By Daniyal Khan, June 12th, 2012 
“Do you think it matters, Daniyal? Do you think anybody cares about your senior project? All that matters is the people around you, and your senior project doesn’t make a difference to anyone.”
All I could do was to look at my friend with a blank expression, completely stunned and humbled. These words weren’t spoken with the least bit of aggression, as one might think. Rather, they were delivered with a straight, honest face and in a soft-spoken manner, and still managed to convey all the seriousness in the world. The words struck me more so for two reasons. Firstly, I consider my undergraduate senior thesis to be the culmination and high-point of a grueling intellectual journey undertaken over five years. Secondly, my project is dedicated to my friends because they have often been my most ardent supporters as well as my harshest critics during this journey. Yet, there she was, a friend mind you, effortlessly reducing my best academic work to a heap of worthless trash!
In retrospect, her attitude towards a piece of academic writing and a person who aspires to be an academic was not surprising at all. Current opinion on the value and worth of the institutional home of the academic — the university — is far from being conclusively positive. My friend had recently experienced and witnessed some of the worst tendencies of academia at a conference at which she presented a paper. Rather than asking a question about the presentation, a philosophy instructor in the audience had chosen to speak to my friend in a patronizing manner, suggesting that her interest in her chosen subject of inquiry was worrisome, thinking that it was unhealthy for a girl of her age.
Thus, understanding the source of her disdain towards my project was not difficult. Academics and university professors aren’t always worthy role-models, to say the least. Many people I’ve spoken to insist that academics don’t really do anything, just talk; and you can bet there’s going to be a lot of self-serving conversation (at academic conferences, for example, not to say that there aren’t constructive conferences). No wonder academics are often . . .
Read more: Academia: Reflections of an Undergraduate Student in Pakistan
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, June 4th, 2012 
The jobs report on Friday was bad, as David Howell analyzed here. This immediately was interpreted across the board as good news for Mitt Romney and his party, bad news for President Obama and his. It’s the economy stupid, and bad news about employment means that Obama’s chance for reelection has declined precipitously. And things are worse then that. It’s now or never. It is in the summer that the public’s perception of the economy is locked in for Election Day. Even if things improve in the fall, there won’t be enough lead-time to change the public’s perception.
I know that this is based on solid evidence. Considerable scholarly research has demonstrated the strong correlation between the state of the economy and election results. But the way this research has been directly applied in daily political commentary is troubling, especially because it can become a political factor itself. As the “Thomas Theorem” posits: If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. I add, especially when they are doing the defining on television.
This concerns me as a scholar and as a partisan. As a scholar, I worry about the philosophic anthropology of this. The voting public is being depicted as simpletons, not capable of critical thought, of the most basic examination of the facts. There is a kind of economic determinism involved and the determinism is quite mechanical. People vote their pocketbooks and they don’t think critically about it. They don’t wonder about the causes of their economic woes and just vote the bums out. It amazes me how in the same broadcasts talking heads suggest both that the job numbers are a result of long-term trends beyond the control of the President and that Obama’s chances of victory have greatly diminished because of the state of the economy as indicated by the latest job report. They propose a simple Pavlovian stimulus and response vision of voters, . . .
Read more: It’s More Than the Economy, Stupid
By David Howell, June 1st, 2012 
In this morning’s press release on the employment numbers for May, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ lead was “no change”: non-farm employment “changed little (+69,000)” and “the unemployment rate was essentially unchanged at 8.2%.” But little change in a severely depressed labor market is very bad news for workers. Even worse news for the Obama Administration is that the labor market so far in 2012 shows no sign of the turnaround he needs.
While it’s true that the increase in employment of 69,000 was not much below April’s increase of 77,000, it was 143,000 in March and higher than that in February. The unemployment rate’s increase from 8.1% to 8.2% can be viewed as essentially unchanged because it’s small, but if these figures hold up, the data still show 220,000 more unemployed than the month before.
