Government: the things we do together.

April 6th, 2016

cal

Barack Obama is fond of describing government this way.

As President Obama said the other day, those who start businesses succeed because of their individual initiative – their drive, hard work, and creativity. But there are critical actions we must take to support businesses and encourage new ones – that means we need the best infrastructure, a good education system, and affordable, domestic sources of clean energy. Those are investments we make not as individuals, but as Americans, and our nation benefits from them.

That was a reaction to Romney’s criticism of his silly comment.

I prefer the quote attributed to Washington.

“Government is not reason, it is not eloquence,—it is force! Like fire, it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.”

Now, we see a new imposition.

The Department of Labor says its so-called fiduciary rule will make financial advisers act in the best interests of clients. What Labor doesn’t say is that the rule carries such enormous potential legal liability and demands such a high standard of care that many advisers will shun non-affluent accounts. Middle-income investors may be forced to look elsewhere for financial advice even as Team Obama is enabling a raft of new government-run competitors for retirement savings. This is no coincidence.

Labor’s new rule will start biting in January as the President is leaving office. Under the rule, financial firms advising workers moving money out of company 401(k) plans into Individual Retirement Accounts will have to follow the new higher standards. But Labor has already proposed waivers from the federal Erisa law so new state-run retirement plans don’t have the same regulatory burden as private employers do.

State run retirement plans. What could go wrong ? Well, we saw one version in Cyprus in 2013.

European leaders reached an agreement with Cyprus early on Monday morning that closes down the island’s second-largest bank and inflicts huge losses on wealthy savers.

Those with deposits of less than €100,000 (£85,000) will be spared, but those with more than €100,000 – many of them Russian – will lose billions of euros under draconian terms aimed at preventing the Mediterranean tax haven becoming the first country forced out of the single currency.

The deal is expected to wreak lasting damage on the Cypriot economy, which has grown reliant on offshore banking and Russian money. Analysts said Cyprus could see its economy contract by 10% or more in the years ahead.

Well, those Russian oligarchs deserved it. Maybe American companies attempting “inversion” deserve it too.

CEOs have learned to keep mum in the Obama era, lest their companies be punished like J.P. Morgan after Jamie Dimon criticized some parts of Dodd-Frank. So it’s worth noting the candid reaction after a new Treasury rule scuttled the merger between Pfizer Inc. and Allergan PLC.

The companies ended their $150 billion tie-up after Treasury Secretary Jack Lew issued new rules that made it harder for companies like Pfizer to move to Ireland to legally lower their taxes. Pfizer will have to pay Allergan a breakup fee of $150 million, though Allergan shares are still down more than $10 billion since the Treasury ambush.

I am not a slavish advocate of corporate tax avoidance but we are in an era of confiscation.

“If the rules can be changed arbitrarily and applied retroactively, how can any U.S. company engage in the long-term investment planning necessary to compete,” Mr. Read writes. “The new ‘rules’ show that there are no set rules. Political dogma is the only rule.”

He’s right, as every CEO we know will admit privately. This politicization has spread across most of the economy during the Obama years, as regulators rewrite longstanding interpretations of longstanding laws in order to achieve the policy goals they can’t or won’t negotiate with Congress. Telecoms, consumer finance, for-profit education, carbon energy, auto lending, auto-fuel economy, truck emissions, home mortgages, health care and so much more.

Now, they want everypne to “invest” in state run “retirement programs.” CalPERS has not distinguished itself, except perhaps in corruption.

After spending years dogged by unpaid debts, California labor leader Charles Valdes filed for bankruptcy in the 1990s—twice. At the same time, he held one of the most influential positions in the American financial system: chair of the investment committee for the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, or CalPERS, the nation’s largest pension fund for government workers. Valdes left the board in 2010 and now faces scrutiny for accepting gifts from another former board member, Alfred Villalobos—who, the state alleges, spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to influence how the fund invested its assets. Questioned by investigators about his dealings with Villalobos, Valdes invoked the Fifth Amendment 126 times.

Well, it is California where Hispanics, especially illegals, run the state.

Last month the board of California’s new “Secure Choice” retirement plan wrote to state legislators about their “exciting win” in Washington. They reported that employers enrolling workers in the new government-run plan “would have no liability or fiduciary duty for the plan.” Score! The California bureaucrats added that “we have been given the green light to auto-enroll workers into an Individual Retirement Account (IRA).”

What could go wrong ?

