Shots in the Dark

Smart Money does it too: The finance magazine looks at 50 “top-priced” (not sure if that means most expensive, or just expensive) colleges and how much money their graduates make.

It’s the kind of calculation that ruffles the robes of administrators at the most prestigious universities in the country. It’s a blunt bottom-line approach to a postsecondary education, a show-me-the-money college survey. And it’s one academic contest that the Ivies don’t win.

It’s the cost-benefit analysis of a college degree in which the benefit is defined entirely as money. Princeton comes in at #19, Harvard #22, Yale at 30….

Sorry, Smart Money—I still wouldn’t want to go to the Georgia Institute of Technology (#1)…..or the Colorado School of Mines (#8)…

How about trying to do something distinctly un-American and looking at how happy the graduates of specific colleges are? I have no idea how you’d determine this, but someone does. All the variables would likely make this a meaningless ranking, but at least it would be an interesting one, and a counter to the increasing sense that a college degree is only worth what it pays you….

I’ve been meaning to make a note of Tina Brown’s sleazy choice of a cover photo that makes Michele Bachmann look deranged, but Jon Stewart beat me to it. (And is far funnier about it than I could have been anyway.)

Brown defended the photo on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, saying,

“The intensity in her eyes is in all the photographs of her. You know, this is the thing that’s connecting with people,” Brown said. “We have people in the crowd saying, something about her tells me I should follow her. And there is something about Michele Bachmann, with the eyes looking out, she has this very, very, kind of, intense demeanor.”

Come now, Tina—tell the truth. You picked the photo because it makes Bachmann look nuts, which in fact she may be, but there are legitimate ways of pointing that out and using an unflattering photo isn’t one of them.

And Brown also manages to make people who like Michele Bachmann look nuts—”something about her tells me I should follow her,” Brown says, as if it’s a crowd of zombies. As Stewart points out, it’s annoying when the liberal media gives conservatives legitimate reasons to blame everything on the liberal media.

The really sad thing is that Brown is employing such pathetic, cheap shot journalism and Newsweek’s numbers are still going down.

Hmmm. Connection perhaps?

Sorry about the sparse blogging the past couple of days. I have been too upset about the stock market Yankees to write much. The Yankees should have swept the Sox, or at least taken two out of three, in Boston; deeply irritating that they let the Sox steal the series. And last night, Mariano Rivera blew his second game in a row, which is worrisome. For years I’ve been fretting that Rivera is losing his mojo. I may finally be right. You just don’t get the sense that hitters are afraid of RIvera any more.

The only good thing is that AJ Burnett was booed off the field last night, as he should be. There has never been a pitcher who could give up a lead as predictably as Burnett. Why does Joe Girardi insist on keeping him in the lineup? Burnett hasn’t won a game—no exaggeration—since June…..

The Wall Street Journal interviews RIchard Vedder, an Ohio University economist, on the Forbes magazine college rankings as compared to the US News college rankings. The latter picked Harvard at #1, Princeton at number two, Yale at three; Forbes picked Williams at #1, followed by Princeton and West Point—Harvard was at #6, and Yale wasn’t even in the top ten. (Haverford, meanwhile, is at #7.) Curious!

Two wonderful stories in two different papers, yesterday and today.

The Times reports that Faye Dunaway has been evicted—she says she left in a huff—from her $1048.72-a-month rent-controlled apartment on E. 78th Street.

While Ms. Dunaway appears ready to hand back the keys, she took a final swipe at her landlord in one of her voice mail messages.

“I hope you need that money like crazy and you’ll give it to poor people,” she said to Mr. Moses. “I hope you have a terrible life.”

I know who I’m siding with here….

Also, former New York gubernatorial candidate Jimmy McMillan—who ran as the head of the “The Rent is Too Damn High” party—has been evicted from his…um…rent-controlled apartment.

As the New York Post reports,

Jimmy McMillan says he pays $872.96 for a rent-controlled ground-floor apartment on St. Marks Place in the East Village — which he’s had since the late-1970s, when the rent was around $275.

$872.96 for an apartment on uber-trendy St. Marks Place—nice digs if you can get ’em. And if you’ve had that apartment for 40 years, even at a low-paying job you could pretty easily be a wealthy man from the savings…

Apparently the Mystic Aquarium’s beluga whale likes mariachi music. (The band was performing at a recent wedding held at the aquarium.)

* I have racked my mind to see if this pun is offensive, and so far as I can tell, it’s just a good (which is to say, bad) pun.

** By the way, the Japanese hunt beluga whales. Argh.

A fascinating juxtaposition on Page 1 of this morning’s Times. (Bravo to the Times if it was deliberate; probably not.)

On the top left, this story: “City Campaign Seeks to Lift Young Black and Latino Men.” It details an effort funded by NYC, and with significant private financial support from the mayor himself, to target at-risk black and Latino men.

Even as crime has fallen and graduation rates have risen in New York over the past decade, city officials said that black and Latino men, especially those between ages 16 and 24, remained in crisis by nearly every measure, including rates of arrest, school suspension and poverty.

…Starting this fall, the administration said it would place job-recruitment centers in public-housing complexes where many young black and Latino men live, retrain probation officers in an effort to reduce recidivism, establish new fatherhood classes and assess schools on the academic progress of male black and Latino students.

