A new year means a new highest paid "educator" ever at nine million dollars!

With fewer and fewer students choosing to enroll in my classes, soon I will be forced to blog for loose change.  So ... how much would you pay to subscribe to my daily rants and raves?

Of course you would not spare a penny, and would rather condemn me to the unemployment lines, right?

Because you--well, not personally you, but as a stand-in for an American--would rather be entertained.  I don't entertain.  Not even close.

So, you want to be entertained.  And that is how you would spend your money.  There are millions of Americans expressing such choices.

So, guess what?

Shit like this happens: Jim Harbaugh is done with the San Francisco 49ers.  The team that he coached was not entertaining enough this year.  Off with his head then!

But, oh, this is Jim Harbaugh.  So, guess what?  Shit like this happens:

Harbaugh is expected to become college football's highest-paid coach, earning more than the $8 million per-year salary that was originally reported, sources told Rapoport. Nick Saban is the highest-paid college coach at $7.2 million per year. Harbaugh's number could reach as high as $9 million per year, according to NFL Media's Albert Breer.

Are you now happy that nine fucking million dollars a year is what a public university will spend on a football coach in order to entertain the masses?  Are you not entertained?

As you the consumer make these choices, there are fewer dollars to spend on other things. Like, you know, education.  Who cares for those youth who come from low- and middle-income families with no trust funds for their education, right?  It is their mistake not to have been born into rich families.

It is only a matter of time before the university where I teach gets into a budget squeeze that has already affected other institutions.  You as the taxpayer will then point to classes like mine with three and five students and remark, "what a waste of money with only three students in a class!" because you are not being entertained with your tax dollars.  You would rather have that tax money back in your wallet in order to spend it on football coaches who will entertain you.

A liberal democracy means that you have the right to make these choices.  More power to you.  May you have enough and more entertainment in the new year and beyond.

Can you locate Michigan on this map and determine whether its needs to be updated? ;)
Source

More on athletics v. academics

Outsourced:

Recent renovations have reaffirmed the Big House as the Biggest House: Michigan Stadium's official capacity this fall will be a whopping 109,901, moving it ahead of Penn State as the largest sporting edifice in America. (It even says so on Wikipedia.) That's $226 million well-spent.
For some context, 109,901 people will make the stadium the seventh-largest city in Michigan on game days (passing up Ann Arbor, ironically), and is significantly larger than the largest city in Delaware, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire or North Dakota. The combined populations of the largest cities in West Virginia (Charleston, 53,421) and Wyoming (Cheyenne, 55,362) couldn't quite fill it. (And yes, 109,901 is nearly the exact population of the U.S. Virgin Islands at last estimate.)

Economic crisis. Stay the course. False Dawns.

A couple of days ago, the official state economist of my wonderful state--Oregon--came out with the depressing news that unemployment had reached 12.1 percent. It simply is beyond awful that one in eight Oregonians interested in being productive has not been able to find work :-(
I told my students that we would find out on Friday whether Oregon is the worst in the country, in terms of unemployment rate. Turns out that Michigan beat us, not by much though. With 12.6 percent unemployment rate, Michigan is in quite a slump. The question for Michigan is whether the state would end up matching its 1982 record of 16.9 percent unemployment.

Chris Wilson at Slate has put together a really neat animated graphic where he shows, by county, that:

As early as August 2007, for example—several months before the recession officially began—jobs were already on the decline in southwest Florida; Orange County, Calif.; much of New Jersey; and Detroit, while other areas of the country remained on the uptick.

Too bad that the interactive map that Wilson has done is not available with an embedding option.

Given that employment is still at an awful stage, I am beginning to get ticked off when media reports focus only on the ups and downs in the stock market indices. All the more the reason why I appreciated Krugman's column, where he notes:

The 2001 recession officially lasted only eight months, ending in November of that year. But unemployment kept rising for another year and a half. The same thing happened after the 1990-91 recession. And there’s every reason to believe that it will happen this time too. Don’t be surprised if unemployment keeps rising right through 2010.

How much ever we might be upset and frustrated with everything from TARP, AIG, foreclosures, GM, ...., we have no option but to keep up with trying everything possible to prevent a global depression. We simply have no choice in this. Again, way better to channel Krugman's words:

History shows that one of the great policy dangers, in the face of a severe economic slump, is premature optimism. F.D.R. responded to signs of recovery by cutting the Works Progress Administration in half and raising taxes; the Great Depression promptly returned in full force. Japan slackened its efforts halfway through its lost decade, ensuring another five years of stagnation.

The Obama administration’s economists understand this. They say all the right things about staying the course. But there’s a real risk that all the talk of green shoots and glimmers will breed a dangerous complacency.

So here’s my advice, to the public and policy makers alike: Don’t count your recoveries before they’re hatched.