Jeff Licquia writes of a lesson he learned after some problems (thankfully resolved) with tires he bought at Sam’s Club:

Nevertheless, as a lesson hard won, it bears repeating: do not buy anything from club stores that you foresee needing ongoing customer support for, including automotive parts, computers and other electronics, or anything else where warranty support is important to you.

It seems to me that he omits the caveat “if you don’t plan on keeping your membership through the warranty period.” Given the extremely generous Costco and Sam’s return policies on most goods, maintaining one’s membership would seem to be a relatively inexpensive insurance policy.

George Will has a good column on the problems that face the Democratic Party these days:

The reason that Moore is hostile to U.S. power is that he despises the American people from whom the power arises. Moore’s assertion that America “is known for bringing sadness and misery to places around the globe” is a corollary of Kuttnerism, the doctrine that “middle America” is viciously ignorant.

Beinart is bravely trying to do for liberalism what another magazine editor—the National Review’s William Buckley—did for conservatism by excommunicating the Birchers from the conservative movement. But Buckley’s task was easier than Beinart’s will be because the Birchers were never remotely as central to the Republican base as the Moore-MoveOn faction is to the Democratic base.

The nation needs a 1947 liberalism—anti-totalitarian but without what Beinart calls the Bush administration’s “near-theological faith in the transformative capacity of U.S. military might.” Wish Beinart well.

The Democrats could take a principled stand against totalitarianism, as in 1947, but I doubt they will: the lure of opportunism is too strong these days. For evidence, look at McQ's post on this Chicago obituary. Absolutely laughable: died of a broken heart due to the election. Yeah.

BTW, I still don’t like Will’s use of the word liberalism, but I think my quixotic quest to change that has run its course. For now, anyway.

Will Baude and Heidi Bond are considering the difficulty of spelling various words correctly. Baude and Bond suggest “necessary, privilege and judgment” are difficult, as is “license.”

The latter two are perhaps difficult because the Commonwealth spellings “judgement” and “licence” are similar (but invalid in Standard American Written English).

Personally, I only seem to have trouble with “tendency”... which I managed to misspell on the American government exam I gave today, and is confusingly different from words like “attendance” that are pronounced the same. The moral of this story: flyspell-mode is your friend.

China seems to be all the rage these days. I’ve seen the issue of China’s ascendancy in at least one textbook and one test in recent months. The question is generally asked as a comparative advantage question, such as “If China has an absolute advantage in producing all products (meaning it can produce each of them with fewer inputs per unit of output) against the U.S., will China still choose to trade with us?”. The answer is a modern spin on Ricardo’s “wine and wool” scenario between Britain and Portugal.

I would be interested to hear a contrary answer, provided it doesn’t contain overheated rhetoric about “predation” and so forth.

The answer, of course, is “yes”, China would continue to trade with us because it’s too expensive for them not to. Even if they have an absolute advantage in everything, they will still be internally better at producing some good and there’s an opportunity cost associated with their production choices. So it behooves us to not respond to their ascendancy with quotas or tariffs, but rather to continue trading with them. Monetary theory adds some additional difficulty but the answer should be the same (I would be interested to hear a contrary answer, provided it doesn’t contain overheated rhetoric about “predation” and so forth). Business Week has a good article on the economic history of the U.S. and Europe that provides a present-day lesson:

The close links between the U.S. and Europe fostered growth in both regions then, but how is trade affecting the U.S. today? Just as Europe prospered in the 1800s despite the rise of America, the U.S. is faring relatively well now, in a world where manufacturing jobs are moving in droves to China and white-collar jobs are outsourced to India. GDP per person in the U.S., adjusted for inflation, is up 6% since 2000 despite a recession, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and a massive trade deficit that is subtracted from GDP.

Surprisingly, real wages are up as well, as inexpensive goods from China hold down inflation and help paychecks go further. According to the latest figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, real wages of private-sector workers are up 3.3% since 2000. At the high end, real wages rose 5.1% for managers and 3.1% for professionals despite the recession and pressure from information-technology jobs transferring out of the country. At the less-skilled end, over the past four years there has been a 4.1% real wage increase for clerical and administrative support workers, a 3.2% gain for less-skilled blue-collar workers, and a 6.7% jump for traditionally low-paid health-care workers. These are solid improvements, even compared with the boom years of 1996 to 2000, when private-sector wages showed a 5.4% increase.

