NOT an actual email from a book author...

To be quite clear....

I did not receive the following email from any Duke colleague, or any professor of history. But I did receive the email, and I thought I would repost it.  It pretends (falsely) to be a summary of my review of Democracy in Chains. It isn't. But it is fair to say this is what the author might have said.

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Thanks so much for the very positive review and affirmation of my book Democracy in Chains by my colleague Duke Professor of Political Science Dr. Michael Munger. Please find below salient extracts from Dr. Munger’s review.

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, by my Duke University colleague, Nancy MacLean, a professor in our distinguished Department of History… is… a remarkable book. MacLean has argued persuasively throughout her career for the historical method…in this book… MacLean recounts an exchange, a conversation really, between two conservatives…intent on reverse-engineering a …political order in America…using shadowy methods and discredited theories. Democracy in Chains is a work of …historical...research underpinning …facts … from a much larger record…drawing reliable conclusions about history. 

…Democracy in Chains is a great story… of … James M. Buchanan, the winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. MacLean is able to decode the true meaning of his …writings which…sought … to bring down.. America and replace it with a plutocracy. …MacLean’s excellence as a writer,…careful sifting of evidence and respectful encounters with opposing points of view…reveal … that …Buchanan … wanted to establish a …society …for racial segregation… 

MacLean’s book…is admirably academic and careful. … MacLean …found …the attempt by segregationist forces to support vouchers. MacLean says, “The economists made their case in the race-neutral, value-free language of their discipline, offering what they depicted as a strictly economic argument—on ‘matters of fact, not values.’” MacLean … support the claim that Buchanan advocated vouchers for the purpose of achieving segregation. … Buchanan’s support for vouchers and for school choice arose from a deeply held concern for …a …repressive apartheid society where African-Americans were …murderous and … must be forcibly suppressed… MacLean has discovered a number of important documents from the history of Public Choice, and other aspects of the history of the 1960s and 1970s in academic economic circles. There is a terrific example on pp. 115–117, where the “glee” of Buchanan and others about their conspiracy, gathered around a roaring fire in the remote mountains of Virginia, is documented.

 … MacLean has…written that history, using … public documents that … destroy...the conspiracy; …that … would sweep the nation, and the world… When summarized in this way, MacLean’s thesis really does read like a … narrative thread connecting the documents and discussions that …strategize about how to win back the White House and rejuvenate the conservative movement… The contribution of Democracy in Chains, then, is to do two things…Identify James Buchanan as the focal point of the revolution, and identify the content of Public Choice research and teaching as anti-Constitutional and anti-democratic… As I hope has been clear, as a book Democracy in Chains is well-written, and the research it contains is both interesting and …illuminating…as an actual history…of the work of James Buchanan …to end democracy in America. 

My thanks to the actual author of this email, Steve Spearman. And he is right: every word of the above actually appears in my review, and in precisely this order!

Questions with easy answers: Higher Ed Edition

Salon asks the following: Why does the GOP hate college? and blathers on and on without ever once touching on the very simple answer:

Because "College" hates the GOP!

People, this is just basic, basic politics. An overwhelming majority of college professors are liberals. They vote for and contribute to the Democratic Party almost exclusively. It is widely perceived that professors spend much of their time inculcating liberal ideas into their students' unformed brains.

The reason the GOP hates college is the same reason why they hate Unions. Both are bastions of support for the Democratic Party.

It's amazing to me that liberals can't or won't see this. College professors and administrators backed the wrong side (at least for now). They didn't play it down the middle. They put all their eggs in one political basket and now, hey, payback's a bitch.

Of course, this is a shame because a college degree has perhaps never been more valuable. It is truly amazing that, even as the share of young people attending college rose steadily, so did the college wage premium.

So Proud of....CLEMSON!

When sex is outlawed, only outlaws will have sex.

And Clemson wants to outlaw sex. 

Why do states allow their universities to be taken over by these sorts of administrators?  Because most people don't want to go into administration.  Do you?

Then you had better get ready to fill out your survey.

Tenure and the Caterpillar

Found this great caterpillar, on the LMM's car.  Note the giant false head, unseeing "eyes," and upright posture.  When threatened, it rears up and tries to look all bad-ass, when in fact it's a soft little useless wimp.

Unfortunately, my good friend Michael Thomas imagined that there is some connection between this beast and the beast called "The Tenured Professor."   Click for an even more tenured image.

