Brad DeLong

Why Is Oakland TSA Still Using Rapiscan Machines While Others Next to Them Stand Idle?

TSA dumps near-naked Rapiscan body scanners:

The Transportation Security Administration said Friday it's dropping the full-body scanning machines that produced almost nude images of people at checkpoints and outraged many travelers. The reason: The maker of the machines, Rapiscan Systems, cannot produce software to eliminate the almost nude images that TSA personnel view and turn them into stick-like figures. The machines also were controversial because they use X-rays to scan passengers, prompting concerns about radiation.

Monday 10 AM: U.C. Berkeley: Panel on the Supreme Court's Health Care Decision: What Next for Health Care Reform?

Come one, come all… Monday July 2nd, 10 AM to Noon, Berkeley Law School at Boalt Hall, Room 132:

Ann Marie Marcarille's Powerpoint:

20120702 ann marie marciarille ac aat sct

View more PowerPoint from Brad DeLong

Ann Marie Marciarille's Powerpoints: Download 20120702 Ann Marie Marciarille ACAatSCt | key | ppt

J. Bradford DeLong's Powerpoint:

20120702 berkeley obama care event

View more PowerPoint from Brad DeLong

Brad DeLong's Powerpoints: Download 20120702 Berkeley ObamaCare Event (pdf) | key | ppt

Panel Audio: Berkeley ACA SCOTUS Panel

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Panelists:

• Robert Reich, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy, U.C. Berkeley, quondam Secretary of Labor
• Moderator: John Ellwood, Professor of Public Policy and Program Director of the Berkeley/UCSF Branch of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Research Scholars in Health Policy Program, U.C. Berkeley
• Jesse Choper, Earl Warren Professor of Public Law, U.C. Berkeley
• Steve Shortell, Dean of the School of Public Health, U.C. Berkeley
• J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics, U.C. Berkeley
• Ann O'Leary, Director, Children and Families Program, Center for the Next Generation
• Ann Marie Marciarille, Associate Professor of Law, University of Missouri at Kansas City

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What I am going to say: first draft:

One piece of background is all-important in assessing last Thursday's decision.

ObamaCare is RomneyCare.

The health-care reform plan that Mitt Romney proposed when he was Governor of Massachusetts, and shepherded through the Massachusetts legislature is the health-care reform plan that Barack Obama proposed and shepherded through the U.S. Congress.

RomneyCare made it through the Massachusetts legislature with only two dissenting votes. RomneyCare made it through the Congress with not a single Republican vote in favor. No Republican made audible complaint that RomneyCare was bad policy, or would destroy the economy, or would be unconstitutional at the federal level, or whatnot--not as long as it was the signature policy initiative of a Republican governor who might well become president someday.

But when the same policy became the signature policy initiative of a Democratic president, every single Republican in office changed their mind.

Some Republican officeholders claimed that they had always been opposed to RomneyCare--but had just kept quiet because of Ronald Reagan's 11th Commandment: "Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican".

For the most part, however, Republican officeholders claimed that they had not changed their minds. When a state government requires people to buy insurance, they said, that is Gan assertion of the Conservative Principle of Personal Responsibility. But when a federal government requires that people to buy insurance, they said, that is Bad Big Government, the Liberal Nanny State, and unconstitutional. Never mind that the centerpiece of the Bush 2005 Social Security privatization proposal was an individual mandate to regulate "inactivity": to require that people who had not established their own private individual retirement accounts do so.

Go figure.

Of all the justices who claimed that the individual mandate exceeded Congress's Commerce Clause powers last Thursday, only Justice Thomas would have reached the same conclusion had the issue reached them in the form of a challenge to a Republican president's policy mandating the purchase of retirement accounts rather than a Democratic president's policy mandating the purchase of health insurance: Kennedy jointed and Alito and Roberts endorsed Scalia's opinion in Gonzales v. Raich holding that the Commerce Clause allows Congress to take away from cancer patients pain-relieving marijuana that they have grown themselves. Larry Lessig had a piece a couple of months ago about how his patron Scalia's Commerce Clause jurisprudence was principled, and he would uphold the law. Larry Lessig has a lot of explaining to do. Akhil Reed Amar said a couple of weeks ago that if the Court did not uphold the ACA under the Commerce Clause that his career had been a waste--that he ought to have been doing constitutional law not as an autonomous discipline but as a subbranch of political science.

Both Lessig and Amar really ought to have taken as their model not Alex Bickel but Fred Rodell.

Indeed, that ultimate legal realist Fred Rodell would have been shocked and astonished by last Thursday. In past Constitutional Moments--Miranda, Brown, Jones and Laughlin, Lochner, Dred Scott, McCulloch vs. Maryland, Marbury vs. Madison--the stakes had been partisan, yes, but they also had been moral, and properly political: decisions on deep questions about what kind of country America is going to become are made when the Court rules that the law is different today from what it was yesterday. When the original Four Horsemen--never mind that McReynolds, van Devanter, and Butler begged Herbert Hoover not to appoint Cardozo because Brandeis was already one kike too many on the court--struck down New Deal legislation, it was because they thought America should not become a social-democratic country.

But this time it is our New Four Horsemen--supposedly market-oriented Republican justices who have struck down RomneyCare: an approach supported by the market-oriented Republican presidents who appointed them--an approach thought up by market-oriented Republican ideologues and developed by market-oriented Republican health care experts to be the market-oriented Republican minimal state intervention to make the health-insurance market work and thus preserve its market-oriented character. Fred Rodell understood that supreme court justices were for the most part moral and political actors first and text- and precedent-oriented legal technicians second. Fred Rodell would have been astonished by judges who were for the most part neither precedent- and text-oriented legal technicians nor moral and political actors but mere partisans.

One piece of background is all-important in assessing what will happen to healthcare reform in the future.

ObamaCare is RomneyCare.

