Presidents and Their Debts (dcat Mentors Watch)

A while back The New York Times' periodic "Room for Debate" feature addressed "Presidents and Their Debts: FDR to Bush," and of the eight featured debaters, two were my grad school professors at Ohio University, including Joan Hoff and my friend and mentor Lon Hamby.

Texas' Priorities

Jesus. So we're looking at draconian cuts in higher education, secondary education, human services, and just about every sector of the Texas economy. yet somehow the state of Texas can afford $250 million over ten years to support Formula One racing, which may be the world's premiere form of driving in a pattern but does not even register? And to top it off, we are lining the pockets of billionaires AND we are bidding against ourselves?

Yep.

Well, That Sucks

Yeay! The Free Market is Awesome!

Oh, wait, depending on whose definition we are using the free market can be awful?

Oh, dammit. The world is complex and sloganeering does not actually help describe the world?

But I was reassured by a sloganeering and bumper stickering world.

The State of State Universities

The New York Times recently conducted a discussion between a number of prominent academics on the state of public universities. The jumping-off point was the state of California's public universities and starts with the following question: "As they deal with tighter budgets, what should public universities do to balance fiscal responsibility and equal opportunity?"

Among the participants was Richard Vedder, an economist and economic historian from Ohio University where I received my PhD. I know Professor Vedder but never took a class with him at the Contemporary History Institute, with which he is affiliated as a professor and I was affiliated as a student. I disagree with much that he says but I am always glad to see OU folks getting such attention.

Academia, The Economic Crisis, and What Professors Do

Over at The Cyber Hacienda Jaime has a post in which he links an open letter from an Arizona State University professor explaining what it is that professors do, clearing up some misconceptions along the way. I would further add that research expectations are not only prevelant at Research I universities such as ASU and that even in smaller institutions, such as mine, research is a serious expectation, and that when people don't get tenure here, as at a large swath of schools, it is almost universally because of a lack of research productivity.

The professor (who is not yet tenured) had to write anonymously because the university president has apparently put forth a dictum that faculty may not speak about the crisis. Were I a tenured professor at ASU, and especially were I in a discipline in which writing about politics or current affairs could plausibly be part of what I do -- ie: were I me -- I might challenge that demand of silence frontally in the name of both academic freedom and free speech. Of course that's easy for me to say here and now, as the crisis in Texas is nowhere near as dire as that in Arizona, and we are not facing such severe circumstances.

Will 2009 be the Year of the Sports Fan?

At The New Republic Darren Rovell argues that because of the economic crisis 2009 is likely to be the "Year of the Sports Fan." Hopefully he is right. The trend in recent years has been to take fans for grantes, assuming that we will constantly show up, pay the exhorbitant ticket prices, the absurd concession costs, and leave the stadium with a mexed out credit card and handfuls of jerseys and hats and t-shirts and whatever else we can stuff into a shopping bag.

I would assume that there will be a great deal of regional variation, and that the places with the loyalist fan bases will benefit the least. After all, if fans are flocking to see the games in some cities, those owners are going to see little need to drop prices, add incentives, or provide bargains. In other words, if you're in Boston, don't expect most of these trends to help you more easily and cheaply see the Sox, C's, Pats, or resurgent Bruins. But in somewhat more marginal, or perhaps to be kinder, less entrenched, sports markets, Rovell just might be right.

Meanwhile it continues to be the decade of the Boston Sports Fan. If you need a reminder of the current state of Boston sports, see this Bob Ryan article in The Boston Globe.

Handouts and Chutzpah

I have to admit, I am not certain how to think about the myriad and complicated bailout plans both passed and proposed. On the one hand, I am wary of giant corporations that clearly screwed up royally suckling at the teat of federal largesse when they will reject government oversight or regulation whenever possible. On the other hand I worry that not providing federal help will make a nightmare economic scenario all the more intractable. I keep remembering the unseemly way that the airline industry after 9/11 ran to get handouts while the smoke was still wafting from the charred remains of those horrible attacks despite having resisted federal oversight and despite security malfeasance by the airlines and airports having contributed to the perilously unsafe situation we faced.

