WPA spending as a function of population.

Spending on WPA projects as a function of state population. Mainly for fun, and so I could learn me some graphical commands in R, but I thought y’all might like to see it.

Suggestions about improving the presentation are, as ever, welcome.

If you want to pursue the question of where New Deal money went overall, you might look at

Wallis, John Joseph. “The Political Economy of New Deal Spending Revisited, Again: With and without Nevada.” Explorations in Economic History 35, no. 2 (April 1998): 140-170.

Also, more generally on the allocation of public works expenditures,

Smith, Jason Scott. Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933-1956. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

The real world does not work like this.

The story of the plane non-crash keeps getting more and more improbable.   First we have a plane lose both engines on take-off due to avianterrorism.  Then we have a pilot who misses the city, misses the bridge, and lands it in the water without breaking the plane, made possible by his skills and the hundreds of thousands of man-hours that have gone into improving plane safety.  Passengers who all get off of the plane.  The guy in the exit row who read the card.  (Don’t forget praise for the flight attendants.) Passengers none of whom drown or freeze to death.   Perfect rescue response complete with plucky NYC commuter ferries.

And now we find out that the pilot not only was superbly trained, but had been an accident investigator and a glider pilot.

This was really a test-run for a new Hollywood blockbuster, right?  Reality is punking us.

Update: Teaser trailer due to Coast Guard.

Remembering Martin Luther King (again).

[Author's note: I hope you'll forgive me for recycling a post from last year. I'm doing so because MLK, Jr., had he not been gunned down on April 4, 1968, would have been 80 years old today. And while I don't want to let the occasion pass without comment, I'm too tired and busy to think of anything new to say.]

The Martin Luther King of American memory serves this nation as the safe Civil Rights leader. When shrunk to fit within the confines of soundbite history, the pages of a textbook, or the scenes of a primary school pageant, King is cleansed of anger, of ego, of sexuality, and even, perhaps, of some of his humanity.

Counterpoised against the ostensibly violent Malcolm X, who supposedly would have forced America to change its ways by using “any means necessary,” King comes off as a cuddly moderate — a figure who loved everyone, enemies included, even whites who subjugated black people. Although there’s some truth lurking behind this myth, there was more (about both X and King) to the story: complexities and nuances that escape most popular recollections. Martin Luther King, no matter how people remember him now, was not nearly so safe as most of us believe.

On March 12, 1968, less than a month before he was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee, King visited the wealthy Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe. Largely white, Grosse Pointe was — and to some extent still is — a bastion of establishment power. By that point in his career, King had embraced issues that moved well beyond the struggle against de jure segregation in the South. He had begun focusing most of his energy on inequality nationwide — de facto issues of poverty, job discrimination, fair housing, and, as Matthew Yglesias notes, the Vietnam war.

“Molasses, waist deep”

Ninety years ago today, a 50-foot tall vat of molasses collapsed suddenly in the North End of Boston, sending a 15-foot tidal wave of syrup into the streets. The accident, which took place along the Charles River waterfront just north of Commercial Street, sent more than two million gallons rushing forth at 35 miles per hour, carrying a force of 2 tons per square foot as it washed across the North End Paving Yard. The Boston Post, mixing several culinary metaphors, described the horrific scene the next day.

Like eggshells it crushed the buildings of the North End yard of the city’s paving division… To the north it swirled and wiped out practically all of Boston’s only electric freight terminal. Big steel trolley freight cars were crushed as if eggshells, and their piled-up cargo of boxes and merchandise minced like so much sandwich meat . . . .

The sight that greeted the first of the rescuers on the scene is almost indescribable in words. Molasses, waist deep, covered the street and bubbled about in the wreckage. Here and there struggled a form — whether it was an animal or a human being it was impossible to tell. Only an upheaval, a thrashing about in the sticky mess, showed where any life was. Horses died like so many flies on sticky fly paper.

In the wave of molasses and the vacuum created in its wake, a section of Boston’s elevated train track was destroyed and a train car thrown into the air; several buildings were wrecked, including Firehouse 31, whose collapse trapped a firefighter named George Layhe was trapped underneath the building. Though he managed to keep his head above the molasses for several hours, Layhe eventually lost consciousness and drowned. In the end 21 people lost their lives, crushed or asphyxiated by the most common form of sweetener in the United States at the time. Most were ordinary laborers. Several of the bodies were too battered and glazed to be properly identified. Nearly 200 other Bostonians were injured in the catastrophe. Of the 20 horses that perished in the molasses wave, several had to be shot because they could not be extracted from the goo.

