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Those who chose a career in the academy in the 21st century are a foolhardy lot.  The job market for professors has shrunk while the expectations for tenure-track faculty have risen

The "adjunctificaion" of the academy is proceeding apace.

The phrase "publish or perish" still applies with a vengeance -- but so does the demand to be a dynamic teacher that reaches students.

The autocratic, pro-Western military government that took power in 1975 instigated limited economic liberalization. This enabled Bangladeshi entrepreneurs to take advantage of the Multifiber Arrangement, an international trade agreement on textiles and garments that placed export quotas on the emerging economies of East Asia in order to shield Western economies from competition. Very poor countries were exempt from the restrictions, and in the 1980s the new military elite of Bangladesh, hoping to capitalize on the cheap local labor, opened garment factories with the help of South Korean investors. Know-how soon spread, attracting more investment. Bangladesh is now the world’s second-largest exporter of apparel after China.

because Bangladesh’s banking sector and stock market are “not very much exposed to the world,” Muhith explained, the country has weathered global financial crises well, holding a G.D.P. growth rate at an average of 5 percent since 1990.

Globalization has arguably created a two-tier society in India: one worldly and plugged in, the other mired in medieval poverty. But it gave Bangladesh, which knew it was on the sidelines of modernity, a reason to develop the old-fashioned way: by industrializing to create low-level jobs for the masses

One of the most interesting recent political and policy developments is the involvement of Ron Unz in a major effort on behalf of a referendum to raise California’s minimum wage to $12 an hour by 2016.

The American Conservative (he served as publisher until recently), favor an increase in the minimum wage,

“We have all these low-wage workers who are getting $7.50, $8, or $9 an hour, and because they earn such small wages, the government subsidizes them with billions or tens of billions of dollars of social-welfare spending that comes from the taxpayer. It’s a classic example of businesses privatizing the benefits of their workers while socializing the costs

erotic capital is what economists call a “personal asset,” ready to take its place alongside economic, cultural, human and social capital. It is just (if not more) as important for social mobility and success.

Erotic capital goes beyond beauty to include sex appeal, charm and social skills, physical fitness and liveliness, sexual competence and skills in self-presentation, such as face-painting, hairstyles, clothing and all the other arts of self-adornment. Most studies capture only one facet of it: photographs measure beauty or sex appeal, psychologists measure confidence and social skills, sex researchers ask about seduction skills and numbers of partners.

men still rank sex as more important than women. Indeed, rocketing global demand for sexual activity of all kinds (including commercial sex, autoeroticism and erotic entertainments) has been far more pronounced among men than women.

Stimulus size is not the key factor in determining how quickly a country emerges from recession. The U.S. tried big, but is emerging slowly. The Germans tried small, and are recovering nicely.

the Germans have built on their advantages. They effectively support basic research and worker training. They have also taken brave measures to minimize their disadvantages. As an editorial from the superb online think tank e21 reminds us, the Germans have recently reduced labor market regulation, increased wage flexibility and taken strong measures to balance budgets.

American policy makers have done little to maximize their model’s natural advantages or address its problems. Indeed, they’ve only made the short-term thinking problem worse, with monetary, fiscal and home-ownership policies encouraging even more borrowing and consumption.

But while the ordering experience may not change, the labor market could feel an impact. During the Great Recession many consumers had to turn to McDonalds – one of the few employers still hiring – for employment.  McDonald’s itself recently held a “national hiring day” to fill 50,000 jobs company-wide. There may be some risk in rolling out a cashier-free system after touting the restaurant’s footprint as an employer.

What lies behind this trans-Atlantic policy paralysis? I’m increasingly convinced that it’s a response to interest-group pressure. Consciously or not, policy makers are catering almost exclusively to the interests of rentiers — those who derive lots of income from assets, who lent large sums of money in the past, often unwisely, but are now being protected from loss at everyone else’s expense.

the argument against helping the unemployed is framed in terms of economic risks: Do anything to create jobs and interest rates will soar, runaway inflation will break out, and so on. But these risks keep not materializing. Interest rates remain near historic lows, while inflation outside the price of oil — which is determined by world markets and events, not U.S. policy — remains low.

the only real beneficiaries of Pain Caucus policies (aside from the Chinese government) are the rentiers: bankers and wealthy individuals with lots of bonds in their portfolios.

Modern history teaches two great lessons about revolution: that revolutions are inevitable, and that a large majority of revolutions either fail or go bad.  Americans almost instinctively look at revolutions in terms of our own past: the 1688 Glorious Revolution that made Parliament more powerful than the King in  England, and the American Revolution that led in relatively short order to the establishment of a stable and constitutional government.