Unfortunately, this bad news is likely to hold up because the same trends appear across lots of related indicators: the recently unemployed (less than 5 weeks) increased from 2.54 to 2.58 million; seasonally adjusted initial unemployment insurance claims rose by 10,000 (to 383,000, about where it has been stuck for the last 6 months despite the tightening of eligibility requirements by many States); the long-term unemployment rate (27+ weeks) increased quite substantially, from 5.1 to 5.4 million), as did the median duration of unemployment (from 19.4 to 20.1 weeks). Significantly, the rate of those working part-time but want a full-time job also increased, from 7.8 to 8.1 million. And to top it off, average hourly pay for non-supervisory workers has been flat at $19.70 (up 3 cents from March).
The problem, of course, is that while private sector employers have not been hiring at a pace that offsets the massive job destruction of 2008-10, austerity politics is actually leading to absolute reductions in government employment, and at an accelerating rate. Obama is in a tough spot, since even if employment picks up dramatically, the unemployment rate could continue to increase as millions of discouraged workers re-enter the labor force.
By Michael Cohen, May 24th, 2012 
I welcome Will Milberg’s response to my book and was pleased with his appreciation of how the case of Argentina challenges conventional wisdom in economics. His review adds to the debate about Argentina, highlighting one of my motivations for writing the book: to show how the Argentine experience since 2001 flies in the face of economic pundits, both in the academy and in the financial press, and that it is important to pay attention. Milberg’s message was seconded by Paul Krugman in a NY Times blog posting in which he directly identifies “conventional wisdom” as obscuring accurate perception of strong Argentine recent economic performance.
I would carry this further to the case of the recent re-nationalization of the Argentine oil company, YPF. The exaggerated external critique and prediction of economic doom once again for Argentina fails to see that this decision makes sense if the government is able to achieve its own institutional objective of making YPF a well-run enterprise serving the national interest by expanding energy production. Commentaries by The Financial Times and The New York Times, with the exception of Krugman, sound eerily similar to their alarmist predictions in 2002 that Argentina would fall off the tip of South America after the default on its debt. Conventional wisdom, I believe, as Milberg notes, is sorely in need to revision.
And while I very much agree with most of Milberg’s observations about the Argentine case, and accept his friendly critique of some parts of my book, I think that he is too easily accepting some external views, from the U.S. and Europe, that “the country is once more on the edge.” This is not true in terms of its growth, balance of payments, fiscal deficit, growing investments in infrastructure, and most importantly reduced poverty and inequality. Low unemployment continues despite some slowdown in the construction sector.
Recent policy decisions and major legislative victories by President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner on critical issues of social policy and the reorganization of the Central Bank demonstrate continued . . .
Read more: Argentina Continues to Defy Conventional Wisdom: A Response to Milberg
By Jim Arrowsmith, May 2nd, 2012 
Arrowsmith was an economics professor at the City College of New York. After he left that position, he worked for many years as a business economist for a multinational oil company, where, like most corporate economists, he used a macroeconomic framework essentially based on Keynes. -Jeff
Whatever can explain the rise of mass hysteria over the U.S. national debt and federal deficits? To be sure, debt/deficit issues give the Administration’s political opponents a grand weapon in the gladiatorial contest that constitutes the nation’s public politics, but the issue only works because of a virulent public antipathy to serious macroeconomic analysis that has developed over the past four decades. In 1971, President Nixon announced “now I am a Keynesian,” but by 2011, President Obama (in his State of the Union address) said “Every day, families have to live within their means. They deserve a government that will do the same.”
In this environment, as the U.S. continues to suffer from massive unemployment of labor and underutilization of physical and intellectual capital, political survival almost requires economic policy-makers to pay obeisance to the most primitive anti-Keynesian economic theology.
The proverbial Martian certainly would not anticipate such widespread disdain for serious macroeconomics from the overall educational endowment of the American population. By historical standards, the U.S. population is highly educated, with over 40 percent of the labor force having completed tertiary education as of the end of the last decade and annual four-year college graduations reaching 1.6 million. While only about 3-5 percent of U.S. undergraduates major in economics, a far larger proportion experience some exposure to economics. Although data are far from perfect, the best estimates suggest that half undergo a one-semester introductory course and as many as one third of the total cohort take a two-semester sequence. At first blush, even with the most cynical view of the seriousness of students or their instructors, this suggests that a substantial part of the electorate might be expected to have assimilated central theoretical concepts such as the intrinsic difference between the national economy and the individual household and the potential use . . .