It thus has all the weaknesses of RomneyCare. It does not allow us to conduct the experiment of whether people under 65 would find a Medicare-like public option better on price and quality grounds than bargaining with private insurance companies under the exchange framework: the public option has been excised. It hands a great deal of market power to near-monopoly insurance companies in thinly-populated states--it removes the curb on their ability to raise rates provided by the existence of the option for individuals to exit the insurance system, go naked, and rely on emergency rooms. It requires that state-level bureaucracies be functional and effective when many states' politicians have laid down political markers that the reforms will fail. It relies on a bet that Medicaid can grow by 2/3 and still attract enough doctors and nurses and technicians to service its population even with its low and sub-market reimbursement rates. A substantial hole has just been blown in its structure by the other lawless piece of the decision--the Court's granting of states some kind of entitlement to past levels of Medicaid funding. And its long-run cost-saving and efficiency-increasing provisions rely on six largely untested bets:

1. That Congress will stick to its guns and actually implement the tax on high-cost health plans--which is, over the next two decades, a slow repeal of the much-loved tax preference for employer-sponsored health benefits.

2. That Congress will stick to its guns and allow the IPAB to recover the reimbursement system for doctors from the groups of specialist who have currently captured it.

3. That the bet on evidence-based medicine and comparative-effectiveness and electronic medical records will bring cost and quality in the U.S. as a whole within shouting distance of best-practice found in the Mayo Clinic.

4. That large for-profit providers and sociological groups of practitioners will not find additional ways to game the system and acquire large amounts of unconstrained market power.

5. That demand will create its own supply--that we can double the amount of health care currently received by 40 million of our presently-uninsured without demand for care outstripping the ability of our doctors, nurses, and technicians to provide it.

6. That the insurance market reforms will work--that the exchanges will function as, effectively, one large benefits department for those who do not work for large bureaucracies, and deliver high-quality insurance options at an affordable price.

Bets (1) and (2) are bets on us: on what kind of future congresses we are going to elect. The preliminary evidence from RomneyCare in Massachusetts on (3) through (6) is very hopeful--but the dive was less difficult in Massachusetts, and the success of RomneyCare in Massachusetts is only preliminary.

I am hopeful but worried.

I really wish there were a public option in the mix.

I still don't understand why they didn't simply do FEHBP for all: allow everybody to buy in to the federal employees' health-benefit program if they wished.

Anybody Have an Informed View on Who I Should Vote for for the Democratic Committee for the Fifteenth Assembly District of California?

Berkeley Arts & Letters: Tuesday, May 8: Timothy Noah: "The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality--and What We Can Do About It"

Berkeley Arts & Letters:

7:30 PM

“This is the book the 99% has been waiting for. Crisply lucid and brilliantly argued, THE GREAT DIVERGENCE manages to entertain at the same time that it explains. Best of all, Noah offers some strikingly sensible steps to undo the economic polarization that is tearing America apart.” -- Barbara Ehrenreich

How did “the 1 percent” pull away from “the 99 percent”? A probing and provocative exploration of income inequality in America, and the dangers it poses to our democracy. For the past three decades, America has steadily become a nation of haves and have-nots.  Our incomes are, increasingly, drastically unequal: the top 1% of Americans collect almost 20% of the nation’s income—more than double their share in 1973. We have less equality of income than Venezuela, Kenya, or Yemen.

What economics Nobelist Paul Krugman terms “the Great Divergence” has until now been treated as little more than a talking point, a club to be wielded in ideological battles. But it may be the most important change in this country during our lifetimes—a sharp, fundamental shift in the character of American society, and not at all for the better.

The income gap has been blamed on everything from computers to immigration, but its causes and consequences call for a patient, non-partisan exploration. In The Great Divergence, based on his award-winning series of articles in Slate, Timothy Noah delivers this urgently needed inquiry, ignoring political rhetoric and drawing on the best work of contemporary researchers to peer beyond conventional wisdom. Noah explains not only how the Great Divergence has come about, but why it threatens American democracy—and most important, how we can begin to reverse it. Coming fast on the heels of the Occupy Wall Street movement and at the start of a presidential election year when inequality will be front and center, The Great Divergence is a vitally necessary primer, history, and manifesto that will inform and drive a long-overdue political debate.

“An important, exemplary, and finally passionate work of long-form journalism” -- Hendrik Hertzberg

"A lucid, original, fascinating, and very useful guide to the biggest threat to America's future as a democracy. Noah has pulled together the whole array of explanations for the increasing Third World-ization of America—and he has sorted them out for us, with a guide to which are most important and what we can do about them. This is the book that should have been given out at the Occupy movements and—well, to everyone." -- James Fallows

Timothy Noah was recently named “TRB”, the lead columnist at The New Republic. He wrote for Slate for a dozen years, and previously served at the Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, and the Washington Monthly. He edited two collections of the writings of his late wife, Marjorie Williams, including the New York Times bestseller The Woman at the Washington Zoo. Noah received the 2011 Hillman Prize, the highest award for public service magazine journalism, for the series (of which Nicholas Kristof wrote in the NYT, "An excellent series") in Slate that forms the basis of The Great Divergence.

Brad DeLong is a professor of economics at U.C. Berkeley, chair of the Political Economy of Industrial Societies major, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was educated at Harvard University, where he received his PhD in 1987. He joined UC Berkeley as an associate professor in 1993. He became a full professor in 1997. Professor DeLong also served in the U.S. government as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy from 1993 to 1995. He worked on the Clinton Administration's 1993 budget, on the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, on the North American Free Trade Agreement, on macroeconomic policy, and on the unsuccessful health care reform effort. Before joining the Treasury Department, Professor DeLong was Danziger Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at Harvard University. He has also been a John M. Olin Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, an Assistant Professor of Economics at Boston University, and a Lecturer in the Department of Economics at M.I.T.

Hillside Club (2286 Cedar Street, Berkeley)

Tickets $12 ($6 students, OLLI, and Hillside members) in advance only at Brown Paper Tickets online or 800-838-3006; $15 at the door (all)

Berkeley Faculty Club: Does American Democracy Still Work?

Does American Democracy Still Work? Thursday, May 3, 2012:

Join us at the Faculty Club for the second panel symposium on American politics and democracy. This panel will offer three deeply informed perspectives on the origins and evolution of the economic and political angst that seem to afflict the nation. The panel will feature J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research; David Hollinger, Professor of American History; and Paul Pierson, Professor of Political Science.

