Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong

Alma Mater Blogging...

Greg Mankiw's desire to move Harvard to someplace better adapted to human life than Massachusetts was triggered by:

Greg Mankiw's Blog: Time for Harvard to Move?: The Wall Street Journal reports one of the most pernicious ideas I have heard of late: "Massachusetts legislators, demonstrating a growing resentment against the wealth of elite universities in tight economic times, are studying a plan to levy a 2.5% annual tax on the portion of college endowments that exceed $1 billion. The effort takes aim at one of the primary economic engines of the state, which is home to nine universities with endowments that surpass the $1 billion level, led by Harvard University's $35 billion cache, the nation's largest.... Supporters said the proposal would raise $1.4 billion a year. Based on the most recent size of Harvard's endowment, the university would have to shell out more than $840 million annually..."

There is an important underlying issue here with respect to America's private universities...

Let me put it this way: in 1960, the University of California--then overwhelmingly UCB and UCSF and UCLA--was about four times the size of Harvard, 5000 vs. 1200 undergraduates a year, with graduate students and faculty roughly in proportion. Clark Kerr, as president of the University of California in the 1960s, took a look at space constraints in Berkeley and Westwood, took a look at the rising population of California, took a look at increasing wealth, took a look at increasing educational attainment, took a look at the increasing attractiveness of American universities to people abroad, and conclude that the number of undergraduate students who could and would want to take full advantage of a UC education was going to grow eightfold over the next fifty years. So he decided to go all-out to clone UCB and UCLA.

And he did it.

Today we have UC Davis, UC Merced, UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, UC Sunnydale, UC Irvine, UC Riverside, UC San Diego which together with UCB and UCLA graduate 40,000 undergraduates a year. Quality of education at UCB and UCLA has suffered a little bit as this cloning process has diverted resources away from us--but only by a very little bit. And the other UCs are damned good--with Davis and UCSD now being, I think, equal to the flagship campuses (although we don't admit it in bureaucratic system wars). And the Cal States do an impressive job as well. And the community colleges provide remarkable educational value for the money. The high administrators of the University of California starting with Clark Kerr have an extraordinary, remarkable accomplishment to look back upon. And they should be very proud--especially as they have accomplished it in the face of declining relative levels of support from the state legislature in Sacramento.

Harvard, over the same fifty-year time span... Harvard has gone from 1200 undergraduates a year to 1600, and has done so in spite of starting with a substantial endowment and receiving $15B of private charitable gifts. Harvard does a great many things well--and I am impressed by the fact that Larry Summers's presidency seems to have had the effect of creating a large brand-new science building on every block. But it is hard to think that the production function from resources to outcomes is an efficient one or something to be particularly proud of: I think presidents Pusey, Bok, Rudenstine, Summers, and Bok again were beaten by the system. At meetings of high academic administrators Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau and his ilk can hold their heads up high as proud successors to a highly capable group of administrators who made a lot of lemonade out of the lemons that they were handed, but I don't think Harvard president Faust can do the same.

Somebody last week--was it Jan de Vries? John Ellwood? Somebody else? I forget who, but it is not original to me--said that the right model for Harvard over the past century is Yugoslavia. Remember the story of the Yugoslavian socialist worker-managed firm? If you add another worker to the firm, that worker gets a pro-rata share of the firm's value added. The firm's value added has a component attributable to the firm's capital stock, a component attributable to the ideas embedded in the firm, a component attributable to the firm's market position, and a component attributable to the workers. Hire another worker, and only the last of these goes up: the first three do not, and so average compensation falls.

This means that a worker-managed firm is likely to shrink whenever it gets good news that makes it more productive--the larger is the value added due to ideas, capital, or market position, the more expensive does it become for the existing workers to replace workers who leave, let alone hire enough workers to expand. While a competitive market capitalist firm responds to good news about its productivity and value to society by increasing employment, a Yugoslavian-model market socialist firm responds to good news about its productivity and value to society by shrinking. On this analysis, the very success of Harvard over the past two generations together with its degree of worker management has created enormous internal pressures not to expand, the better to share out the surplus among the existing stakeholders.

If this story of Harvard-over-the-past-two-generations-as-the-socialist-Yugoslavia is correct, then a bunch of hard questions to which I do not know the answers are raised about:

• The judgment of those who have tried to satisfy their charitable impulses by giving $15B to my alma mater over the past two generations.
• The proper incentives that the government should try to present to the institution--and to those who might try to satisfy their charitable impulses in the future by adding to its endowment.
• The responsibility of alumni like myself to try to influence the future governance of the institution: corporation members like Bob Reischauer know what is going on at least as well as I do, but seem to have been unable to move the institution.
• The question of how Harvard should expand if indeed it should expand: it doesn't seem to be nearly as good as the small liberal arts colleges or even its rivals Yale and Princeton at undergraduate education (I did very well, but only because I quickly found two places--Social Studies in Hilles basement, and the graduate economics program--where Harvard was, effectively, a small college); the medical school and the biomedical complex that surrounds it appears to do very well indeed as research institutions; the public policy school seems to have been an experiment worth trying that did not fulfill Derek Bok's hopes, but that I cannot fully evaluate; few of the many people I know who went to the law school say many good words about it; et cetera.

Greg Mankiw Wants to Move Harvard

Greg Mankiw wants to move Harvard to someplace better adapted to human life than Massachusetts:

Here is what I would consider.... Harvard could create a second campus in another state. Call it Harvard South. (Put it in a better climate than Boston, and I would be one of the first faculty to volunteer for the move.) Transfer much of the endowment to Harvard South. Support Harvard North by slowly selling off land in Massachusetts. Eventually, make Harvard South the main campus, and Harvard North the satellite. If Massachusetts state lawmakers remain hostile, close Harvard North down entirely.... I have often wondered what the efficient scale of a university is and, in particular, whether it would be better to create a second Harvard with the university's wealth than to expand the first one. Maybe the Massachusetts state legislature will give the powers-that-be at Harvard an incentive to consider more radical expansion plans.

There may be a Pareto-improvement possible here. Extrapolating from how much it cost to get Tom Campbell here at Berkeley formally called the Bank of America Dean of the Haas School of Business, I am confident that it would cost relatively little--perhaps 5% of Harvard's current endowment--to get us to be willing to rename this campus the Harvard University of California at Berkeley. And while I haven't talked to department chair Hermalin or personnel chair Shannon about this, I do think their judgment would be that adverse selection problems are low enough and Harvard's standards in economics high enough that we would be willing to issue a blanket offer to its faculty (but this would not, I understand, be the case in some other fields, computer science and chemistry for example). For Greg I'd even be willing to give up my office, with its $10M view of the Golden Gate, San Francisco, and its bay from its perch 100 feet above Berkeley's faculty glade. (Although if he wants both the west and the south view, he would have to strike a deal with Maury Obstfeld.)

There is one important proviso. Harvard's administrators--everyone who works in Massachusetts Hall, University Hall, and whatever that atrocity on the south side of Harvard Square is called--would have to stay behind. Even if we had not been certain of this point before, this month's Harvard ad-hoc committee personnel decisions have fixed our resolve. I had always thought that "when they heard the news, they couldn't stop laughing" was hyperbole. But it took John Quigley five full minutes before he could say an intelligible word...

Mark Graber, John Yoo, and the Problem of Academic Evil

Law professor Mark Graber--who we last saw using Martin Luther King Day weekend to blog about how Dred Scott was rightly decided by Roger Taney, and how Taney's opinion was legally correct when it stated that no Black man had any rights that the white man was bound to respect--pokes his head out of his whatever-it-is and becomes the first man I have seen who comes to the substantive defense of John Yoo:

Balkinization: Having just excerpted the Yoo memo... let me suggest that the claims are constitutionally plausible or as plausible as most of what I read when I read legal materials.... I was no more impressed by the Roberts opinion in Parents Involved (the Seattle school district case) then the Yoo memo.