Read more: It’s the Economy, Stupid: But Why So Stupid?
By Michael Corey, April 30th, 2012 
The 12th Annual Cyber Defense Exercise was held by the National Security Agency at a Lockheed Martin Corporation facility in Hanover, Maryland during April 17-20. Cadet teams from the U. S. service academies competed with one another to defend their own team’s computer network designed, built and configured by them against attacks by the National Security Agency and the Department of Defense. This year’s winner was the Air Force Academy. The Army team from West Point had won the prior six. Previously, the Air Force Academy had two wins, the Naval Academy two wins and the Merchant Marine Academy one win. The United States is taking cyber warfare very seriously. Tony Sager, Chief Operating Officer of NSA’s Information Assurance Directorate who created the contest in 2000, noted that cyber defense is extremely difficult, in part because things like home banking, military applications and power systems all share the same network.
Serendipitously, on Friday the 13th of April, I attended a presentation by Paul A. Strassmann on cyber warfare at the New Canaan Senior Men’s Club. Strassmann is a member of the club, and an internationally recognized authority on the subject. Strassmann convincingly argued that cyber warfare is a legitimate concern, which affects us all.
FBI Director Robert Mueller at a Senate hearing indicated that he believes that cyber threats are becoming the number one threat to the USA, according to Strassmann. James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, believes that cyber threats are a danger to economic and national security. The magnitude of the danger is indicated by the inter-connectivity of the following systems: oil and gas. electric power, transportation, emergency services, government services, banking and finance, water and communications. To help thwart attacks from a broad range of attackers — “crackers”; “insiders,” “hostile countries,” and “terrorists” — the Department of Defense established the U. S. Cyber Command in May 2010 under the U. S. Strategic Command, working hand in hand with the Department of Homeland Security. I’m not sure what the clandestine services are doing. A . . .
Read more: The Cyber Warfare Age?
By Richard Alba, April 16th, 2012 
It’s sometimes said that presidents don’t control the economic weather but rather it controls them. We have reached the moment, however, when magical powers are going to be attributed to the presidency, and the current incumbent, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, will be charged with incompetence in using them. One manifestation of this thinking is the Romney campaign’s recent claim that women have suffered more than 90 percent of the jobs lost since Obama became president, a blatant attempt to undermine his lead among women voters. This claim involves two distortions; and most of the mainstream media have caught what I view as the smaller one—namely, that the claim ignores the full history of the recession and the huge job losses borne by men when George Bush was president.
The larger distortion has generally gone unnoticed, indeed, it has been mostly accepted. According to it, some 740 thousand jobs have been lost on Obama’s watch. This claim is another expression of the Republican mantra about a “failed” presidency. And it involves some statistical crafting to fit the data to the argument, manipulating data in a way that we are likely to see a lot more of as the campaign proceeds, especially given the huge amounts of money available to hire “researchers” to come up with “facts.”
The Romney campaign arrives at the estimate by attributing to Obama all of the job losses since February 1, 2009, even though he had barely taken office at that point and there was not enough time for any of the new administration’s policies to have an impact. To understand how much timing matters in this case, recall that Obama entered the White House when the labor market was already in a swoon, and the number of jobs lost that February was more than 700 thousand, on a par with the losses for the final months of Bush’s second term. If we tally the jobs record of the current administration from March 1 instead of February 1, then the jobs deficit under Obama shrinks dramatically to 16,000 and, with any luck, will be erased in coming . . .
Read more: Phony Data on Jobs and the Obama Administration
By David Howell, January 18th, 2012 
 Howell continues his “Metrics of Protest” series. -Jeff
Extreme inequality has finally made it to prime time. Occupy Wall Street helped focus attention on the problem last Fall, and President Obama finally rose to the challenge with what was perhaps the best speech of his presidency. He spoke forthrightly about the massive and continued growth in inequality, linking this to the collapse of the middle class and to the obstructionism of the Republican-controlled Congress.