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Is American Democracy Broken?

I am here somewhat under false pretences.

I am not a political scientist.

I am an economist.

And, with this topic, I feel myself outside my comfort zone.

What I have to say is made up of two parts: The first part is an economist’s not theories or analyses but rather prejudices about how modern democracy should work. The second part is my reflection on both my experience of serving as a deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury for economic policy in the Clinton administration and from watching as my friends went to Washington in the Obama administration, in what seemed to me to be at times a bizarre surrealistic remix of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington".

An economist is going to start thinking about democracy with Tony Downs’s economic theory of same. First-past-the-post electoral systems and office-seeking politicians should produce a two-party system. Office-seeking candidates simply won't join any third party because their chances of election will be too small. Only those who want to make some ideological or demonstrative point rather than to actually win office and then make policy--cough, Ralph Nader, cough--will do so. Hence the stable configuration has two parties. And then the two parties hug the center and follow policies attractive to the median voter.

Ideology will matter--politicians do not run purely for love of office but rather to then make the country into what they regard as a better place. There will be swings to the left, to the right, to the up, to the down, to the forward, to the back. But the policy views of the median voter ought, according to Tony Downs, function as a strong attractor and we should not expect the policies implemented by the politicians who get elected to deviate far from them.

Now there are qualifications. It is the median voter, not the median citizen.George W. Bush became president not because his policies came closer to the preferences of the median person who voted on that Tuesday in November but because his policies came closer to the preferences of the median Supreme Court justices Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor. Gerrymandering and misapportionment--cough, the Senate, cough--matter a lot. But these are qualifications. Tony Downs made a very strong case that first-past-the-post electoral systems will produce policies that the median voter likes. Thus in this sense the electorate gets the government it deserves. If there are problems, the problems are in the minds of the voters rather than in the Democratic system.

That is the economist's not theory, not analysis, but rather prejudice. theory. Political scientists will scorn it as hopelessly naïve. But it is the benchmark from which I start.

Now let me shift and talk about our experience here in America since I got to Washington in early 1993, carrying spears for Alicia Munnell in Lloyd Bentsen’s Treasury Department in the Clinton administration.

Clinton was a centrist Democrat. The Clinton administration's priorities were by and large, with exceptions--gays in the military--what you might call "Eisenhower Republican" priorities. Expand healthcare coverage so there were fewer uninsured and fewer people dumped by ambulances on the corners of the Tenderloin. But also control government healthcare costs, which were then ballooning out of control--even though we didn’t know what "ballooning out of control" really meant back then. Balance the budget. End welfare as we know it--thus buying into the Republican critique of the Depression-era belief that raising children was real work and a socially-valuable task, even if you were not married to a rich husband who was the chief executive of Bain Capital. Passing NAFTA. Creating the World Trade Organization. Strenthening Social Security through a combination of tax increases, benefit cuts, retirement-age increases, mandated private accounts requiring individuals to contribute their own money over and above Social Security (as an add-on but not a carve-out, as a supplement to and not a substitute for Roosevelt's New Deal's Social Security), etc.

All of these seemed to us in the early 1990s to be bang-on the median voter’s preferences. Eisenhower Republicans. Clinton Democratics. We in the Bentsen Treasury at the start of 1993 looked forward to doing an awful lot of technocratic work--cranking out centrist legislation approved by large bipartisan majorities.

We found Republicans cooperative on NAFTA.

We found Republicans pushing for welfare reform--but only to the extent of passing things that were so highly punitive that they could not believe any Democratic president could in good conscience sign them. But Clinton fooled them. He signed welfare reform--and then spent some time in 1996 campaigning on the message: "re-elect me because only I can undo some of the damage that I have done to the welfare system". Which was true. And which he did.

Otherwise...

Otherwise the Republicans when I got to Washington at the start of 1993 decided that they were going to adopt the Gingrich strategy: oppose everything the Democratic president proposes, especially if it had previously been a Republican proposal and priority.

That is not a strategy that would ever be adopted by anybody who wants to see their name written in the Book of Life.

But Gingrich found followers.

And so things that we in the Bentsen Treasury all expected to happen, did not happen. We had expected that sometime between January and June 1994 Lloyd Bentsen’s chief healthcare aide would sit down with Bob Dole's chief healthcare aide. We had expected that they would hammer out a deal, so that people in the future would never be as dependent on on charity for their healthcare as Bob Dole was when he returned injured from World War II.

That meeting never happened. Bob Dole decided he would rather join Gingrich to try to portray Clinton as a failure. So Bob Dole never got a legislative accomplishment. Instead, he got to lose a presidential election. And I today remember Bob Dole not as the co-architect of health care reform in 1994, but as somebody who denounced Roosevelt and Truman for getting us into those Democrat wars that saved Europe from the Nazis, China and the rest of Asia from Imperial Japan (and that have allowed South Koreans to grow five inches taller than their North Korean cousins).

As my friend Mark Schmitt wrote in his review of Geoffrey Kabaservice's book about the moderate Republicans, Rule and Ruin, the moderate Republicans were partisan Republicans first and Americans second. And so they erased their names from the Book of Life.

And in all of this back in 1993-4, it really didn’t help that various Democratic barons--Boren, Kerrey from Nebraska, Moynihan, a bunch of others who are not spoken of for their names are Unwritten--thought at the time that their principle task was to teach the Hick from Arkansas that he was not boss.

Then came Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky.

Then came George W. Bush--installed, as I said before, by the mandate of the median voters Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy. Bush's priorities were: (i) tax cuts for the rich (which attracted the support of "centrist" Democrats); (ii) an unfunded Medicare drug benefit, Part D, that also busted the budget and seemed designed more for drug companies than for Medicare beneficiaries (partisan); (iii) to casually and thoughtlessly bust the budget and undo all the budget-balancing work we in the Clinton administration had accomplished (partisan); (iv) o child left behind (bipartisan), (v) the war on Iraq (bipartisan); (vi) the deregulation of finance (which attracted the support of "centrist" Democrats; and (vii) a big right wing push for social security privatization that was purely republican, but that never passed because the Republicans shied at the jump.