The notion that Yoo ought to be disciplined for his involvement in a criminal conspiracy also strikes me as a bit strange. I confess to thinking that both that Yoo probably knew he was facilitating torture, but that there was no conspiracy in the non-legal sense of the word.... President Bush and the Republican Party, however, repeatedly and publicly declared that their philosophy during the war on terrorism was "whatever it takes." Of course, there were occasional denials... but I suspect they were not believed or even intended to be believed.... If there is a conspiracy, we probably should arrest about 60% of the country.... [T]he Yoo memo provided constitutional justification for what may be the majoritarian constitutional understanding in the United States.... [A]s a legal matter, you could still confine conspiracy to Yoo and a few others, but there would be an awful lot of unindicted co-conspirators.... [T]he constitutional support for Yoo's position is gaining strength.... Constitutionalists who disagree had better spend more of their time explaining to their fellow citizens what is wrong with torture than suggesting the problem might be cured by better legal methods courses in the first year of law school.

I confess I don't see an argument here.

Of course, I didn't really see an argument in Graber's applause for Roger B. Taney either. If there was an argument it seemed to be: "The southern slaveholder aristocracy would never have ratified the Constitution if they had thought that its proper interpretation would ever piss them off, so the first principle of interpreting the Constitution of 1789 must be to interpet it in a way that doesn't piss the southern slaveholder aristocracy off." And this was profoundly stupid--it leads to the conclusion that no constitution can ever be interpreted to mean anything that pisses anybody off (except slaves, women, the propertyless, subsequent immigrants, etc.--all those who didn't get to vote on it--it's OK to piss them off). And this was empirically false: in the Nullification Controversy Andrew Jackson and the Democratic congress interpreted the tariff clause in a way that pissed the slaveholding aristocracy of South Carolina off mightily--and made it stick, with President Jackson reportedly swearing that if the legislature of South Carolina did not back down he would seize its leading politician and his own Vice President John C. Calhoun and hang him on the south lawn of the White House.

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Time to hoist my earlier views of Mark Graber from the archives:

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/08/law-professor-m.html

Mark Graber is back: This time it is one of the most bizarre ripping-of-quotations-from-context I have ever seen, asserting that the differences on slavery between Roger B. Taney and Abraham Lincoln were "almost trivial." In making this argument, Graber lets Lincoln speak for one single clause before silencing him and hustling him offstage:

Balkinization: A good case can be made for tearing down the bust of Roger Brooke Taney that stands in front of the city hall in Frederick.... Taney wrote the opinion for the Supreme Court in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1856)... that persons of color could not be American citizens and that slavery could not be prohibited in American territories.... While the bulldozers are rented, we might get our money’s worth and tear down all statues honoring Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln insisted he "never complained especially of the Dred Scott decision because it held that a negro could not be a citizen..."

From a contemporary perspective, the differences between Lincoln and Taney seem almost trivial. The sixteenth president opposed making persons of color citizens of Illinois, advocated federal fugitive slave laws, endorsed slaveholding in the nation’s capital, and insisted that the federal government had no power to interfere with slavery in any state in which human bondage was legal. Their only serious dispute was over whether slaveholders could take their human property to North Dakota, a place few if any slaveholders had expressed interest in settling...

Let us bring Abraham Lincoln back on stage, and let him say more than the nineteen words from his Alton speech that Graber lets him say. Here is what Lincoln said about the "almost trivial" differences between him and the anti-anti-slavery Democrats like Stephen Douglas (let along the pro-slavery Democrats like Roger Taney):

Last Joint Debate, at Alton. Mr. Lincoln's Reply. Lincoln, Abraham. 1897. Political Debates Between Lincoln and Douglas: Judge Douglas... says he “don’t care whether [slavery] is voted up or voted down” in the Territories. I do not care myself, in dealing with that expression, whether it is intended to be expressive of his individual sentiments on the subject, or only of the national policy he desires to have established. It is alike valuable for my purpose. Any man can say that who does not see anything wrong in slavery; but no man can logically say it who does see a wrong in it, because no man can logically say he don’t care whether a wrong is voted up or voted down. He may say he don’t care whether an indifferent thing is voted up or down, but he must logically have a choice between a right thing and a wrong thing. He contends that whatever community wants slaves has a right to have them. So they have, if it is not a wrong. But if it is a wrong, he cannot say people have a right to do wrong.... You may turn over everything in the Democratic policy from beginning to end, whether in the shape it takes on the statute book, in the shape it takes in the Dred Scott decision, in the shape it takes in conversation, or the shape it takes in short maxim-like arguments, it everywhere carefully excludes the idea that there is anything wrong in [slavery].

That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—-right and wrong—-throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, “You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.” No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle...

Mark Graber may think this difference is "almost trivial." I cannot find anybody else who does.

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"To Secure the Blessings of Liberty" by reiterating his claims that (i) Dred Scott v. Sanford was rightly decided, and (ii) it was Lincoln and the Republicans in the 1850s--rather than either Roger Taney with his southern power grab in 1857 or the slavemaster secessionists firing on Ft. Sumter in 1861--who broke the constitutional order set up in 1857. It's an interesting way for him to celebrate Martin Luther King holiday weekend

As you may or may not remember, I read Mark Graber's Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil as making seven claims:

1. The 1787 Constitution intended "contested constitutional questions... be settled by the bisectional coalitions."
2. The framers thus set John C. Calhoun's principle of "concurrent majorities" in the Constitutional bedrock
3. The Republicans of the 1850s, who stuck to the letter of the Constitution, refused to admit that they were undermining its spirit.
4. In Dred Scott, Roger B. Taney replaced failing the political protections of slavery provided by sectional balance in numbers of states and populations per section with legally-enforceable protections.
5. In violating the letter of the Constitution, Taney was being faithful to the spirit of the Constitution, and so was preserving it.
6. In criticizing Taney for violating the letter of the Constitution, Lincoln was being unfaithful to the spirit of the Constitution, and so was destroying it.
7. Dred Scott was rightly decided.

Claim number two, especially, struck me as simply weird. Read John C. Calhoun's Discourse. John C. Calhoun himself did not believe that his principle of concurrent majorities was part of the 1787 constitutional order. He believed that it would have been wise for the framers to have made it part of the order. He believed that the constitution should in his day be amended to make it part of the order. He believed that without this principle the country might disintegrate. But he did not believe that the North had any sort of constitutional responsibility or obligation to treat his principle of concurrent majorities as part of the 1787 constitutional order.

Mark Graber has gotten himself to the right of John C. Calhoun. This is a position painful and ludicrous for a twenty-first-century American legal academic to assume. It is a position so painful and ludicrous that it should induce any twenty-first-century American academic to undertake an agonizing reappraisal--particularly over Martin Luther King holiday weekend.

But Mark Graber doesn't. Let's turn the mike over to him:

Balkinization: [A] fundamental principle of an empirically realistic constitutional theory ought to be that constitutional bargains survive only when interpreted, however creatively, in ways that create opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation.... Of course, members of [the North] will have the luxury of knowing, as civil war wracks their country, that [the slavemasters of the South] was the party responsible for abandoning the constitution. This, however, is unlikely to reduce their casualities....

[C]onstitutional bets made by one generation... should not be enforceable against the next when the result is a sharp imbalance in the benefits... constitutions are best interpreted in ways that enable all parties... to believe that they are better off continuing to cooperate than going at matters alone (or engaging in civil war)....

I think DeLong is mistaken when he insists that northerners ratified on the basis of their belief that slavery would diminish over time (while most hoped so, the best evidence indicates that concerns with slavery were not central for most northern proponents of ratification). But even conceding the point for argument's sake, the more vital constitutional consideration is that as a political matter people are not going to pay off constitutional bets made by their ancestors when the payment requires a sacrifice of crucial interests with inadequate present payoffs.... [T]he constitutional bargain was likely to continue only if the winner, in this case the free states, did not collect. The Constitution of the United States... could survive only when all crucial parties believed that cooperative served their interests, as they presently defined their interests...

I want to make two points in response.

My first point: pacta sunt servanda. Agreements should be kept. We use analogies derived from the law and practice of private contracts in our reasoning about public moral and legal constitutional obligations. Whether it makes sense for us to use these analogies is a deep question well above my pay grade. But we do use them: it is the style of constitutional reasoning that we have. And it tells us that pacta sunt servanda: agreements should be kept.

