Category: General

What the world needs now is another good lawyer

Excellent post from Dybbuk at OTLSS on a new “initiative” from the Law School Admissions Council –the agency that administers the LSAT — designed to entice high school students and first and second year undergraduates “particularly but not exclusively those from ethnically and racially diverse backgrounds” into eventually enrolling in law school, via images suggesting that they’ll be able to save dolphins, fight environmental racism etc.

I have thoughtlessly compared the law school scammers to Bernie Madoff, but these images make me realize how unfair that is to nebbishy old Uncle Ponzi, rotting away in federal prison. Madoff scammed the wealthy, and he scammed institutional investors who should have known better. The law school racketeers operate from a lower circle of depravity, luring social justice-oriented kids into life-destroying debt by promising to provide the foundation for a career that will allow those kids to fulfill their highest ideals.

I know that this blog mostly involves preaching to the converted. However, I hope readers will explain to youth of their acquaintance, who may be vulnerable to this kind of law school marketing approach, that public sector and public interest jobs are few in number, especially now that public sector austerity has taken on cast of permanence. Moreover, the structure of student debt forgiveness programs has made these jobs, which were once practically consolation prizes, highly desirable and competitive on purely economic grounds. And that means, in all likelihood, that a law grad will not have the opportunity to use the law to effect social change, represent indigents, or save the dolphins, unless he or she is willing to do so pro bono. . .

The images below all bear the slogan: “Actually, the world DOES need another lawyer.” Maybe so, but the world DOES NOT need another scammer.

Naturally legal academics are outraged by comparisons to Madoff et. al., despite the striking practical similarities between Madoff’s activities and initiatives such as LSAC’s newest propaganda campaign. That outrage is a consequence of their genuinely sincere belief in their own probity. And that belief is a prime example of the power of ideology:

Very frequently such views systematically distort social reality in much the same way that an individual may neurotically deny, deform or reinterpret aspects of his life that are inconvenient to him . . . In such analyses the ideas by which men explain their actions are unmasked as self-deception, sales talk, the kind of “sincerity” that David Riesman has aptly described as the state of mind of a man who habitually believes his own propaganda. In this way, we can speak of “ideology” when we analyze the belief of many American physicians that standards of health will decline if the fee-for-service method of payment is abolished, or the conviction of many undertakers that inexpensive funerals show lack of affection for the departed, or the definition of their activity by quizmasters on television as “education.” The self-image of the insurance salesman as a fatherly adviser to young families, of the burlesque stripper as an artist, of the propagandist as a communications expert, of the hangman as a public servant — all these notion are not only individual assuagements of guilt or status anxiety, but constitute the official self-interpretations of entire social groups, obligatory for their members on pain of excommunication.

Peter Berger (1963)

Determinants of student debt

The Project on Student Debt has just released a study, indicating that 71% of 2012 graduates of non-profit colleges and universities graduated with student debt, and that on average these students borrowed $29,400 over the course of their college attendance (This figure does not include accrued interest on debt. It is also an underestimate, since the methodology the study employed could not account for all private loans. Approximately 20% of the reported debt was in the form of private loans, although with the 2010 changes in higher ed financing this figure is probably declining going forward).

The Project’s web page allows you to look up debt totals for individual schools, and it enables the following striking comparison:

Colorado College

Average amount borrowed of 2012 graduates with debt: $19,970

Percentage of graduates with debt: 32%

Average amount borrowed of all 2012 graduates: $6,390

Current total nominal cost of attendance: $208,000

University of Colorado Law School

Average amount borrowed of 2012 graduates with debt: $100,813

Percentage of graduates with debt: 86%

Average amount borrowed of all 2012 graduates: $86,699

Current total nominal cost of attendance: $156,000

What accounts for such remarkable disparities? Possible explanations:

(1) Differences in socio-economic status of families of graduates. My semi-educated guess is that this is a factor, but a relatively minor one. While the student body at CC, like that at all elite liberal arts colleges, is dominated by people from rich and upper middle class families — with the emphasis on upper — this seems to be increasingly the case at CU Law, from my impressionistic sense of the marked change in the demographics of students over the past 20 years (during which time resident tuition went from $4,000 to $31,500 per year). In sum the average CC student probably comes from a wealthier background than the average CU Law student, but not drastically so.

(2) Differences in levels of financial aid. This is probably a big factor. The CU Law class of 2012 got about $4,000 per year, on average, knocked off the nominal price of attendance. I don’t know what the comparable number is for CC, but I would imagine it is much higher. (The respective endowments of the two schools in 2012 were $47 million and $573 million).

(3) Differences in the willingness — as opposed to the ability — of families to contribute to the cost of student attendance. I suspect this is by far the most salient factor. It seems to now be the cultural norm among the lower upper class/upper middle class in America that it’s expected families will pay for all or most of the cost of undergraduate degrees, but will contribute little or nothing to financing the cost of graduate and professional school. (A common arrangement seems to be that families will contribute toward the cost of living while their children are in the latter institutions, but will require students to pay for — or more accurately borrow from the federal government — all of the cost of tuition).

That certainly seems to be the case at CU Law, given that it appears the average undergraduate debt of our students is somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000, with the median being zero. (This figure is of course relevant to interpreting (1) above).

This cultural norm is probably a product of, among other things, a semi-conscious assumption that the point of a college education is to provide one’s children with the benefits of general edification, i.e., the classic liberal arts ideal, while at the same time engaging in a powerful form of social signaling (It’s further assumed that this social signaling can to some extent be monetized). Meanwhile the function of graduate and professional education is to produce an enhancement in future earning potential that has a positive net present value in straightforward pecuniary terms, when measured against the cost of attendance.

To say these assumptions are becoming problematic would be something of an understatement.

The Overdetermined Shape of Health Care Reform

Johnathan Bernstein has an addition to my recent series of posts on health care reform:

One key point that Lemieux doesn’t mention this time: in one sense, this really isn’t about 2009 at all. It’s about 2007 and 2008, when the three leading Democratic presidential candidates converged on essentially the same plan (with Obama famously omitting the individual mandate). That says a lot. It says that none of those three candidates believed that adopting single-payer would have given them a serious edge in a closely contested nomination fight — and that no other candidate was able to leap to the top tier by embracing single-payer. In other words, it tells us that in the world of 2007-2008, at least, the ACA was mainstream within the actual Democratic Party as it was, and single-payer was a fringe position in the actual Democratic Party as it was. Maybe lots and lots of Democrats preferred single-payer in some sense, but virtually none of them, either elites or electorates, did anything about it. And that’s what counts.

What this also means is that ACA vs. single-payer had virtually nothing to do with Barack Obama himself. And so Obama-centric explanations for it are clearly, 100%, wrong.

This is right. Presidents have agency, but they lead political coalitions. In a political universe where single payer (or, more plausibly, Swiss health care) was viable, at a minimum it would have to have such powerful support among the Democratic electorate that a major presidential candidate would endorse it. This wouldn’t be enough — given its structure, the median votes in the Senate are almost certain to be well to the right of the Democratic candidate for president, let alone the Democratic primary electorate — but it would be a minimum first step. In the politics of 2008 and 2009, anybody who became a Democratic president was going to pursue comprehensive health care reform of essentially similar shape unless they decided not to pursue it all (which was highly unlikely.) It’s worth noting that the comprehensive health care reform undertaken by a major state with a much more liberal electorate and collection of legislators took a simialr form as well.

And while nobody can prove the counterfactual, I also agree that President Clinton would have signed something virtually identical to the ACA. It’s true that in a context in which every single one of the maximum number of votes in the Senate available in a very narrow window was necessary, there’s far more risk of a catastrophic downside (health care reform fails outright or settles for token tinkering, either ruining health care reform for at least another generation and squandering a rare historical opportunity) than of a marginal upside (it’s highly unlikely that everything Obama did was optimal, but nobody has articulated a scenario in which every single conservative Democratic senator votes for a singificantly more progressive bill). But nobody learned the lesson of failure of the Clinton administration’s health care reform more vividly than Hillary Clinton; she was if anything even less likely to going try the “develop a plan and shove it right down Congress’s throat with the ram of the BULLY PULPIT!” strategy beloved by people who have no idea what they’re talking about again. And moreover, she had in the interim actually served more than one term in the Senate; she certainly wasn’t going to listen to asinine amateur-hour advice about how she should sit down with Max Baucus and Joe Lieberman and tell them to cut the bullshit. It’s overwhelmingly likely that something virtually identical to the ACA would have passed with Clinton in the White House. With Edwards, it’s trickier, but he was never going to be the Democratic nominee for a variety of reasons.

Finally, the fact that Obama’s pandering on the mandate was abandoned when it was time for actual presidenting also further reveals the stupidity of the “but the ACA and Romneycare the plan passed by massive supermajorities of Masschusetts Democrats over Mitt Romney’s many vetoes were just a slightly varnished Republican Heritage Foundation plan” line of argument. The only important thing that the Heritage Foundation’s never-serious plan to force every non-healthy adult to pay for unregulated catastrophic insurance while destroying Medicare and Medicaid has in common with the ACA and MA health care reform is the mandate. But the mandate is just an obvious requirement of any program that has guaranteed issue — that is, any serious health care reform that doesn’t perform the politically impossible task of eliminating the American insurance industry. Barring a level of subsidies that wasn’t forthcoming from Congress, guaranteed issue can’t work without a mandate — the alternatives, like Paul Starr’s proposal that adults who forgo insurance sign contracts to refuse emergency care health care benefits* for a given time period, were both politically impossible and, in my view, substantially worse on the merits than the mandate. The free rider problem is not, in fact, some unique insight on the part of Heritage Foundation hacks. Any comprehensive health care reform was going to take the shape of guaranteed issue with mandate, and other than that the ACA and the Heritage Foundation plan couldn’t be more different.

*UPDATE: As a commenter notes, Starr’s proposal would not have applied to emergency care, but only to any benefits of the law (including, presumably, COBRA or Medicaid.) I’ve corrected to reflect my error. I stand by my criticism of the plan as both politically unworkable and inferior to the mandate; refusing access to the market for people who lose employer-based coverage would be still be horrible, and if it didn’t apply to emergency care it would also deal much less effectively with the free rider problem. See also Cohn’s contemporaneous response.

The Jenny McCarthy Award

Today’s winner: Katie Couric.

Judy Rodgers

I was sad to read about the death of Judy Rodgers. The Zuni Cafe Cookbook has long been one of my favorites, and I’ve been able to visit the namesake restaurant several times (including on my honeymoon.)

Her signature recipe is for roast chicken with bread salad, which (sans pine nuts) I’ve had many times and it’s great. Tonight, though, we celebrated with my own favorite, pasta with spicy cauliflower and broccoli. I’m so confident you’ll like it that if you don’t your next year of LGM posts are free.

R.I.P.

The New Republican Platform: Life Begins at Conception, Ends at Birth, And is Resurrected by Incorporation

I’ve been waiting for Dahlia Lithwick to take on the argument that corporations can “exercise” religion (and hence can claim exemptions from laws that don’t even significantly burden the religious beliefs of their owners) for a while. Thankfully, she now has. And she has a definitive new addition to Barney Frank’s dictum that for Republicans life begins at conception and ends at birth:

But corporations aren’t America’s only new people. States and the U.S. Congress are also attempting to expand the definition of personhood in a different direction: Anti-abortion activists are attempting to redefine “personhood” to include the potential personhood of a fertilized egg. If the so-called personhood bills and ballot initiatives across the country succeed, a day-old zygote would have the same legal status as a person, with sweeping implications for criminal law, reproductive rights, and access to birth control.

So pause for a moment with me to ponder what it means that some of the greatest civil rights battles of our era are being fought to extend personhood into the weeks prior to viability and the years after incorporation? What does it mean for actual human “personhood”—as well as for reproductive rights and corporate control—that, if the far right succeeds in stretching these two legal fictions to their illogical extremes, American “personhood” will begin at conception, diminish somewhat at birth, and regain its force upon incorporation?

[Picture Charles Foster Kane clapping, only pretend that Susan Alexander had given a brilliant performance]

B. Spencer: Tacky American

When you’re online– posting, talking to people, sharing your opinion–it’s natural to want to put your best face forward. We want people to think we like  good food, cool music, and have tastefully-decorated homes. (Not mine, of course–my house is floor to ceiling early 80’s unicorn art.) In short, we want folks to think we’re neat, which is completely understandable. Not I. I thought I would switch things up and tell you exactly how gross and tacky I am. Enjoy!

Hi, my name is B. Spencer, and I’m a tacky American.

Admit it: you kinda want one now

• I drink artificially-flavored coffee from a pod.
• I like Snow Babies (no, really) unironically.
• I only use Aunt Jemima syrup on my pancakes. (No, I am not a troll.) Yes, I do like real maple syrup, but only in savory applications.
• I’ve watched daytime soaps my entire adult life.
• I like Christmas sweaters (again, unironically.)
• I have a Britney Spears song in my music library. I have two Avril Lavigne songs.
• I like to drink Lime-a-Ritas. (Doctored with real lime and margarita salt, but still…)

@ColinMSnider @scottekaufman So I guess we can say definitively that my son is not a troll. #UnimpressedwithPancakes pic.twitter.com/olF7t3Y4Hx

— bspencer (@vacuumslayer) December 2, 2013

Now, you know. I invite you to share your own brushes with tackiness, not because it will generate interesting conversation but because I’m plagued with insecurities I desperately want to feel better about myself.

The Affordable Care Act Is Not Remotely Similar to the Heritage Plan

As long-time readers know and new readers were reminded yesterday, I’ve long been intensely irritated by claims that the Affordable Care Act proves that Barack Obama is a hapless sellout because it was a “Republican plan.” The rather obvious problem with this line of argument is that any non-trivial number of Republicans have been willing to support the “Republican plan” when 1)massive veto-proof supermajorities of liberal Democrats put it on their desk, and 2)that’s it. Republican support for the plan might discredit it if any conservative Republicans ever wanted anything like it to pass, but of course they didn’t. The plan was a decoy, not a “Republican Plan,” so which think tank came up with it is neither here nor there.

But as stepped pryamids points out in comments, I’ve really been burying the lede. While aware that the Heritage Foundation plan was inferior, I’ve played along with the idea that the ACA was in some way comparable to the Heritage plan. But in fact, the two plans are not remotely comparable. Actually reading the famous policy document, it’s striking how little of relevance the plans have in common. Yes, both plans have a mandate, but since any means of comprehensive insurance that didn’t involve eliminating the health care industry was going to have some kind of mandate to prevent a death spiral in the insurance market, so in itself that doesn’t mean much. And this is a major issue, because that’s where the similarities end. As s.p. puts it:

The Heritage plan was an individual mandate for catastrophic coverage with a tax credit to help subsidize it. That’s pretty much it.

[...]

It’s like saying the EITC is a Republican plan because the Republicans proposed capital gains tax cuts and they’re both tax cuts.

And the Heritage plan is actually even worse than that. Where the ACA included a massive expansion of Medicaid, the Heritage plan essentially proposes to apply the principles of welfare “reform” to Medicaid, allowing states more “flexibility” (to reduce coverage) and allegedly helping the poor by eliminating state regulations requiring health insurance to have actual content. (In fairness, it does offer to give tax benefits to people who subsidize the health care of poorer relatives, so the many poor Americans with rich uncles will be in great shape!) It would have taxed health care benefits gained through employment as income, and therefore for all intents and purposes forced middle-class people into an individual market that for the non-wealthy would have offered nothing but crappy, largely unregulated catastrophic coverage. Oh, and it would have voucherized Medicare a la Paul Ryan.

To compare the ACA and the Heritage plan, in other words, is ludicrous. The ACA contains many long-standing liberal priorities — expanding Medicaid, regulating the health care industry, providing substantial subsidies for real insurance — that the Heritage plan manifestly does not. And the Heritage plan includes many horrible ideas that the ACA did not contain. But acknowledging the massive, fundamental differences between the ACA and the Potemkin Heritage plan — differences of kind, not of degree — makes it harder to advance the narrative that the flaws in the ACA result from Barack Obama’s abiding hatred of the very idea of federal intervention into the health care market. If Obama had actually proposed something like the Heritage plan, it would actually be fair to call him a neoliberal stooge. But he didn’t, and the differences between the Heritage plan and the ACA disprove the charge conclusively.

The greatest Mexican baseball player of all time

As a kid, I could fairly be called an obsessive baseball fan. Among many other useless pieces of information I could have told you Ted Williams’ lifetime batting average, home run total, number of batting titles, and other bits of arcana which were much more impressive to know in the days before Google. I owned a copy of The Science of Hitting. I learned, courtesy of Ball Four, that the main labeled by the Boston press (whose members he generally despised, and who generally returned the sentiment) employed a striking ritual when preparing to ply his craft:

In the bullpen tonight Jim Pagliaroni was telling us how Ted Williams, when he was still playing, would psyche himself up for a game during batting practice, usually early practice before the fans or reporters got there.

He’d go into the cage, wave his bat at the pitcher and start screaming at the top of his voice, “My name is Ted fucking Williams and I’m the greatest hitter in baseball.”

He’d swing and hit a line drive.

“Jesus H. Christ himself couldn’t get me out.”

And he’d hit another.

Then he’d say, “Here comes Jim Bunning, Jim fucking Bunning and that little shit slider of his.”

Wham!

“He doesn’t really think he’s gonna get me out with that shit.”

Blam!

“I’m Ted fucking Williams!”

Sock!

When I put aside childish things, I read some classic essays about the man, including Updike’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” and Richard Ben Cramer’s “What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?”

Here’s what I didn’t know about Ted Williams until today: he was half-Mexican (with some Basque heritage thrown in for good measure).

It’s something that didn’t come out until a month before Ted died in 2002, the fact that he was a Mexican-American. His mother was Mexican — [she] was born in Mexico — and her parents were born and raised there as well. He was embarrassed about this and afraid that the prejudice of the day would hurt his baseball career. Even though Mexicans didn’t figure as prominently as black ball players, nevertheless he was aware of the black prejudice and feared that it could hurt him. He was advised to keep this under wraps and he did. He always spoke rather contemptuously of his extended family on his mother’s side and referred to them as “the Mexicans” in not a nice way.

There was a very telling moment in 1939 after Williams had completed his rookie year with the Red Sox and had made an absolutely smashing debut — hit well over 300 and led the league in runs batted in — and he returned to San Diego the conquering hero and was met at the train station by a gaggle of 100 or so of the extended Mexican clan. Ted took one look at them from afar and beat a hasty retreat. He didn’t want to be seen with them.

Ted Williams was one of the most famous athletes in America for 20 years, and he had to put it mildly an adversarial relationship with what used to be called “the press” and is now the media. Yet he passed with complete success; nobody outed him.

A final note: Williams’ well-known acceptance speech when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1966 now becomes an even more interesting cultural moment:

Ballplayers are not born great. They’re not born great hitters or pitchers or managers, and luck isn’t the big factor. No one has come up with a substitute for hard work. I’ve never met a great player who didn’t have to work harder at learning to play ball than anything else he ever did. To me it was the greatest fun I ever had, which probably explains why today I feel both humility and pride, because God let me play the game and learn to be good at it.

The other day Willie Mays hit his five hundred and twenty second home run. (Note: Williams retired with 521.) He has gone past me, and he’s pushing, and I say to him, “Go get ‘em, Willie.” Baseball gives every American boy a chance to excel. Not just to be as good as someone else, but to be better. This is the nature of man and the name of the game. I hope that one day Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson will be voted into the Hall of Fame as symbols of the great Negro players who are not here only because they weren’t given the chance.

Green Lantern ACA Addendum

Armando asks a common question with respect to my post from this morning:

@taupe_hat @LemieuxLGM Well, could Obama have done anything different on ACA in your view? Should he have? I think it is a fair question.

— Armando (@armandodkos) December 3, 2013

Well, whether the ACA was literally the most that could have been obtained is unknowable. But I will say this:

• Of course Obama had agency.  It was because of him that health care reform was the top priority, and he certainly could have abandoned it in exchange for token reforms, as his chief of staff inter alia urged him to do after the election of Scott Brown.  Again, nobody thinks that the presidency is powerless.  The question is whether Obama could have done something to get a dozen+ conservative Democrats in the Senate to vote for progressive additions to the ACA they clearly didn’t support.
• It seems to me that given many decades of failure to pass comprehensive health reform, the burden of proof rests squarely on those who think that Obama could have gotten substantially more.  How, in concrete terms, is Obama getting Lieberman’s vote for a public option?  Then repeat for Nelson, Bayh, etc. etc.   (And, no, “end the filibuster” isn’t an answer, since there aren’t even 50 votes for that now.)
• In particular, any counterfactual must take into account that Bill Clinton tried the strategy most commonly favored by the ACA’s left critics (develop a plan, use public pressure to get Congress to pass it), and it was an utter catastrophe that set back health care reform for a generation.  Again, the burden of proof is one those who want to argue that Obama should have repeated this strategy rather than trying to do something different, especially since Obama’s actually, you know, worked.
• If you look at the comments thread, it’s instructive that the “Obama failed by getting unprecedented legislation passed” crowd can’t help assuming that Obama is a Westminster Prime Minister.  Did you know that Obama “let” Max Baucus take charge of the bill as a powerful Senate committee chairman?  Not if you understand anything about American politics.
• If you want me to take your counterfactuals seriously, it’s probably best to not characterize plans that are supported by Republicans only when supermajorities of liberal Democrats would pass them anyway as “Republican plans.”