We seemed to have returned to normal politics.

Certainly there was no lockstep Democratic opposition to all Bush initiatives in the hope of portraying him as a wimp and winning the next election. The policies were, all in all, very lousy--but I blamed that on (i) the voters who elected Bush--cough, Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, O'Connor, Kennedy--(ii) a media that refused to tell the citizens when and how Bush was lying to them, and (iii).

Then came George W. Bush in 2007 and 2008. Things seemed to be heating up again: Bush seemed not terribly interested in centrist policies. But the Democrats seemed not terribly interested either. Everybody seemed to be interested in "heightening the contradictions" and waiting for November 2008.

Then came Obama in 2009 and 2010. My friends--Christina Romer, Lawrence Summers, Peter Orszag, and company--headed off to Washington to plan a Recovery Act. A bipartisan Recovery Act. They thought it would get 25 Republican votes in the Senate easy, for itt was a squarely bipartisan fiscal stimulus: this tax cut to make the Republicans stand up and applaud, this infrastructure increase to make the Democrats applaud, this increase in aid to the states to make the governors and state legislators applaud.

It didn’t get 25 Republican votes in the Senate.

It got 3.

On healthcare reform, Barrack Obama's opening bid was the highly-Republican Heritage Foundation plan, the plan that George Romney had chosen for Massachusetts.

RomneyCare got zero Republican votes.

On budget balance, Obama’s proposals have not been the one-to-one equal amounts of tax increases and spending cuts to balance the budget of Clinton 1993 or Bush 1990. Obama’s proposals have been more along the lines of $1 of tax increases for every $5 of spending cuts.

And the Republicans rejected them.

Controlling global warming? Doing something to deal something to deal with our increasingly unequal and outsized income distribution? Strengthening financial regulation so tht things like the 2008-9 financial crisis do not happen again? No republican votes for any proposals on any of these issue areas under any circumstances--not even when the proposals Obama makes were baked in Republican think tanks even five years ago.

What’s going on?

I look around and I see a number of things:

• I see a press corps that is unconcerned with policy substance and the future of America and devotes itself to calling politics like a basketball game: "who wins the week?" "who wins the day?" Lately it’s been: "who wins the morning?"

• An electorate that in my fears appears to want to be led by a strong or a competent leader--or rather by a leader whom the press corps tells it wins lots of mornings--and that does not want to see its policy preferences actually enacted and satisfied, or that does not know what its policy preferences are.

• Multiple blockage points in our outdated eighteenth-century orrery of a political system that froze the distribution of power between President, Senate, and House where the distribution of power between King George III, Lords, and Commons had been in 1776--and thus that makes it easy to block things, and hence very easy to portray a president of the other party as a hapless failure.

• A recognition that if you make blocking everything the president of the other party does your highest priority, you do have a good chance of portraying him as a weakling and doing well in the next election cycle.

• 1994 and 2010 demonstrate that this nihilistic, anti-patriotic, un-American strategy works.

• Democratic barons--cough, Blanche Lincoln and Ben Nelson, cough--who remind me of Wile E. Coyote standing in the desert after the Roadrunner has dropped a 500 ton weight from above: frozen and watching in place as the shadow covering him grows larger. Simply put, they do not understand that when they face the electorates of Nebraska and Arkansas, saying "but I helped block Obama from doing liberal things!" is not a strategy that wins them reelection. But "I backed the president, and the president did X, Y and Z, and look at how much better things are" might well be.

• On top of all these, everybody below the top 5% of the American income distribution today is not living any better than their predecessors did a generation ago. We all have lots of cheap electronic toys (I love mine). But offsetting that we have more congestion, longer commutes, and more expensive houses. For the top 5% things are better. For the rest of America, it looks as though they may well not be.

• Right now, for every 13 workers in America, we have one person who would be working in normal times--who was working back in 2007--and who now is not working. That means that two-thirds of American households today have one or more people in their or their parents' or their siblings' or their childrens' households who would be working in normal times and is not working now. At the moment more people still think that this is George W. Bush’s fault than think that it is Barack Obama’s. But everyone agrees it is the governments fault somehow--although they are not sure how.

Is this broken democracy? Does our politics still work?

I am just an economist.

I am not sure what the definition of broken politics is.

I am looking for enlightenment from my other two panelists.

May I Say How Disappointed I Am to Discover That the Patrons at Sacks Coffeehouse Do Not in Fact Sit on Sacks of Coffee Beans?

Why Do 51B Buses Travel in Packs?

Ashby and College is not nearly as bad as Ashby and Claremont. But that is not saying very much, is it?

And Ashby and Telegraph is unspeakable...

Sign of the Yuppie Apocalypse?

Or is Whole Foods simply exploring to see if there is any price at all that makes its target demographic go "Whoa!!"?

Love Your Street Sweeper!

The City of Berkeley says:

Street Sweeping: Residential street sweeping is a City service that not only beautifies our streets and community by removing litter and debris, but protects our environment and keeps the storm drain system from clogging.  Street sweeping reduces the pollutant load (leaves, pet/animal debris, heavy metals, oils, grease, sediment, etc.) to the Bay.  In addition, material removed by street sweeping will not be able to block lines reducing the amount of flooding during heavy rainfall…

Love your street-sweeping parking tickets!

This New Neighborhood Looks Even More Berkeley than the Old One...

Just saying:

Catastrophe!

I am out of caffeinated pods for the Nespresso machine...

Not a Staged Photo

In Berkeley, that's four, in a row:

Earthquake!

Well, that is certainly an alarm clock for you…

This Is Horrible!

It is too cold to sit outside in the morning Berkeley sun to prepare for lecture! I have to go sit in the windowless Wheeler Green Room instead!

Earthquake!

Magnitude 4...

A $1.12 Million Bet on the Berkeley, CA Housing Market

Western U.S. Precipitation Since July...

Inches of Rain:

Percent of Average:

I know, I know that California has two normal climate modes:

• One in which there is a substantial amount of rain in December, in which people then write "ZOMG!! BUILD AN ARK!!" stories, and in which January is then relatively dry and things are about normal.