Now we are considering helping out the Big Three automakers. I am not theoretically averse to this, though I do hope that any of this support comes with serious strings attached. Let's see a few austerity demands, not to mention provisions for the common good (hello electric car!) come with any federal support. But it becomes a lot more difficult to sympathize with an industry that sent the three CEO's to Washington on private corporate jets or that at least one of the CEOs earned @28 million last year.

As Anne Kornin writes at the Set America Free Blog:

I am reminded of Nero and violins. That $36 million GM private jet is the cost of making 360,000 cars gasoline-ethanol-methanol flexible right there (it’s a $100 cost per car,) breaking oil’s monopoly in the transportation sector through fuel choice. And GM has 8 such jets. Add up the Ford and Chrysler plane fleets and we’re talking the cost of making several million cars gasoline-ethanol-methanol flex fuel vehicles. Given that taxpayer money is on the table here, the trade would seem only fair. I for one don’t appreciate having taxpayer money be used to pay for someone’s private jet and 8 digit salary. If they earn it, fine, hats off, but once their hand dips into taxpayer pockets for a handout, that’s quite a different story. And I would guess others share the sentiment. Let Congress know what you think.

As I say, I am fairly ambivalent about all of this and want to see it play out. I am not averse to strategic aid to struggling industries. But right now my inclination is to say that the auto industry appears to be the victim of its own profligacy and that any help should begin with paring waste at the top of it and any other industry or field in which those at the top do little to sacrifice while cutting jobs, paring benefits, and asking for government aid but maneuvering for little oversight.

Odessa, The Oil Boom, and Energy Policy

A while back a reader (presumably Canadian -- my sincere apologies -- I forget who) sent along this National Post article on how Odessa is experiencing a boom even as the rest of the country looks at an economy in which virtually all of the fundamentals are decidedly unsound. The "drill, baby, drill" mindset is nonsense, representing shallow sloganeering and empty thought, but will be the vital cog in the local economy in West Texas for a long time. We are not going to achieve energy independence through drilling for oil no matter where we do the drilling. Period. I've long known this and the point was hammered home to me at the Set America Free Energy Summit in Chicago a couple of weeks back. Oil is a fungible commodity and there is no way that we can ever drill our way to a self-sustaining capacity. I am absolutely agnostic about how we move away from oil (I have my preferences -- count me in for supporting the electric car as a first choice -- but adhere to no one true faith) but move away from oil we must.

Reckoning With Reagan

Over at The New York Times on Monday Paul Krugman engaged in a pretty significant evisceration of what he deems as the false narrative as a decade of economic boom. Money quotation:

The Reagan economy was a one-hit wonder. Yes, there was a boom in the mid-1980s, as the economy recovered from a severe recession. But while the rich got much richer, there was little sustained economic improvement for most Americans. By the late 1980s, middle-class incomes were barely higher than they had been a decade before — and the poverty rate had actually risen.

My own views on Reagan are complex. In the wake of his passing I wrote a perhaps too charitable assessment here, though I stand by most of the general conclusions. Reagan did have his successes, and his character and personality towered over the decade that historians will always associate him with. At the same time, his failings are manifest, and at times embarrassing. Iran Contra (which really ought to go down in the annals as worse than either Watergate or whatever Clinton was guilty of), Vetoing the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, Bitburg and Neshoba, Opposing renewal of the Voting Rights Act and MLK Day (until faced with the prospect of an overwhelming veto): These and many more failings will always loom over his presidency in my mind. Still, the shadow he casts over contemporary conservatism, and thus on modern American society is huge, and for that reason alone, independent of the quality of his presidency, which will be the source of decades of debate, the importance of the Reagan years seems almost incontrovertible.

A New Way Of Looking at The US Economy in the World

The map exchanges states for the country with the GDP that most closely matches it. For more explanation see here. This comes from a great blog called Strange Maps. Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.

"Southern Africa's 'Invisible' Entrepreneurs"

BBC News has a photo gallery on South Africa's "'Invisible' Entrepeneurs," the traders who cross borders throughout the region to engage in the full array of the informal economy. The Africans, disproportionately women, live on the fringes of society, on the fringes of the economy, and on the very fringes of respectability in the countries they enter as visitors. These individuals are ubiquitous at border crossings, chaotic at the best of times, and yet the region's ecomomy relies on this trade while at the same time rarely recognizing their importance or facilitating their transitions.

Hat Tip to Robert Nolan of the Foreign Policy Association, who sent me the link.