As for innovation, the U.S. still has a comparative advantage in key areas such as biotechnology and finance. Biotech, which many believe could fuel the next global boom, is still concentrated in the U.S. And the American financial system, far deeper and more robust than its fragile Chinese counterpart, is much better suited to be the global financial hub.

But as history shows, in periods of political, economic, or military turmoil, the free flow of goods, capital, and ideas can get choked off. And some countries feel the pain more than others. Europe found that out during World War I and the Great Depression. While America was developing mass production and a domestic automobile industry, “Europe was distracted by wars and interwar economic chaos,” writes economist Robert J. Gordon of Northwestern University. The result: The U.S. grew while Europe stagnated. From 1913 to 1950, U.S. GDP per person rose 1.6% per year—as fast as in the previous 100 years—while Europe struggled with a meager 0.8% annual gain.

When you have learned of the bitter oppressions that so many people have suffered under, in despotic countries around the world, have you ever wondered why Americans have been spared?

Have scenes of government-sponsored carnage and lethal mob violence in countries like Rwanda or in the Balkans ever made you wonder why such horrifying scenes are not found on the streets of America?

Nothing is easier than to take for granted what we are used to, and to imagine that it is more or less natural, so that it requires no explanation. Instead, many Americans demand explanations of why things are not even better and express indignation that they are not.

Some people think the issue is whether the glass is half empty or half full. More fundamentally, the question is whether the glass started out empty or started out full.

Those who are constantly looking for the “root causes” of poverty, of crime, and of other national and international problems act as if prosperity and law-abiding behavior were so natural that it is their absence that has to be explained. But a casual glance around the world today, or back through history, would dispel any notion that good things just happen naturally, much less inevitably.

There will be challenges due to China’s growth—and those that see economics as an extension of their penises will probably feel threatened by it—and we’ll have to address them through education, job retraining and income assistance. Even so, we’ll end up better off and, assuming they pose no military threat to us, we shouldn’t feel threatened by another country throwing off poverty and developing a middle class.

Via the still-valuable-even-though-the-election’s-over Real Clear Politics.

Finals are now mercifully over. Unfortunately, I forgot to use my Professorial Powers of Evil to ask my tuned-into-the-Zeitgeist students the question that’s been bothering me for the past two weeks: what’s the deal with Lindsay Lohan? No, really, I mean it. Anyone?

To the shock of virtually no one, the New York Times reports that Ukranian opposition presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin. It’s still not entirely clear who was responsible, but the smart money is either on the Russian FSB—the organization formerly known as the KGB—or its Ukranian equivalent (þ: PoliBlog).

With exams over less than twelve hours, I wasn’t planning on doing much thinking—who knows, after reading this you might conclude that I haven’t been doing much thinking—but this is an issue I care about. So I blog.

I read a proposal in the WSJ earlier this year, which has apparently come up again, about ending the tax deductibility of health benefits and was struck by how simple it is. I wish I still had the archive from my old site so I could find the original article.

Anyway, making benefits exempt from taxable income causes people to over-consume and employers will opt for more elaborate plans for more expensive workers. They’re the ones with the bargaining power. Will eliminating this distortion, by treating different forms of income equally, cause employers to abandon health insurance as a benefit? I suspect not for two reasons.

First is institutional inertia. Employees have come to expect employers to offer some sort of health benefit and it’s one of the first things employees think about when evaluating jobs. Employers will likely continue to offer health benefits simply because employees expect the benefits.

Another reason employers will continue to offer health benefits, even without the tax benefit, is because it’s something that they can offer relatively cheaply, as opposed to having employees get their own insurance. This won’t be true in every case, to be sure, but in general employers will be able to buy insurance at a lower rate than employees can alone, therefore adding more value to a compensation package from the employee’s perpective at a relatively low cost to the employer.

Will the benefit of eliminating the propensity to over-consume that’s built into the tax code outweigh the costs of disintermediation and other considerations? I don’t know, but on its face it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to treat one form of income as preferable to another.

More on this issue can be found here and here.

Update: click through the "here" links if you want to see actual numbers.

Exams are officially over!

Former Steelers great Lynn Swann is reportedly considering running for governor on the Republican ticket in 2006.

With various holidays approaching, what better way could there be to show your appreciation for Signifying Nothing than by getting Chris something he wants for his birthday and/or Christmas?

God, I feel like K-Lo (☣). Someone shoot me.

The BBC helpfully informs us that using your laptop on your lap may have negative effects on male fertility.