• A second in which there is little rain in December, in which people then write "ZOMG!! WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE, CLUBBING EACH OTHER WITH THE GOLD BARS IN OUR BASEMENT AS WE TRY TO GRAB HOLD OF THE LAST DROPS OF WATER!! stories, and in which January is then relatively wet and things are about normal…

But, guys, it's January 9 already. We had our very dry December. Where is our wet January? (Looks at to sea…)

Tomorrow's UC Berkeley Faculty Meeting

Michael O'Hare:

Occupy UC « The Reality-Based Community: On Monday, the Berkeley faculty will have a special meeting to consider several resolutions condemning the police behavior at the Nov. 9 Occupy Cal demonstration, and another resolution that says in part:

Therefore be it Resolved that the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate has lost confidence in the ability of Chancellor Birgeneau, EVC Breslauer and VC LeGrande to respond appropriately to non-violent campus protests, to secure student welfare amidst these protests, to minimize the deployment of force and to respect freedom of speech and assembly on the Berkeley campus.

This is going to be a complicated, awkward (not that that’s a fatal flaw) exercise that will probably not clarify much for anyone.  In the first place, the “Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate” is not a representative body but a committee of the whole 2000-odd of us, and its meetings are rarely attended by more than 100. Obviously it meets in a dense cloud of selection bias that obscures its legitimacy, so its resolutions and actions don’t seem to be taken very seriously by the campus authorities, who can easily say, “well, that’s what several dozen malcontents think, end of story”.  In the second place, the motion uses very strong language. Despite having signed the call for the meeting, mainly because I think this stuff desperately needs to be discussed, I’m not sure I’ve lost confidence precisely in the leadership’s ability to protect protesters from beating and chemical assault.

Admittedly, it’s hard to reconcile the chancellor’s public words from two years ago on the occasion of excessive police force at the Wheeler Hall occupation

Any tactics to exercise crowd control on campus must provide a safe platform for expression of free speech and freedom of assembly and we expect that, as a result of this review, modifications will be made. We must strive to ensure that there is no possibility in the future of the alleged actions of police brutality and that our actions are guided by non-violence.

with what happened three weeks ago, but probably the latest quite broad outrage and criticism have got their attention and they will not make that mistake (whether of omission or commission doesn’t matter too much) again.

But that’s not the big mistake, outrageous as it was. Another reason the meeting and the resolution are somewhat off-target is the blurring of different issues in the protests themselves. At Cal, public action has been pretty specifically directed at the chancellor, president, and regents, demanding increased state funding for higher education and reducing student fees (as though any of them had money to give out).  I regret this focus, because it looks self-serving and narrow; if tuition at Berkeley dropped to zero, (i) the students would still be facing terrible trouble because their state political machinery is broken, they will have trouble getting jobs and keeping them, and we have run out of tricks with which to pretend it isn’t necessary to pay for essential state services (like schools for their kids) (ii) the majority of the population not lucky enough to go to college at any price are already much worse off than they are.

In any case, the chancellor and president have been vocal (though ineffectual – probably inevitably) advocates for restoring state funding for higher education, and while I don’t have a good sense of the President Yudof’s personality either way, I believe Birgeneau to be a decent person who genuinely believes in educational access for everyone, in social and economic mobility generally, and also in not breaking his students’ and faculty’s ribs or dragging them on the ground by the hair.

The Occupy Cal protests, however, are part of a larger movement directed at the unconscionable increase in US economic inequality over the last thirty years and a widespread perception that the 1% who have been scooping up everything in sight have not contributed social value to society in any way proportional to the loot they have been collecting.  Income is supposed to reflect the value you create; Steve Jobs made a lot of people a lot better off in many ways, but what the financial sector’s big winners have done for us is, um, less clear. The big mistake is that campus (and university) leadership is a day late and a dollar short on the disintegration of the American economic and political systems.

Leadership is supposed to shape, direct, clarify, and empower a group’s values, and to represent those values to the larger environment (and to the group).  In the end, what I don’t have confidence in is our current leadership’s ability to do is any of that on the larger issues.  I brought this up with my public policy students in one course, mentioning that in 1986, Berkeley had divested itself of South African investments, manifesting and implementing (not just stating) an institutional position against apartheid.  I asked if they wanted the president or chancellor to represent, in their name,  that UC Berkeley is against endlessly increasing income inequality in America.  I was surprised to learn that their support for this idea was tepid at best, mainly (I think) because they sense a slippery slope of public university officials taking positions on all sorts of things without a real mandate.  And of course we have no machinery by which to unambiguously give such a mandate; it’s not even possible to email everyone on campus, the faculty senate is a noisy channel, and student government…well, the less said about its political efficacy the better.

As I rarely do, I think my students (at least this sample) are wrong.  I fault Birgeneau for being both invisible to the troops except as a source of inept spam emails, and the author of managerial choices that are incomprehensible to me, dithering around the edges of the crises rather than doing consequential things.  Why hasn’t he had a big meeting in the Greek Theatre of students and faculty to make some noise about the economic and political crisis in the state and nation, and put duties and tasks before us; if not us, who? Why hasn’t his discourse on police violence here been a real cry of rage that his instructions from 2009 were ignored, backed up with rolling heads and visits to the injured students?  Why isn’t he out walking around during demonstrations, getting between the cops and student bodies and putting good quotes on TV news?  There’s a lot of energy being released diffusely, and he should be the one directing it usefully. Afraid the regents will fire him? There are a lot worse things to lose than your job.

The crisis we’re enduring, like any crisis, is the occasion for a real leader to focus attention and break some habits and bonds of tradition, even at the cost of some collateral crockery. That’s not happening: instead (for example, my own hobbyhorse) of setting up a real quality assurance program that would reach every session of every course so we could show the public we’re going to overdeliver the learning the state has traditionally paid us to provide, he fired the Vice-Provost for Teaching and Learning, rolled her functions into another administrator’s very large portfolio, and hired a consulting firm to cut administrative costs. Instead of bringing the intercollegiate athletics program to heel as though it reported to him, and stanching $12m a year of bleeding, he’s allowing us to be saddled with a half-billion dollar debt for an over-the-top stadium upgrade and a conditioning center/coaching office palace/booster party venue that will crush us financially.