And just below that article, this one: “Even Marked Up, Luxury Goods Fly Off the Shelves.”

Even with the economy in a funk and many Americans pulling back on spending, the rich are again buying designer clothing, luxury cars and about anything that catches their fancy. Luxury goods stores, which fared much worse than other retailers in the recession, are more than recovering — they are zooming. Many high-end businesses are even able to mark up, rather than discount, items to attract customers who equate quality with price.

The juxtaposition demonstrates nicely the schism of wealth inequality that’s dividing this country; it’s one of our greatest challenges, and more power to Bloomberg for taking it on. But I keep thinking that it’s going to take much more than the availability of employment centers; the real change that has to come in Harlem and East Harlem—the most difficult problem areas for minority men—is cultural. Having lived in a neighborhood that sat squarely between Harlem (poor) and Columbia University (not poor) for years, I had the chance to watch a crucible of class interaction, and I got the distinct feeling that many African-American men have basically just given up on the possibility of normal work—a career. Nor do they seem to want to make the sacrifices that many recent immigrants make. The block next to my apartment was filled with little shops, bodegas, a Chinese restaurant, a Mexican restaurant, a Mexican supermarket, a market run by guys from Yemeni—there didn’t appear to be one black-owned or -operated business on the block. What you could see was clusters of hardworking immigrants willing to make enormous sacrifices (the Yemeni guys worked about 25 hours a day) to make money and get ahead. For whatever reason—and please, just so we can avoid this, race has nothing to do with it, the idea that there’s any relationship between race and work ethic is absurd—I didn’t see that with African-American guys.

This is all anecdotal, of course, and I certainly wouldn’t base any policy or spending decisions based on my two cents. But I couldn’t help but think of the need for cultural change when I read this article in the New York Post about two employees of an Auto Zone store who chased down and wrestled with a shoplifter.

Meanwhile, a crowd gathered — with some onlookers threatening the AutoZone staffers for daring to stop the suspected thief. Lozada said he and his co-worker tried to ignore the onlookers’ contemptuous cries of “It’s not your store! Why do you care?”

The crowd got so hostile that the store employees eventually gave up and let the guy go.

…shortly after the mayhem, The Post found the suspect shuffling along East 138th Street.
“They didn’t have any right to do that to me,” the man said, pointing to a black left eye and bloody scab on the back of his head. “I’m homeless. I’m not going to steal from other homeless people. Better to steal from the store.”

That, as they once used to say, is FUBAR. (And, since it’s the NY Post, must be taken with a grain of skepticism.) But if it’s accurate, the incident shows how alienated from capitalism (and honesty) some people—black, white, brown, whatever—have grown in this economy. You can bring the job fairs to the alienated, the demoralized—but can you make them work? It wouldn’t be a bad thing for more of the people spending $1000 on a pair of shoes to start paying attention to such matters.

When a newspaper becomes bad, it doesn’t always do so in glaring ways, like typos in headlines. It’s more a general kind of dumbing-down—less ambitious, less sophisticated stories written by reporters shuffled from beat to beat.

You can see that in the Globe today—well, you can see that in the Globe a lot—but an article this morning demonstrates the process neatly.

Written by Megan Woolhouse, it’s titled “Huge Cuts Could Imperil Recovery, Economists Say.” And both halves of that title are true. Economists such as Paul Krugman, Larry Summers, Simon Johnson, Brad DeLong, Laura Tyson, Robert Shiller and others have been arguing that for some time.

But the economist around whom Woolhouse centers her article, Kenneth Rogoff, doesn’t say that. In fact, Rogoff is one of the few economists around who argues that cutting spending right now is actually good for the recovery, because it allegedly increases consumer confidence. You can read about him here, in this Business Insider article, “Meet the Two Most Dangerous Economists in the World Right Now.”

Rogoff gives Woolhouse this quote:

“I don’t think the cutbacks are as big a problem as the process - and that was a disaster,’’ Rogoff said. “What really bothers me is that the whole process is a constitutional crisis that makes the US Congress look like the Italian parliament. And that’s not good for growth.’’

There may be some short-term truth to this, but it’s an awfully self-serving quote for Rogoff-hey, it’s not my fault if they cut the budget and consumer/investor confidence goes down instead of up! The process was messy!

There’s probably more truth to the fact that draining billions of dollars out of a weak recovery is exactly the wrong thing to do at this economic moment—it’s like practicing bloodletting on a patient recovering from internal bleeding. And letting Rogoff be the go-to guy for this article is like letting Barry Bonds be a spokesman for Whole Foods.

So why did Woolhouse do it? Well, probably because Rogoff is local, he’s Harvard, and his book has gotten a lot of attention. Not because he was the right person to make this argument. It’s the kind of thing that makes you sympathetic to Paul Krugman when he points out how right he’s been….

….and so apparently there won’t be a federal default. But is it a good deal? At first glance, it is—for the Republicans. (This Washington Post chart is pretty helpful.) They won $1 trillion in spending cuts without any tax increases. Meanwhile, entitlement reform and “tax reform” are, as they say in Washington, kicked down the road, the work of to-be-determined congressional committees.

I’m pleased they’re going to pass something to avert a financial crisis, but this seems a significant victory for the Tea Party People—and a real defeat for everyone else. No new revenues, no entitlement reform, apparently very minimal cuts in defense spending—that’s not going to get the job done.