United States Industrial Alcohol, the company that owned the faulty vat, tried to blame the accident on anarchist saboteurs, an accusation that would have been plausible if the tank had not been famously defective to those who lived and worked in its vicinity. Though it was less than four years old when it gave way, the vat had been hastily assembled in 1915 to facilitate the production of industrial alcohol. With the United States escalating it munitions shipments to Britain, Canada and France, USIA and its Boston subsidiary, the Purity Distilling Company, stood to gather enormous profits so long as the war endured; facing competition from major weapons manufacturers like du Pont, Aetna and Hercules, however, USIA needed a tank of its own in Boston, and the ill-fated Commercial Street project was the result.

By 1918, the structure creaked and groaned like a foghorn whenever it was filled, and its leaks were well known to local residents, many of whom sent their children over to scoop up the pools of molasses that drizzled from at least a dozen places along the seams at the base of the structure. Isaac Gonzales, an employee of USIA, had been haunted by nightmares about the tank’s collapse for well over a year. When Gonzales urged his supervisors to do something about the problem, they shrugged off his warnings and insinuated that further complaints might cost him his job.

Litigation over the next several years gave the owners of the molasses facility a wider platform from with to insist that anarchists — Italian immigrants specifically — had instigated the disaster. Though nativist hysteria during those years sowed more than its share of misfortune, liability for the Great Molasses Flood was unmistakable. By 195, USIA had settled lawsuits amounting to more than $600,000.

Courses That Get Bad Evaluations

Following up on the discussion of teaching evaluations, I thought I’d mention courses that tend, in my experience, to be more prone to getting bad course evaluations. By “prone to getting bad course evaluations,” I mean that these courses, independent of how well they are taught, or how well the students retain the information, are nonetheless likely to be low-rated for other reasons. Today, I’d like to introduce gateway courses

There are more undergraduates planning to go to medical school than there are openings in said medical schools. Institutions don’t want to graduate a lot of pre-med majors who will never be able to get into an onshore medical school. The result, at many undergraduate institutions, is the gateway course. This is a course, coming early on in the student’s undergraduate existence, that is designed to weed out people who aren’t really committed to becoming doctors, or who don’t have the skills necessary to thrive in medical school. Some professor is given the job of designing a course so unrelentingly hard, so horrifically evil, so sadistically impossible to get a good grade, that all the excited young first years whose mommy and daddy had dreamed of them being a top-flight surgeon suddenly discover the wonders of Public Policy.

Teaching a dead horse.

1. No worries, dude.

2. That said, something interesting from the A&M paper: (via Alterdestiny via LGM):

Karan Watson, Texas A&M’s dean of faculties and associate provost, admitted that the bonus program has shortcomings, including a disadvantage to professors such as Loudder. It’s also more likely that the instructor of a fun elective is going to get higher ratings than someone who teaches a mandatory class, Watson said.

But the fundamental purpose of this program, she said, is to measure student satisfaction, not teaching effectiveness.

Dudes, even they admit this isn’t about assessing teaching effectiveness.  Can we stop the charade?

3.  In Ezra’s second post on the matter he made an offhand remark to the effect that the reasonably well-known correlation between being hot and getting good evaluations might not be entirely pernicious, as “attractive” could be a shorthand for “charismatic.”

I am skeptical, because the good evals also seem to track gender, race, and nationality.  Curiously, attractive women don’t score as well as attractive men; I suspect this is because what counts as attractive for a woman feeds into the perception of the woman as ornamental and cute, especially when the woman is younger.  What a bubble! Certainly not an expert in the subject like the tall male rakish young prof over there.

Race ends up affecting evals in a predictable way, as does nationality.  While suffering through a section where the prof or TA  has an indecipherable accent can be hellish, in my experience student complaints start about as soon as the TA has a non-standard American accent.  (Unless it’s British.)

Now, these are all minor forms of bias, and they’re hard to screen out.  But that’s another reason subjective evaluations shouldn’t be the primary method of evaluating teaching.  Here are some more.

Who’s tribunaling whose what to whom here?

Yesterday, I was reminded of the odious John Ziegler, for whom David Foster Wallace’s suicide was a once-in-a-lifetime self-promotional opportunity. “Which act offended me more?” I asked myself. Ziegler attacking Wallace’s “Host” the day his death was announced, or the anonymous student Horowitizing about grades in a professor’s memorial?