Oftentimes prudence, empathy, the desire to make additional agreements in the future, et cetera will lead both parties to agree to renegotiate a contract when circumstances change. But that doesn't mean that a dissatisfied party has the right to unilaterally change it. In private law a dissatisfied party's options are to fulfill the terms, to breach and renegotiate, or to breach and litigate. The breach-and-renegotiate option between say, Target and a supplier of electric toothbrushes entails an acknowledgement of breach and negotiations among the parties, with mediation a welcome aid. It doesn't entail the guy who has the job of monitoring compliance--the guy driving the truck and checking in the shipment at Target's loading dock--saying "There are only 100 gross of toothbrushes here, but we'll say there are 144 gross because the original contract turns out to have been unfair."

In this analogy, Roger B. Taney in Dred Scott is not the mediator at the renegotiation. He is the truck driver checking in the shipment. He was not acting as the agent of the High Contracting Parties in their renegotiation. If he were, there would not have been such anguished cries from the free-soil north in resonse to his ruling.

My second point: Go back to how Mark Graber opens his post this Martin Luther King holiday weekend. He opens with an analogy. He sets forth what he regards as a situation capturing the key aspects relevant to Dred Scott of the evolution of the United States over 1787-1860. Here's what he says:

Suppose two tribes who have some reason to cooperate but whose members do not like each other very much ratify a constitution that grants the northern half of their territory to Tribe A and the southern part to Tribe B. Each party is rather happy with the bargain. Each believes that, in the next hundred years, climate changes are likely to enhance the value of their land and make the other tribe’s land nearly uninhabitable. As a result of this constitutional bargain, members of both tribes are able to form an army that provides for the common defense and make mutually beneficial trade agreements with other nations.

After 100 years of no apparent changes, evidence conclusively indicates that Tribe A has won the constitutional bet. The soil on the northern half of the continent is becoming increasingly fertile, while the soil of the southern half of the continent (for natural reasons) is slowly killing the members of Tribe B...

There are two parties to the constitutional contract in Mark Graber's imagination. There is Tribe A--the North. There is Tribe B--the slaveholders of the South. Notice anybody missing? Yep. There is no Tribe C--the slaves. One of the most ancient principles of any law worthy of the name is that, at some appropirate level, quod omnes tangit ab omnibus approbari debet. And the slaves of the United States America were certainly in the direct object of the verb tangit, as far as contemplated revisions of the 1787 constitutional order were concerned.

Mark Graber says that if changes in circumstances greatly disadvantage how a constitution impacts some group, that constitution should be revised and amended so that the losers should not have to pay up the full amount of the constitutional bet that they have lost. Well, there were powerful changes in circumstances from 1787 to 1860. In 1787, with the exhaustion of tobacco soils, Thomas Jefferson believed he would someday free all his slaves. In 1860m, with with the profits of cotton and sugar, Jefferson Davis was damned sure he would not free any of his. These changes in circumstances greatly, greatly disadvantaged Tribe C. Does not Graber's argument that the free-soil North should not have collected on its victorious bet from the slavemasters of the South have further consequences? Doesn't it carry with it a much stronger argument about relations between slavemasters and slaves? Doesn't it entail that the slavemasters of the South--transformed by the profits of cotton from seeing slavery as a temporary evil to seeing slavery as a permanent good--should not have collected on their victorious bet from the slaves?

But in the world of Mark Graber's imagination there is no "Tribe C." There are only Tribes A and B: only free-soil Northerners and slavemaster Southerners. The slaves have vanished. They are socially dead. They, you see, have not made a constitutional bet because they are not parties to the constitution. They are not and never can be citizens of the United States. They are not among the people who have inalienable rights. Governments are not instituted to secure their rights to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness: they have none. Their claim that they are among the "we the people" for whom the constitution is supposed "to secure the blessings of liberty" is null and void, if not simply laughed out of court.

We don't have to think about the impact on Tribe C. For, as Roger B. Taney wrote, African-Americans are:

beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.

But I maintain the contrary. I maintain that we do have to think about Tribe C. I maintain that everybody doing politics and law in the United States--today or in the 1850s, whether Roger B. Taney or Mark Graber--ought not to pretend that Tribe C is absent from the table. Tribe C has a seat at the table, for as Abraham Lincoln said in 1858:

I agree with Judge Douglas that [the Negro] is not my equal in many respects, certainly not in color--; perhaps not in intellectual and moral endowments; but in the right to eat the bread without the leave of any body else which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every other man.

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http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/01/to_secure_the_b.html

Consider Mark Graber (2006), Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil. At the start of his book, Mark Graber sets out seven propositions:

1. The original Constitution of 1787 intended that "contested constitutional questions... be settled by the bisectional coalitions."
2. The framers thus set John C. Calhoun's principle of "concurrent majorities" in the Constitutional bedrock: the framers regarded it as substantively unconstitutional for legislation affecting slavery to be passed by a section-specific majority.
3. The Republicans of the 1850s, who stuck to the letter of the Constitution, refused to admit that they were undermining its spirit, which was the "original constitutional commitment to bisectionalism."
4. In Dred Scott, Roger B. Taney replaced failing the political protections of slavery provided by sectional balance in numbers of states and populations per section with legally-enforceable protections acceptable to the "Jacksonians" (who were the people who counted).
5. In violating the letter of the Constitution, Taney was being faithful to the spirit of the Constitution, and so was preserving it via his little Constitutional Moment.
6. In criticizing Taney for violating the letter of the Constitution, Lincoln was being unfaithful to the spirit of the Constitution, and so was destroying it.
7. Dred Scott was rightly decided.

For example, see pp. 4-5, 12-13:

Confident that population was moving southwestward, the persons responsible for the Constitution assumed that representation by population, the electoral college, and the three-fifths clause would ensure Southern control.... [T]he antebellum regime disintegrated when an unexpected northwestward population explosion undermined these power-sharing arrangements....

[...]

The framers expected that contested constitutional questions would be settled by the bisectional coalitions they anticipated would be elected.... The framers never considered [that]... the letter of the constitutional rules [might subvert]... the bisectional contitutional purposes underlying those rules.... [The] real debgate [in the 1850s] was whether the original constitutional commitment to bisectionalism should be modified or abandoned.... In Dred Scott the Supreme Court fostered sectional moderation by replacing the original Constitution's failing political protections for slavery with legally enforceable protections acceptable to Jacksonians.... Republicans[']... refusal to acknowledge the constitutional commitment to bisectionalism... [was] a de facto renunciation of the original constitutional understanding that slavery would never be left to the mercy of Northern majorities.... Taney was more faithful to the original Constitution [than Lincoln] when [Taney] championed policies that could be supported by Jacksonians throughout the nation...

But there is an alternative, a more conventional story: that at the original Constitutional Moment slaveholders were betting that their power would increase over time (hence the Constitution was worth ratifying even though it did not include unneeded long-run explicit protections of slavery) and those who wanted to preserve the possibility of future abolition were betting that slaveholders' power would diminish over time (hence the Constitution was worth ratifying as long as it did include dangerous long-run explicit protections of slavery). According to this more conventional story, the abolitionists won their bet and the slaveholders lost theirs. According to this more conventional story, there was nothing in the Constitution that said that slaveholders got a "do over" if they lost their bet. In this story, Roger B. Taney's little Constitutional Moment in Dred Scott was illegitimate: an effective amendment of the Constitution that did not have the overwhelming support that whatever your theory may be of "Constitutional Moments" requires.

This more conventional story seems much stronger to me than Graber's story. At least, I didn't find anything in Graber's book that seemed inconsistent with it. And on p. 101 ff, Graber appears to sound a lot like this alternative, more conventional story--the story not of a bedrock constitutional principle of concurrent majorities but of different expectations about what the future was likely to hold:

The framers thought it "wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men."... Slavery was [thus] protected by political arrangements.... [F]ramers... assumed that population increases would be greatest in the South and Southwest... [and] guarantee to the slave states the control of the House of Representatives and the executive branch necessary to secure slaveholding interests.... [T]he framers self-consciously rejected more explicit textual restraints on federal power over slavery... opposed Roger Sherman's proposal... that "no state shall without its consent be affected in its internal police."... [I]n the bill of RIghts, no slave state's representative demanded a ban on federal laws interfering with slavery....