However, someone will have to explain to me later why health researchers are allowed to make inferences about the entire human male population from a study of just 29 subjects. They’d shoot me if I tried that. (þ: memeorandum)

Hei Lun of Begging to Differ explains why we won’t be seeing a playoff in college football (at least, not one bigger than the “plus-one” four-team format) any time soon. But he omits one other aspect of the “money” side of the equation: the way that bowl revenues are divvied up.

The teams (except independents, which today means—in practice—Notre Dame) don’t keep all of the payout from a bowl appearance; instead, they get about half, and the rest is divided equally around their conference, with perhaps a share also going to the league office. So every SEC school will get about a million dollars in shared bowl revenue this winter, in addition to any bowl payout shares (Auburn will get the biggest chunk of change, while every school will at least break even—travel expenses for the team and the band come out of the payout, obviously, so the headline payout number can be misleading at smaller bowls). In a playoff, these guaranteed revenues would essentially go away for conferences that don’t get anyone in the bracket—and the big schools depend on this money to fund their “non-revenue” sports (i.e. the sports other than football, men’s basketball, and [depending on the school] women’s basketball), and, by extension, deter Title IX lawsuits.

More importantly for this equation, any playoff would almost certainly fall under NCAA auspices and probably either give every playoff participant a slice of the pie (as outlined above) or every I-A school a slice of the pie; either option would essentially take money—and control—from the 5½ major conferences. And, given that a slight majority of I-A programs are in the majors (a figure likely to increase once the new I-A actual attendence requirements start to erode the Sun Belt and other minors), the status quo works just fine for a majority of the programs out there.

If the new Left2Right blog’s contributors want to understand “Red America” (gag), it occurs to me an excellent place to start might be by asking their conservative colleagues how to better understand, and communicate with, the unwashed masses, rather than by starting a weblog. Readers are cordially invited to point out any flaws in my thinking.

One might also point the blog’s contributors to, say, any of the empirical research on the public opinion formation process, which suggests that by far the worst way to convince anyone to change their opinions is to wrap one’s self in ideological and partisan colors opposite of those of the people one is trying to convince. Try here and here for starters.

The fun in Hattiesburg never ends; the Hattiesburg American reports that Southern Miss was put on probation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, its accreditation body (and the accreditor for most of the colleges and universities in the southeastern United States, including Millsaps). The issues leading to the decision include problems with the “assessment of institutional effectiveness, assessment of distance-learning effectiveness and strategic planning in academic units..”

In other SACS news, Auburn’s probation was lifted ($) on Tuesday.

Not much seems to have changed from yesterday’s account by Robert Knodell at the SEC Fanblog, although today’s Clarion-Ledger reports that USC (that’d be the one in California, not the one in the Carolinas) assistant Ed Orgeron really wants the job, and notes the latest salvo in the Bobby Petrino–Pete Boone pissing contest.

Brian Weatherson of Crooked Timber links to a new group blog, called Left2Right, which allegedly is designed for “blue state” professors to understand “Red America” (excuse me while I projectile-vomit). According to Weatherson:

The contributors so far include Elizabeth Anderson, Kwame Appiah, Josh Cohen, Stephen Darwall, Gerald Dworkin, David Estlund, Don Herzog, Jeff McMahan, Seana Shiffrin, and David Velleman. Wowsa. And many other names you may have heard of, from Peter Railton to Richard Rorty, are listed as being part of the team. This should be worth following.

Do I have to turn in my cap and gown if I declare that I haven’t actually heard of any of these people? (þ: Orin Kerr)

Professor Becker’s first post is online and here’s the last graf:

Moreover, the degree of certainty required before preventive actions are justified has been considerably reduced below what it was in the past because the destructive power of weaponry has enormously increased. Perhaps most worrisome, the power of weapons continues to grow, and to become more easily accessible. Critics of preventive wars and other preventive actions against rogue states and terrorist groups ignore these major changes in weaponry and their availability. Democratic governments have to recognize that they no longer have the luxury of waiting to respond until they are attacked.

Another commenter brought up an intriguing [update: I rarely re-read posts, but if this post hadn't been up for a few hours already I would edit it and use the word inane, not intriguing] point about box cutters: more people have been killed in the U.S. by terrorists with box cutters than by nuclear weapons. Why aren’t we attacking nations that manufacture box cutters? The commenter misses the whole point of any notion of preventive war: we don’t want to be attacked with nuclear weapons in the first place. September 11th was simply a wake-up call to something that had been building since the Iranian hostage crisis, and it took a disaster to get us out of our slumber. I don’t want to have to wait for yet another disaster to wake us again. There’s an argument to be made against preventive war, but that ain’t it.