Ow.  Problem with the analogy, of course, is that caterpillars pupate and turn into pretty butterflies.  Tenured profs turn into....Keith Poole.  Double ow.

D-Drez lays down some smack

So, this guy was pretty sure of himself.  Got all up in here and talking big.  I thought I was going to have to respond.  I mean, the guy's "data" is "a woman sent me a letter."  Really?

But D-Drez took care of it.  Better than I could have anyway.

This Is Bad

At first, I thought that this was pretty funny.  You would have to know Gary, to see why it is funny.  But he would absolutely not see why taking a grenade onto a plane would be a problem.


A political science professor at Stanford University who attempted to bring a World War II-era grenade Tuesday afternoon through security at Los Angeles International Airport — forcing police to evacuate a portion of the airport — was being questioned by police Tuesday evening, three law enforcement sources told the Los Angeles News Group. 

Gary Walter Cox, 58, told authorities the grenade had belonged to his father, who had recently died, the sources said. He thought it was inert but a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation said police determined that it might actually have been live. 

The grenade was spotted by Transportation Security Administration workers during routine screening, a federal law enforcement official said. The Los Angeles Police Department bomb squad was called out to the airport, and Terminal 1 was evacuated at about 3:45 p.m. Police transported the item and later blew it up, the three sources said. The terminal was reopened about 4:20 p.m. 

The reasons it is not funny:

1.  He was returning from his dad's funeral.  Dad has been sick for a while, dad's an old military man.  You can see why Gary wasn't really thinking straight, even by Gary standards.

2.  More importantly, they are going to charge him with a felony.  And he had to stay in jail overnight.

So, in short, my tendency to see things as ironic and amusing is just wrong here.  This is terrible.  You'd have to know Gary to understand this, and the judge won't know that.  The facts are not good.

Taking On the Ivy League

It is possible to do better on education.  Even in higher ed, where the U.S. is pretty good, it is possible to do MUCH better.  An interesting video with some ideas on how.


Also...the Minerva Project

Nod to the Ward Boss.

"I Quit" LIt

Professors quitting professing. 

Excerpt:

Academe is a profession full of erudite free-thinkers who feel disillusioned by a toxic labor system in which criticism is not tolerated—so those who leave often relish the newfound ability to say anything they want (talking about “a friend” here). In its insularity and single-mindedness, academe is also very similar to a fundamentalist religion (or, dare I say, cult), and thus those who abdicate often feel compelled to confess. 

That may well describe English, and Literature generally.  The Humanities are much closer to a secular leftist religion than anything else.  No orthodoxies can be questioned.  So don't go into the Humanities.

But as you read the article, you'll note that a lot of those who "quit" didn't jump.  They were pushed. If it makes them feel better to say, "No!  I broke up with YOU!" then fine.

Nod to Anonyman.

Unhedged economists are vulnerable economists

People the econ job market is pretty good. So it seems surprising that the University of Florida is defunding, and thus effectively killing, their PhD program in Econ as reported here.

But, it is perhaps not so mysterious when you consider the unhedged financial position of that department. As the article points out, it generates a lot of credit hours and tuition money from its classes, but most of those hours come in the Arts and Sciences College. Meanwhile, the Econ department is in the business school.

So its revenues accrue to one accounting unit while its costs are borne by another. No wonder the department has shrunk from 38 to 11 and there are plans to shrink it further still to 6!**

This is a classic case of unhedged risk, the academic equivalent of a firm who earns its revenues in Pesos but pays its costs in Dollars.

Note that the department was offered the option of moving to Arts & Sciences, "where, deans say, the Ph.D. program might have survived. The faculty voted not to move because, they say, the liberal-arts college has its own financial problems, and they were concerned about salaries, research budgets, and teaching loads."

My department at OU was in the B-school back in the day and faced a similar situation. They decided to move (or got kicked out, depending on who is telling the story) to A&S and our program lives to this day!


**Mrs. Angus says that if she was one of the 11, she'd be very careful about accepting a drink or any food from the B-school dean!

Hat tips to PrisonRodeo and RKG

Atlantic: Why Do People Have to Make Stuff Up?

I have found it interesting how many people have truly strange conspiracy theories about big money and libertarianism.