The confidence with which the most fervent supporters of human bondage believed population was flowing southward explains their willingness to accept a mere twenty-year moratorium on federal laws banning the international slave trade.... Federalists in some Northern states and in Virginia declared that this clause [allowing the Congress to prohibit slave imports in 1808 and thereafter] doomed slavery, which required continuous importation.... Deep South representatives expected their political strength in 1808 would render unnecessary the legal protection for slavery demanded in 1787....

Certainly John C. Calhoun did not believe that the 1787 Constitution enacted his principle of "concurrent majorities." He thought that the principle of concurrent majorities was wise. He believed that it was probably necessary if the United States were to survive. He believed that the framers had made a mistake by not incorporating it--perhaps through a two-person presidency. But he was very clear in his Discourse that he did not believe that it was a bedrock principle of the pre-Civil War Constitution: he believed that the Constitution ought to be amended to enact it.

Mark Graber, in his assertion that Calhoun's concurrent majority principle--"bisectional coalitions" he calls it--was bedrock in the pre-Civil War Constitution has managed to get himself to the right of John C. Calhoun. Whenever any modern academic gets himself to the right of John C. Calhoun, it is time to check your wallet and count the spoons. Nice try.

What was really going on? Those who set up our original Constitution had lots of hopes. To create a fit instrument of government for the advance of human liberty was one. To avoid sectional strife was a second. There were a lot of others. Lots of unexpected things happened between 1787 and 1860 that caused Constitutional history to flow in unforeseen channels. Let me list four:

1. Many more people than expected voted with their feet for the institutions of the free-soil North than of the slave-soil South.
2. The coming of the cotton gin and the British industrial revolution greatly raised the value of American slaves and thus greatly increased the attachment of slaveholders to their Peculiar Institution: Thomas Jefferson wanted to emancipate his slaves; Jefferson Davis did not.
3. The existence of a written Constitution and the structure of the Supreme Court, coupled with the difficulties of formal amendment, created a situation in which by far the easiest way to amend the Constitution is to choose five justices who then have a Constitutional Moment.
4. Even after the abolition of the international slave trade in 1808, the slave population of the United States continued to increase as births to slave women outnumbered deaths, manumissions, and runaways--something few if any expected beforehand, as history teaches that slave populations do not maintain themselves.

Each of these caused American constitutional history to flow in different channels than the framers of 1787 had expected, and presumably called for some adjustment to bring the Constitution back to its intended order and purposes. So what are the principles to guide that adjustment? Which of these hopes were the bedrock principles that determine the Constitution's intended order and purposes? There is only one paragraph that tells us:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

I read this paragraph and see "secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity" as having pride of place. Abe Lincoln thought so too. Mark Graber and Roger B. Taney have a different view. I'm happy where I am.

Cowwedge: A Dweam within a Dweam...

It looks like the seventeen-year-old's live college options are going to be Reed, Johns Hopkins, and (if he gets in off the wait list) Wesleyan. Any non-obvious information relevant to his decision would be welcome...

2008 SIEPR Economic Summit

Critical Issue Sessions and Panelists: March 7: 4:30-5:45pm....

Session II: Is Free Trade Fair Trade? * Moderator: Dixon Doll, SIEPR Board member * Brad DeLong, Professor of Economics, University of California, Berkeley * Alan Taylor, Professor of Economics, University of California, Davis * David Dollar, Country Director, China and Mongolia, World Bank

http://siepr.stanford.edu/SummitAgenda2008.pdf

Frances C. Arrillaga Alumni Center, 326 Galvez St., Stanford Campus

Presentable Conservatives

Jacob Levy responds to my "I say cut the Gordian knot. THERE ARE NO ATTRACTIVE MODERN CONSERVATIVES BECAUSE CONSERVATISM SIMPLY IS NOT ATTRACTIVE. DEAL WITH IT!!" by saying:

Jacob T. Levy: [F]eh. Scoring points is fun and all, but the point being scored here is entirely beside the, well, point. Brad has no difficulty finding classic teaching texts for views he considers unattarctive--say, Marxism....

John Finnis' Natural Law and Natural Rights and Robert George's Making Men Moral are major, intellectually serious statements of a social conservatism I find deeply unattractive. But for current purposes my problem is not that they're unattractive, it's that they're unteachable--pitched at too high a level, too drenched in literatures undergraduates in political theory courses won't have read, too Raz-ishly dense (and Raz is hardly teachable to undergraduatess in the first place).

Schmitt's Concept of the Political and Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy [also] provide teachable, cogent, serious statements for a position I trust Brad finds "unattractive." So does Maistre. Why is it easier to find enduring reactionary texts than enduring texts that state the basic position of conservatives in liberal democracies? That's the puzzle.

I think Jacob has already solved his own puzzle higher up in his post, where he writes:

One of the problems is that history keeps right on going--and so any book plucked from the past that was concerned with yelling "stop!" tends to date badly to any modern reader.... This is a particular problem because of race in America--no mid-20th c work is going to endure as a real, read-not-just-namechecked, classic of political thought that talks about how everything will go to hell if the South isn't allowed to remain the South.... This is a special case of Tyler [Cowen]'s depravity point--but in the context of 20th c American conservatism, an important special case. And note that Oakeshott has his own version of these problems; doesn't "Rationalism in Politics" end up feeling faintly ridiculous by the time he's talking about women's suffrage?...

Levy is happy assigning de Maistre and Schmitt because he doesn't mind that they convict themselves out of their own mouths of being Monster Raving Loonies. His problem with Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind and Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and, indeed, Oakeshott's "Rationalism and Politics" (and, indeed, Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and Letters on a Regicide Peace cto the extent that one reads them not as expressions of a mood but as a call to crown the Comte de Paris at Reims next Easter) is that they too have acquired the tinge of looniness with the passage of time.

I wager that Robert George and John Finnis will seem similarly tinged with looniness in another half a generation. Had they been writing a century ago one of the "powerfully seductive and corrupting vices" that they think should be suppressed by the state with dungeon and manacle would be the idea that women have a role to play in the public sphere; had he been writing half a century ago one of the PSaCVttTSBSbtSwDaM would have been miscegenation, and votes for Negroes; but they are writing today and so they concentrate their fire on heterosexual sex outside of marriage, on--indeed--heterosexual sex "not of the reproductive kind" inside of marriage, and on homosexuals:

Source: David Paul Morris/Getty Images.

But in all likelihood history will continue to progress toward the light, homosexuality wiill become more broadly accepted, some Pope will endorse artificial birth control, and some future Jacob Levy will complain that George and Finnis are unacceptable not just becuase they are rarified but because what they claimed would cause the sky to fall came to pass, and the sky did not fall.

Conservatism and Its Absence of Contents

Jacob Levy thinks he has a problem: he cannot present conservatism attractively in his classes because there are no attractive modern conservatives:

Jacob T. Levy: Tyler Cowen... makes the insightful point that "none [of the 20th century American conservatives] have held up particularly well, mostly because they underestimated the robustness of the modern world and regarded depravity as more of a problem than it has turned out to be."

It's a real problem--one I've often talked with people about in a teaching context, because there's no modern work to teach alongside Theory of Justice and Anarchy, State, and Utopia that really gets at what's interesting about Burkean or social conservatism.... The problem isn't... that the conservative temperament isn't easily reduced to programmatic philosophical works.... One of the problems is that history keeps right on going--and so any book plucked from the past that was concerned with yelling "stop!" tends to date badly to any modern reader who does not think he's already living in hell-in-a-handbasket. This is a particular problem because of race in America--no mid-20th c work is going to endure as a real, read-not-just-namechecked, classic of political thought that talks about how everything will go to hell if the South isn't allowed to remain the South.... Oakeshott has his own version of these problems; doesn't "Rationalism in Politics" end up feeling faintly ridiculous by the time he's talking about women's suffrage?...

I don't see any great answers in the comment thread yet. I guess I might say Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, and Kristol, Two Cheers for Capitalism, but the former isn't really distinctively conservative enough and I'm not sure the latter is a classic.

I say cut the Gordian knot. THERE ARE NO ATTRACTIVE MODERN CONSERVATIVES BECAUSE CONSERVATISM SIMPLY IS NOT ATTRACTIVE. DEAL WITH IT!!

