I was trying to think of ways to legitimately work this photograph of Judge into a post, but there aren’t any, really. So here he is anyway, to remind us all of the virtues of carefully weighing your options and making wise choices. Suffice to say that Judge would not approve of torturing prisoners, invading other countries with a minimum of long-term planning, selling stock in insider deals, laggardly hanging about when people need urgent help, or crossing the road without first looking for a safe place and then letting all the traffic pass you. Pay attention to Judge. He knows whereof he speaks. Normal programming will resume shortly.
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Kieran Healy
What with “all”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/09/21/selecting-future-moms/ the “kerfuffle”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/09/20/mommy-tracking-the-ivy-leaguers/ about the “NYT article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/national/20women.html?ei=5090&en=6a8e0c413c09c249&ex=1284868800&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all on Ivy League women and their labor market / parenting plans, I took a look at some “BLS”:http://www.bls.gov/ data on long-term trends in earnings patterns within families, and in mothers’ labor force participation. Here are a couple of figures I created that capture some of what’s been happening in these areas over the past thirty-odd years.
The first figure shows trends in earning patterns within families. (You can get it as a “PDF file”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/fe-trends.pdf.) Here you can see that even in 1967, when the series starts, families where the Husband was the only earner were already a minority of all families. By the 1990s, there were almost as many families with no earners as families where only the Husband was working. The percentage of families where only the Wife was working rose from 1.7 to 5.2 percent from 1967 to 2003. The percentage of families where both the husband and wife were working peaked in 1999 (at just over 60 percent) and has fallen slightly since then. Note that this figure doesn’t tell you how earning patterns change once families have children, just the absolute numbers of each type, whether they have children or not.
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David Goldenberg at “Gelf Magazine”:http://www.gelfmagazine.com has a copy of “the survey”:http://www.gelfmagazine.com/gelflog/archives/media.html#surveying_ivy_league_motherhood that Louise Story conducted as the basis for her “irritating”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/09/20/mommy-tracking-the-ivy-leaguers/ “article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/national/20women.html?ei=5090&en=6a8e0c413c09c249&ex=1284868800&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all about Ivy League women and their plans for motherhood. Doing a reliable survey is hard, and by far the two biggest difficulties are sample selectivity (when the probability of participation is related to the outcome you want to measure: this a very tricky problem) and poor design of questions (where you look for what you want to find). Here are the first few questions from the survey, which was emailed to a group of freshman and senior women at Yale:
When you have children, do you plan to stay at home with them or do you plan to continue working? Why?
If you plan to continue working, do you plan to work full-time in an office, or full-time from your house, or part-time in an office, or part-time from your house? Why?

If you plan to stay at home with your kids, do you plan to return to work? If so, how old will you wait for your kids to be when you return?
Was your mom a stay-at-home mom? Explain whether she worked, and how much she worked! Were you glad with her choice (to either work or stay-at-home or whatever combination she did)?

At what age do you think you’ll have kids? How many kids do you want?
More commentary “at Gelf”:http://www.gelfmagazine.com/gelflog/archives/media.html#surveying_ivy_league_motherhood.
Here’s an “irritating piece”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/national/20women.html?pagewanted=1&hp from the New York Times about how high-achieving women students at elite schools are planning to quit their jobs and have children when they’re a bit older:
Cynthia Liu is precisely the kind of high achiever Yale wants: … So will she join the long tradition of famous Ivy League graduates? Not likely. By the time she is 30, this accomplished 19-year-old expects to be a stay-at-home mom. “My mother’s always told me you can’t be the best career woman and the best mother at the same time,” Ms. Liu said matter-of-factly. “You always have to choose one over the other.” … Many women at the nation’s most elite colleges say they have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children. Though some of these students are not planning to have children and some hope to have a family and work full time, many others, like Ms. Liu, say they will happily play a traditional female role, with motherhood their main commitment.
Now, let’s be clear about why the article is annoying. I don’t begrudge these women their choices in the slightest. I hope they make happy lives for themselves. In many ways they get the absolute best deal possible. But as usual, the article is steeped with the standard way of framing the issue, viz, only women have work-family choices. It’s up to them to be “realistic”, while of course the male students do not have any work-family choices at all. The subtext of the piece is the indirect vindication of those crusty old bastards in the 1950s who couldn’t see why they should hire, say, Sandra Day O’Connor because she’d only be taking a place away from a man with a family.