I will probably vote for the resolution, even though it’s not exactly what I want to say and despite my discomfort making such a strong statement against someone whose heart is in the right place. But Birgeneau is way over his head in his job, served by inadequate lieutenants, or both. Some kind of wakeup call is in order, and this is the motion on the table.

Quote of the Day: November 13, 2011

“We are Bay Aryans from Berkeley: prepare to be reengineered in an attractive range of colour schemes for your safety and comfort!”

--Charles Stross: The Atrocity Archives

Yes, I Frequently Carry an EmptyCardboard Box to Put Over Parking Meters. Why Do You Ask?

Earthquake!

M3.2 – San Francisco Bay Area, California:

Saturday, November 5, 2011 at 14:52:18 Local

37.85°N 122.24°W Depth: 6km

40% of the Cars Driving Up Marin in Berkeley Are Prii...

Where Is Friedrich A. von Hayek When You Need Him?

Another failure of central planning: the U.C. Berkeley Graduate Economics Association runs out of ketchup at the annual opening-of-the-school-year picnic.

Well, This Is More Like It...

If i Do Drive to Portland Next Week...

…what route should I take?

Thank-Eee Mister Rooz-Eee-Velt!

No sooner did we move into our rented house at the top of the Berkeley hills, but our electricity went out.

That seemed to carry the heat with it, either from the thermostat or the electrical igniter. Moreover, since everything was in boxes, we needed a flashlight to find the box with the flashlights in it. And our movers in trying to install our refrigerator had somehow switched off and then broke the valve to the water in the kitchen.

We were--barring expeditions down Marin, watching regenerative braking recharge the Prius's battery followed by purchasing prepared foods at Andronicos--suddenly reduced to the 19th century: no running water, no central heat, no electricity, no phone, no Internet, no cable.

Then over the next five days all of these services were restored, and we went in less than one week from the 19th to the 21st century.

And now my wife occasionally chirps up and says: That rural electrification initiative shoor is something! Thank-eee Mister Rooz-eee-velt! I am going to vote for him for life!

Our View of the Golden Gate and San Francisco This Morning...

With the imminent departure of the Youngest Child for college, we have sold our five-acre Mediterranean palazzino in Lafayette--the land beyond the tunnel--and are renting a small house for six months in Berkeley at the top of Grizzly Peak (because I was hinky about running the risk of owning two houses in a largely-frozen yet still overpriced housing market).

So now we have a comfortable hunk of change to serve as a down payment on our next: over 15 years 30% cumulative inflation, 20% real house price appreciation, 30% improvements that our buyers were willing to pay for, and 40% forced savings via amortization of the nominal principal do add up. Where should we buy next>

No, the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Is Not a "Quick Walk from the BART"

That is all.

Dawn Patrol...

No, we cannot see the sun rise this morning:

Arabian Nights Returns to Berkeley Rep

Arabian Nights Returns to Berkeley Rep

The First Rain--OK, Drizzle--of the Season

Kings Canyon Loop Trail starting at EBMUD Valle Vista Staging Area...

The (Bob) Cat Came Back the Very Next Day...

... and a ten-year old Labrador Retriever charging uphill is not the most effective huntress of bobcats conceivable...

Hoisted from Comments: SomeCallMeTim Reports from Portland

SomeCallMeTim:

It's Like Ra-a-a-a-ain on Graduation Day!: Ha! We've only had dribs and drabs of sun, and last week the weather catchphrase was 'March weather in May - unusual, but not unheard of.' Also, don't forget that 'sunbreaks' was popularized here in the Willamette Valley decades ago, as a way to celebrate 2 minutes of sun or very bright clouds on an otherwise thick gray blanket day in November-midJune.

[I wouldn't wish this weather on the Bay Area - I have fond memories of two weeks a month of sun all through the winter in Berkeley and Oakland.]

PS Sent more prozac and full spectrum lighting!

Pollen City!

Goldenrod.

That is all...

Ace Hardward Is Running a Special on Gopher Wood...

The NWS says:

National Weather Service Watch Warning Advisory Summary: THIS HAZARDOUS WEATHER OUTLOOK IS FOR SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA AND MONTEREY BAY AREA.

.DAY ONE...SATURDAY AND SATURDAY NIGHT

SCATTERED SHOWERS WILL CONTINUE ON SATURDAY. BRIEF HEAVY DOWNPOURS ARE POSSIBLE WITH SOME SHOWERS...AS WELL AS SMALL HAIL. SNOW WILL FALL IN THE MOUNTAINS...MAINLY ABOVE 2000 FEET. SHOWERS WILL GRADUALLY TAPER OFF DURING THE DAY AND END BY SATURDAY EVENING.

.DAYS TWO THROUGH SEVEN...SUNDAY THROUGH FRIDAY

A PACIFIC WEATHER SYSTEM WILL BRING PERIODS OF RAIN TO THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA FROM SUNDAY THROUGH TUESDAY NIGHT. LOCALLY HEAVY RAIN MAY OCCUR AT TIMES. THE SOIL IS SATURATED AFTER A WEEK OF SIGNIFICANT RAINFALL. THEREFORE...ADDITIONAL RAINFALL WILL RESULT IN RAPID RUNOFF. STREAMS AND CREEKS ACROSS THE AREA WILL RISE RAPIDLY IN RESPONSE TO HEAVY RAINFALL. MINOR URBAN AND SMALL STREAM FLOODING IS POSSIBLE FROM LATE SUNDAY THROUGH TUESDAY.

.SPOTTER INFORMATION STATEMENT...

WEATHER SPOTTERS ARE ENCOURAGED TO REPORT SIGNIFICANT WEATHER CONDITIONS PER STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURES.

$$

DYKEMA

Does This Mean That Our Drought Is Over?