Concern over rising inequality has even made its way into the Republican presidential primary debates. While Mitt Romney has announced (with the Supreme Court) that “corporations are people” (see Stephen Colbert’s hilarious PAC advertisement), he has also said that he is really concerned about the poor and that we should address income inequality, but only in “quiet rooms.”
The argument on the right has always been that people should not bemoan extreme inequality as long as America remains the land of opportunity, where anyone who goes to school and works hard can make it. Those of a certain age will remember the 1960s pop hymn to American mobility “Only in America” by Jay and the Americans (who else?). Did anyone question the reality behind these uplifting lyrics? At least for white people?
But now the reality behind mobility promise of America has also hit prime time. The New York Times ran a front page story on the compelling evidence, quite well-known for some time among labor economists (at least progressive ones), that Americans actually have far lower chances of moving up the income ladder than those in other rich countries. Extreme inequality and low social mobility have become definitive of the American social condition, an apparent refutation of the American dream.
The latest . . .
Read more: Inequality and the Fantasy of American Upward Mobility: The “Great Gatsby Curve”
By David Howell, December 23rd, 2011 
It’s the holiday season and most American households are struggling, many desperately, as the economy continues it’s dismal performance. Yes, unemployment is down to 8.6% from 9% and higher (where it had been stuck since 2008) but that modest “improvement” was mainly due to discouraged workers dropping out of the labor market. The employment and hiring rates remain at historically low levels.
But while there’s been lots of attention paid to unemployment and to the income gains of the top 1%, there has been far too little focus on the need to combat poverty level wages. We are enmeshed in a toxic brew of joblessness, low hours (involuntary part-time employment), and low pay (1/3 of all workers earn below 2/3 of the median wage – see below).
It is said that Charles Dickens intended A Christmas Carol as a “sledgehammer blow on behalf of the poor and unfortunate” (“Father Christmas,” New York Times, December 7, 2011). One of the great lessons of Dickens’ accounts of 19th century London is that poverty for families with working-age adults is rooted less in joblessness than in low pay. But they’re connected: the threat of job loss undermines the ability of workers to demand decent pay and working conditions.
In the first pages of the A Christmas Carol, Dickens writes:
“The door of Scrooge’s counting-house was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk’s fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal. But he couldn’t replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room…”
And when Scrooge overhears his pathetic clerk mutter Merry Christmas to Scrooge’s nephew, his response is “… my clerk, with fifteen shillings a week, and a wife and family, talking about a merry Christmas. I’ll retire to Bedlam.”
Yes, keeping a veneer of Christmas cheer while maintaining a family on 15 shillings a week in the employ of . . .
Read more: The Metrics of Protest – A Christmas Carol for 2012: Good News in the Fight Against Low Pay?
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, December 19th, 2011 
Ideological clichés are deadly. In 1989, the end of the short twentieth century (1917 – 1989) with all its horrors, I thought this simple proposition was something that had been learned, broadly across the political spectrum . I was wrong, and the evidence has been overwhelming. This was my biggest mistake as a sociologist of the politics and culture.
When Soviet Communism collapsed, I thought it had come to be generally understood that simple ideological explanations that purported to provide complete understanding of past, present and future, and the grounds for solving the problems of the human condition, were destined for the dustbin of history. The fantasies of race and class theory resulted in profound human suffering. I thought there was global awareness that modern magical thinking about human affairs should and would come to an end.
My first indication I had that I was mistaken came quickly, December 31, 1989, to be precise. It came in the form of an op ed. piece by Milton Friedman. While celebrating the demis e of socialism in the Soviet bloc, he called for its demise in the United States, which he asserted was forty-five per cent socialist, highlighting the post office, the military (a necessary evil to his mind) and education. He called for a domestic roll back of the socialist threat now that the foreign threat had been vanquished. Friedman knew with absolute certainty that only capitalism promoted freedom, and he consequentially promoted radical privatization as a solution to all social problems. This was an early battle cry for the neo-liberal assault of the post-cold war era.
The assault seemed particularly silly to me, and hit close to home, since I heard Friedman lecture when I . . .
Read more: My Big Mistake: The End of Ideology, Then and Now
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