The Doctor Shortage, discovered once more.

April 1st, 2016

33 - Lister

I have previously written posts about a coming doctor shortage.

They assume that primary care will be delivered by nurse practitioners and physician assistants. They are probably correct as we see with the new Wal Mart primary care clinics.

The company has opened five primary care locations in South Carolina and Texas, and plans to open a sixth clinic in Palestine, Tex., on Friday and another six by the end of the year. The clinics, it says, can offer a broader range of services, like chronic disease management, than the 100 or so acute care clinics leased by hospital operators at Walmarts across the country. Unlike CVS or Walgreens, which also offer some similar services, or Costco, which offers eye care, Walmart is marketing itself as a primary medical provider.

This is all well and good. What happens when a patient comes in with a serious condition ?

The health policy “experts” have been concerned to train “lesser licensed practitioners” and have pretty much ignored primary care MDs except to burden them with clumsy electronic medical record systems that take up time and make life miserable.

I repeatedly ask medical students if they would choose a career in primary care if it would completely erase their student loan debt. A few hands go up, but not many. In fact, for a while now, the federal government has dedicated millions of dollars to repaying loans for students who choose primary care. Yet residency match numbers show that the percentage of students choosing primary care is not increasing. Though loan forgiveness is a step in the right direction, medical students realize that by choosing a more lucrative specialty, they can pay off their loans just fine.

I proposed years ago, a health reform that resembled that of France where medical school is free. It could be arranged that service in primary care, low income clinics would give credit against student loans. Nothing happened. Except physician income has declined. And tuition has increased.

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Unions and the march of robots.

March 30th, 2016

port
California has now decided to impose a a $15 per hour minimum wage on its remaining business economy.

Denial of consequences is an important part of left wing philosophy.

“California’s proposal would be the highest minimum wage we have seen in the United States, and because of California’s sheer size, it would cover the largest number of workers,” said Ken Jacobs, chairman of the UC Berkeley center. “This is a very big deal for low-wage workers in California, for their families and for their children.”

Implicit in all the assumptions is the belief that employers will not adjust by reducing the number of minimum wage employees they have.

The UC Berkeley estimate also includes some who earn slightly more than the lowest wage and stand to benefit from a ripple effect as businesses dole out raises to try to maintain a pay scale based on experience, Jacobs said.

If Brown’s plan passes, 5.6 million low-wage workers would earn $20 billion more in wages by 2023, according to the UC Berkeley analysis. It assumed no net jobs would be lost as businesses look to trim costs.

The experience in other places has not been positive.

Even a former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, Alan Krueger, has cautioned recently that “a $15-an-hour national minimum wage would put us in uncharted waters, and risk undesirable and unintended consequences.”

Krueger is the economist whose “study” of the effect of minimum wage increases in fast food industry has been debunked as invalid.

But Card and Krueger’s conclusion is that there’s no effect, not that increases in the minimum wage increase employment as a general rule. “We believe that this research provides fairly compelling evidence that minimum-wage increases have no systematic effect on employment,” they write in their 1995 book, “Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage.” They also write, “On average, however, our findings suggest that employment remains unchanged, or sometimes rises slightly, as a result of increases in the minimum wage.” It would be fair for Hanauer to cite the individual studies showing an increase in employment, but to characterize Krueger and Card’s work on a whole as showing an increase in employment resulting from a minimum wage increase is inaccurate.

In less polite terms, it’s bunk ! Newer studies with better methods have shown That employment is reduced.

Second, the studies that focus on the least-skilled groups provide relatively overwhelming evidence of stronger disemployment effects for these groups.

Now, we come to the larger issue the entire “Blue Model” of employment and politics.

The teachers’ unions won a temporary victory to force non-members to pay “agency fees” involuntarily, a decision that resulted from the death of Antonin Scalia last month.

With the absence of the late Antonin Scalia’s reliably-conservative vote, labor unions clenched an unexpected Supreme Court victory on union fees for government workers.

With agency fees – and the structure of union dues – remaining intact, union leaders hailed the court’s affirmation but warned there could be further challenges ahead.

The union case is among a handful of key disputes in which Scalia’s vote was expected to tip the balance toward a result that favored conservatives.

Some non-union teachers in California sued over the fair share fees, claiming that the fees are unconstitutional and violate their freedom of speech and association.

That decision will probably stand until a new Justice is confirmed and a Hillary Clinton presidency would keep the matter going. What about the rest of the world ?

