Antidote to hysteria

Famously, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Only the meat in a wish sandwich comes without someone paying somewhere.

In any public policy debate, global warming included, cost is important. Paul Krugman reports this no-bullshit assessment of cap and trade:

If emission permits were auctioned off — as they should be — the revenue thus raised could be used to give consumers rebates or reduce other taxes, partially offsetting the higher prices. But the offset wouldn’t be complete. Consumers would end up poorer than they would have been without a climate-change policy.

But how much poorer? Not much, say careful researchers, like those at the Environmental Protection Agency or the Emissions Prediction and Policy Analysis Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Even with stringent limits, says the M.I.T. group, Americans would consume only 2 percent less in 2050 than they would have in the absence of emission limits. That would still leave room for a large rise in the standard of living, shaving only one-twentieth of a percentage point off the average annual growth rate.

The fun part is Krugman's twitting of those who call themselves free marketeers, in particular Newt Gingrich:

But if you really believe in the magic of the marketplace, you should also believe that the economy can handle emission limits just fine.

Bomb squad called to supermarket

Fruit case filled with boxes of some infernal device that looks a lot more like a cherry bomb than this:

We really have lost our minds. I've seen dog turds that look more like explosives. But at least the cops got to deploy their robot.

Click thumbnail for The Tech's report.

Bonus babies

Wall Street spends billions in bonuses for its mostly (entirely?) random top performers. What does billions of dollars buy? For their customers, not a goddamn thing. Their margin over the cold boring average is eaten up in taxes and in fees. Of course, fees are what the street actually cares about. They're playing with other people's money to enrich themselves. Sweet!

This of course is why scam artists investment professionals are so obsessed with three things:

• Lowering already low capital gains taxes
• Finding new "innovative" investment vehicles, many or most of which innovate only in sleight of hand with risk
• Deregulation
  

Conclusion: To a first approximation, there is no smart money.

The future grows out of today

MIT's curriculum is on line. There are big changes coming for higher education. They won't all be good, but they're coming.

Education is labor intensive. American colleges and universities deliver it via very highly trained and hence very expensive professors. They have already responded to this expense by adding an exploited middle tier of Ph.D. instructors who have no chance at tenure, no job security, and low pay for arduous hours - pretty much the condition of the rest of the American labor market in these days when every worker is expected to tolerate a much greater degree of risk than was true in the four decades after WWII.

Information delivery is a critical part of education. Those nostalgic for the allegedly golden age of McGuffey's Reader may think that's all there is to it, but there's also the more important aspect of learning how to use that information. Even in the humanities, it's not enough to memorize what the dead white guys said and wrote. It's also important to reason about that, to assess other voices, to compare and contrast, and then to generate the next set of questions and proposed answers.

Both these rough categories are communication, and telepresence technology more and more permits them to be done without sharing physical space. Most large corporations use telepresence every day, even if they do try to accomplish it on the cheap with commodity facilities such as phone conferences, video conferences, and desktop sharing.

Here are some possibilities:

• Many more low-residency programs - What's good for MFA programs in writing will work for the sciences as network bandwidth permits better sharing of virtual spaces.
• Exploitation of economies of scale - A lot more people can go to elite institutions if they don't need dorms or classrooms. This of course would mean a brutal shakeout of lesser institutions and the usual attendant reduction of variety.
• The further mean marketization of the academic life - If you want a career in education that can't be done remotely, and you're not sure you're among the intellectual elite, I'd recommend K-12 teaching or college tutoring that fills the gaps left by distance learning.
• More Internet instruction with an Indian accent - Phoenix University is working out the paradigm domestically, but there's no reason it can't be extended overseas. A population of a billion produces a lot of smart people, even if my experience with engineers educated in India suggests over-reliance on memorization and authority to the detriment of some aspects of critical thinking.
• Narrowly targeted training - Republican and business interests will try to exploit the economics to kill the independence and freedom of the academy.