In the inbox:

Currently, the strong El Nino is reaching its peak in the Eastern Pacific, and now finally appears to be exerting an influence on our weather. The strong jet has been apparent for quite some time out over the open water, but the persistent block had prevented it from reaching the coast. Now that the block has dissolved completely, a 200+ kt [this means approximately 230 miles per hour] jet is barreling towards us. Multiple large and powerful storm systems are expected to slam into CA from the west and northwest over the coming two weeks, all riding this extremely powerful jet stream directly into the state.

The jet will itself provide tremendous dynamic lift, in addition to directing numerous disturbances right at the state and supplying them with an ample oceanic moisture source. The jet will be at quite a low latitude over much of the Pacific, so these storms will be quite cold, at least initially. Very heavy rainfall and strong to potentially very strong winds will impact the lower elevations beginning late Sunday and continuing through at least the following Sunday.. This will be the case for the entire state, from (and south of) the Mexican border all the way up to Oregon. Above 3000-4000 feet, precipitation will be all snow, and since temperatures will be unusually cold for a precipitation event of this magnitude, a truly prodigious amount of snowfall is likely to occur in the mountains, possibly measured in the tens of feet in the Sierra after it’s all said and done.

But there’s a big and rather threatening caveat to that (discussed below). Individual storm events are going to be hard to time for at least few more days, since this jet is just about as powerful as they come (on this planet, anyway). Between this Sunday and the following Sunday, I expect categorical statewide rainfall totals in excess of 3-4 inches. That is likely to be a huge underestimate for most areas. Much of NorCal is likely to see 5-10 inches in the lowlands, with 10-20 inches in orographically-favored areas. Most of SoCal will see 3-6 inches at lower elevations, with perhaps triple that amount in favored areas.

This is where things get even more interesting, though. The models are virtually unanimous in “reloading” the powerful jet stream and forming an additional persistent kink 2000-3000 miles to our southwest after next Sunday. This is a truly ominous pattern, because it implies the potential for a strong Pineapple-type connection to develop. Indeed, the 12z GFS now shows copious warm rains falling between days 12 and 16 across the entire state. Normally, such as scenario out beyond day seven would be dubious at best. Since the models are in such truly remarkable agreement, however, and because of the extremely high potential impact of such an event, it’s worth mentioning now. Since there will be a massive volume of freshly-fallen snow (even at relatively low elevations between 3000-5000 feet), even a moderately warm storm event would cause very serious flooding. This situation will have to monitored closely. Even if the tropical connection does not develop, expected rains in the coming 7-10 days will likely be sufficient to cause flooding in and of themselves (even in spite of dry antecedent conditions).

In addition to very heavy precipitation, powerful winds may result from very steep pressure gradients associated with the large and deep low pressure centers expected to begin approaching the coast by early next week. Though it’s not clear at the moment just how powerful these winds may be, there is certainly the potential for a widespread damaging wind event at some point, and the high Sierra peaks are likely to see gusts in the 100-200 mph range (since the 200kt jet at 200-300 mb will essentially run directly into the mountains at some point). The details of this will have to be hashed out as the event(s) draw closer.

In short, the next 2-3 weeks (at least) are likely to be more active across California than any other 2-3 week period in recent memory. The potential exists for a dangerous flood scenario to arise at some point during this interval, especially with the possibility of a heavy rain-on-snow event during late week 2. In some parts of Southern California, a whole season’s worth of rain could fall over the course of 5-10 days. This is likely to be a rather memorable event. Stay tuned.

Marx, Engels, Lenin, Oktyabrskaya Revolyutsiya

Hoisted from Comments: Kaleidescope writes:

It's Like Rain...: Typhoon Melor. During the Thirties, scores of Soviet citizens named their children Melsor, which stood for Marx, Engels, Stalin, October Revolution. After Khruschev's 1956 speech to the 20th Party Conference, the Melsors changed their names to Melor.

It's Like Rain...

...well, it is somebody's wedding day.

But it is not supposed to rain--hard--in Berkeley on October 13. I'm told they opened the ski runs at Lake Tahoe yesterday...

From <>:

Loretta Kalb: California: Typhoon remnants threaten to bring Central Valley flooding, mudslides, weather service says: The remains of super typhoon Melor, which is barreling across the Pacific at high speed today, threaten to bring flooding to some areas of California's Central Valley and mud slides in recently fire-ravaged areas, the National Weather Service reports. Up to 6 inches of rain could fall starting Tuesday in the foothills and mountains east of the Sacramento Valley in the season's first major storm for Northern California, meteorologist Felix Garcia of the National Weather Service said. The valley could see up to 2 inches of rain during the entirety of the storm, he said.

The snow level will stay above 7,000 feet or 8,000 feet, meaning virtually all the precipitation will be in the form of rain, Garcia said.... Growing winds will accompany the heavy rain, with gusts of up to 40 mph on Tuesday at lower elevations and higher in the mountains.

Typhoon Melor clobbered the Philippines and Japan in the western Pacific before its remnants were swept into the jet stream now West Coast bound. "The typhoon intensified so that the remnants were caught up with the jet stream and carried the moisture," Garcia said. He said the fast-moving storm front should reach the West Coast by Monday afternoon, then slow somewhat, and begin dumping its wet cargo in the Central Valley in earnest starting Tuesday morning. That will push rivers and creeks higher and cause local flooding in areas unable to absorb the heavy rainfall...

Lawrence Hall of Science Webcam

The Fog Wall Cometh!

Temperature 4 PM Saturday: 102F
Temperature 9 AM Sunday: 55F

"How About Meeting in the New Peets Coffee in the New Citris Building"

There's a new Peets Coffee (and Tea) in the new Citris building?

How is it that I do not know these things?

(The answer is that today is the third day it has been open, people in overalls are still running around with power drills and ladders, and the cash registers all have signs saying "please bear with us while we learn how to do this"...)

Still, it is nice to see the transformation of the U.C. Berkeley campus into Sybaris continue...

Only in Berkeley...

---

Posted via email from http://braddelong.posterous.com/only-in-berkeley at Brad DeLong's Scrapbook

More Fowl Pictures

---

Benjamin Franklin: "A rising, not a setting, sun..."

Posted via email from http://braddelong.posterous.com/939883 at Brad DeLong's Scrapbook<

Poults on Deck!