But in the larger context the public unions greatest enemy isn’t the ghost of Antonin Scalia but the onslaught of technology. Recently, the mighty International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) was forced to let giant robots handle cargo in the port of Los Angeles. “At one of the busiest shipping terminals in the U.S., more than two dozen giant red robots wheeled cargo containers along the docks on a recent morning, handing the boxes off to another set of androids gliding along long rows of stacked containers before smoothly setting the boxes down in precise spots,” wrote the Wall Street Journal. “‘We have to do it for productivity purposes, to stay relevant and to be able to service these large ships,’ said Peter Stone, a member of TraPac’s board.”

About ten years ago the Longshoreman’s union struck the port of Los Angeles to try to keep out GPS devices to locate containers.

Traditionally, clerks had climbed around containers to identify them and mark their location. Like Luddites in the 18th century, they attempted to keep their 80 jobs by paralyzing the worlds busiest port.

The union says that over 51 permanent positions have been lost to outsourcing in recent years — a claim that the Harbor Employers refutes. According to the Harbor Employers, those 51 individuals either “retired with full benefits, quit, or passed away during the past three years.”

It is unclear when the strike will end but the Port of LA is urging both sides to come to an agreement promptly for the sake of international commerce.

But the union says the workers are standing up to some of the world’s largest shipping lines to protect the future of American jobs in the industry. “We just reached the point where somebody had to stand-up and draw the line against outsourcing, because these companies will eventually take all the good jobs,”said Fageaux.

According to its website, the Port of Los Angles is responsible for 1.2 million jobs in California and 3.6 million jobs across the country.

No matter. Those 51 jobs were important !

Eventually, the union lost. Now new troubles are coming.

In the end, even those advantages proved insufficient to stop automation. There will be pressure to deploy more robots. The “TraPac site is one of only four cargo terminals in the U.S. using the technology. That is fewer automated terminals than there are at the Port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands alone.” The ILWU is fighting a rearguard action; its members are training on automated terminals “to ensure there’s a future for the workers”. And probably to keep alive the possibility of paralyzing the docks via strike by console operators.

None of this can disguise the fact is that the glory days of union crane jobs are over. The CEO of Carl’s Jr, a hamburger chain, predicts that fast food restaurants of the near-future will have no human employees. A special report in the New York Times says “the robots are coming to Wall Street.”

Within a decade … between a third and a half of the current employees in finance will lose their jobs to … automation software.

Already, CAT scans are read by radiologists in India. Radiologists who have no local credentialing and who are unknown. All X-rays now are digital and can be transmitted across the world.

For the poor the citizenship deal is votes in exchange for welfare or sinecures. For the financially better off it is campaign contributions in exchange for crony capitalist opportunities. The Friedrichs vs California Teachers Association is an example of the latter, with the Supreme Court unable to reject a transaction that is ultimately unsustainable.

Technology may have changed the debate around closed union shops, quotas, identity politics and mandatory minimum wages from one of ideology to economics. What’s the use of ideological policies, if they’re can’t deliver the goods? If the public employee’s unions can do no better at protecting their fiefdom than the ILWU, if immigrants from Mexico can find no employment because robots are doing all the work then what will the politicians promise?

Yes. What can they promise ?

The Next Step from Craig Venter.

March 24th, 2016

cell

I have previously posted about Venter’s work with synthetic organisms.

While I was digesting this new material, Craig Venter was making the Gene VII book obsolete. He set up a new company to compete with the Human Genome Project The result is well described in The Genome War by James Shreeve who was given access to Venter but less to the government funded project. This year, Venter’s autobiography was published and his plans for the future are described.

The links are at the original article which is from 2007.

Now, his group has progressed to a synthetic bacterium.

Using the first synthetic cell, Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 (created by this same team in 2010), JCVI-syn3.0 was developed through a design, build, and test process using genes from JCVI-syn1.0. The new minimal synthetic cell contains 531,560 base pairs and just 473 genes, making it the smallest genome of any organism that can be grown in laboratory media. Of these genes 149 are of unknown biological function. By comparison the first synthetic cell, M. mycoides JCVI-syn1.0 has 1.08 million base pairs and 901 genes.

A paper describing this research is being published in the March 25th print version of the journal Science by lead authors Clyde A. Hutchison, III, Ph.D. and Ray-Yuan Chuang, Ph.D., senior author J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., and senior team of Hamilton O. Smith, MD, Daniel G. Gibson, Ph.D., and John I. Glass, Ph.D.