The other day I got a very angry letter from a colleague, claiming that the Koch Foundation was trying to take over NC politics.  I checked (by googling) the source.  And it was a fund-raising letter from Sen. Kay Hagan.  The point being that fund-raising letters by their nature are designed to use scare tactics, and have no obligation to be truthful.  I asked for evidence that the CGKF was trying to "buy" NC politics, and my colleague sent back something about Art Pope.  Ma'am, those are different people, and Art Pope lives in NC.  Lots of rich people (including my colleague who was sending these notes, by the way) had made contributions to NC politicos.

Now, the Atlantic has a piece wondering why people need to make up these bizarre stories.  The answer appears to be that folks on the left need, actually psychologically NEED, to think they speak for "the people."  They have never met the people, and they actually think the people are morons who need protection designed by smart leftists, but okay.  So when a leftist encounters someone they disagree with, their first instinct is to believe that the disagreer can't possibly ACTUALLY believe those things.  S/he must be getting paid.  And they must be getting paid by...the KOCHS.  Because the Kochs are everywhere.   (What about Soros?  Well, that money goes to leftists, and they are telling the truth.  So that money is not the same as the Koch money, which is for EVIL).

This argument gives two useful things:  1.  A bogeyman, a single enemy; and 2.  An explanation why someone might disagree (they don't REALLY disagree, but they are being bribed to pretend to disagree, with the claims of the left).  Since no smart, reasonable person could POSSIBLY disagree with a leftist, who cares so much about the people, and who knows the truth with scientific certainty.

Duke....Really?

I had not been keeping up with this.

Have to admit, I am ashamed of Duke at this point.  I have often defended Duke's record during the lacrosse scandal, blaming it mostly on the fact the prosecutor actually lied about facts, and made things up.

Sure, some (not a lot, but some) faculty said things that I regret, even if they don't.  But a number of Duke administrators (particularly Provost Peter Lange) actually behaved admirably, and they don't always get proper credit.

But this...gosh.  Full disclosure:  I consider KC Johnson at somewhere between acquaintance and friend, and I have known him for quite a while.  So perhaps I'm biased.  I'll let you decide.

As for me, I'd say Duke acted badly here.

You Stressed Bro?

Forbes magazine has declared that "University Professor" is the least stressful job in America, and university professors across America have been going nuts disputing it (check #RealForbesProfessors on Twitter or read this).

People, the simple fact is that there is no one set of experiences, working conditions, or stress levels that describe the job of "university professor".

If you are a "full-time adjunct", man that is a stressful life. Low pay, low status, no job security, little to no benefits. If I were to give someone in that situation advice, it would be to find another line of work.

At the other extreme, if you are a tenured professor at all but the most elite of institutions, that can be a very stress-free life. Or to put it another way, most stress that may come there is self imposed. For example, I find it stressful to have PhD. students on the job market. I am to a certain degree responsible for their placements and that weighs on me. However, I could always just not be a thesis advisor or greatly restrict the number of students I advise and avoid this "stress".

Prepping a new class, or mastering new research tools can be difficult and stressful. However, most tenured professors can avoid doing these things unless they at some level want to do them. Again, the stress involved is self imposed.

It's true that many tenured professors check out every spring and are not heard or seen again until the new academic year starts in the fall. They don't do research. They don't update their class notes. They work the system. Not only is there no stress, there's no sweat.

However, many other tenured professors work pretty hard year-round, continue to publish and continually work on their teaching. A lot of sweat, perhaps some stress, but most of it is self imposed. Getting significant pay raises, getting promoted, getting a chair, are post-tenure goals that often require continued productivity, but the basic fact is that you can hunker down and hibernate for the rest of your natural life with few overtly negative repercussions.

Assistant professors on tenure track have another different set of experiences. Sometimes they have no clear idea of what it will take to earn tenure. That can be stressful. Sometimes their colleagues or university bureaucrats will take advantage of them, pressuring them into spending time on things that won't pay off at tenure. That can be stressful too.

The job experiences of professors are way to diverse to be captured in a single description. The stress-level is extremely context dependent.

Grand Game: Academic "Honor" Edition

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UPDATE:  Okay, so don't even read my post.  It is lame and ad hoc.  GR answers all the questions, way better than I did.  Just read what he said.  Seriously.

*********************************

So, this piece, based on this book, says that there is a giant conspiracy of "honor" in academic political science.

