Monthly Archives: October 2008

where were our business schools?

There’s some blogospheric talk about the failure of economics (the academic discipline) to predict, explain, or help to remedy the current financial crisis. Economists are being blamed for using mathematically complex but empirically ungrounded models instead of studying things that matter. They have, for example, little to say about whether it’s wise to inject public money into banks during liquidity crises.

Economics probably is excessively theoretical and too enamored of complicated math instead of observation and application. But at least economics contributes powerful methods and theoretical models, some of which turn out to be useful (or at least provocative) across the social sciences. For instance, even though Don Green has shown that game theory is incompatible with empirical facts, it remains a powerful and insightful conceptual scheme. So it wouldn’t be the worst thing if economics departments were irrelevant in times of crisis–as long as they were great centers of theoretical inquiry.

The most obvious place where professors should study public issues related to business is not the econ. department–it’s the business school. Businesses can pay for their own training. Yet we subsidize business schools and provide a whole structure of benefits and protections, such as tenure, for their faculty. Why? I can only think of three rationales:

1. To equip disadvantaged students with skills that make them more competitive in the job market;

2. To give their graduates some kind of ethical orientation or concern with the public interest; and

3. To provide citizens, policymakers, and consumers (overlapping groups) with reliable and independent–and sometimes critical–insights about business.

I’m not sure how well business schools are doing with #1 or #2. They certainly seem to have failed with #3. Last year, if business school professors were having serious discussions and conducting research on the roots of today’s crisis, they failed to share the results in a timely or prominent way.

what difference will the ’08 youth turnout make?

All the leading indicators suggest that youth turnout will reach about 50%–or maybe a little higher–which will come close to the record set in 1972. From a nonpartisan point of view, that’s a good thing because it means that more young people are interested and involved, which benefits them and society. Voting is a form of expression and it correlates with other forms of engagement, such as volunteering and following the news.

Of course, 50% is the proverbial glass that’s half-full and half-empty. We will still have a long way to go to match the youth turnout rates that are standard in other democracies. There will probably be 20-point voting gap between young people who have college experience and those who don’t–a clear equity problem.

From a partisan perspective, the higher the youth turnout, the better for Barack Obama. But Obama is currently far enough ahead that he wins under any plausible youth turnout scenario from most pessimistic to the most optimistic. This chart, from Gallup, shows the proportion of all voters who would be young, given various turnout scenarios, and what that would mean for the results of the election:

Obama wins under all these scenarios. But if the national race tightens by about 4 points, then the difference between Gallup’s lowest and highest youth turnout estimate will be the difference between President Obama and President McCain. (Or more precisely, it will determine who wins the popular vote.)

turnout data from CIRCLE

We will release estimates of young people’s voter turnout early on November 5th. Meanwhile, we have released a final fact sheet with historical turnout stats; a map of turnout trends in each of the states; detailed fact sheets about selected states that we expect to be newsworthy, and a fact sheet that shows which voting laws are in place in each state and how those laws affect youth voters. Finally, the earliest of returns from states like North Carolina (based on people who have voted already) show high youth participation.

at Google

I happen to be in a meeting at the Google headquarters in DC. The place is hip and techie enough that I feel moved to try a little live-blogging, but without quoting or citing any individuals. So…

2:26: Picture an ordinary office building not far from the White House. The interior space has–I suppose deliberately–been left largely unfinished. There are heating ducts everywhere, simply wrapped in foil. There are also a half-dozen large hanging monitors in view, plastic blocks for playing with, and free soft drinks in an open kitchen. Most of the people in room have federal grants for service projects in schools, colleges, or nonprofits. One could imagine a bit of a cultural gap between the audience and the space we’re in, although I don’t know my peers well enough to guess how they feel. Right now, we are listening to a presentation about Google for Non-Profits. The speaker is wearing a YouTube fleece.

2:32: Just heard about Google’s election page, which seems fairly cool overall and has a nice feature that tells you where to vote.

2:45: The Google guy is telling us about how Google Maps can be used to organize a neighborhood cleanup. The Google corporation itself has done that, enlisting its own employees. It interests me that cleaning parks is the inevitable example of a service or volunteering project. I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, cleanups are limited because they are episodic, completely noncontroversial, and not very educational. On the other hand, litter in public spaces is a classic collective-action problem, and it is interesting to find new ways to address such problems.

2:52: We’re getting a dose of advertising for Google’s various software offerings. No complaints from me, but I just wonder whether my peers–community-organizers and activists–like this or not. Twenty years ago, they would have been reflexively anti-corporate.

3:15: OK, that’s enough. I’m not sure I’m a live-blogging kind of person.

P.S. Later on I figured out the iconography of the Google office design. All the wiring and pipes have been left exposed. Transparency–get it?

the politics of Wind in the Willows

I recently read Kenneth Grahame’s classic to my 9-year-old. As you may remember, Toad is the heir to the local manor and fortune and the one character in the neighborhood with an advanced education. He begins as an awful person–arrogant, selfish, pretentious, wasteful, lazy, and a menace on the road. He takes some hard knocks and finally learns to be a good squire. His transformation is shown by two major signs: his behavior at a banquet in his own Hall, and his friendships. Whereas in the bad old days Toad used to make risibly arrogant speeches at dinner parties, the new Toad, “by pressing delicacies on his guests, by topical small talk, and by earnest inquiries after members of their families not yet old enough to appear at social functions, managed to convey that this dinner was being run on strictly conventional lines.” Meanwhile, he shows genuine respect and admiration for his three main friends–the acknowledged best of whom, Mr Badger, speaks with a notably uneducated accent and dresses roughly.

(As for Toad’s friend Mole–he is a wonderful caricature of a provincial middle-class suburbanite. “On the walls [of his garden] hung wire baskets with ferns in them, alternating with brackets carrying plaster statuary–Garibaldi, and the infant Samuel, and Queen Victoria, and other heroes of modern Italy.”)

This is a conservative vision. No one gains any rights vis-à-vis Mr. Toad. He is not compelled to act better, nor to renounce any of his wealth or prestige. He isn’t (for example) taxed to fund better education for the myriad little rabbits who live in the Wild Wood. Instead, he helps to restore the ancient social equilibrium by acting responsibly and generously and thereby winning the respect of the neighborhood.

It’s not my ideal. I’m glad the real Mr. Toads of England had to pay inheritance taxes, and the real Moles and Rats got subsidized access to higher education. But The Wind in the Willows has a moral core as well as charm. In our era of billionaire celebrity heiresses, we could do worse.