The Borjas Blog

A long hiatus...

A few loyal readers have asked me if I would start blogging again at some point. It's been some time since my last post--but a unique confluence of professional and personal circumstances have kept me away for a while.

In the meantime, we've had a full-blown economic crisis and a presidential election. Quite an interesting few months!

I'll try to blog more often now. I'm particularly interested to see how the new administration handles the immigration issue during a deepening recession. I will have much more to say about this as things develop.

What's The Matter With Parents Today?

What can one add to this story?

The Georgetown psychologist fell into the role of toilet-training coach. She mastered potty training while working with children in an early-intervention program in the District in the late 1990s. About five years ago, she shared her techniques with a few groups of mothers. Word of Zimmitti's skills soon lit up local Internet discussion groups.

Now eager parents line up to pay her $250 for a consultation, with topics like quelling a toilet rebellion and pointers on how to avoid one.

"Sometimes a parent will say, 'How about I pay you $5,000 and you potty train for me?' " Zimmitti said. "They're halfway joking." 

It's hard to resist some smirky editorializing about those parents who are willing to pay to have someone else potty-train their child. But it's actually kind of sad. They just don't get it--there are some things that money can't buy.

I Work At....

For reasons best understood by the layers of deans at my place of employment, I used to work at what was commonly known as the Kennedy School of Government (KSG). Now I work at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS). And here is a terrific and mercifully brief history of the school's name. Funny--when I was commuting in today it didn't feel like I was starting a new job on what seems like the first day of spring in New England.

Now all that's left is to start spending the school's money getting new HKS stationery and business cards.

Back In Business

Blogging has been "very light" for the past few weeks. A number of time-pressing commitments and time with family have taken up almost all of my time lately.

One reader sent me a short email: "Please get back to work on your blog! We have a presidential campaign going on!" We sure do. Yet I look around the field in both parties, consider the positions of the leading candidates, and an old Simon-Garfunkel refrain immediately comes to mind:

Sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon.
Going to the candidates' debate.
Laugh about it, shout about it
When you've got to choose
Every way you look at it you lose.

Bloggers As Illegal Immigrants

It is not uncommon to see a Journalist (with a capital J) launch into a diatribe against bloggers and sometimes even call for regulations to stop "citizen journalists" from spreading the news. Although such calls are often couched in terms of noble-sounding goals like protecting the integrity of information in a free society, there's also an important self-serving economic motive at play.

It doesn't cost all that much to become a citizen journalist: a computer and your own time is about all it takes for you to start reporting your view of the world to whoever wants to read it.

The laws of supply and demand suggest that the rewards to being a Journalist would drop because anyone can now start reporting news and opinionating a la Paul Krugman or Maureen Dowd. It's as if the Journalistic profession has received its own influx of illegal immigrants--increasing competition, lowering rewards, and creating havoc along the way.

Maybe now the Journalists will learn how those workers affected by immigration have long felt.

You Get What You Pay For

I've just finished reading a superb book, Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson's Until Proven Innocent, the definitive account of the Duke lacrosse rape case. The parts of the book that I found most interesting revolve around the widely publicized "send them to the gallows" reaction of a sizable chunk of the Duke faculty. There is one very revealing passage at the beginning of the book, the consequences of which reverberate throughout the story:

...Duke sought to join the Ivies, Stanford, and MIT among the nation's leading institutions. It chose to do so, however, on the cheap: bypassing the sciences (where the combination of salary and lab costs for a new hire ran around $400,000), the school focused on bringing in big-name humanities professors, for whom the only startup cost was salary. Politically correct leftist professors were in vogue nationwide, and the leftward slant of Duke's humanities and social sciences faculty accelerated...

Why is it that this trend so afflicts the humanities and the "soft" social sciences? An easy answer would be that these fields lack a well-defined theoretical framework and have little attachment to (or understanding of) the scientific method--making the professors highly susceptible to the latest fads sweeping the intelligentsia. 