You can see this most clearly if you take a close look at Edmund Burke. Edmund Burke does not believe that Tradition is to be Respected. He believes that good traditions are to be respected. When Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France makes the argument that Britons should respect the organic political tradition of English liberty that has been inherited from the past, he whispers under his breath that the only reason we should respect the Wisdom of the Ancestors is that in this particular case Burke thinks that the Ancestors--not his personal ancestors, note--were wise.

Whenever Burke thought that the inherited political traditions were not wise, the fact that they were the inherited Wisdom of the Ancestors cut no ice with him at all. It was one of the traditions and institutions of Englishmen that they would conquer, torture, and rob wogs whenever and wherever they were strong enough to do so. That tradition cut no ice with Edmund Burke when he was trying to prosecute Warren Hastings. It was one of the traditions and institutions of Englishmen that all power flowed to Westminster. That tradition cut no ice with Burke when he was arguing for conciliation with and a devolution of power to the American colonists. It was one of the traditions and institutions of Englishmen that Ireland was to be plundered and looted for the benefit of upwardly-mobile English peers-to-be. That tradition, too, cut no ice with Burke.

Even in Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke doesn't argue that Frenchmen should build on their own political traditions--the traditions of Richelieu and Louis XIV, that is. He argues--well, let's let him talk:

Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France: We [in Britain] procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle upon which nature teaches us to revere individual men; on account of their age; and on account of those from whom they are descended.... You [in France] might, if you pleased, have profited of our example, and have given to your recovered freedom a correspondent dignity. Your privileges, though discontinued, were not lost to memory. Your constitution... suffered waste and dilapidation; but you possessed in some parts the walls, and in all the foundations, of a noble and venerable castle. You might have repaired those walls; you might have built on those old foundations. ... In your old [E]states [General] you possessed that variety of parts corresponding with the various descriptions of which your community was happily composed; you had all that combination, and all that opposition of interests, you had that action and counteraction which, in the natural and in the political world, from the reciprocal struggle of discordant powers, draws out the harmony of the universe.... Through that diversity of members and interests, general liberty had as many securities as there were separate views.... [B]y pressing down the whole by the weight of a real monarchy, the separate parts would have been prevented from warping and starting from their allotted places.

You had all these advantages in your antient [E]states [General].... If the last generations of your country appeared without much lustre in your eyes, you might have passed them by, and derived your claims from a more early race of ancestors. Under a pious predilection for those ancestors, your imaginations would have realized in them a standard of virtue and wisdom.... Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to respect yourselves. You would not have chosen to consider the French as... a nation of low-born servile wretches until the emancipating year of 1789.... [Y]ou would not have been content to be represented as a gang of Maroon slaves, suddenly broke loose from the house of bondage....

Would it not... have been wiser to have you thought... a generous and gallant nation, long misled... by... fidelity, honour, and loyalty... that you were not enslaved through any illiberal or servile disposition... [but] by a principle of public spirit, and that it was your country you worshipped, in the person of your king? Had you made it to be understood... that you were resolved to resume your ancient [liberties,] privileges[, and immunities]... you would have given new examples of wisdom to the world. You would have rendered the cause of liberty venerable in the eyes of every worthy mind in every nation. You would have shamed despotism from the earth...

Burke's argument is not that France in 1789 should have followed its ancestral traditions. Burke's argument is, instead, that France in 1789 should have dug into its past until it found a moment when institutions were better than in 1788, and drawn upon that usable past in order to buttress the present revolutionary moment. This isn't an intellectual argument about how to decide what institutions are good. It is a practical-political argument about how to create good institutions and then buttress and secure them by making them facts on the ground.

What are good institutions? Burke sounds like Madison: checks-and-balances, separation of powers, rights of the subject, limitations on the state. Burke's views on what good institutions are Enlightenment views--that branch of the Enlightenment that took people as they are and politics as a science, that is, rather than the branch that took people as Rousseau hoped they might someday be and politics as the striking of an oppositional pose. Because he finds that the English past is usable as a support for his Enlightenment-driven views, Burke makes conservative arguments in Reflections. But whenever conservative arguments lead where Burke doesn't want to go--to Richelieu or Louis XIV or the plunder of Ireland or the Star Chamber or Warren Hastings or imperial centralization--Burke doesn't make them and they have no purchase on him. England's inheritance of institutions and practices is to be respected wherever it supports Burke's conception of properly-ordered liberty, and ignored wherever it does not. For Burke, conservatism is a sometimes useful rhetorical weapon, not a set of principles.

Dani Rodrik Doesn't Think Much of "Mr. Kristol"

Dani Rodrik has been waiting a long time--decades, in fact--to give William Kristol a grade:

Mr Kristol, you get a C in economics!

I think that Dani is being really generous: a C is a real gift here.

Most interesting, perhaps, is Dani's report of William Kristol's teaching methodology, which appears to have involved giving lots of unmotivated Cs to a man who is the finest political economist of my generation. It is an interesting method--but I would classify it not as a way of teaching but as an exercise in Herrschaft...

Introduction to Financial Engineering: Emanuel Derman Laughs in the Dark

Emanuel Derman, author of the excellent My Life as a Quant, is putting the lecture notes from his Columbia Master's in Financial Engineering course up on the web:

Laughter in the Dark: An Introduction to the Volatility Smile: These are unpublished lecture notes from the Master's in Financial Engineering Program at Columbia University. I have used many published papers and books to improve (I hope) the pedagogic nature of these notes, and perhaps not referenced them properly. Since they are in rough form, I will be pleased to correct any errors or omissions. I'll add new lectures as the semester progresses.

• Lecture 1: The Principles of Valuation
• Lecture 2: Dynamic Replication: Myths and Realities of Options Pricing
• Lecture 3: The Smile: Constraints and Problems

Cosma Shalizi Criticizes One of the Sartorial Geniuses of Our Age

Cosma Shalizi is driven into shrill unholy madness by Inside Higher Ed the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Clothes Make Working for the Man Easier: I have just had one Prof. Erik M. Jensen's op-ed "A Call for Professional Attire" referred to me by multiple sources (none especially pointedly, thanks), and I find myself greatly irritated. Jensen says that contemporary American academics generally fail to dress up, in the modes that are supposed to reflect seriousness and status, and spends about 2000 words bemoaning this, long for a lost "golden age" (his phrase), and trying to ridicule, brow-beat, and shame his audience into complying with his wishes. The closest he comes, in all of this, to present an actual reason for doing so is saying this: "People generally act better when they're dressed right. If a professor is sending a signal of seriousness, of civility, students will pick it up." This is backed up by a causal reflection on how " in DiMaggio's day ... [t]he men wore white shirts and ties under coats and hats, the proper attire in public, even at a ball game."

This is a style of cultural commentary which drives me up the wall.... It is not that hard to think of an actual rationale for what Jensen wants; it would go something like this. (These are, of course, my words, not his.) "Academics are supposed to impart knowledge and skills to their students, to critique their work, to direct their intellectual and to some extent their moral development; in all these tasks they are supposed to exercise authority over students. They may also be called upon to supervise student or other employees, which is another exercise of authority. They will do so more effectively if they display the recognized external markers of high status and of seriousness, which includes dressing in certain ways and adopting certain demeanors. In fact, if they do this, their authority is more likely to be accepted as legitimate, leading to fewer occasions on which it must be explicitly insisted upon and made into naked acts of domination. Furthermore, academics are often called upon to represent their schools and/or their scholarly communities to the outside world, and this, too, will be done more effectively if they dress in ways which their audiences take to convey seriousness."

This is a reasonable argument... [about] consequences... with empirical premises, and one susceptible to balancing --- how much extra effectiveness is the extra expense, hassle, infringement on personal choice, etc., of this mode of dress worth?... One could imagine a reasonable essay which... thought through the trade-offs.

Jensen... just wants to take his internalized... transparently parochial... [norms] and pretend that they are... universal laws.... This is by far the more common rhetorical mode when people try to criticize manners and customs, and it strikes me as deeply stupid... since it gives you no reason to believe that acting as the author wants will make things better...