THis is huge news and will take years to develop.

The most surprising result of their work—and perhaps the most sobering one for the rest of the field: The team still doesn’t understand what 31 percent of the essential genes do in even the simplest organism, to say nothing of a human genome. It’s a development Venter called “very humbling.”

“We are probably at the 1 percent level in understanding the human genome,” said Clyde Hutchison III, a distinguished professor at the Venter Institute.

That lack of knowledge isn’t standing in the way of entrepreneurs. Biology has been “hot and heavy” since the development of a molecular tool that makes gene editing easy, Hutchison explained. Scientists might be able to remove disease-causing genes or even determine a baby’s eye color. This technology, known as CRISPR/Cas-9, has alarmed many inside and outside the research community, who fear it may be used on the human genome before its effects are understood, with unforeseen results.

If he does another public seminar, I hope Bradley can get me a ticket. I am now reading “Lewin’s Genes XI,” although he seems to be no longer the editor.

I hope I can wade through it. Sometimes, as knowledge progresses, it becomes simpler. I hope so.

“These cells would be a very, very useful chassis for many industrial applications, from medicine to biochemicals, biofuels, nutrition, and agriculture,” said Dan Gibson, a top scientist at both Venter’s research institute and his company, Synthetic Genomics Inc. Ultimately, the group wants to understand the tiny genetic framework well enough to use it as a biological foundation for more complex organisms that could address many of the world’s ills. Once each essential gene’s function is identified, scientists can build an effective computer model of it; from there, they can simulate how best to go about “adding pathways for the production of useful products,” they wrote.

I will be following this story closely, if I can only understand it.

What I saw at the Revolution.

March 21st, 2016

Zulu Dawn

News from the front today. First, Glenn Reynolds explains where Trump came from.

The thing is, we had that movement. It was the Tea Party movement. Unlike Brooks, I actually ventured out to “intermingle” with Tea Partiers at various events that I covered for PJTV.com, contributing commentary to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Examiner. As I reported from one event in Nashville, “Pundits claim the tea partiers are angry — and they are — but the most striking thing about the atmosphere in Nashville was how cheerful everyone seemed to be. I spoke with dozens of people, and the responses were surprisingly similar. Hardly any had ever been involved in politics before. Having gotten started, they were finding it to be not just worthwhile, but actually fun. Laughter rang out frequently, and when new-media mogul Andrew Breitbart held forth on a TV interview, a crowd gathered and broke into spontaneous applause. A year ago (2009), many told me, they were depressed about the future of America. Watching television pundits talk about President Obama’s transformative plans for big government, they felt alone, isolated and helpless.

Bingo !

Now, we have Act Two. Will Hillary’s “Thin Blue Line of rust belt states hold ?

Lt William Vereker, on a routine patrol from the British camp at Isandlwana looked down into the Ngwebeni valley to find it boiling with the hitherto unseen main Zulu Army of 20,000 men.

As in 1879 the political scouts are rushing back to inform the camp of the unanticipated development. Shocked but still undaunted, the pundits remain confident that the threat can be stopped by the Democrat “Blue Wall” in the industrial and upper Midwest. There, media artillery and the technologically superior liberal ground game are expected to hold the line against the angry white voter.

Read the rest, as Glenn says.

Now, we have the horrified GOPe. To Peter Wehner, Trump is the scary black face in the forest.

It is stunning to contemplate, particularly for those of us who are lifelong Republicans, but we now live in a time when the organizing principle that runs through the campaign of the Republican Party’s likely nominee isn’t adherence to a political philosophy — Mr. Trump has no discernible political philosophy — but an encouragement to political violence.

Mr. Trump’s supporters will dismiss this as hyperbole, but it is the only reasonable conclusion that his vivid, undisguised words allow for. As the examples pile up, we should not become inured to them. “I’d like to punch him in the face,” Mr. Trump said about a protester in Nevada. (“In the old days,” Mr. Trump fondly recalled, protesters would be “carried out in a stretcher.”)

OMG! What happened to “hit back twice as hard!” or “Bring a gun to a knife fight?” Rudeness will not be tolerated in the GOPe.

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We were pretty close.

March 18th, 2016

When we were in Brussels last September, we stayed at a nice hotel near the Grand Place called The Bedford Hotel and Congress Centre.

belgium-brussels-grand-place

I showed some of our photos here.