Most revolutions don’t work like this at all.  Many of them fail, with the old despots crushing dissent or making only cosmetic changes to the old system.  (This happened in Austria in 1848 and something very like it may be happening in Egypt today.)  Others move into radicalism, terror and mob rule before a new despot comes along to bring order — at least until the next futile and bloody revolutionary spasm.  That was France’s history for almost 100 years after the storming of the Bastille.  China, Russia and Iran all saw revolutions like this in the 20th century.

the countries that had ‘velvet’ revolutions shared a number of important characteristics.  They had or longed to have close political and cultural ties to the West.  They wanted to join NATO and the EU, and had a reasonable confidence of doing so sooner rather than later.  They could expect enormous amounts of aid and foreign direct investment if they continued along the path of democratic reform.  They lay on the ‘western’ side of the ancient division of Europe between the Orthodox east and the Catholic/Protestant homeland of the modern liberal tradition.

the professor is not just a disinterested pedagogue. As a dispenser of grades he is a gatekeeper to worldly success. And in that capacity professors face upward pressure from students ("I can't afford a B if I want to get into law school"); horizontal pressure from their colleagues, to which even Mansfield gave way; downward pressure from the administration ("If you want to fail someone, you have to be prepared for a very long, painful battle with the higher echelons," one professor told the Crimson); and perhaps pressure from within, from the part of them that sympathizes with students' careerism.

Not every class was so easy. Those that were tended to be in history and English, classics and foreign languages, art and philosophy—in other words, in those departments that provide what used to be considered the meat of a liberal arts education. Humanities students generally did the least work, got the highest grades, and cruised academically

the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick once hypothesized that most professors oppose capitalism because they consider themselves far smarter than boobish businessmen, and therefore resent the economic system that rewards practical intelligence over their own gifts. I'm inclined to think that such resentment—at least in money-drunk America—increasingly coexists with a deep inferiority complex regarding modern capitalism, and a need, however unconscious, to justify academic life in the face of the fantastic accumulation of wealth that takes place outside the ivory tower.

let's acknowledge that both candidates fudged, exaggerated, or flat-out lied on just about everything pertaining to foreign economic policy during last night's debate.  It was a truly bipartisan fib-fest.  I could go through the debate transcript line by line, but let's just hit the highlights.  At varous points, one or both of the candidates tried to convince undecided voters of the following:  1)  Energy independence is the cure for what ails the U.S. economy; 2)  The U.S. loses from trade with China, and tougher trade enforcement will fix that; 3)  Free trade with Latin America will create millions and millions of jobs; 4)  The only reason China is doing well comparatively is that it's keeping its currency undervalued; and finally 5)  Illegal immigration is threatening the American economy.  Let's inject a little reality here, shall we?  Repeat after me:  1)  Because most energy sources are traded in global markets, energy independence has zero effect on the economy (though there might be a few security dividends). 2)  The United States benefits a great deal from trade with China and the rest of the world. 3)  Perfect trade enforcement would have only a marginal impact on employment; 4)  China's currency interventions have been slowing down for much of 2012.  Literally. 5)  Illegal immigration into the United States "has been in reverse for several years."

The biggest whoppers in last night's U.S. presidential debate

After spending the past year designing  and making this course, however, let me say that those who believe that it will be easy to "scale up" existing lecture courses into the online world are kidding themselves.

Tuna and Moskovitz were in their mid-20s in 2010 when they became the youngest couple ever to sign on to the Giving Pledge, the campaign started by Bill Gates and Warren E. Buffett to encourage the world’s billionaires to commit to giving away most of their wealth.

They had little experience with philanthropy, but they believed that the bulk of the money Moskovitz had made — estimated to be $8.1 billion by Forbes — should be returned to society in their lifetimes.

they have narrowed their interests to four major “buckets”: U.S. policy, global catastrophic risks, international aid and science. They plan to announce their first major gifts in early 2015 and eventually hope to scale up to give away hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

the International Agency for Research on Cancer declared that glyphosate, the active ingredient in the widely used herbicide Roundup, probably causes cancer in humans. Two insecticides, malathion and diazinon, were also classified as “probable” carcinogens by the agency

an announcement by the Food and Drug Administration that new breeds of genetically engineered potato and apple are safe to eat. Which they probably are, as are the genetically engineered papayas we’ve been eating for some time. In fact, to date there’s little credible evidence that any food grown with genetic engineering techniques is dangerous to human health

unlike Europeans, Canadians, Australians and others, we don’t subscribe to the precautionary principle, which maintains that it’s better to prevent damage than repair it.

years of predictive failure haven’t stopped the orthodoxy from tightening its grip on the party. What’s going on?

the Friedman compromise — trash-talking government activism in general, but asserting that monetary policy is different — has proved politically unsustainable. You can’t, in the long run, keep telling your base that government bureaucrats are invariably incompetent, evil or both, then say that the Fed, which is, when all is said and done, basically a government agency run by bureaucrats, should be left free to print money as it sees fit.

Politicians who lump it all together, who warn darkly that the Fed is inflating away your hard-earned wealth and enabling giveaways to Those People, are always going to have the advantage in intraparty struggles.

you might have expected the debacle of George W. Bush’s presidency — a debacle not just for the nation, but for the Republican Party, which saw Democrats both take the White House and achieve some major parts of their agenda — to inspire some reconsideration of W-type policies.

What we’ve seen instead is a doubling down, a determination to take whatever didn’t work from 2001 to 2008 and do it again, in a more extreme form.

Big tax cuts tilted toward the wealthy were the Bush administration’s signature domestic policy. They were sold at the time as fiscally responsible, a matter of giving back part of the budget surplus America was running when W took office. (Alan Greenspan infamously argued that tax cuts were needed to avoid paying off federal debt too fast.)

"The problem's not solved because of this accord, but make no mistake, the Paris agreement establishes the enduring framework the world needs to solve the climate crisis," the president said late Saturday in a speech from the White House's Cabinet Room. "It creates the mechanism, the architecture, for us to continually tackle this problem in an effective way."

But who benefits from the new "architecture" the accord creates? And what will the deal cost for others?

On its face, the plan agreed to on Saturday affects just about every nation. It requires countries to limit the rise in global average temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. It also sets an even more ambitious goal to slow the warming further -- down to just 1.5 degrees Celsius. (In the years since global industrialization, the world's temperature has already risen 1 degree Celsius.)

Maybe the question that we should be asking is not what killed liberalism, but rather, what can we learn from liberalism’s long story of persistence—and how can we apply those insights in order to help liberalism write a new story for our own time.

Liberalism is not a doctrine founded on a sacred text, like Communism. It is something more like a set of predispositions—a faith in individuals and their capacity for growth, a tempered optimism that expects progress but recoils before utopian dreams, a belief in open debate and the possibility of persuasion, an insistence upon secularism in the public realm, an orientation towards civil rights and civil liberties.

liberalism has a core, and that is the right of the individual to stand apart

Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump's demand that new tariffs be slapped on steel and aluminum imports has spooked markets, prompted his chief economist's resignation, rattled major US allies and widened a rift with establishment Republicans.

"A strong steel and aluminum industry are vital to our national security -- absolutely vital. Steel is steel, you don't have steel you don't have a country," Trump said Thursday, adding that foreign imports and dumping have led to "shuttered plants and mills" and the laying off of "millions of workers," overstating the job losses in those industries, which his own adviser put at under 100,000.

Coming on the same day that 11 US allies -- but not the US -- sign a landmark Asia-Pacific trade agreement, the move on tariffs only underscores Trump's embrace of the protectionist policies he believes helped him win the presidency.

implicated in these and other maladies is the breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture.

That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

They could be followed by people of all backgrounds and abilities, especially when backed up by almost universal endorsement.

Smartphones changed the advertising game completely. It took only a few years for billions of people to have an all-purpose content delivery system easily accessible sixteen hours or more a day. This turned media into a battle to hold users’ attention as long as possible.

And it left Facebook and Google with a prohibitive advantage over traditional media: with their vast reservoirs of real-time data on two billion individuals, they could personalize the content seen by every user. That made it much easier to monopolize user attention on smartphones and made the platforms uniquely attractive to advertisers. Why pay a newspaper in the hopes of catching the attention of a certain portion of its audience, when you can pay Facebook to reach exactly those people and no one else?

Wikipedia defines an algorithm as “a set of rules that precisely defines a sequence of operations.” Algorithms appear value neutral, but the platforms’ algorithms are actually designed with a specific value in mind: maximum share of attention, which optimizes profits.

For years, both Republican and Democratic administrations argued that the gravitational pull of U.S.-dominated international institutions, trade flows, even pop culture, would gradually reshape the People’s Republic, resulting in a moderate new China with which the United States and its Asian allies could comfortably coexist.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has just engineered his potential elevation to president for life. This is the latest proof — along with China’s rampant theft of U.S. intellectual property, its military buildup in the South China Sea and Xi’s touting of Chinese-style illiberal state capitalism as “a new option for other countries” — that the powers-that-be in Beijing have their own agenda, impervious to U.S. influence.

If there had been more such candor earlier, we might not have President Trump, whose rise owes much to a public backlash against the perceived costs — especially in jobs lost to Chinese imports — of the erstwhile bipartisan China policy consensus.