A professor's clothes--supposed to lie somewhere on the spectrum between total nudity and the purple-red dress of a Byzantine emperor--need to serve four purposes:

1. To make the appropriate people envy, in an appropriate way, the professor's (actual or counterfactual) spouse.
2. To make the professor comfortable.
3. To make the students more willing and eager to learn.
4. To take a particular stand on the great debate between the courtier Lord Chesterfield on the one hand and the intellectual Samuel Johnson on the other, summed up in Johnson's remark that Chesterfield's fashion-centered advice to his illegitimate son taught the boy "the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing master."

I will pass over (1) as requiring a knowledge of evolutionary biology and a working aesthetic sense--which disqualifies me on both counts. I will pass over (2) as requiring a knowledge of biological thermodynamics which I do not have, save to observe that the traditional tweedy professor male academic clothes are, from a thermodynamic point of view, appropriate only for some British or New England campus without effective central heating. But I will say:

With respect to (3):

• I have found that wearing my doctoral robe to class is counterproductive. It
  • is hot pink, and
  • leads my students to think that I may be crazy, or
  • am making fun of them, unless
    • the class is on the medieval university, or the middle ages more generally--then wearing the doctoral robe can be very effective at focusing the class
• I have found that running shorts and a t-shirt is also counterproductive. The students think that:
  • I was too self-absorbed to figure out it was time to leave the gym, or
  • I am too self-absorbed and eager to get to the gym
  • But Matt Rabin achieves great success with his tie-died t-shirts and shorts
    • Matt Rabin, however, won the Clark Medal
• I have found that wearing a suit and tie is very effective if done occasionally with non-math-oriented students. It tells them that I care because it shows that I have taken sufficient time to prepare and teach the class even though I am a busy person whose schedule requires meetings with:
  • some powerful political figure,
  • some powerful economic figure,
  • some powerful university administrative figure, or
  • some TV interviewer
• With math-oriented students, however, a tie tells them that I spend too little time thinking about isomorphisms
• And if done too often, a tie tells even non-math-oriented students that I am not focused enough on the life of the mind to be worth paying much attention to
• My National Journal "I won a budget battle" federal budget expert t-shirt and my 1993 Clintona administration "budget victory" t-shirt (awarded to all those who worked in Roger Altman's rapid-response room) are very effective with students interested in policy or politics
• Otherwise, there is no discernible pattern

With respect to (4):

• The most important signal of expertise that a professor can send is that he or she is so monomaniacally focused and on intellectual task as to be completely outside the normal status hierarchies
• Thus it is very important that their values and tastes appear visibly different from those of either the striving poor or the smug rich
• And the best way to do this, from a sartorial point of view, is to make it appear that the professor had better and more important things to think about than mere appearance while getting dressed that morning
  • There is a faction that thinks that the best way to appear to have had better and more important things to think about is to never care at all about appearance--so that whatever one thinks of is automatically more important than how one looks
  • There is another faction that thinks that true unconcern is too risky, and that one must utilize great art in appearing artless in one's dress
    • But systematic artful artlessness is an impossibility
    • Pulling things at random from one's closet may, however, come close

Why Should Economists Study Economic History? After-Action 210a Note

---

I'm Brad DeLong, and this is my morning coffee.

Jan de Vries ran our first Econ 210a class yesterday--"Introduction to Economnic History" for the first-year Ph.D. students in economics. He spent more time than I had in the past on what he called "apologetics"--outlining why we were requiring first-year Ph.D. students in economics to take an economic history course--and he gave a historian's answer to that question: a narrative, a particular individual story, a talk about the formation of the social sciences and the rise and fall of positivism and the subsequent vicissitudes of economic history as a subdiscipline within economics.

It struck me after the class that I should have taken up a bit of time to give the economist's answer to the question of why we make first-year Ph.D. students take economic history. I think it goes roughly as follows:

Economics is the hyper-positivist of social science disciplines: believing that everything of interest can be reduced to law-like theoretical and empirical propositions modeled after classical mechanics; that what cannot be reliably, repeatedly, quantitatively, and empirically demonstrated does not really exist as knowledge; that the only good social science is a deductive, analytical, model-based, general, experimental science.

But this misses a lot. Because we are people like those whom we study, we have psychological access to our subjects' internal decision-making processes and motivations at a level that we cannot obtain from market price-quantity data. There is lots of interest that happens once and only once. Natural experiments are rare, and so if we restrict ourselves to positivist tools alone much is underidentified. The individuals' preferences--the "tastes" part of "tastes and technologies" are not primitive but are themselves the result of long and complex historical, sociological, psychological, and--yes--economic processes. You need thickly-described case studies and anecdotes looking out from people's insides before you can tell if your statistical results mean what you assert they mean.

Most important, every piece of economic theory is ultimately a piece of crystalized history. And you have a much deeper and more sophisticated knowledge if you know the history that led people to think that elaborating these particular theories was worth doing. If you just do the crystalized stuff--well, there is a sense in which your thought processes are then on crack, unable to properly process and reflect on the systems of analysis you are using.

Of course, there is a parallel answer to the question of why historians should be forced to take economic history courses. It has, I think, two parts. First, certainly since 1800 and perhaps since 1500, what is most extraordinary and salient about our global society is primarily economic and scientific, so you cannot do post-1500 history without knowing economics anymore than you can do early Byzantine history without knowing theology.

Second, just as every piece of theory is ultimately crystalized history, so every individual historical narrative or judgment is based on a web of implicit social science theories. And your knowledge of the past is inadequate if you do not understand your implicit social science theories critically enough to be expert users of them.

I'm Brad DeLong, and this is my morning coffee, drunk this morning out of my Revelation of Saint John the Divine mug, it happens.

Business School Professor Richard Green Unleashes His Inner Metrosexual

From his eyrie well within the radius of total destruction of anything aimed at the White House, Richard Green writes:

Richard's Real Estate and Urban Economics Blog: Neckties: Personally, I love neckties. In general, men are allowed to wear four colors--black, gray, blue and brown--and black and gray aren't really colors, and I don't like brown. Ties allow men to wear something red, or yellow, or purple, or green, or even pink. For this reason alone I hope they never go away--Obama notwithstanding.

All I can say is that he has not seen my doctoral gown...

A Question...

How can I add my undergraduate thesis to the books freely available via Google book search?

The Classical Economists Perceive the Industrial Revolution Google Book Search:

Timeo Pressarium Universitatis Oppidi Princepis et Dona Ferentes

It is Halloween.

Princeton University Press is sending me Walter Lippman, Liberty and the News; Arthur Schlesinger, The Politics of Hope; and Arthur Schlesinger, The Bitter Heritage

I am afraid. Very afraid.

I have work to do today.

Liberalism Is an Affinity for Things that Are New and Trendy

Hoisted from Comments: Bruce Bartlet:

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: Under the best of circumstances, getting a tenured position at an elite university is very hard. Because you can't get rid of someone with tenure and may be stuck with them as a colleague for decades, it stands to reason that the process of choosing someone for such a position is going to be very intense. For the same reason, the choice is not entirely meritocratic--elite universities don't choose the best scholars as professors any more than they choose the best applicants as students. There are a lot of factors that go into a hiring decision that don't favor conservatives and go beyond simple ideology.

Just to mention one area, conservatives have a tendancy to choose sub-disciplines within academic fields that are not very fashionable. For example, in political science, conservatives tend to gravitate toward political theory--a field that has been out of fashion since at least the 1960s. In history, conservatives often excel at military and diplomatic history--again, fields that have been out of fashion for decades.

One of the basic elements of liberalism is a greater affinity for things that are new and trendy. For conservatives, it is the opposite--an affinity for the familiar, the tried and true. This means that conservatives are always going to be behind the curve in any field where changing fashion is a key to advancement.

Andrew Samwick on Conservatives in Academe

Two and a half years ago, Andrew Samwick wrote about the lack of conservatives in academe:

Vox Baby: A Kibbutz Hooked up to an ATM: I should have my head examined for getting into this discussion.... I am a self-proclaimed conservative.... I agree with the general terms that Krugman uses to frame his explanation:

The sort of person who prefers an academic career to the private sector is likely to be somewhat more liberal than average, even in engineering.