The Grand Place is about four blocks from our hotel which is quite central. Also fairly central is Molenbeek where the leader of the Paris terrorist attack was captured today.

brussels

To the left is the canal and across it, the Molenbeek neighborhood where the terrorists were holed up. We walked by it during our stay which was a few weeks before the attack. Our hotel was locked down for a week after the Paris attack as they searched for the perpetrators.
We were very close.

The Chicago riot and a long hot summer.

March 12th, 2016

trump rally

Last night, the Trump rally in Chicago after rioters invaded the hall and threatened to rush the stage.

Last night saw unprecedented scenes inside the University of Illinois at Chicago Pavilion between an anti-Trump mob and Chicagoans who came to hear the Republican front-runner speak.
While outside, an impatient group of thousands more massed. Temperatures rose.
Multiple law enforcement sources told DailyMail.com that there was a credible threat against Trump from groups of protesters who planned to storm the stage.

I watched some of the TV coverage and the protestors seemed to be a combination of blacks and white “Bernie” sign carrying student age people. There were a few fist fights but the vast majority of the capacity crowd filed out peacefully and drove home. I was struck by the quiet cooperation of the rally goers and the taunting celebration of the rioters.

This will be a long hot summer. Last weekend saw 22 shootings in Chicago’s black neighborhoods. St Louis saw protestors at that Trump rally and there is another big rally scheduled in Ohio tonight.

The political world holds its breath for Saturday’s Ohio rally after Donald Trump’s Chicago event last night went into melt down after bloody brawls and loud demonstrations broke out, amid simmering racial tensions.
As the dust settles in Chicago, hundreds gather in Wright Brothers Aero Hangar for the Republican candidate’s first official address since last night’s fracas.
Supporters were queuing from midnight last night, according to local reports, where there is a heavy police presence and the venue is said to be ‘at capacity’.
Today’s event is arguably the most anticipated of the entire primaries following yesterday’s unprecedented scenes.
The Donald tweeted this much-needed message of encouragement as the crowds anticipate his arrival: ‘The rally in Cincinnati is ON. Media put out false reports that it was cancelled. Will be great – love you Ohio!’

It will be interesting to see if the rioters can create the same disturbance. In Chicago, local politicians helped organize the riot.

Bernie-Sanders-supporters-Chicago-pic

Yes, it did and some of them are elected officials. Some are old experienced terrorists, like Bill Ayres who was there.

Ted Cruz managed to look creepy.

Ted Cruz: Ted Cruz is responding to Donald Trump’s cancellation of his Chicago rally, saying the billionaire has created ‘an environment that encourages this sort of nasty discourse.’ The Texas senator is calling it a ‘sad day.’
He says, ‘Political discourse should occur in this country without the threat of violence, without anger and rage and hatred directed at each other.’
Cruz says blame for the events in downtown Chicago rests with the protesters but ‘in any campaign responsibility starts at the top.’
Cruz says, ‘When the candidate urges supporters to engage in physical violence, to punch people in the face, the predictable consequence of that is that is escalates. Today is unlikely to be the last such incidence.

An invitation ?

More on where Trump came from.

March 7th, 2016

There is increasing panic among the GOPe about the possibility that Trump could win the nomination. The “Anyone But Trump” fixation is obsessing the usual suspects.

Megan McArdle: As I see it, there are basically three strategies you can follow:

Anyone but Trump: It doesn’t matter, as long as you vote against Trump. Democrats in open primary states can play, too.
Vote the leader: Pick the winner in your state, and force the nomination selection to the convention.
Attempt to generate an actual alternative front-runner by voting for the national poll leader, or the most plausible candidate — probably Marco Rubio, given that he seems to have the most support from the highest number of GOP coalitions, but possibly Ted Cruz, since he appears to be the next most appealing to Trump voters.
I’ll just start by asking: Which of these would someone follow if their main priority is to defeat Trump? Or am I thinking about it all wrong?

Sean Trende: No, I think you have it basically right. I actually think that, for now, their best chance lies behind Door No. 2.

Why are the elites so obsessed with keeping Trump away from the levers of power ? This is not limited to the USA. Germany is having its own voter revolt.

The anti-immigrant AFD – Alternative for Germany – party has scored massive gains in municipal weekend elections which reflect growing public anger at the refugee policies of Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The polls for councils in the state of Hesse saw the AFD make significant inroads on the two main established parties – Merkel’s conservative CDU and the centre-left SPD – to come in third with 13.2 percent of the vote, knocking the environmental Greens into fourth place.
Frankfurt CDU politician Markus Frank said: ‘The preliminary result of the AfD is frightening. I had expected a maximum five percent.’