As for the title of the post? One of the commenters mentioned that we are creating additional terrorists by attacking Iraq. This is almost certainly true. The questions is, I suppose, are we arresting / killing them faster than we create them? Are we being made less safe for having gone into Iraq? I don’t know, but there’s an upper bound on the number of new terrorists—really, pent up terrorism is more accurate—and I would like to think we’re getting rid of them faster than they’re being created.

I somehow managed to purchase two frozen pizzas (“Dano’s Gourmet”—I always trust pizza from a company named after a character on Hawaii Five-O) at Winn-Dixie last week, and, upon cooking the first, I discovered to my horror that in lieu of actual mozzarella cheese, one of the toppings on the pizza is called “mozzarella cheese substitute blend.”

My question: should I be annoyed at the regulatory state for its failure to ban fake cheese from the frozen pizza market (i.e. its failure to act in the Carolene Products vein), or should I be annoyed at the regulatory state for its lulling me into a false sense of security—a belief that I wouldn’t be sold a pizza with fake cheese on it—which led me not to check the ingredients until I got home?

Or, should I be annoyed at Winn-Dixie for stocking this crap and take my grocery business to Kroger or Brookshire’s or McDade’s or Super Wal-Mart? (I’d add New Deal to this list, but I’m leery of any supermarket whose primary selling point in its weekly ads is that ”$19.99 feeds your family meat for a week.” Plus, I generally make it a matter of principle to avoid stores named after government programs…)

This is what Stalinism does for you. Maybe North Korea will collapse so their people can eat:

Sixty years of North Korean communism have had a grim and unexpected impact on its citizens: it has paralysed their growth.

While their cousins in the south have thrived physiologically, thanks to the comforts of capitalism, North Koreans remain as stunted in stature as they were after the Second World War. Adolescents look like children, adults like young teenagers. Nor is the height difference a slight one. After studying more than 2,300 refugees who have fled the north over the past four years, anthropologist Sunyoung Pak has found that the average young northern male is 5.9cm (2.32in) shorter than his southern contemporary. The difference for women is 4.1cm (roughly 1.62in).

‘North Koreans are clearly suffering from chronic growth retardation,’ said Pak, of Seoul National University in South Korea. Her studies, to be published in the international journal, Economics and Human Biology, this month, suggest that North Koreans must have suffered severe malnutrition problems virtually since Korea split into two states in 1948.

Her research shows that the only ages at which the average North Korean in her sample and the average South Korean share about the same height is from 50 to 69 years. Since height is determined during the early teenage years, this suggests that North Korea began to suffer food shortages at least by the 1960s.

Amazon has a new "citations" feature for academic books. If the book is one for which "Search inside this book" is enabled, Amazon will tell you what other books are cited by the given book, and also what other books (with "Search inside" enabled) cite the given book.

For example, take the Amazon page for one of my favorite philosophy books, On the Plurality of Worlds, by David Lewis. In the citations section, we see that this book cites 29 other books in Amazon's catalog, including The Shape of Space, by Graham Nerlich, and Science without Numbers, by Hartry Field. There are 120 books in the Amazon catalog that cite Plurality, such as Supervenience and Mind, by Jaegwon Kim. There are even links to images of the pages where the citations occur.

It's trackback for books!

(þ Brad DeLong.)

Tucked into the omnibus appropriations bill passed a few weekends ago, there was a little noticed provision designating the oak as America’s national tree.

It would have been the maple, but I understand that one’s already taken.

A recent amendment to the Fair Credit Reporting Act requires that all three major credit bureaus (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion) provide you with a free copy of your credit report, upon your request, once per year.

To prevent them from being overwhelmed with requests, the free reports are being phased in over a nine month period, from Dec. 1, 2004 to Sept. 1, 2005, depending on your state of residence.

For more information, visit the FTC‘s page, or go to http://www.annualcreditreport.com/. (No link provided, since that web server rejects requests with a HTTP_REFERER header from any site other than www.ftc.gov, www.equifax.com, www.experian.com, or www.transunion.com, presumably to thwart phishing attacks.)