In passing the other day, I mentioned the Moondoggle. This is the idea floated early last year that NASA might return to the moon and build a base there, for no particular reason. At the time I thought it was just a “failed trial balloon”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/09/16/tax-and-spend-or-just-spend/ that rose out of Karl Rove’s head. But several commenters said that in fact it was alive and well, and now I see the “BBC reports”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4261522.stm that 2020 has been set as the date NASA will triumphantly return to 1969 — er, I mean, the moon. Nasa Administrator Mike Griffin said the new launch vehicle and lander would be “very Apollo-like, with updated technology. Think of it as Apollo on steroids.” This is an appropriate comparison, because it makes clear that the new project will be bloated, prone to fights, and, when it comes to producing anything of lasting scientific value, probably impotent.
As of this evening you can’t get access to the Op-Ed columnists of the New York Times unless you pony up for “Times Select”:http://www.nytimes.com/products/timesselect/whatis.html, a new subscription service. I have no plans to sign up. Don’t know about you. I doubt this spells the beginning of the end either for political bloggers or the relevance of the Op-Ed page to the chattering classes at large. But it does seem that this will reduce the columnists’ ability to set the agenda for online chatterers like ourselves. We won’t have David Brooks or Airmiles Friedman to kick around any more. But is that bad for us, or for them? NYT columnists are the pinatas of the _conscience collective_. If not so many people are reading them, you have to wonder whether it’s worth signing up yourself just for the content. I think we benefit at CT. The _Times_ makes you pay to read Paul Krugman, but his substitutability with our own “John Quiggin”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/author/john-quiggin/ is pretty high, and as of this evening we’re therefore e a better deal than ever.
About a year and a half ago, the White House floated the “moondoggle”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/01/09/moondoggle/. Remember that? Casting about for some legacy or other, Karl Rove came up with the idea of a permanent base on the moon. (And “a pony”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/03/if_wishes_were_.html.) At the time I wondered whether the initiative would be funded by a series of aggressive tax cuts. After the President’s speech yesterday, it’s clear that while the moon is no more (so to speak), the “payment plan for Katrina-cleanup”:http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=1133876 is the same. “You bet it’s going to cost money,” the President said, “… It’s going to cost whatever it costs.” Reported estimates are that it’s going to cost at least as much as the War in Iraq has so far.
Meanwhile, White House economic adviser Allan Hubbard said the administration still plans to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, while at the same time “cutting the deficit in half by 2009.”:http://money.cnn.com/2005/09/16/news/economy/katrinarebuild/ The White House Press Corps laughed roundly at this statement. No, of course they didn’t. The President also proposed to create a “Gulf Opportunity Zone”:http://money.cnn.com/2005/09/15/news/economy/bushzone/, which would provide subsidies to business, because “he said”:http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/09/20050915-8.html, “It is entrepreneurship that creates jobs and opportunity … and we will take the side of entrepreneurs as they lead the economic revival of the Gulf region.” This reminds me of a comment I heard the economist “Geoff Brennan”:http://socpol.anu.edu.au/brennan.html make during a conversation about alternative forms of energy. Someone suggested that entrepreneurs should lead the way in this area, and Geoff agreed. They then said the government should maybe offer some subsidies or assistance to them as part of some program. “I think you have a different concept of entrepreneur from me,” says Geoff. As “Max says”:http://maxspeak.org/mt/archives/001610.html
bq. If the city is cleaned up, its infrastructure restored, and flood protection established, there should be no need for subsidies to make business development flourish. On the other hand, individuals will need compensation to get on their feet again, including access to credit for business start-ups. Such access would not be a subsidy if it plugged preexisting holes in the market — the sort of red-lining that prevents solvent, lower-income people, especially minorities, from getting the loans they need and can repay to buy housing and start businesses.
And I’m not sure whether to hope he’s right about this or fear that he is right about this:
bq. However messy the use of money becomes in the hands of the Bushists, I maintain that this is a watershed moment for the limited-government movement. What we have in this Administration is an unwholesome mixture — the term toxic soup comes to mind — of Christian fundy prejudice (towards non-Christians, science, and the Enlightenment), Wilsonian jingoism, and blind anti-tax sentiment. Big, stupid government is all over your bedroom and your public schools, driving your kids further into debt, rattling an insubstantial sabre at a legion of emboldened international miscreants. These people will be the death of us all.