Our Chemists Are Hardcore Blogging

Yali's Cafe East in Stanley Hall. Home of the Redeye: a large coffee with an added double shot of espresso.

More Nature Liveblogging: A World Full of Turkeys

Three adult turkeys and twenty-one poults make their way up the hillside at dawn...

I am told that the California wild turkey was hunted to extinction in the 1920s--"Ma! Get a net!" These are Texas wild turkeys, and are animals that are neither "native" nor "non-native" but rather "near native."

I think that their edge over other ground-birds in American suburbia is that they do not fear cats much...

Real-Time Coyote Blogging via iPhone

Wile E. Coyote on the driveway at 7:00 AM Sunday morning...

Nerd Tourism

Leila Abu-Saba sends us to Alison Chaiken's Technical Tourist's Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area:

Technical Tourist: Sick of netnews? Caught up on all your blogs? You could always exercise, floss, call your mom or perform a breast self-exam. Nah. Perhaps you need:

The Technical Tourist's Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area

1. Tour the Geysers, Calpine's geothermal generation plant in Middletown, Lake County. See giant turbines and clouds of sulfuric acid steam! The link is, ahem, optimized for a non-Mozilla browser, so you can also call toll-free (866)-GEYSERS for more information.

2. Visit the GM-Toyota NUMMI auto manufacturing plant in southern Fremont. There are fascinating robot welders and giant metal stampers. The tour is quite suitable for children in my unexpert opinion.

3. Particle accelerators are big fun. Consider an outing to the Advanced Light Source in Berkeley or the Stanford Linear Accelerator. The LBNL tour may also visit other facilities such as the National Center for Electron Microscopy, the Environmental Energy Technologies Division and the Center for Beam Physics.

4. For more gigantic steel structures, check out the Port of Oakland tour. Enjoy giant cranes and a boat ride too. (Thanks to Meg.) To get an even closer look at the cranes (and a fine view of San Francisco as well), walk around and have a picnic at Middle Harbor Shoreline Park.

5. The Menlo Park branch of the USGS is a reliable source of entertainment. Every couple of years there's an Open House. In the meantime browse the quads, fault maps and satellite photos at the Earth Science Information Center, which is located in Building 3 at 345 Middlefield Road and is open Monday through Friday from 8 to 4.

6. Meditate on earthquakes while hiking the San Andreas Fault Trail in Palo Alto or seeing the Loma Prieta Epicenter in Forest of Nisene Marks. (I'll confess that the Nisene Marks hike is a bit dull: miles and miles of trail through dark second-growth redwood forest.) Many more earthquake-related outings are described in Geologic Trips: San Francisco and the Bay Area, which I highly recommend. Another book of interest is Geology Trails of Northern California, which I haven't yet had the chance to purchase. If you're really interested in local seismology field trips, send for the Field Trip Guidebooks from the Conferences on Earthquake Hazards in the Eastern San Francisco Bay Area that were sponsored by Cal State East Bay.

7. Take the ferry to Sausalito and view the San Francisco Bay Model. (Thanks to KML.)

8. While you're in Marin, visit the Nike Missile Base in the Headlands. (Thanks to KML.)

9. The Hiller Aviation Museum specializes in early helicopters which range from the admirable to the laughable. The annual Vertical Challenge should not be missed. (Thanks to KML.)

10. Speaking of aviation, the Moffett Field Museum is now open Weds-Sat from 10-2. Learn all about Moffett's history with lighter-than-air craft.

11. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View is full of treasures. Besides the Visible Storage there's an excellent speaker series. (Until the interpretive material at the exhibits is expanded, this one really is for nerds only.)

12. The San Jose Astronomical Association will invite you to a star party. Alternatively drive up Mount Hamilton and take in the Lick Observatory. In the summer Lick has astronomical lectures and public viewing plus concerts. And the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland has free public telescope viewing every Friday and Saturday night. (Thanks to Leila.)

13. Arthur Frommer rates the San Francisco Cable Car Museum as "one of the top ten free attractions in the world." (Thanks to Leila.)

14. Take the Hazel-Atlas silica mine tour at the Black Diamond Mines in Antioch. There's also a lot of old mining equipment at Almaden Quicksilver County Park in San Jose. (Thanks to KML.)

15. We still haven't gotten around to visiting the Intel Museum in Santa Clara or the Exploration Center at NASA Ames in Mountain View. South San Jose hosts the Magnetic Disk Heritage Center but there's no indication when it's open.

16. A bit further afield, the California State Railroad Museum looks appealing. Of course you could take the remarkably scenic and comfortable Amtrak Capitol Corridor line to get there. Closer to home you can ride the Niles Canyon Railway in Fremont or the Roaring Camp Railroad in Felton. If you still have railfanning on the brain, consider the Western Railway Museum on Highway 12 between Suisun and Rio Vista. (Thanks to Mark.)

17. No matter how you feel about our California water politics, the acqueducts and dams are certainly an engineering marvel. The Sunol water temple is open 9 AM to 3 PM Monday through Friday. The similar Pulgas Water Temple, adjacent to the Crystal Springs Reservoir, has more reasonable hours but no longer has any water. (Thanks to Mark and, come to think of it, KML.)

18. The American Society for Mechanical Engineering has a Northern California Landmarks in Mechanical Engineering web site. Some of the sites can be visited in person while others just have cool photos. (Thanks to LSK.)

19. Visit the California Academy of Science in their temporary home at 875 Howard Street in San Francisco and be amazed by the ant colonies. The museum is open every day from 10 to 5. (Thanks to LSK.)

20. In the recent past I've seen advertisements for tours of the Altamont windfarm and the Cargill salt processing facility in Newark, but I can no longer find information about these excursions. Anyone?

21. If you care about engineering history, check out the local chapter of the Society for Industry Archeology.

22. If all else fails, go to Central Computer and hang out. CC employs staff who have actually used computers before.

23. Know of any Bay Area technical highlights that I've omitted? Have a similar web page highlighting nerdly landmarks in another urban area? Please send email.

alchaiken@gmail.com

And Now the Poultry Have Moved in...

By the edge of the driveway, in the blackberries: