Category: Education

Climate Scientists “Conspiring to Bully and Silence Opponents”

(p. A15) [In November 2011], 5,000 files of private email correspondence among several of the world’s top climate scientists were anonymously leaked onto the Internet. Like the first “climategate” leak of 2009, the latest release shows top scientists in the field fudging data, conspiring to bully and silence opponents, and displaying far less certainty about the reliability of anthropogenic global warming theory in private than they ever admit in public.
The scientists include men like Michael Mann of Penn State University and Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia, both of whose reports inform what President Obama has called “the gold standard” of international climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
. . .
Consider an email written by Mr. Mann in August 2007. “I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thus far unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests. Perhaps the same needs to be done w/ this Keenan guy.” Doug Keenan is a skeptic and gadfly of the climate-change establishment. Steve McIntyre is the tenacious Canadian ex-mining engineer whose dogged research helped expose flaws in Mr. Mann’s “hockey stick” graph of global temperatures.

For the full commentary, see:
JAMES DELINGPOLE. “OPINION; Climategate 2.0; A new batch of leaked emails again shows some leading scientists trying to smear opponents.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., November 28, 2011): A15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Wilson’s Advice to Conservative Academics: “Be Twice as Productive and Four Times as NIce”

(p. A13) Pat Moynihan once reportedly told Richard Nixon (who was known for his disdain for intellectuals), “Mr. President, James Q. Wilson is the smartest man in the United States. The president of the United States should pay attention to what he has to say.”
. . .
At one point in my academic career, I called Jim for advice about how best to navigate the waters of liberal academia when one is openly conservative. “Simple,” he told me lightheartedly, “Be twice as productive and four times as nice as your colleagues.” It was a formula he himself had followed.

For the full commentary, see:
ARTHUR C. BROOKS. “OPINION; Social Science With a Soul; Life for James Q. Wilson was like a roadside curio shop, full of hidden and unrecognized intellectual treasures..” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., March 3, 2012): C4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

“Scratch a White Liberal and You’ll Find a Bigot”

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Source of book image: http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowldc/files/2011/10/my-long-trip-home.jpg

(p. C1) As a social studies major in his junior year at Harvard, Mark Whitaker attended a debate on the subject of ethnicity. One participant was the chairman of the department. Mr. Whitaker stood up to raise some questions.

“What would you tell someone who didn’t have a clear ethnic identity?” he asked. “For example, what would you tell someone who had one parent who was black and another who was white? Who had one parent who was American and another who was European? Who had moved dozens of times as a child and didn’t have a specific place to call home?” Everyone in the room knew that Mr. Whitaker was talking about himself.
“I guess I would say that that’s too bad,” the professor answered. “In the future I hope we don’t have too many more people like you.”
Mr. Whitaker recounts this story in “My Long Trip Home,” a book filled with as much family tumult as Jeannette Walls described in “The Glass Castle” and a racial factor to boot. It’s a story that registers not only for its shock value but also for the perspective and wisdom with which it can now be told.
The episode did not anger him, he said. He saw it as his professor’s Freudian slip, “exposing a wish to hold on to a sense of certainty about his roots in the face of a gathering demographic storm that threatened to wash them away.” But Mr. Whitaker’s troubled and combative black father, who is the book’s central figure through sheer force of personality, had a more heated reaction. “As I always say, scratch a white liberal and you’ll find a bigot,” Cleophaus Sylvester Whitaker Jr. told his son.

For the full review, see:
JANET MASLIN. “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Born Along the Racial Fault Line.” The New York Times (Mon., November 7, 2011): C1 & C4.
(Note: the online version of the review is dated November 6, 2011.)

The book under review is:
Whitaker, Mark. My Long Trip Home: A Family Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

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“Mark Whitaker” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Libertarian Law Professor Defends Free Choice in Health Care

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“Randy E. Barnett has argued against the health care law.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) WASHINGTON — When Congress passed legislation requiring nearly all Americans to obtain health insurance, Randy E. Barnett, a passionate libertarian who teaches law at Georgetown, argued that the bill was unconstitutional.
. . .
. . . over the past two years, through his prolific writings, speaking engagements and television appearances, Professor Barnett has helped drive the question of the health care law’s constitutionality from the fringes of academia into the mainstream of American legal debate and right onto the agenda of the United States Supreme Court.
. . .
. . . the challenge championed by Professor Barnett: that Congress’s power to set rules for commerce does not extend to regulating “inactivity,” like choosing not to be insured.
. . .
(p. A14) He is a fierce advocate of economic freedom who is accustomed to being a legal underdog. In 2004, in his first (and, he says, probably his last) appearance before the Supreme Court, he argued that Congress could not criminalize the production of home-grown marijuana for personal medical use. There again, critics said he would lose 8 to 1. He did lose, but took satisfaction in the actual vote, 6 to 3.
. . .
Professor Barnett’s work on the health care law fits into a much broader intellectual project, his defense of economic freedom. He has long argued that the Supreme Court went too far in upholding New Deal economic laws — a position that concerns his liberal critics.
Even a close friend and fellow Georgetown law professor, Lawrence B. Solum, says that Professor Barnett is aware of the “big divide between his views and the views of lots of other people,” and that his political philosophy is “much more radical” than his legal argument in the health care case. Professor Barnett, for his part, insists that if the health law is struck down, it will not “threaten the foundation of the New Deal.” But, he allowed, it would be “a huge symbolic victory for limited government.”

For the full story, see:
SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and CHARLIE SAVAGE. “Libertarian’s Pet Cause Reaches Supreme Court.” The New York Times (Tues., March 27, 2012): A1 & A14.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated March 26, 2012 and has the title “Vindication for Challenger of Health Care Law.”)

Myhrvold Left Work with Hawking for the Excitement of Entrepreneurship

(p. 139) Microsoft was represented ¡n the discussion by its senior vice president for advanced technology, a thirty-five-year-old Nathan Myhrvold. After finishing his Ph.D. at Princeton at age twenty-three, Myhrvold had worked for a year as a postdoctoral fellow with the physicist Stephen Hawking at Cambridge, tackling theories of (p. 140) gravitation and curved space-time, before taking a three-month leave of absence to help some friends in the Bay Area with a software project. He became caught up in the excitement of personal computer software and entrepreneurship and never went back. In Berkeley, he co-founded a company called Dynamical Systems to develop operating system for personal computers, which struggled for two years until Microsoft bought it in 1986. At Microsoft, he persuaded Bill Gates to let him establish a corporate research center, Microsoft Research, with Myhrvold himself in charge.

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: italics in original.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

Most Articles in Top Two Economics Journals Receive Zero Citations in First Five Years

Journal quality is often used, or suggested, as a proxy for the quality of articles. It is a very poor proxy.
Economist Robert H. Frank writes that:

(p. 3) The economist Philip Cook and I found, . . . , that in the first five years after publication, many fewer than half of all papers in the two most selective economics journals had ever been cited by other scholars.

For the full commentary, see:

ROBERT H. FRANK. “ECONOMIC VIEW; The Prestige Chase Is Raising College Costs.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., March 11, 2012): 3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated March 10, 2012.)

I assume, but have not verified, that the above finding is reported in:
Frank, Robert, and Philip J. Cook. The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us. New York: The Free Press, 1995.

Diamond to Teach Economics of Entrepreneurship in Fall 2012

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Some Questions to Be Discussed:

• How can policies encouraging innovative entrepreneurship help us recover from the current economic stagnation?

• Are innovative entrepreneurs smarter, or less risk-averse, or more intuitive, or more determined, or more frugal, or nobler, or greedier, than the rest of us?

• Can economic historian John Nye defend his claim that successful entrepreneurs are “lucky fools?”

• What is the role of entrepreneurship in the process of creative destruction, and what is the role of creative destruction in making our lives longer and better?

• Would labor be better off in an economy in which innovative entrepreneurship is encouraged?

• Why does economist Will Baumol believe that too much higher education can discourage successful innovative entrepreneurship?

• What are the most promising sources of financing for successful innovative entrepreneurship?

Diamond to Teach Creative Destruction Colloquium in Fall 2012

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Colloquium Rationale:
Creative destruction is the process through which innovative new products are created, and older obsolete products are destroyed. In transportation, for example, cars creatively destroyed the horse and buggy, trains creatively destroyed horse-drawn wagons. Such innovations contribute to longer and richer lives, but may come at the cost of greater uncertainty in the labor market. Schumpeter claimed that the process of creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. Although Nobel-prize-winner George Stigler has described creative destruction as “heresy,” a growing number of economists and non-economists have found the concept useful in understanding the world. While most of the emphasis will be on the implications of creative destruction for business and the economy, the discussion will sometimes involve issues related to information science, sociology, medicine, law, engineering, psychology, literature, political science, architecture, and history.

You can hear me talking about last year’s version of the Creative Destruction Colloquium (which was offered last year under a different course number and a slightly different title) in the following YouTube video:

Lower Grades for Male Spectators When Their Team Wins

(p. C4) Big-time college-football teams may build school spirit, but they also hurt the grades of male students in the bleachers–at least when the teams are winning, a study suggests.

Economists at the University of Oregon tracked the grades of students there (athletes on all teams excluded) from 1999 through 2007, mapping them against the record of the Ducks, whose fortunes varied from season to season.

For the full story, see:
Christopher Shea. “Week in Ideas: Education Dumbed Down by Football.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., December 24, 2011): C4.

Paper summarized:
Lindo, Jason M., Isaac D. Swensen, and Glen R. Waddell. “Are Big-Time Sports a Threat to Student Achievement?” NBER Working Paper # 17677, December 2011.

“No Street Protester Has Yet Endowed a University Department”

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Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) Over the next three decades, Breasted would excavate a series of sites in Egypt, the Sudan and the Near East. He would also develop an important ability to identify rich and influential benefactors and to gain their confidence without resorting to sycophancy. . . . Notable among the Maecenas figures he cultivated was John D. Rockefeller.

Rockefeller had been an early patron of the University of Chicago; he might have done something for Near Eastern studies in any case, but it is clear that without Breasted’s energy and enthusiasm, Rockefeller’s scholarly philanthropy would never have taken the course it did. Eventually, he provided the funding for an entire Oriental Institute in 1931. (The OI, as it is affectionately known, had existed from 1919 but essentially as a concept between academic committees.) Together with its Egyptian offshoot, Chicago House, the OI is perhaps the leading center of Egyptology and Assyriology in the world. At the moment, on both sides of the Atlantic, we are hearing a lot about the evils of bankers and capitalism, but as far as I know no street protester has yet endowed a university department.

For the full review, see:
JOHN RAY. “BOOKSHELF; From Illinois To Mesopotamia; Excavating sites in Egypt and the Near East, writing groundbreaking books and developing a talent for courting wealthy donors.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., February 23, 2012): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Book under review:
Abt, Jeffrey. American Egyptologist: The Life of James Henry Breasted and the Creation of His Oriental Institute. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

CalArts Was One of Walt Disney’s Last Projects

It is a nice minor coda to Walt Disney’s life that the CalArts school that he founded provided a starting point for many of the next generation of great innovative animators, including John Lasseter.

(p. 47) CalArts was Walt Disney’s brainchild; he had started the planning of the school in the late 1950s and provided generously for it in his will. Walt and his brother Roy formed it in 1961 through a merger of two struggling Los Angeles institutions, the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music and the Chouinard Art Institute. The doors opened at the school’s consolidated campus in Valencia in 1971, five years after Walt’s death.
. . .
(p. 48) The storms of the 1960s had mostly receded by the time Lasseter arrived. At CalArts, he found his own kind of liberation: Here, he no longer needed to conceal his passion for cartoons. His twenty classmates from across the country were animation geeks like him. Others had been corresponding with the Disney studio just as he had, and even making their own short films. Many would go on from CalArts to perform significant work at Disney or elsewhere; among them were future stars John Musker (co-director of Aladdin, Hercules, and The Little Mermaid) and Brad Bird.
First-year classes took place in room A113, a windowless space with white walls, floor, and ceiling, and buzzing fluorescent lights. The teachers made up tor the setting, however: Almost all of them were longtime Disney artists with awe-inspiring animation credits. Kendall O’Connor, an art director on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, taught layout; Elmer Plummer, a character designer on Dumbo, taught life drawing; T. Hee, a sequence director on Pinocchio, taught caricature. The program was rigorous and the hours long; the fact that the campus was in the middle of nowhere made it easier to focus on work. Tim Burton, who entered the program the following year, remembered the experience: . . .

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: ellipsis added; italics in original.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)