A column by Mikita Brottman in the “Chronicle”:http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i04/04b00701.htm contends that
bq. It has often been observed that the more prodigious the intellect, the more it can compromise other aspects of the personality, such as self-awareness and social grace … All vocations attract certain personality types; academe appeals particularly to introspective, narcissistic, obsessive characters who occasionally suffer from mood disorders or other psychological problems.
The piece is pretty bad, and in places is a bit stupid — John Nash is cited as an example of a “forgetful genius,” when in fact he has been mentally ill for much of his life. But it did bring to mind A.J. Liebling’s remark that the University of Chicago constituted “the biggest collection of juvenile neurotics since the children’s crusade.” (With apologies to Dan, Jacob, et al.) I notice also that Brottman contends that “Eccentric characters seem particularly common in those departments known for the more abstract realms of thought, like … most often, philosophy, the field of notorious oddballs.” Moreover, she says people with Asperger’s Syndrome — a condition freely and confidently diagnosed by amateur psychiatrists everywhere, like ADD — are characterized by their “persistent preoccupation with parts of objects.” As it happens, my “wife”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lapaul/ is a notorious oddball philosopher, and is presently writing an entire book about “parts”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lapaul/papers/logical-parts.pdf of “objects”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~lapaul/papers/ajp.pdf. Hmm.
I haven’t been following the buildup to the Roberts hearings closely, but today, “via Bitch PhD”:http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/2005/09/and-theyre-off.html, I see this analysis from the NYRB:
Roberts was in favor of limiting the progress of African-Americans in participating in the political process and of making far-reaching changes in the constitutional role of the courts in protecting rights. … Roberts conceded that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment could pose a formidable barrier to legislation intended to strip the federal courts of jurisdiction over cases involving school desegregation. But, he noted, the problem might be surmounted, since strict scrutiny would be applied only if there were “racial classification,” and the legislation in question would only classify cases by type, i.e., not “race” but “school desegregation.” Giving state courts the final say over school desegregation, he added, *would not involve unequal treatment because white officials as well as black groups would lack the right to appeal*. … Nowhere in any of the memos that have been made available did John Roberts acknowledge the effect of the many years of disenfranchisement on black citizens. Instead his concern was about the effect of an imagined quota system on whites, a concern that twenty-five years later has proved to be groundless. (Emphasis added.)
I’d be interested to see the original text that this paraphrases. It looks like it was just lifted directly from Anatole France: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets or steal bread.” Or sue under the fourteenth amendment. It’s hard to imagine someone with an education like Roberts’ writing that sentence and not immediately thinking of France’s epigram. Maybe he smirked.
CT was a knocked out by today’s “big power outage”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-5274095,00.html in Los Angeles, along with every other site hosted by our provider, and much else besides, like traffic lights. Despite our cosmopolitan nature, our server is in one place only — the wrong place, today. But they seemed to have managed over there without any panic. One of the news reports I saw quoted a vox pop reaction from a woman identified as “Stylist for TV Commercials.” Ah, LA.
Routledge publish a nice line of “classic social science, literary criticism and philosophy”:http://www.routledge.com/classics/. A couple of months ago I picked up their edition of “Words and Things”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415345480/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/, Ernest Gellner’s entertaining hatchet-job on linguistic philosophy _a la_ Wittgentein, J.L. Austin and the like. The flyleaf has a couple of blurbs from Bertrand Russell and the Times (“The classic attack on Oxford Linguistic Philosophy”, etc) but also one from Bryan Wilson, the sociologist of religion. He says “No one who has flirted with, or been puzzled by, postmodernism, or wondered about the meaning of resurgent Islam, should fail to read this tour de force.” What? This is in fact an endorsement of another of Gellner’s books, “Postmodernism, Reason and Religion”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/041508024X/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/. Perhaps a small, once-off error, I thought — but then last night I was in a bookshop and saw Routledge’s edition of “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/041525406X/kieranhealysw-20/. While the front cover affirms the author as Max Weber, the spine insists that credit should go to Friedrich Hayek. Perhaps there’s an intern somewhere in need of a harsh performance review. I suppose these errors aren’t quite so bad as they might have been: a friend of mine who was an editor for a major university press once told me that they had to recall the entire run of a prominent astronomy book because, mysteriously, every instance of the word “quasar” in the text had been replaced by the word “banana.”
I went to watch the Arizona Wildcats beat Northern Arizona University in the first home game of the season last night in front of a happy home crowd. I’ve only been to one other American Football game in my life, so there was a whole novelty dimension. During the halftime show, as the “marching band”:http://www.arts.arizona.edu/band/athletic/marchingband.html played Led Zeppelin favorites and marched in complex, quasi-aesthetic formations (it looked and sounded like you might imagine), the “color guard”:http://web.cfa.arizona.edu/colorguard/ drew a disproportionate amount of attention. (The color guard join in the band routines, twirling and throwing large flags. It looks tricky.) The color guard wore blue pants and sparkly, ruby-colored bustiers … except for one of them, whose whole upper body was covered in sparkly goodness. His presence was hard to miss, partly because he was the only male in the colorguard, partly because he was about twice the size of his fellow flag-bearers, but mostly because he twirled more effusively and pirouetted more extravagantly than anyone else. He flung himself _en arrière_ and _en avant_, he pirouetted under the posts and _jeté _-ed across the fifty yard line. He was terrific. Some people in the crowd got a little wound up, apparently annoyed that a gender boundary might be in danger of subversion on the very altar of American masculinity’s defining ritual. There were some catcalls and cries of “Get that guy outta there!” But mostly people loved it. And the guy himself could have cared less, blissed out as he was in front of 40,000 people, having reached a kind of camp Nirvana.
Alan Wolfe and Tyler Cowen are “discussing”:http://www.slate.com/id/2125041/entry/2125046/ Barbara Ehrenreich’s book “Bait and Switch”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805076069/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ on Slate this week. The book is a kind of white-collar counterpart to Nickel and Dimed, where Ehrenreich tries to get a job (using an invented identity) in the media/public relations sector. Neither Wolfe nor Cowen is much impressed by the result, so I wonder whether they’ll be able to keep agreeing with each other about this for the next few days.
Today, Tyler opens his comments by saying, “We still need a good book on why white-collar workers are having a harder time finding jobs.” I suggest Vicki Smith’s Crossing the Great Divide: Worker Risk and Opportunity in the New Economy, which does what Ehrenreich is trying to do, only — if Tyler’s characterization of Bait and Switch is accurate — with more nuance and better methods. Smith is a sociologist at U.C. Davis. Her book looks at the efforts of non-union, white-collar workers to build careers for themselves at three companies (including a photocopy service firm and a computer outfit) and a job-search club. It’s a clear and nuanced piece of work, and it might be what Tyler is looking to read. (The next few paragraphs draw on an unpublished discussion of mine about the book.)
I’m a little late to notice this, but via “Alan Schussman”:http://www.schussman.com/article/1157/short and “AmericaBlog”:http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/09/hyatt-hotels-got-food-and-supplies-to.html, I just read the following “press release”:http://biz.yahoo.com/iw/050902/094479.html, which was issued on Friday:
CHICAGO, IL–(MARKET WIRE)–Sep 2, 2005 — Hyatt Regency New Orleans and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) today announced the evacuation of hurricane victims — including both guests and employees — from the hotel. With the exception of a small group of Hyatt executives, safety experts, city officials and FEMA representatives, all guests have vacated the premises. … *A convoy of food and supplies provided by Hyatt hotels in Atlanta and Houston arrived at Hyatt Regency New Orleans on Wednesday of this week*.
Hyatt had a convoy arrive by _Wednesday_? As “Alan notes”:http://www.schussman.com/article/1157/short, Google Maps helpfully tells us that the New Orleans Hyatt Regency is “less than two tenths of a mile”:http://maps.google.com/maps?spn=0.009273,0.014799&saddr=500+Poydras+St,+New+Orleans,+LA+70130&daddr=900+Convention+Center+Blvd,+New+Orleans,+70130&hl=en away from the goddamn Convention Center. I guess FEMA couldn’t figure out the last leg of the trip or something?
*Update*: Look, just to be clear, this post isn’t really about whether the disaster should make me or anyone else want to become a libertarian. Examples like this show — in case you needed more evidence — that there is absolutely _no good reason_ the federal government couldn’t have mounted a serious relief effort for the people of New Orleans much, much faster than it did, and especially for the thousands at the convention center and the Superdome. Commenters who claim I’m somehow ignoring the way the problem scales up are mistaken. You can fit an awful lot of food and water into a few container trucks. Don’t tell me that isn’t within the operational capacities of the U.S. army. The people down there could have at least had a minimum of care. Instead, they were abandoned. I don’t accept that evacuating the people at the center and the Superdome was some kind of impossibility in the first day or two, either: sports stadium- and convention-center-sized groups of people are moved via train or bus all the time, filling and emptying venues in the space of a couple of hours. It’s a question of good organization, that’s all.