra taxes they would have owed at the previous tax rates. Would it make sense for the GOP to suggest that these Democrats were disingenuous or hypocritical? I don't think so. Many times, we as individuals benefit from policies we opposed. There is nothing wrong about that.

Lapham on Yale’s New Admissions Video

2010-02-16T23:35:25+00:00

He faulted the new video not for its failed attempt at Sontagian camp but for portraying the university as a kind of summer camp for élites. “It’s a variation on Marie Antoinette in the garden of Versailles,” he said. “I’m surprised they didn’t dress the girls as shepherdesses. In the ancien régime, this is the kind of thing that would have prompted the French Revolution. Are we supposed to send this to struggling youths in Asia and Africa?”

The New Yorker

(For those of you fortunate enough to have missed it, he’s speaking about these 17 minutes of institutionally-sanctioned musical theater hell.)

Blog Update, Website Update, and New Episode!

2010-02-16T21:49:45+00:00

Major news from the OHT front! We've got a brand new website and brand new blog (this blog is being retired, so just mosey on over there from now on).

Oh, and don't forget our Spring Premiere!

Q&A: Kathryn Bigelow

2010-02-16T19:05:02+00:00

I would have shot in Iraq if it had been possible. That’s kind of a joke, but we did get close, at times five kilometers from the border. Architecturally, Jordan is a very good match for war-torn Baghdad. Plus, the military equipment was available. A bonus I had not anticipated was the one million Iraqi refugees in Amman, a contingent of whom were actors. All of our extras were Iraqi actors. Two of them told me they had been prisoners of the Americans in Iraq, and now they were playing prisoners in the film. It was surreal — and a little uncomfortable — but they laughed and said they were happy to have the work.

Q&A: Kathryn Bigelow | Men’s Journal

IvyMusic: Magic Man

2010-02-16T17:22:48+00:00

Welcome to IvyMusic, where we give you a glance at the dulcet tones emanating from the Eastern Seaboard ivory towers.

Wesleyan has MGMT, Dartmouth has Filligar, Columbia has Vampire Weekend, Harvard has Yo-Yo Ma… and now Yale has Sam Lee, who makes up one half of the newest in the line of Ivy bands: Magic Man. Sam and his high school friend Alex Caplow, a Tufts sophomore, recorded their first album on their Macbooks over this summer in France while they were both working on organic farms; great electronica inexplicably ensued. Compounding the lo-fi-garage-edness, the album was mixed via email (hail the Internets). You might even call it fantastic and you might even say it’s the first great music made by two college sophomores, two MacBooks, lots of usendits, a guitar and a keyboard in a while. What I’m getting at here is that Sam is as cool as it gets and listening to his album will give you a lot of street cred and plenty of indie/hipster/whateveryouwanttocallit points. Download it (for free) now and play it at your next party to show just how much you care (or how apathetic you are, whichever).

Web 2.0 Suicide Machine

2010-02-16T03:00:18+00:00

Web 2.0 Suicide Machine – Meet your Real Neighbours again! – Sign out forever!

web 2.0 suicide machine promotion from moddr_ on Vimeo.

[ironically via a. otto's facebook]

Gawker Takes on “Hahvahd”-Educated Alabama Shooter

2010-02-15T21:17:45+00:00

As at least one commenter and several tipsters noted over the weekend, we have thus far held back on the tragic massacre at the University of Alabama, and the subsequent detention of the Harvard-educated prime suspect, Dr. Amy Bishop.

We hadn’t fallen asleep at the wheel — we were, of course, aware that this had happened. But for this editor, at least, there was no good way to write about the subject in light of Gawker’s coverage, such as it was, of Dr. Bishop.

Gawker enlisted a reporter to check out, for instance, Dr. Bishop’s RateMyProfessors profile. To wit:

On a scale of one to five, Bishop received ratings of 2.3 for “average easiness,” 3.7 for “average helpfulness,” 3.4 for “average clarity,” and a “hotness total” of 0. Her “overall quality” was a 3.6. None of the postings describe Bishop as the kind of angry or mean person from whom we might have expected some sort of violent outburst.

It goes without saying that when a murder happens, one’s thoughts do not turn to whether or not the suspected killer was considered hot or not. Well, our thoughts don’t, at least! Gawker wastes our time sorting through data in order to make the point that “aggregated information is hitting people faster and is colored deeper than each time before it.” This after two pieces of information — a reference to “Hahvahd” (oh, good, anti-elitism and scapegoating, too!) and Bishop’s “hotness” on RateMyProfessors — are used to indicate that Bishop may have been isolated and alone at Alabama.

Aggregation only can matter when there is something to aggregate, not just a website, RateMyProfessors, that caters to everyone’s worst impulses and cannot possibly explain away a tragedy. As a gossip blog, we’re probably going to leave this case alone from now on (unless something notable happens and we can actually add something to the coverage). That’s our take on it, I guess!

Ranking CEAs

2010-02-14T04:11:25+00:00

Tino Sanandaji ranks CEAs by their academic accomplishments. The ranking is based on the total citations of the three members on the Council.

The Buck Stops Where

2010-02-14T03:44:43+00:00

Click here to read my latest column in the NY Times.

RagTime: Playing Catch-Up Edition

2010-02-12T16:03:04+00:00

Your IvyGate editors were stuck in a snowdrift yesterday, and will be really busy this morning, so here is a RagTime designed to catch you up on news you missed. Get it while it’s lukewarm!

Brown: Confidential to non-Ivy students reading this blog — you can transfer to Brown, like, really easily! And then take whateeeever you want.
Columbia: “LionPAC calls itself “Columbia University’s pro-Israel public affairs committee” rather than a lobby group, though it does go on a lobbying mission to Congress every year. Spectator regrets the error.” Congratulations on the most unnecessary correction ever, Spectator!
Cornell: Congratulations on the most decontextualized image ever, Sun! [This time we mean it.]
Harvard: Exxon on the Charles! Just one more reason why Boston is the worst city in America. [This is a meme, we're starting it, and you can't stop us.]
Yale: This poignant article made us think about people different from ourselves! STRONGLY RECOMMEND.