But I do not buy into the remainder of his argument, which can be loosely paraphrased as not enough conservatives believe in the virtue of scholarship.... Rather, I think the explanation... is that [liberals] actively like the way the academy is organized. An elite university is like a kibbutz hooked up to an ATM. It is the closest thing we may ever find to a socialist enterprise that endures... faculty governance.... The notion that this is a sensible way to organize one's professional life is bound to resonate more with people who have a soft spot for socialist, utopian ideals.... Under normal circumstances, we would expect such an enterprise to implode, because some members of the collective are more productive than others, and they eventually get tired of subsidizing.... So what keeps the elite university alive?

It's the ATM--alumni generosity. With outside money, even those who cross-subsidize the rest can feel like they are being adequately rewarded.... Take away that ATM, and I wager that a lot of the perks that make the quasi-socialist utopian enterprise so interesting to those who are left-of-center would disappear. Universities would have to conduct their daily operations more overtly like a business, and we would find a more balanced mix of people trying to get jobs there.... Krugman makes thinly veiled accusations from the left that conservatives have no respect for scholarship, and the David Horowitz crowd makes equally absurd accusations from the right of a left-wing conspiracy.... I have just offered a much more benign explanation...

Today he says that he thinks Krugman is much closer to being correct--right now:

Vox Baby: Conservatives in Academia: [A]t present, we are in a low point for conservatives or Republicans self-identifying as such among academics.... Krugman's argument regarding the virtue of scholarship--while it is not true for most of the conservative- or Republican-leaning people whom I know--seems to be a pretty good characterization of the top Republican in the White House. (And this is coming from someone who spent a year working at the CEA for this Administration and, despite the ample misgivings I have aired on this blog, would do so again.)... When there is a new person in the White House, particularly if it is a Democrat who now has to take on the responsibilities and potential failures of governing rather than merely criticizing the job that others are doing, we will see a bit less self-identification as Democrats or liberals and a bit more as Republicans or conservatives...

First, I do want to thank Andrew Samwick for being willing to work for the Bush administration as a reality-based Republican.

Second, I want to say that I fear that the conservative- and Republican-leaning people whom Andrew Samwick knows are not representative. It is not just because of George W. Bush that natural scientists are embarrassed to be Republicans--it is the whole range of creationist and other yahoos. It is not just because of George W. Bush that economists are embarrassed to be Republicans--it is the entire party full of supply-side kooks. As one of my ex-Republican friends put it yesterday: the left-wing Democrats are the party of Jefferson and Roosevelt, the right-wing Democrats are the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower, and today's Republicans are the party of Bozo.

Is There a "Liberal Professor" Problem?

Larry Summers thinks about it:

The Liberal (and Moderating) Professoriate: Summers said he identified strongly as a liberal and a Democrat, but that while in Washington he viewed himself as being on “the right half of the left,” in Cambridge, he landed “on the right half of the right.”... Summers said, he found “even less ideological diversity” than he thought he would, and that in the humanities and social sciences, Republicans are “the third group,” after Democrats and Nader and other left-wing third parties.

To date, Summers said, he has largely viewed the political imbalance as one of “able people making choices.” He said that if you are a smart individual, and you like the market, profits, and “striving for profits,” you have “a wide range of choices in life,” of which an academic career is but one. If you are a smart person who doesn’t like the world of markets and profits, “you have a much narrower range of choices,” he said, and academic careers may be quite desirable. In this way of thinking, he said, it’s not surprising to find more liberals than conservatives on college faculties.

At the same time, he added, the extent of the imbalance and some informal research he has conducted “give me pause”.... It’s not that there are no conservative professors, he said, but their share is so small as to raise questions that deserve more attention. Summers wondered if the situation isn’t like it was in the early days of baseball’s racial integration, when people trying to say equality had arrived could point to the relatively equal performance of black and white stars. “But it appeared that there were not any African-American 0.250 hitters,” Summers said. “The only [black] players who played were stars.”

Summers said it would be “extraordinarily unwise and dangerous” for government to try to force more balance in hiring. And he said it would be “a real horror” if, in the name of respecting all views, Harvard’s astronomy department hired an astrologer or the biology department hired a creationist. But while there is a “tension” in calling for more diversity of views, while excluding views such as those, he said it was worthy to seek more ideological diversity.

One reason... is to help liberalism. “As someone who is a strong Democrat and is a liberal, and does not think that we have won the argument with the country over the last 40 years, rather to the contrary, it makes me wonder whether if you do not engage in intense dialogue with those whom you disagree with in substantial number whether your own arguments will be sharpened and honed to maximum effect,” Summers said....

There is another argument for saying that more ideological balance in higher education shouldn’t be a goal, Summers said, and it is one that he understands, but questions. This perspective relates to conservative success in much of American society. “From the perspective of many, they’ve got the White House, the Supreme Court, the CEO’s of 85 percent of the Fortune 500. They’ve got Fox News. They’ve got an increasing share of the media, so is the right way to have diversity to change the one thing that’s progressive?” While Summers said that this attitude creates “a problematic role for universities to put themselves in,” he said that it explains the “extreme hostility” of some in academe to conservative ideas.

From where I sit, I don't think that either economics or political science has a conservative problem--meaning that I find myself slightly on the left as far as both disciplines are concerned. And I don't think any institution anywhere has a too-few-Republicans problem: universities don't need more believers in intelligent design or the appicability of the Laffer curve or the unitary executive or the genetic inferiority of Africans or more disbelievers in global warming. Do other disciplines have a too-few-conservatives problem? Perhaps, but I don't think it can be solved: I cannot think of a sociology department that would be improved by hiring Charles Murray or a philosophy department that would be improved by hiring William Kristol or a Middle Eastern studies department that would be improved by hiring Daniel Pipes. Perhaps there are history departments that would be improved by Ronald Radosh, perhaps not. But anti-meritocratic discrimination against thoughtful conservatives should create an opportunity and an obvious pool of potential high-quality conservative hires. I don't see such a pool anywhere.

Top Ten Results for Brad DeLong on Google, October 6, 2007

What Google pays most attention to about me, at least this weekend:

1. J. Bradford DeLong, "The Invisible College," Chronicle of Higher Education: Right now I'm looking out my office window, perched above the large, grassy, Frisbee-playing, picnicking, and sunbathing area that stretches through Berkeley's campus. I'm looking straight out at the Golden Gate Bridge. It's a view that I marvel at every dayI wonder why the chancellor hasn't confiscated such offices and rented them out to hedge funds to improve the university's finances. I walk out my door and look around: at the offices of professors who know more about topics like the history of the international monetary system or the evolution of income distribution than any other human beings alive, and at graduate students hanging out in the lounge. It's a brilliant intellectual community, this little slice of the world that is our visible college. You run into people in the hall and the lounge, and you learn interesting things. Paradise. For an academic, at least. But I am greedy. I want more. I would like a larger college, an invisible college, of more people to talk to, pointing me to more interesting things...

2. J. Bradford DeLong and A. Michael Froomkin, "Speculative Microeconomics for Tomorrow's Economy," First Monday: Governments and societies that bet on the market system become more materially prosperous and technologically powerful. The lesson usually drawn from this economic success story is that in the overwhelming majority of cases the best thing the government can do for the economy is to set the background rules - define property rights, set up honest courts, perhaps rearrange the distribution of income, impose minor taxes and subsidies to compensate for well-defined and narrowly-specified "market failures" - but otherwise the government should leave the market system alone. The main argument for the market system is the dual role played by prices. On the one hand, prices serve to ration demand: anyone unwilling to pay the market price does not get the good. On the other hand, price serves to elicit production: any organization that can make a good, or provide a service, for less than its market price has a powerful financial incentive to do so. What is produced goes to those who value it the most. What is produced is made by the organizations that can make it the cheapest. And what is produced is whatever the ultimate users value the most. The data processing and data communications revolutions shake the foundations of this standard case for the market...