I'll admit that perhaps academic rank of PhD institution is more important than it "should" be (and I'm not sure what that means, but I'll admit it).  But if admissions processes are based on grades, recommendations, and GRE scores, and if the top ten PS departments* choose the 150 best applicants each year, wouldn't it be amazing if those departments did NOT dominate the job market?  Let's assume that the admissions criteria are only 50% predictive of later success.  Still, year after year, 75 of the best young political scientists in the country are going to the top ten departments. 

Sure, that means that there may be no value added in "top" PhD programs.  But if the admissions process selects based on traits that are actually correlated with ability, this is just sorting.   To put it another way, the admissions processes at top ten poli sci departments would have to be pretty dumb for anything other than dominance to occur.

Anyway, see if you agree with me, and pick out some of the logical howlers in this piece.

(*Based on this ranking, which the researchers used, Duke is 9th, so perhaps I'm just biased? Or drunk on all that "honor"?)

And, since @lordsutch linked it in the first place, apparently (?) approvingly...what say you, Lord Sutch?  You called it "in-breeding."  Why isn't it just probabilistic sorting?

You Publish, or I'll Perish

Okay kids, sorry to harsh your mellow.  But I am sick and tired of writing letters of recommendation for promising young scholars who have given me nothing to work with.  I say that I will write the letter, and then I look at the CV and think.....FiretrUCK.  What am I going to do with this?

Academics is a simple business.  If you write every day, three pages or more, you will be successful.  You can be successful other ways, for sure (write one truly brilliant paper every other year, and publish it in Econometrica or AER).  But that's hard.  There is nothing hard about writing three pages per day, every day.  Except that apparently no one, NO ONE does it.

Some facts:

It takes two journal articles per year to get tenure.  Good journals.  Not great journals.  If you can publish in great journals you can get away with fewer publications.  But barring consistent genius, you should assume you need two journal articles per year to rest easy.

To do that, you have to have three papers out at journals at all times.  Four would be better, but never less than three.  Since your articles are going to get turned down 2/3 of the time, that means you need to have only two new papers per year (assuming that your portfolio of "work at journals" turns over once every six months, and each time one of the three gets accepted).  What I mean is that you only have a 1/3 success rate, and you get back two responses each year on your three articles.  Two of them get accepted, and you write two new ones.  You are writing the new ones while the ones out there are being considered by reviewers, for six months.

More after the jump ==>

Letter from Hugo Chavez

I have been waiting for a long time, months and months, to publish this little letter that came into my possession.  I had to wait long enough, and indefinitely enough, so that it would be harder to determine just who was the recipient.

A person who is on the faculty at a universidad in Venezuela applied for funding to travel abroad to a conference.  The funding was granted, and the person asked his/her bosses to approve the trip.  This was the letter that came back (I typed it out from a paper original, so forgive the lack of proper accents, and the misspellings):


Republica Bolivariana De Venezuela            (DATE)
Estimada y estimado compatriota
Tenga un saludo cordial y Revolucionario!
    Cumplimos con informarle que su solicitud no puede ser ni sera procesada por diferencias de pensamientos.  Esto es debido a que su proposito de estudio no servira para el beneficio de la nacion.
    Personas de su familia presenta expediente contra la revolucion, por lo tanto, debemos cuidar a la nacion de sus intenciones.
    Le recomendamos que enmiende su vincula con el Estado soberano para poder confiar en las intenciones y proposito de su preparacion en el exterior del pais.
    Sin mas que agregar, se despide ante de Comision Administracion de Divisas (CADIVI)

(Two Truly Enormous Quarter Page Signatures, Obviously Proud and Important Dignitaries)

Now, in my not very good Spanish, here is the (a?) translation.  (After the jump)

BEFORE THE JUMP UPDATE:  Got an email saying that the letter is a hoax.  So, don't go saying "I read this on the internet, so it must be true!"  It may not be.  I'm going to leave it up, though for its truthiness value...

The Final Answer: You are BOTH Crazy

There was a bit of a kerfuffle over this comic, by Zach Weiner.

Everyone, including me, was sure that the comic was mocking whoever we were not. Economists laughed that philosophers were so ridiculous, and philosophers thought it funny that economists were so shallow and arrogant. Jacob was sure he knew, for example. But then to be fair a few folks, at least, over here thought that the philosopher was ridiculous.

At KPC we want to KNOW. So I wrote to Zach W himself. And the answer is... you people are ALL crazy. And hilarious. (quotes with permission)

As to the joke: If it went right, hopefully it made fun of both. I actually did a similar treatment of philosophy vs. engineering a while back here:

In that one, hopefully it's clear that the engineer is simplifying in a way that is both informative and problematic. Since Economists are essentially engineers who work with human lives instead of mechanical systems, the perspective is more or less the same.

Curiously, it was popular in both the reddit.com economics forum and the reddit.com philosophy forum. The former thought it was making fun of philosophers for being useless, and the latter thought it was making fun of economists for lacking a sense of profundity.

So yeah, making fun of everyone. Zach Weiner, SMBC

My own conclusion: the Philosophers are not interested in an answer, really. If faced with this real life situation where a decision is required would either respond purely emotionally or else would lie on their backs and kick their little legs in the air, hoping that the problem will go away. Philosophers and grandma both die, because Philosophers aren't interested in answers, only questions.

The Economists would save the Mona Lisa, and spend the rest of their lives trying to forget the haunting screams of the grandma as they carried the Mona Lisa out of the room.

But the problem with policy analysis generally is you don't get to say, "I don't know." You have to do something, you simply must. Philosphers spend all their time wondering if they can get both thumbs up their butt at the same time, or if they have to take turns. Economists spend just a very brief time figuring out "the answer," which is always wrong, and then they pretend they already knew that.

Talking

You can say whatever you want.

And we at the U will tell you what you want!

New video from FIRE

In Italy, Laziness is NOT a Problem

Does anybody really know what satire is?; does anybody really care?

Abstract: We investigate a phenomenon which we have experienced as common when dealing with an assortment of Italian public and private institutions: people promise to exchange high quality goods and services (H), but then something goes wrong and the quality delivered is lower than promised (L). While this is perceived as ‘cheating’ by outsiders, insiders seem not only to adapt but to rely on this outcome. They do not resent low quality exchanges, in fact they seem to resent high quality ones, and are inclined to ostracise and avoid dealing with agents who deliver high quality. This equilibrium violates the standard preference ranking associated to the prisoner’s dilemma and similar games, whereby self-interested rational agents prefer to dish out low quality in exchange for high quality. While equally ‘lazy’, agents in our L-worlds are nonetheless oddly ‘pro-social’: to the advantage of maximizing their raw self-interest, they prefer to receive low quality provided that they too can in exchange deliver low quality without embarrassment. They develop a set of oblique social norms to sustain their preferred equilibrium when threatened by intrusions of high quality. We argue that cooperation is not always for the better: high quality collective outcomes are not only endangered by self-interested individual defectors, but by ‘cartels’ of mutually satisfied mediocrities.

Either way, fabulous. Really a fine piece of social science. Not least because the phrase "cartels of mutually satisfied mediocrities" sounds a lot like a faculty meeting in the US. Not at Duke, of course. No, really.

(Nod to the Ward Boss, who is never lazy)

The Sacrifices We Make For Research

I am sorry; I find this quite funny.

That does not MAKE me a bad person, but it IMPLIES that I am a bad person.

The guy was doing what he knew, so that he knew who he was doing. Here is his dissertation. So when he did the Pres's wife, he had solid research to back him up.

(Nod to Anonyman, who also found it funny. But there is no question Anonyman is going to hell, none)

Miller Center Summer Institute

Back home now. Was in NY, at Columbia Law School, for Tikva-Hertog.

And then in Pasadena, for Miller Center. Amazing students, in both cases. Scary smart people, really interesting and accomplished.

There is a tradition (blame the Admiral, I expect) of "toasting" at the Miller Center.

These can get a bit rococo. But, in this case, even more. It was... It was.... well, I have pictures.

I did my usual shy, balanced, fair-minded discussion, in two lectures. Okay, actually, I was pretty tired, and I went full-out teller of ungentle truths, "you maggots need to get to work, nobody likes you anyway, you all suck!" on them.

At the dinner on Thursday night, the toast took the form of a male maenad (if you can be a male maenad; is that a "gonad," perhaps?), a frenzied follower of Bacchus.

He mounted the stage, which was a table. Now, this particular gonad was not a small gonad. So there was some question whether the table would be able to do its job here, adding dramatic tension.

Then, the gonad held forth, in quite an impressive Shakespearean form, about my outrages and errors of the previous day. The list was long (and, I should add, quite accurate).
We, as the British say, fell about. Well played, young gonad.

.
(Thanks for DS for the pix)