Offense being an unlimited resource, I decided not to choose. The desire never to waste brain on John Ziegler again factored heavily into my decision, but then I read the Times and learned that the world conspires against me. Want more proof? Click around that very-professional-from-the-look-of-it-website and you land in my new least favorite place, where you learn that

[t]he Governor’s measured, rational and accurate attempts to correct the historical record about the basis for which a Presidential election was decided were “reported” by the left as being “whiny,” “catty” and “delusional.” Folks, there’s a reason why there’s such a thing as a war crimes tribunal; some things you just have to get to the bottom of.

Finally, a prominent-ish conservative who understands the need for a war crimes tribunal—wait, what?

The fallacy of we-must-do-something

Ezra responds! And he thinks I’m eric!   But never mind that.

Ezra’s response:

• Sure, it’s true that students reward easy graders and attractive professors.  But presumably one can also score good evals by teaching well, so profs can do that. And so, A&M should try it, and if it doesn’t work out, they should remove the prize.
• My anecdata about how profs don’t care about teaching balance out your anecdata, so neener.  (I paraphrase.)

My response to the response:

• No, no.  Look, there’s a problem that I’m sure you’ve seen before in other areas.  It’s the problem where meeting the measurement is mistaken for improvement.  Here’s an example: I once worked at a fast food joint that had the goal of reducing wait times in drive-through.  This was monitored on the computer system; when one finished with a customer, one “served off” the order and it recorded the time.  Then management was told that times were too long, and they needed to show an improvement.  The predictable result:  shift managers served off the orders before they were complete.   This led to a worse result:  longer lines, and people being confused about which order was being filled, more mistakes.  Now, we could have all worked harder, and improved times just by being faster!  But it was far easier to meet the requirement by pushing a button.  Similarly, if profs can win a prize for having high student evaluations they can do so by providing a rigorous and stimulating syllabus, paying careful attention to every student, writing long and caring comments on their written work.   Or the profs can ease up the grading, make exams multiple choice, and tell funny stories.     Moreover — and this is the more serious criticism –  there’s no way to tell whether this prize “works.”  It’s not meant for that; it’s meant to say “we value teaching.”  That is not the same as creating a system where good teaching is valued, and it’s wrong to treat it as such.
• Be careful not to confuse griping about a job (Ezra’s anecdote) with failing to care about a job (Ezra’s conclusion.)  Plenty of academics gripe.  So do doctors, lawyers, nurses, roustabouts, elementary school teachers, office workers, managers, actors, musicians.  People gripe about their jobs.

Much cooler than the church sign generator

Seriously. Who says the internet is useless?

“I’ll just rework it later into some other sort of example like a pile of rocks or something.”

I heart Plato.

(Your mileage may vary.)

Testing to the teach?

Even granting for the sake of argument*, both of Klein’s premises, viz., that university professors do not care about teaching, and that universities are structured not to reward good teaching, this proposal strikes me as a bad idea.  It’s not that it’s unfair; it’s that student evaluations reflect not the quality of instruction, but factors such as easy grading, and whether the professor is attractive.

Providing a handsome reward for good student evaluations isn’t going to give professors an incentive to care about teaching; it’s going to give them an incentive to care about whether they get good student evaluations.   There is not necessarily a lot of overlap. See:  NCLB, call center metrics, etc.

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*I’d agree with the second, but not the first.  Plenty of professors care about teaching and do a good job; it’s just that it won’t matter a hill of beans when it comes time for tenure evaluations.

Boxers: Missionary Murdered in China

For an explanation of the following, see this.

In the New York Times in early January 1900, China appeared several times, in a number of roles. There was China, the state, much fought over by the imperial powers of the world, ancient, decayed, helpless to resist, and ripe for exploitation. There was China, the nation, a subject of fascination and dismay, whose people lived lives of squalor amid the elegant splendor of thousands of years of history. There was the actual China, in some ways the least interesting of all from the Times’ perspective, where real things happened to real people.

The Chinese state emerged as a helpless pawn which the western powers moved back and forth to suit. China itself became a stage in which plays not of its writing were acted out. Thus on January 13, 1900, an article appeared talking of war between Russia and Japan over Russian influence in northern China and Korea. Japan, the Times confidently asserted, have “recently given an order in England for 100,000 suits of warm Winter clothing for Japanese soldiers in preparation for a campaign” to prevent “Russian ascendancy in Northern China.” China’s wishes were simply irrelevant and beyond consideration or mention.[1]

And yet China was of great interest as a nation. The same paper that ignored China altogether in its consideration of international actors had published a week earlier a laudatory review of a book about Chinese society, Village Life in China. “That wonderful people…this great race” was how the Times referred to the Chinese, with their “numerous admirable qualities.” China as a nation was portrayed not only as worthy of study but simply too big and complex to be comprehensible. There are several interesting tensions in the article. China’s complexity and history was held in explicit counterpoise to its current degraded condition. China, the article made clear, may have had a deeper history (deeper implicitly than America’s) but its people lived in poverty. Chinese society had “many disabilities” which “retard [its] advancement in modern civilization.” The book suggested that only “Christianity in its best form is the only agency which will cure the defects which exist,” though the review article, interestingly, is quick to disavow (at least partially) that conclusion by saying that “the reader must not imagine that this volume is a missionary report.” [2]

The only article with specific people was the shortest. “Missionary Murdered in China,” announced a Times story of January 5th. “The Rev. Mr. Brooks of the Church Missionary Society…was captured…and murdered Dec. 3 by members of a seditious society called ‘Boxers,’ who have been active lately, destroying many villages and killing native Christians. The Governor of the province had dispatched a force of cavalry to the scene of the disturbances, but the soldiers arrived too late to save Mr. Brooks’s life.” [3]

The article was spare, with no details about the killing except the date. It assumed that the reader would have no idea who the Boxers were, introducing them in quick detail and positioning them as anti-Christian. The Chinese government was portrayed as friendly, if ineffectual, and there was little in the way of positioning the situation, with no real emphasis even on the obvious storyline of a “seditious” group moving from attacking “native” Christians to a western one. Someone had been murdered in a far-off place: important enough to mention in the paper, but not important enough for much elaboration or emphasis.

Quartered safe out ’ere.

Everyone knows that Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (a) isn’t very good and (b) is largely borrowed from/an homage to Gunga Din.

Now, it is almost as widely assented that Gunga Din is good, or at least not very bad. Why is this so?

Partly, I think, this is because it was made in the 1930s, instead of set in the 1930s; set in the c19, a story about British imperial rule over India and crackdown on Thuggee makes some sense. Whereas the same story set in the 1930s (hi, Gandhi) and made in the 1980s, doesn’t.

Partly I think this is because, well, even if you don’t think Cary Grant is obviously cooler than Harrison Ford, you must concede that Victor McLaglen and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. are cooler than Willie and Short Round.

But here is my question: Gunga Din is actually not much based on “Gunga Din”. What is it based on/ripped off from? Partly Soldiers Three, I gather, but is that all of it?

And how is it that the Wikipedia page on Gunga Din omits to mention the Beatles’ Help (which is also very good, or at least not very bad) among its descendants?

Finally, we should note that “Gunga Din” gives this post its title, in a phrase that George MacDonald Fraser used for his memoirs of World War II—in case you thought he was funning you with Flashman’s value system, he wasn’t.

Our work isn’t done just yet.

A great injustice is brewing here, as jesus general had the lead when last I looked. So please, go vote for our friends at bitchphd. (Today is the last day to do so.)

Update: B lost. By 30 votes. And it’s all your fault.

Not quite the Enola Gay controversy.

TPM reports that Senator Bernie Sanders (Pinko, Maple Syrupville) is asking the Smithsonian Institution to change the caption beneath its portrait of George W. Bush (rugged, rough-hewn, repugnant). The caption apparently includes the line, “the attacks on September 11, 2001, that led to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

Sanders, in a letter to the Smithsonian, takes issue with this formulation:

When President Bush and Vice President Cheney misled our country into the war in Iraq, they certainly cited the attacks on September 11, along with the equally specious claim that Iraq possessed vast arsenals of weapons of mass destruction. The notion, however, that 9/11 and Iraq were linked, or that one “led to” the other, has been widely and authoritatively debunked … Might I suggest that a reconsideration of the explanatory text next to the portrait of President Bush is in order[?]

I think I understand Sanders’s broader point here. In the coming years, we’re likely to see endless instances in which Republican factotums will try to recast the events leading to the second Gulf War in a heroic light. If we consider the captioning of the Bush portrait as one of the first skirmishes in this coming struggle, Sanders’s position seems entirely laudable. Especially so considering the terrain on which it’s being fought. The Smithsonian is among our most important national public spaces. In this view, ceding ground on the national Mall — allowing neoconservative fantasies to be carved into stone within the Smithsonian — might be construed as a first step in surrendering control of the official memory of the last eight years.

Still, I wonder: is it unreasonable to suggest, as the Smithsonian’s captions does, that the attacks of September 11 led, albeit indirectly, to the conflict in Iraq? Put another way, it seems clear that there was no substantive link between the 9/11 attackers and Saddam Hussein. But fabricated ties between the two nevertheless formed an important part of President Bush’s spurious case for war. The caption, then, seems right enough (strictly speaking, at least) to pass muster, even if the impulse that Sanders apparently sees lurking behind it merits a stout challenge.

The long walk back to the real world.

How do conservatives reconcile their cultural tastes with their partisan politics? I don’t mean generally, because generally the answer is they don’t think about their media consumption any more than your average liberal. I mean specifically, that is, when they do consider how the media they consume intersects with the beliefs they profess, what happens? Thanks to Andrew Breitbart, we now have a daily glut of valuable insight into what it is to be a conservative for whom music, literature and film don’t nadir after Beethoven, Shakespeare and Bogart. Admittedly, some of the revelations are old hat, as with Breitbart’s confession of how certain conservatives really feel about the working poor:

Whoever cast the Boston grotesques that littered the film, my hat’s off to you. These profoundly ugly people really created a backdrop that made you want to root for the kid not to be found and brought back to her natural origins.

But most of Big Hollywood is so awesomely counter-intuitive Walter Benn Michaels wouldn’t touch it with your ten-foot pole. Exhibit A: Evan Sayet’s post on Bruce Springsteen’s secret conservatism, in which he claims

that, while Springsteen the multimillionaire, rock star with the mansion in Beverly Hills may be a Liberal, Bruce Springsteen the poet is one-hundred percent Republican.

Those of you currently reading Dante in your sophomore English classes take note: Sayet someone out. Not that I need to tell you this, but the Commedia is written by Dante the Man about Dante the Pilgrim as narrated by Dante the Poet. The Poet is the fiction’s conceit—the character who remembers and recalls what happened after he found himself per una selva oscura—and is not to be treated coextensive with Dante the Man. I invoke Dante here because Springsteen, like Dante, is frequently confused for his narrators by people who should know better. No one reads “Caliban upon Setebos” and mistakes the theological musings of Prospero’s deformed manservant for a definitive statement of Browning’s philosophy; whereas with Springsteen, every word his narrators utter is an expression of his personal beliefs even when he opens with a lyric like “[m]y name is Joe Roberts.”

Nutshell.

This graph, from David Beckworth, is pretty hilarious. It’s unfair, but who minds unfair?

Thanks to commenter, uh, David Beckworth, for pointing this out.

I think what this picture best illustrates is the peril of getting drawn into a debate over the recovery question and the recovery question alone. The New Deal did a lot more than just set about a plan for recovery. For one thing, it saved some considerable number of people from starving, which is a nice thing. For another, it gave us a significantly reformed system of regulating economic downturns: a re-drawn Federal Reserve System, the FDIC, the SEC (which, prior to its gutting, was a pretty good thing), Social Security (which includes not only old-age but also unemployment insurance), and a variety of other similar measures. For yet another, it set about hauling the South out of poverty—a project at which nobody had succeeded despite considerable effort since the Civil War. So it was a lot more than just a recovery program.

But also, thinking just of the recovery program, I guess I think this graph isn’t so terrible at illustrating what I think we ought to notice: there was a deep, deep hole to climb out of in 1933, and the rate of climb was pretty quick. Could you really, realistically, expect much quicker, as broken as things were?

One question for David: what numbers did you use to establish trend? Did you include 1928-9, or just 1923-7 (which is one of the methodological disputes here)?

And one further point: the person who really should be on the list with Krugman, Sirota, and me, is the currently-rather-important Christina Romer. Probably also Gauti Eggertson, of the New York Fed, come to think of it.

A present for me!

Exhibit; Sentence.  I love this list.

Advantage: Swedish Chef.

Candidates should be no more than 15 inches high at the withers.

My first thought was that this proposal is beyond bizarre.  My second thought is it’s beyond bizarre, but worth kicking around a bit because it hits on some interesting issues about the profession.

So, there’s a perception that academic pedigree, i.e., where one did one’s Ph.D. and with whom one worked, particularly who wrote one letters of recommendation, matters disproportionately much to search committees, to the detriment of equally good but less prestigious candidates.  And there’s a stickiness problem, because it is commonly believed that one’s first job sets the course of the rest of one’s career, meaning that if it’s true that pedigree matters too much, there are plenty of people not getting good jobs their first time out, and having no real way to recover.

Portmore’s solution: candidates should submit blind dossiers, including blind letters of recommendation.

I think this is a bad suggestion on both practical and theoretical grounds.