Chris just commented on this extensively, but this topic seems to be all over the place (and I mentioned it earlier this week, however briefly). The Economist has an article as well by their “Lexington” on this issue of ideological bias in the universities. A quote:

This is profoundly unhealthy per se. Debating chambers are becoming echo chambers. Students hear only one side of the story on everything from abortion (good) to the rise of the West (bad). It is notable that the surveys show far more conservatives in the more rigorous disciplines such as economics than in the vaguer 1960s “ologies”. Yet, as George Will pointed out in the Washington Post this week, this monotheism is also limiting universities’ ability to influence the wider intellectual culture. In John Kennedy’s day, there were so many profs in Washington that it was said the waters of the Charles flowed into the Potomac. These days, academia is marginalised in the capital—unless, of course, you count all the Straussian conservative intellectuals in think-tanks who left academia because they thought it was rigged against them.

Bias in universities is hard to correct because it is usually not overt: it has to do with prejudice about which topics are worth studying and what values are worth holding. Stephen Balch, the president of the conservative National Association of Scholars, argues that university faculties suffer from the same political problems as the “small republics” described in Federalist 10: a motivated majority within the faculty finds it easy to monopolise decision-making and squeeze out minorities.

The more indeterminate the discipline, the more it tilts left.

There are some on the right that rather loudly oppose affirmative action in all its forms, except in academia, where they want some form of preferences for the right. This seems like a bad idea to me, and Chris said it better than I can below: “Replacing liberal ideologues who can’t keep their lectures and their leftism separate with right-wingers with similar faults is no solution.”

It’s not as much of a threat in my discipline, economics, as it is in other fields. As my Thought professor has pointed out at great length, the economic discipline has created a “little box” which it defines as theory. The box is supposedly used as a means of keeping ideas that aren’t fully explainable out of the body of theory. There’s also a nearly complete positive correlation in favor of those ideas that can be expressed using math. Again leading to my theory about how indeterminate a discipline is sets its leftward tilt.

Greg Ransom and Glenn Reynolds are among those linking to Jeff Jacoby’s Boston Globe column on a survey conducted on behalf of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni that indicates that students perceive bias in the classroom environment at elite liberal arts colleges and universities; a similar perspective appears today at OpinionJournal.com.

Is political bias a problem in American college classrooms? If so, am I part of the problem?

Among the findings of the ACTA survey:

* 48% report campus presentations on political issues that “seem totally one-sided.”
* 46% say professors “use the classroom to present their personal political views.”
* 42% of students fault reading assignments for presenting only one side of a controversial issue.

The survey also indicates that political comments are consistently partisan. The survey, which was conducted just before and after the American presidential election, found that 68% of the students reported negative remarks in class about Pres. George Bush while 62% said professors praised Sen. John Kerry. ...

74% of students said professors made positive remarks about liberals while 47% reported negative comments about conservatives.

One wonders, somewhat, about issues of question wording (for example, if we invite a third-party presidential candidate to speak on campus, does that constitute a “totally one-sided” presentation?) and selection (what percentage of students said professors made negative remarks about Kerry or praise of Bush?). The lack of a straightforward report on the survey on the website is troublesome, to say the least, and I’m not sure you can infer much based on an average of 12 or 13 interviews per college, particularly without knowing the mode of interview or how interviewees were selected.

Nonetheless, there are a few noteworthy issues here worth discussing; first, course readers like the one I use for my introductory American government class rarely include articles supporting both sides of a particular issue, and I can’t assign a “conservative” reading on campaign finance reform if the only one in the book is from The Nation. Nor, for that matter, can I assign a “liberal” reading on homeland security, since the ones in the book are both from The Economist. Should I include a reading from David Duke to offset the pro-civil rights articles? At some point, balance becomes silly.

Second, the perception that the “job” of the liberal arts college professor is to indoctrinate students in political liberalism, rather than guiding students to knowledge through justified true belief and promoting the ability to think critically about conflicting ideas and values, is distressingly common on college and university campuses. A friend (and fellow Ph.D. student) and I once talked about the problem inherent when people who teach political science don’t even consider the political views of one of the two major parties to be legitimate.

All that said, I’m damned if I know what the solution is. Replacing liberal ideologues who can’t keep their lectures and their leftism separate with right-wingers with similar faults is no solution. Nor is a witch hunt against professors who, after all, are human and—over the course of 100+ hours of lecturing a semester—are probably going to say at least a couple of things that reflect something other than the objective material of the class. I like to think I do a good job balancing these things (one of the best compliments I’ve ever received teaching was from a bright student who “couldn’t figure out” what I was), but I also know I don’t always succeed.