Time for a break with ‘Gypsy Jazz’ creator Django Reinhardt and sometimes collaborator Stephane Grappelli.
(Minor Swing)
(Dark Eyes)
Month: March 2016
The Transformation of Economics.
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 all 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.
Humble
In San Saba, Texas. (Which, I am told, is correctly pronounced “San Say-bah” locally.) I met there on Monday with a gentleman who is a descendant of Frank Hamer, in the course of doing a book-talk presentation. I also met with a descendant of John Meusebach. I heard all about a Meusebach daughter, who became a dentist and had an extraordinarily interesting life.
You never know what you are going to find out about in small-town Texas.
And I got some nice pictures in San Saba, and in the next town over, called Cherokee.
CNN’s Trump Zeitgeist
At the gym tonight CNN was on one of the TVs and I saw that Anderson Cooper hosted a panel of 6-8 people to discuss the increasing likelihood the Donald Trump was going to be the GOP nominee. I wasn’t listening, I just overheard snippets and glanced at their clearly worried faces from time to time. I did get a mood sense from the discussion though.
Donald Trump. Will he be the GOP nominee? (Several seconds of silence). Everyone talking at once.
Kasich, he still has a chance…
Maybe Rubio, he’s got a lot of support…
Trump…KKK!…high negatives…brokered convention…(Me thinking: Rip, tear, shred, say anything to destroy him. Also, they’re desperate to tie him to the KKK.)
The panelists had a ‘This can’t be happening, there must be some way out, this can’t be real.’ attitude. My sense was that Trump as the GOP nominee leaves the media in a state somewhere between shock and panic. Is it because, try as they may, they can’t seem to influence this election one way or another, that they’re losing their influence and role as gatekeepers? Or do they simply fear that a populist Trumpalanche might defeat either Democrat in the election? Or do they fear Trump in particular because he doesn’t fear them, and gets away with it, not only unscathed, but ever more popular? Whatever the reason, it was an interesting snapshot at how worried they are.