But this can't be the whole story. If true, ideological extremism and irrelevance should have also characterized earlier generations of professors in those fields.

Duke has already paid dearly for their initial stinginess. But the costs will mount. The tenured humanities and social sciences faculty are going to be doing a lot of hiring in the next 20 years, and one would not lose money by betting that the hiring process will lead mainly to new hires who have the ideological seal of approval.

More On Indoctrination

My earlier post on Indoctrination At College generated a more-than-usual number of reactions. This email from a reader tels us what it is like to be a student in a U.S. history class these days:

I just read your interesting piece on Indoctrination U. I'm on the left myself (sorry), but the right (from the moderate right to the far right) is dead-on accurate when it comes to the issues you raise. For three years in grad school at (name withheld) I saw it all the time. Simply put, religious students, conservatives, Republicans, those who support the war in Iraq, and so on, are not welcome in the vast majority of history courses I took, which often devolved into simple morality tales about American history. And I noticed that these leftist professors got downright offended if a student didn't agree with their interpretations; that is, the class had to be constantly told what was racist, sexist, classist, imperialist, etc, rather than allowing students to simply look at the evidence and come to their own conclusions. That is when I began to realize that when many liberals talk of diversity, they do not mean diversity of ideas and perspectives, but simply go by skin color, gender, or the contour of the eye. How astonishingly ironic that these have become proxies for diversity among the left.

Some reactions: Do most parents have any idea what it is they are paying $40,000 a year for? Should taxpayers let a heavily subsidized industry (i.e., higher education) get away with stuff like this? What would be the most effective way of correcting the problem?

Indoctrination At College

This is something I'm very sensitive about:

The University of Delaware subjects students in its residence halls to a shocking program of ideological reeducation that is referred to in the university’s own materials as a “treatment” for students’ incorrect attitudes and beliefs. The Orwellian program requires the approximately 7,000 students in Delaware’s residence halls to adopt highly specific university-approved views on issues ranging from politics to race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy, and environmentalism...

The university’s views are forced on students through a comprehensive manipulation of the residence hall environment, from mandatory training sessions to “sustainability” door decorations. Students living in the university’s eight housing complexes are required to attend training sessions, floor meetings, and one-on-one meetings with their Resident Assistants (RAs)...

According to the program’s materials, the goal of the residence life education program is for students in the university’s residence halls to achieve certain “competencies” that the university has decreed its students must develop in order to achieve the overall educational goal of “citizenship.” These competencies include: “Students will recognize that systemic oppression exists in our society,” “Students will recognize the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression,” and “Students will be able to utilize their knowledge of sustainability to change their daily habits and consumer mentality.”

I'm not surprised by this. There's little doubt that universities are largely staffed by way-left-of-center faculty and that political correctness has a stranglehold on dialogue in many fields. Just ask Larry Summers.

Why am I super-sensitive to this? Because as a young boy I myself went through a one-year course in ideological reorientation. I attended an elite elementary Catholic school in Havana. Castro took over, the Catholic school was shut down, and I got transferred to a revolutionary school where the entire day was spent teaching Marxist-Leninist ideology. Luckily, this lasted only a year and I continued my education in Miami (where the entire school day was instead spent talking about the upcoming football game). I am certain that the blind zealotry that I saw in the young teacher's eyes that year turned me off from that particular way of viewing the world for the rest of my life. One can only hope that many of the students forced to attend the re-education programs at Delaware and other universities react in the same way.

There's a related documentary called Indoctrinate U that probably won't make it into mainstream Hollywood distribution channels. But I've seen a few clips of it on the web and it looks like something that I should rent when the DVD comes out.

The iShoes

The Segway didn't, ahem, live up to expectations. So those ever-busy  income-maximizing entrepreneurs-to-be come up with what seems like a cool set of shoes to own. It also may be the perfect holiday gift for students in large campuses who somehow can never make it to class on time:

 

Windows Vista vs. Mac OS Leopard

Best point-by-point comparison I've seen. A sample: