The undeserving one percent, and the deserving 99 percent?

Whenever I read anything that Raghuram Rajan writes, I find that I have nothing to disagree with him.  Of course, the extra affinity for the shared cultural background is a bonus :)

Rajan writes about the one-percent that, for instance, the OWS targets.  He comments:

While eliminating inefficient spending, especially inefficient tax subsidies, can generate some of these funds, more tax revenues may be needed. The rich can certainly afford to pay more, but if governments increase taxes on the wealthy, they should do it with the aim of improving opportunities for all, rather than as a punitive measure to rectify an imagined wrong.

This is the distinction that the populist leaders and the OWS people do not make--they come across as angry people who want to punish the one-percent and seem to channel the old revolutionary and anarchist argument that all property is theft.  As Rajan points out:

It ignores, for example, the fact that many of the truly rich are entrepreneurs. It likewise ignores the fact that many of the wealthy are sports stars and entertainers, and that their ranks include professionals such as doctors, lawyers, consultants, and even some of our favorite progressive economists. In other words, the rich today are more likely to be working than idle.

But then such sit-down discussions won't help, right, in the contemporary atmosphere of loud, knee-jerk, talk whether it is from the left or the right!

Full disclosure: I am nowhere near the one-percent :)

As Rajan also notes, education will be key, yes.  But, not the kind we do now.  In fact, students seem to be systematically avoiding the kind of education that will be needed for our collective prosperity--the sciences.  Students avoid the harder subjects and swing to easier majors, like geography (!):

Although the number of college graduates increased about 29% between 2001 and 2009, the number graduating with engineering degrees only increased 19%, according to the most recent statistics from the U.S. Dept. of Education. The number with computer and information-sciences degrees decreased 14%.

And then we import students into these very fields!  (not that I am complaining about that in particular.)  One of the many reasons why students avoid these potentially remunerative fields:

Science classes may also require more time—something U.S. college students may not be willing to commit. In a recent study, sociologists Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia found that the average U.S. student in their sample spent only about 12 to 13 hours a week studying, about half the time spent by students in 1960. They found that math and science—though not engineering—students study on average about three hours more per week than their non-science-major counterparts.

The more I think about all these, the more I wonder why I even bother to get all worked up about these issues.

Instead, I can go about my life disconnected from these, show up at my classes, grade their work, collect my paycheck and say thanks. 

Naaaaah ... that ain't me!

Not from the Onion: Warrant for education minister who cheated in exams

Real life is hilarious enough that we don't even have to be creative to invent jokes in order to laugh.

Today's installment (and here Rick Perry can rest easy) comes from India--that other wishing well, which keeps on giving :)

Puducherry Education Minister P.M.L Kalyanasundaram, who is absconding after the Tamil Nadu police registered a case against him for alleged impersonation, was on Saturday dropped from the Cabinet.

Around 4 p.m Chief Minister N. Rangasamy wrote to Lieutenant Governor Iqbal Singh recommending that the Minister be dropped.

...

The case was registered against Kalyanasundaram by the Villupuram police for allegedly using a proxy to write the Class X supplementary exam in a private school at Tindivanam.

Four police teams are trying to trace his whereabouts.

Laughter aside, the sad thing is this: governments all across the world are made of people like this guy or Palin or Berlusconi or, well, name your pick.

The corporate world is not any better. Hey, if only there was a guy who was awful in the corporate world and in the political world--well, other than Berlusconi :)  Take it away, Jon Stewart:

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The bottom-line: we are screwed!

What do Latvians and the Dutch want from my blog?

The chart below gives an idea of the countries from where visitors came to my blog last week (the single-digits are not included)

My blog provides only such a big picture--there is no way to match the visitor with the post they read.  So, I am curious about whatever it was that drew the Latvians ... I haven't tagged any post with Latvia, though the name of the country is to be found in these three posts that, however, do not discuss anything specific to Latvia.  

Maybe the CIA or the FBI keeps an eye on me through some proxy server in Latvia :)

Rick Perry's "oops" and Torch Song Trilogy

What can be better than a Jon Stewart clip to add to the Rick Perry collection!
"Are you not entertained?"

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At the end, when Jon Stewart goes after the "oops!" I wish he had used the awesome lines from Torch Song Trilogy instead:

"Woops" is when you fall down an elevator shaft.
"Woops" is when you skinny-dip in a school of piranha.
"Woops" is when you accidentally douche with Drano!
No, Ed. This was no "woops."