3. J. Bradford DeLong, "Sailing into Harm's Way versus the Dangerously Eloquent Jeff Faux," TPMCafe: I think it's time to put myself seriously in harm's way here.... I reply: There aren't many commissars-turned-capitalists. Scratching on the back of my envelope, I find that at current exchange rates, China's GDP per worker--and there are 800 million workers--is $3,000 per year. (In 1990 it was $1,100 of today's dollars per year.) According to Piketty and Qian's guesses, the top 0.1% of China's workers get an average of $30,000 per year at current exchange rates. This elite of some 800,000 do live considerably better in their homes in Shanghai than Americans with $30,000 do--unskilled labor and the services it provides are really cheap in Shanghai because China is still really poor (perhaps at a level equivalent to $100,000 per year if you like being waited on and having a household staff; much less if you don't). Redistribute all the income of the 800,000 commissars-turned-capitalists back to the masses, and you boost median standards of living in China by 1% above current levels. In 1877, it was the United States that was the rising superpower across the ocean to the west of the world's industrial and military leader. Today it is China. In 1917 and again in 1941 it was greatly to Britain's benefit that America regarded it as a friend and an ally rather than as a competitor and an enemy...

4. J. Bradford DeLong, "A man who hated government," Salon: "Lord, enlighten thou our enemies," prayed 19th century British economist and moral philosopher John Stuart Mill in his "Essay on Coleridge." "Sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions, and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers. We are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom: their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength." For every left-of-center American economist in the second half of the 20th century, Milton Friedman (1912-2006), Nobel Prize winner, founder of the conservative "Chicago School" of economics and advisor to Republicans from Goldwater to Reagan, was the incarnate answer to John Stuart Mill's prayer...

5. J. Bradford DeLong, "The odds of economic meltdown," Salon: Forecasting recessions is a fool's game. If there is enough solid economic information to make it appear highly likely that a recession is coming -- that production, unemployment and consumer demand will actually fall -- then it is highly likely that there already is a recession. Businesses are not stupid, and they don't have to wait for economists to tell them what they already know. By the time a gloomy forecast has been issued they've probably already noticed a drop in consumer demand and responded by firing workers and reducing production. So: Never say that a recession is coming. Say only that a recession is here, or that there might be a recession on the way. Which, in fact, is what I'm saying today...

6. J. Bradford DeLong, "'The Age of Turbulence' by Alan Greenspan": Los Angeles Times: For nearly 20 years Alan Greenspan, as head of America's central bank, was the most powerful economic central planner the world has ever seen. What did he do? Roughly twice a year, the Federal Reserve chairman had to make a substantive decision about whether to raise, lower or keep the level of U.S. interest rates the same...

7. Russell Roberts, Cafe Hayek: DeLong looks back: Two wonderful posts by Brad DeLong on the economic changes of the last century...

8. Project Syndicate: Thought Leaders: Anatomy of the Global Economy...

9. J. Bradford DeLong - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: James Bradford DeLong (b. June 24, 1960, Boston) is a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the United States Department of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and is a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. DeLong is chair of Berkeley's political economy major and a professor in the economics department. He teaches intermediate macroeconomics, graduate economic history, American economic history, economic growth, and other courses...

10. J. Bradford DeLong, Academic Filters...: Matthew Yglesias asks a good question: Why are people talking about what Larry Summers said were his "guesses" about gender, genetics, and math achievement? Why aren't people talking about the main point of Larry Summers's talk on the underrepresentation of women in high-prestige prize academic jobs?: "Now that the full text of the speech is out, I'm surprised so much of the discussion has focused on the genetics issue to the [exclusion of the] number one [most important] item on the Summers list [of reasons for the underrepresentation of women] -- women's alleged unwillingness to work long hours because they're too busy having kids and taking care of them. This is, I think, undoubtedly a major factor..." I think that Matt is too glib in characterizing what is in fact Larry's main point. The process of climbing to the top of the professoriate is structured as a tournament, in which the big prizes go to those willing to work the hardest and the smartest from their mid-twenties to their late thirties. Given our society (and our biology), a man can enter this tournament this without foreclosing many life possibilities: they can marry someone who will bear the burden of being for a decade a "happily married single parent," or they can decompress in their late thirties, look around, marry someone five years younger, have their family, and then live the leisured life of the theory class--or not. But given our society (and our biology), a woman cannot enter this particular academic tournament without running substantial risks of foreclosing many life possibilities if she decides to postpone her family, and a woman cannot enter this particular academic tournament without feeling--and being--at a severe work intensity-related handicap if she does not postpone her family...

Now I need to think about a hard question: what are the ten substantive pieces that I wish google would list first about me?

End of Lecture Sentence

Not sure if this is a very good or very bad end-of-lecture sentence:

Next time, I'll talk about Adolf Hitler, whose big problem--besides being a bloodthirsty persuasive paranoid genocidal psychopath, that is--is that he pays to much attention to (a) Malthus, (b) social darwinists, and (c) cowboy novels.

Economic History Seminar Liveblogging

Chris Meissner, U.C. Davis: Trade Costs in the First Wave of Globalization

David Jacks, Chris Meissner, and Dennis Novy (2007), "Trade Costs in the First Wave of Globalization" (Davis, CA: U.C. Davis)

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Chris Meissner: freshly arrived at U.C. Davis from the University of Cambridge:

Meissner: Good to be back in California. Some things have not changed. Glad to see that Brad is still blogging...

Meissner: I read it six times a day. My chance of appearing in it has just gone out the winow...

Meissner: What drove the global trade boom 1870-1913? Falling trade costs or economic expansion? Global trade costs fell by 10-15% between 1870-1913. Explain 45% of the global trade boom...

Meissner: Shipping costs fall by 50%. But trade costs include a lot more...

Meissner: Internal distribution costs--wholesale and retail--are here classified as trade costs...

Meissner: Cairncrossd (2001), James (2001), "All of the commodity market integration in the Atlantic economy after the 1860s was due to the fall in transport costs between markets..." (O'Rourke and Williamson, 1999). All. We disagree...

Meissner: They look at price gaps. We look at levels. We will talk about why that gives you a different answer...

Meissner: Monopolistic competition model with consumers who love variety. Trade extent determined by differences in Ricardian technologies and by levels of trade costs. Iceberg trade costs. Gravity model of trade flows. Take the gravity equation and invert it to turn it into a trade cost equation--if you know parameter s, the share of goods that are tradable, and rho, the elasticity of substitution. Rho is eleven: a markup over marginal cost of 10%. s is 0.8: 80% of goods are tradable.

Meissner: Trade costs equal to 1 - ((export share)/(tradables share))^(markup)

DeLong: Meissner's "trade costs" are thus a nonlinear transformation of export shares. And actual international transport costs

Unclear on the Concept of the University

Let me 100% endorse what Alex Tabarrok has to say. A university is a social institution in which people are supposed to think and then speak without fear or favor. The University of California is not doing a good job this week:

Marginal Revolution: What is going on with the UC Regents?!!!!: First this:

In a showdown over academic freedom, a prominent legal scholar said Wednesday that the University of California, Irvine's chancellor had succumbed to conservative political pressure in rescinding his contract to head the university's new law school, a charge the chancellor vehemently denied.

Erwin Chemerinsky, a well-known liberal expert on constitutional law, said he had signed a contract Sept. 4, only to be told Tuesday by Chancellor Michael V. Drake that he was voiding their deal because Chemerinsky was too liberal and the university had underestimated "conservatives out to get me."

Now this:

After a group of UC Davis women faculty began circulating a petition, UC regents rescinded an invitation to Larry Summers, the controversial former president of Harvard University, to speak at a board dinner Wednesday night in Sacramento.

Both of these decisions are shameful.

John Stuart Mill to the white courtesy phone please...

Why Is Michael V. Drake Still Chancellor at U.C. Irvine?

U.C. Regents chair Blum to the white courtesy phone, please:

UC Irvine reverses field on Chemerinsky - Los Angeles Times: Erwin Chemerinsky, a well-known liberal expert on constitutional law, said he had signed a contract Sept. 4, only to be told Tuesday by Chancellor Michael V. Drake that he was voiding their deal because Chemerinsky was too liberal and the university had underestimated "conservatives out to get me." Later Wednesday, however, Drake said there had been no outside pressure and that he had decided to reject Chemerinsky, now of Duke University and formerly of the University of Southern California, because he felt the law professor's commentaries were "polarizing" and would not serve the interests of California's first new public law school in