I sympathize with the Boulder teachers, who face salary cuts and possible staffing reductions next school year. They argue, and in my opinion rightfully so, that since the school district’s top administrators are hired by the School Board, they don’t really represent the teachers’ interests. Instead, they impose a business model on education, cutting expenses designated for classroom teaching without imposing commensurate austerity measures on the managers and accountants and other overhead types who don’t directly contribute to the educational mission. On the other hand, the amount of money available for education really has diminished, a consequence of a general economic downturn that’s lowered the state and local tax revenues which are the only sources of funding for public schools. It’s possible that the electorate will vote for increased school taxes next year to offset the shortfalls, but I seriously doubt that the voters, facing their own diminished economic situations, will be in any mood to do so.

There are more drastic ways to reduce educational costs than incremental reductions in pay and in force. As I noted in a prior post, the school district has been experimenting with online courses. With no classrooms and with discussions taking place via blogs and emails, online teachers can be spread more thinly, reducing per-student costs. Then there’s home schooling, which costs the taxpayers nothing at all. I’ve not made a systematic study, but on a cursory review it’s evident that, in comparing course grades and test scores and student…

As an aside in a post about lobbying, Ezra Klein posits that “This is, essentially, what journalism is about: Leveraging social relationships to get people to tell you things they probably shouldn’t be telling you, and that they certainly wouldn’t tell someone they didn’t know and have human feelings for.”

Obviously the concept of journalism contains many discrete activities, but I feel like to offer this as a generic characterization even of the investigative reporting function is a kind of double mistake. It’s starts with the erroneous conception of the “hard core” reporter who has a fierce attitude and piercing gaze, and roots the truth out from the unwilling and corrupt establishment. This attitude leads to the “cocktail party” critique of actually existing journalists as a bunch of gadabouts and schmoozers. This, in turn, leads to Klein’s reconceptualization of the cocktail party circuit as the essence of journalism—you schmooze, breaking down the psychic and emotional barriers, and then you get the scoop. This seems a little self-serving to me. I’m going to a dinner party tonight featuring a minister from the Afghan cabinet and I’m attending because doing so seems more interesting than the reverse, but if I learn anything there it’ll be because someone wanted to tell me something not because I tricked them with my charms.

Now admittedly, some people (viz: Ezra Klein) are arguably more charming than I am. But in general I think admissions against interest are quite rare. The reason investigative scoops happen…

Previously, I used the term Green Stalinism hyperbolically to emphasize the fact that we need to figure out ways to force people to change rather than focusing on consumer choice. Now Zizek appears to be advocating actual Green Stalinism — or at least Leninism. I can’t say I object, other than on the level of not being able to imagine how his plan would concretely ever happen.

Richard Lewontin, author of The Dialectical Biologist, gives a wonderful interview on politics and science.

Ronan Lyons is unimpressed by the now-viral NYT graphic showing the web of debt within Europe. It’s particularly unfair to his native Ireland, he says:

Because they didn’t look behind their statistics, however, the graphic is about as informative as CNBC’s now infamous unveiling of Ireland as the world’s most indebted country, with debts worth 1300% of GDP! The point that both miss is that you can’t look at debt liabilities without looking at corresponding assets.

That is why the markets are worried not about all debt. They are worried particularly about government debt, because typically there is no corresponding asset.

It’s true that Spain and Ireland — particularly the latter — have much less of their debt at the government level than, say, Greece. And Lyons helpfully provides a little chart showing how much of each of the PIIGS’ external debt is government debt.

But we’re still a long way from the point at which markets are more worried about government debt than about corporate debt, at least if you’re measuring such things using credit spreads. Investors still believe in the concept of the “sovereign ceiling”, and it’s still extremely rare for any corporate, including a bank, to be able to borrow more cheaply than the government of the country it’s in.

Writes Lyons:

For Portugal and Spain, it’s only one fifth of all debt. In the case of Ireland, just five percent of all its debt is general government debt.

The reason is hardly a secret:

…

Watch out. It. Is. Spreading.

I am totally unqualified to pass judgment on specific acts of parenting. If I ever have kids, I'll probably be feeding them margaritas to get them to stop crying or something equally abhorrent that I would currently criticize with great indignation. So I try not to wag my finger at parents, excepting the most flagrant abuses of the "I tattooed my 2nd grader" variety. That said, I am not hesitant to criticize parenting fads, the kinds of things that saturate the non-fiction bestseller list and are more likely than not to come out of the mouths of a Dr. Phil or a Joy Behar.

When social commentators paint the current generation of college students – do they still call them "millennials"? – they focus on the Special Snowflake phenomenon, that overpowering sense of entitlement that is the product of well intentioned but empty-headed emphasis on self-esteem building. Self-esteem is a good thing. So is having a grasp on one's own abilities and accomplishments that is at least partially grounded in reality. But this the generation of "everyone gets a medal" and "everyone's a winner." Gawker recently published an email from a would-be intern to a potential "employer" (to the extent that interning is employment) that sets the Special Snowflake problem in high relief. I am important, I am special, I am fantastic, I am desirable. That's what these kids have been told for 20 years before we graduate them into a grist mill of unemployment, unpaid internships, and $10/hr…

The U.S. and Greece have governments bigger than they are paying for, and it cannot be blamed all on politicians.

Many thanks to the guys at HuffPo, who splashed my video from Friday all over their front page this weekend: the resulting post has now received well over 2,500 comments, and there’s even now a “Felix Salmon Investment Advice” tag over at HuffPo, which is scary.

Naturally, the video being less than 80 seconds long, there wasn’t room for a lot of background and exegesis. But the message I was trying to send is not that I think stocks are going to fall. Rather, it’s that volatility has risen, and that it makes sense to sell stocks in periods of high volatility.

I had a very interesting conversation with Barry Nalebuff today, co-author of Lifecycle Investing: he’s the guy with the idea that young people should lever up their stock-market investments, and that pretty much everybody under the age of 40 should have 100% of their retirement funds invested in stocks. I wrote about his idea a couple of years ago, and I found it intriguing; my main issue with it is that it’s very hard to implement in practice, and that someone trying to do so might well fail miserably. Basically, it’s far too complicated for a typical young investor to even try to follow.

Barry made one thing very clear to me today: if you don’t believe in the existence of the equity premium — if you don’t believe that stocks are going to outperform bonds over the long term — then you…

The defenders of the economic orthodoxy have gotten much more shrill of late. In a perverse way, this is probably a positive sign: they might be feeling a tad worried that they are starting to lose their hold over consensus reality. But given how quick various media outlets are to pick up and amplify their messages, it would be more than a tad premature to say that the prevailing belief system is threatened.

It may be sample bias, but I’ve noticed two patterns. The first is a sharp uptick in criticism of “populism” or better yet, “populist anger”, which then serves as the basis for arguing that efforts to rein in the financial services industry are overdone. Now usually there is a wrapper around it, like “mistakes were made” or another not-very-convincing bit of crowd pleasing pablum to acknowledge that maybe some change might be warranted, but nothing approaching what those enraged savages want.

Second is a new meme, that of arguing that Congress is really at fault, that they (or “the regulators”) failed to curb excesses in the financial services industry (and you will no doubt see similar arguments surface regarding the Horizon Deepwater disaster). This is a staple of the sort of thing you see from Cato and the American Enterprise Institute, and once in a while gets picked up by the MSM, but we’ve had a positive outburst in the last few weeks (it seems to have coincided with the SEC and Senate salvos against Goldman.…