Students ponder about what comes after Occupy Wall Street

I love it: Occupy Fort Lauderdale :)

BTW, speaking of students, "Paterno State U." students rioting because the pope Paterno was fired is a pathetic statement of the times.

I would have thought that students would have been ashamed of how the power of college football made it so convenient to cover up such a tragedy of the rape of preteen and teenage boys.

So ashamed that they should have demanded an immediate cancellation of the rest of the football season.

Or, at least, forfeit the upcoming game as a token of self-inflicted punishment.

But, the rioting seems to clearly convey the supreme priority for college football!

I am all the more impressed, therefore, with the student in this video (ht):

On the Rick Perry version of NPR's "Wait, wait ... don't tell me" :)

Like I do on most afternoons, I was listening to NPR during my drive back and was laughing away when I heard the following in the report on Rick Perry and his brain freeze:

It's rare that somebody actually gets worse every debate. Normally, they start bad and get better. He's kind of a trailblazer in that regard
watching the Texas governor tackle a complex policy question was like watching a chimp with a locked suitcase.
I can't imagine a worse debate night than he had last night, short of grabbing the microphone and beating somebody to death.

These were not comments from a Democratic operative or from comedians.  Nope. "Mike Murphy is a Republican political consultant"

Photos of the day: religious observances

Caption at the source:

A devotee takes the ritual bath at the water tank of the illuminated Bangla Sahib Sikh temple on the birth anniversary of Guru Nanak in New Delhi. Photo: AP

 

 Caption at the source:

Devotees perform 'Anushthan' in Yagya Shala at Shanti Kunj in Haridwar.

 

Caption at the source:

Muslims offer prayers during Eid al-Adha, or the Feast of the Sacrifice, at the Taj Mahal monument, in Agra.

Of three different religions, spaced within a couple of days, and all from the same country ... one of the unique aspects of India.

Why is Michele Bachmann a Communist? A Stalinist? Here is why

Some among the OWS group are the latest in a long line of commentators who point out that socialism is more consistent, than inconsistent, with biblical teaching. 

A note at the Economist shows how much an idea that Michele Bachmann cherishes was an integral part of, gasp, Joseph Stalin's Soviet constitution!

BIBLICAL aphorisms are famous for meaning different things to different people. The one I'm most fond of these days for being cited with extremely different valences by people of differing ideologies is one that I first encountered without knowing it was a biblical aphorism. Apparently Michelle Bachmann referenced it the other day in a speech to the Family Research Council, in which she criticised government social assistance: "Self reliance means, if anyone will not work, neither should he eat." The citation is from 2 Thessalonians 3:10, "If any would not work, neither should he eat." (H/t Dave Noon, who notes that it was cited by Captain John Smith, the leader of Jamestown colony, in 1609 to justify banishing lazy or unskilled colonists across the river to starve.)
Not having grown up as a Christian, I encountered this aphorism first while studying Russian history, as a Communist slogan embraced by Vladimir Lenin in his 1917 work "The State and Revolution": "Кто не работает, тот не ест." Mrs Bachmann might correctly note that this is one Christian precept that actually is explicitly incorporated into the constitution—but it's the wrong constitution: it figures in Article 12 of the 1936 Soviet constitution adopted by Josef Stalin. My impression that the saying's main contemporary fame comes from its centrality to the Soviet project seems to be shared by Wikipedia, which provides the Lenin citation:

The socialist principle, "He who does not work shall not eat", is already realized; the other socialist principle, "An equal amount of products for an equal amount of labor", is also already realized. But this is not yet communism, and it does not yet abolish "bourgeois law", which gives unequal individuals, in return for unequal (really unequal) amounts of labor, equal amounts of products.
This is a “defect”, says Marx, but it is unavoidable in the first phase of communism; for if we are not to indulge in utopianism, we must not think that having overthrown capitalism people will at once learn to work for society without any rules of law.

I love how Lenin tosses in that little injunction not to "indulge in utopianism" here. In every society, the most ludicrous and ruinous projects are constantly being justified as hard-headed, practical realism by the very serious people who run them. Anyway, as late as 1962 the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party published a pamphlet entitled "The struggle of the Communist Party to implement the principle 'He who does not work, does not eat'". Here's the slogan figuring as the centrepiece of a beautifully designed constructivist-era poster from the 1920s that I had sitting around on my hard drive:

I wonder if Bachmann and her people read the Economist and the blogs there; I am guessing not because, after all, all the wisdom one wants has already been recorded in the bible, right?  Including "if anyone will not work, neither should he eat."

This is presidential material? Seriously? OMG!

Rick Perry wants to get rid of three federal cabinet-level agencies, but can't name the third one even when other candidates pitch in with suggestions :) (ht)
(Fast forward to 1:30 if you are in a hurry!!!)



A comment at YouTube is hilarious:

sarah palin sends her thanks she's not longer the dumbest governor ever elected...

Hamlet's Duplex!

From the desk of the New Yorker's cartoonist-in-chief

Cash for clunkers, er, campaigns

I read three wonderful essays/commentaries in two newspapers

Two from the Wall Street Journal, and one from the New York Times.

Two were about sports, and one was about life, liberty, and literature.

The only thing missing--hot coffee as I read them.  If it were at home, or even in my office, I would certainly have been on caffeine as I read them.  But, there I was in the university library, reading the paper the old-fashioned way, occasionally even folding the paper down.

The best of them all was about the reporter watching with Yogi Berra the baseball movie, Moneyball. Who doesn't like Yogi Berra, right?  Jason Gay has written a wonderful piece. In that, Gay notes:

Berra didn't earn a ton of money playing baseball. The game was different then. When Yogi was a 17-year-old prospect from St. Louis, he signed with the New York Yankees for $90 a month. When he returned from World War II, his first major league contract paid him $5,000 a year. Berra worked at Sears, Roebuck & Co. in the winter. He never made more than $65,000 in a season. He never had more than a one-year deal.
But no one squeezed more out of baseball—and gave more back —than Yogi. He played 18 seasons with the Yankees, appearing in 14 World Series, winning ten of them. A catcher, he was a 15-time All-Star, a three-time MVP.
"I was very lucky," Berra says softly.

If only we had more Yogi Berras and his charm and intelligence not only in sports, but in all aspects of life!

The other engaging sports story is as depressing as the Berra essay was uplifting.  It is about the exploding child abuse news out of Penn State.  What an unfortunate irony that the place is Happy Valley!

In contrast to Gay's final comment about Yogi Berra, "Look at the numbers. Look at the life. Yogi Berra is priceless" the equally old and accomplished Joe Paterno seems to be fading fast towards an ugly exit from Penn State:

Paterno has been at Penn State, as an assistant and the head coach, for 62 years, a record. Graham B. Spanier, the university president, was a faculty member and an administrator there from 1973 to 1982 and returned to lead the university in 1995; Curley graduated from Penn State in 1976 and has been the athletic director since 1993; and Schultz graduated from Penn State in 1971 and has worked there ever since. Ultimately, they all serve the monster that rises on 12 Saturdays a year.
The question is, if Paterno heard some ugly stuff about Sandusky in 2002, it is now 2011, and he seems to have not done anything about it since. Maybe he didn’t invite the guy to his house anymore. That I don’t know. But as far as alerting people to the possible predator tendencies of his former assistant, Paterno seems to have been silent. He had a game to coach. He had players to recruit.
...
This seems to be a common malady for big-time coaches. They get so puffed up with trying to go undefeated that they lose sight of reality. Just to run this kind of program demands moral blinkers.

Yes, serving "the monster that rises on 12 Saturdays a year" necessitates moral blinders of various sorts.  How awful!

At Penn State, it was even worse than prostituting education for the sake of a football powerhouse. The entire old-boy system in that university managed to overlook the possibility that children’s lives were being ruined, within the dangerous cocoon of King Football. We need to look beyond the alleged abuses. We need to look at the system that encouraged people to look the other way.
Really, we need to do something about big-time college sports. 

As I often remark in the introductory class that I teach, the market worries not about morals.  Given that we the people are the market, all of us serving this monster that rises up twelve Saturdays are also at fault for having encouraged college sports to become this godawful.

In a wonderful essay about liberty and literature, Mario Vargas Llosa talks up free market and liberty, even while noting that:

There are those who in the name of the free market have supported Latin American dictatorships whose iron hand of repression was said to be necessary to allow business to function, betraying the very principles of human rights that free economies rest upon. Then there are those who have coldly reduced all questions of humanity to a matter of economics and see the market as a panacea. In doing so they ignore the role of ideas and culture, the true foundation of civilization. Without customs and shared beliefs to breathe life into democracy and the market, we are reduced to the Darwinian struggle of atomistic and selfish actors that many on the left rightfully see as inhuman.

Llosa concludes:

The search for liberty is simply part of the greater search for a world where respect for the rule of law and human rights is universal—a world free of dictators, terrorists, warmongers and fanatics, where men and women of all nationalities, races, traditions and creeds can coexist in the culture of freedom, where borders give way to bridges that people cross to reach their goals limited only by free will and respect for one another's rights. It is a search to which I've dedicated my writing, and so many have taken notice. But is it not a search to which we should all devote our very lives? The answer is clear when we see what is at stake.

Indeed.  This is no different from my position as a Libertarian Democrat. More than me, my parents remember all too well my teenage years as a Communist sympathizer before I, and as Llosa writes "abandoned the Marxist myths that took in so many of my generation."

So, there, three wonderful essays.  Read them. Share them.

NPR is the mirror image of the rabidly right talk radio. Except, it is not!

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Empires strike back. Solution: stop empire-building!

The “Arab Spring” is the final unraveling of the Ottoman Empire.

It is now almost a year since the self-immolation of a Tunisian street merchant—a horrific act that captured the imaginations of millions and launched the widespread movement in the Middle East to remove authoritarian governments in favor of democracy.

Almost all the countries included in the ongoing Arab Spring were once part of the powerful and expansive Ottoman Empire, whose prominence was marked by the conquest of Constantinople in 1453.  The victorious Mehmed renamed the city Istanbul and made it the empire’s capital too and, thereby, made clear the intention to expand into Europe.  It was no surprise, therefore, that soon Suleiman and his forces were knocking on Vienna’s doors. 

As empires always do, the Ottoman Empire, also, started its decline after a successful run, and the descent accelerated in the 19^th century.  Again, as it happens with empires, the decline was marked by its territories being taken over by other powers.  Tunisia was one of those, as were the other Arab Spring countries of Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Morocco, and Yemen.  The Pasha was replaced by European colonial powers.  The First World War, whose conclusion we mark with Armistice Day and Veterans Day, had an additional effect of removing the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. 

But, the real and final untangling from the Ottoman ties began with the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991.  The Balkans, too, were once a part of the Ottoman Empire, and Yugoslavia was held together by authoritarian governments, until the death of President Tito and, later, the collapse of the Soviet Bloc.  When the authoritarian structures were gone, for the first time people in Yugoslavia had an opportunity to establish their own political identities.  Unfortunately, it turned out to be violent and bloody and triggered external intervention from the US and its NATO allies.

The collapse of the Soviet Union created new countries that were also former Ottoman territories—Armenia and Azerbaijan.  These had been swallowed by the Russian Czars and, after the Bolshevik Revolution, became a part of the USSR. 

When all that dust settled, more or less, the decade that followed began with the events of September 11, 2001.  One of the grand plans that preoccupied Osama bin Laden’s maniacal approach was the creation of an Islamic state that would continue where the Ottoman Empire had ended.  His logic was that the US was propping up the governments in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Libya, to name a few, and that weakening the US would make possible the supra-Islamic state. 

In this decade, fortunately, the Arab Spring is the exact opposite of what bin Laden had envisioned.  The peoples of the former territories of the Ottoman Empire are protesting against their rulers not because they want to re-create an Islamic empire.  When the Tunisian street merchant set himself on fire, it was because he was fed up with having to deal with the corrupt rulers—all the way down to the local police.  Egyptians similarly were tired of Hosni Mubarak and his cronies looting away the wealth, while the youth were jobless with highly insecure futures. 

Dictators and authoritarian governments have been the norm since the end of the Ottoman Empire, and even after the people in the Arab Spring countries had witnessed the departure of the European colonizers.  Tunisia, for instance, was a French colony until 1956, but independence did not usher in freedom and democracy. 

The correlation between the Arab Spring and the Ottoman Empire is also reflected in the case of Saudi Arabia, which has not experienced mass protests—Saudi Arabia was not a part of the Ottoman Empire.

The Arab Spring is a reminder, in a way, that our contemporary lives are intricately connected with events from the past—something that historians often remind us about but is easily forgotten by most of the rest of us. 

The continued linkage with the past means that even as we keep one eye on the Arab Spring, the other remains fixed on at least one byproduct of the end of the British Empire that the world worries about--Pakistan.  Empires strike back, even from their graves!

Image of the day: Herman Cain

Explanation here, if you need it :)

What did I learn from Google today?

Google had the image below, which is how I learnt that today is Marie Curie's 144th birthday:

Only a few weeks ago I blogged about her being the odd man out ... She persisted and won, despite the lack of loud and vociferous "you go, girl!" And what an achievement that was to win not one but two Nobel Prizes in two fields.  Awesome!

Photo of the day: Eid al-Adha

Caption at the source:
Acehnese Muslims pray at Baiturrahman Grand Mosque during Eid al-Adha in Banda Aceh, Indonesia