Where does this voter anger come from ?

Maybe it is one manifestation of the Principle Agent Problem.

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Romney’s speech

March 3rd, 2016

romney

I did not watch Romney’s speech attacking Trump but have seen short excerpts and comments about it. I think it was a catastrophic mistake by Romney and has ended any future he might have in the GOP. Had he stayed neutral, with perhaps some comments about what is important in a Republican president, his role might be intact. But nobody, especially Mitt, can out insult Trump. It was a foolish lapse of judgement.

I read a blog every day written by a retired Foreign Service Officer, who calls it Diplomad 2.0, and it has commenters from other diplomatic services. His reaction to Romney’s speech is interesting.

I like Romney. I think him a decent man, and one who would have been a very good president. Our country and the West would be in much better shape today if Romney had won in 2012. I had a very minor role on Romney’s foreign policy team and did my best from my lowly position to get the campaign to sharpen its message on foreign affairs, especially on Benghazi–to no avail.

What follows is revealing in the explanation for Romney’s failure as a candidate.

His campaign was dominated by “the oh-so-clever-ones” who think things to death, and analyze until they paralyze. The papers we sent up to Romney were wordy “on the one hand, but on the other hand” expositions of little to no use in a campaign. They read like something written for a transition team, not a campaign team. It was impossible to get Romney’s main handlers to recommend that he go after Obama and Clinton hard on Benghazi and the rest of the misadministration’s foreign policy disasters. They thought that was “too politicizing” and “unbecoming.” Well, what happened, happened.

Romney now comes out and attacks the probably GOP nominee in terms he would never have used on Obama and probably Hillary.

The result ?

The punchline. I had been sitting uncomfortably on the fence re the GOP candidates. After listening to the Romney speech and the other “establishment” types, and hearing the anchor pundits, the pundit anchors, and all the other assorted wise ones, I have jumped off the fence. I have landed in Trump’s farm. He is not perfect, far from it. I might even change my mind, but for now I support Trump.

I don’t know if Trump will be terrible; I do know that what we have right now is horrible beyond words. I can’t bear the thought of a Hillary presidency.

I kind of feel the same way. Trump’s weakest point is foreign policy and here is a guy with years of experience all over the world, who thinks he is better than Hillary and might be OK.

The Transformation of Economics.

March 1st, 2016

A great piece in the Wall Street Journal today about what has happened to Economics and Economics education.

I took an Economics class in college in 1957 and it changed me to a Republican. My first vote was for Richard Nixon in 1960. My family was furious as they thought we were related to the Boston Kennedys and they had always been Democrats. I wonder if an Economics class would have that effect today?

And that political economy and my assessment of it has changed over a career spanning more than half a century. Here are five developments I would emphasize:

I agree with his appraisal.

1.• Diminishing returns to research. A core economic principle is the Law of Diminishing Returns. If you add more resources, such as labor, to fixed quantities of another resource, such as land, output eventually rises by smaller and smaller amounts. That applies—with a vengeance—to academic research. Teaching loads have fallen dramatically (although the Education Department, which probably can tell you how many Hispanic female anthropologists there are teaching in Arkansas, does not publish regular teaching-load statistics), ostensibly to allow more research. But the 50th paper on a topic seldom adds as much understanding as the first or second.

This has been characteristic of Medicine, as well as other academic subjects.

Emory University’s Mark Bauerlein once showed that scholarly papers on Shakespeare averaged about 1,000 a year—three a day. Who reads them? How much does a typical paper add at the margin to the insights that Shakespeare gave us 400 years ago?

That isn’t he has shown.

The attitude touches the President’s favorite pastime. Tevi Troy reported in Commentary how much Obama enjoys television, particularly SportsCenter and the middlebrow series Homeland and Mad Men. The New York Times added Breaking Bad and The Wire in its article “Obama’s TV Picks: Anything Edgy, with Hints of Reality,” and while it warned of the foolishness of “psychoanalyzing” a president based on “the books he reads or the music he listens to or the television shows he watches,” the story mentions not a single book. One would expect Marxists, feminists, queer theorists, post-colonialists, anti-imperialists, and media theorists to chide Obama for his bourgeois, masculinist taste, but as far as I know they have remained silent.

Obama’s taste runs more to sports and rap music.

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