The MBA is taking America down

Bloggers are weighing in on the worthlessness of the MBA. Here's one. I think it's one of the components of the trinity of disaster that academia has imposed on America. The other two are diversity and Colleges of Education.

Student Loan Debt -- Good or Bad?

Two recent articles in the WSJ and at a CNN blog illustrate the role of debt in modern life. In the WSJ article "With this Debt I Wed Thee" the author makes a good distinction:

Good debt: a mortgage on an affordable house; a loan on an affordable car; student loans to pay for a college degree. In effect, good debt improves your life permanently.

Bad debt: auto leases, since they generally finance cars you otherwise can't afford; home-equity loans or lines of credit, which too often fund discretionary purchases; any consumer expenses for which you allow the balance to roll over from month to month. In effect, bad debt only improves your lifestyle temporarily.

The CNN blogger is a recent grad saddled with student loan debt, over $100,000 studying an unspecified major that supposedly allowed her to obtain her position. She does mention that she knew her career prospects would yield low pay. It's clear that she and commentators on her blog are asking for a bailout. To what extent should society accommodate this behavior? The adage that student loan debt is a good one is in fact a fallacy. It's simple to weigh the costs -- does the degree allow for the income to pay off such debt? If not, then it's a no go. This stuff about a college degree creating well-rounded citizens is overrated. If you were take two groups of people send one off to college, the other to work or the military, you'd find the latter more mature and able to assume the responsibility of citizenry. College loan debt can be bad debt, as many use these loans for precisely for temporary improvement of lifestyle, i.e. postponement of adult responsibilities and hedonism with the pretensions of scholarly pursuits.

Is California Going Bust?

Looks like the reverse of the 1930's dust bowl where people fled the heartland for California.

From Forbes magazine:

Is California Going Bust?
Matt Woolsey 04.13.09, 12:00 AM ET

There has been many a time in California's history when it seemed to outsiders to be barreling toward a cliff and to insiders as a place for unbounded optimism. A favorite Silicon Valley bumper sticker says, "Dear God, one more bubble before I die."

That optimism is being sorely tested. Statewide unemployment, at 10.1%, is well above the national average of 8%. Per capita income growth, which used to be above average, is now lagging. In the last year home prices fell 35% in San Francisco, 30% in San Jose and 27% in San Diego, according to Radar Logic, a New York real estate derivatives firm. Half of the home sales in Los Angeles are from banks dumping foreclosed properties at steep discounts.

Have you noticed more Ponzi schemes in the news?

The king of the recent Ponzi schemes is of course Bernard Madoff ($50 billion). But I've noticed that many more mini-Madoffs are appearing in the news. Here are a few: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. Out of these R. Allen Stanford ($8 billion) comes closest to Madoff. Have there been more than usual coming out of this latest bubble, or have these types always been there preying on the naive and/or greedy? Madoff's victims could hardly be called naive, but were they greedy or lazy?

And what about the mother of all Pozni schemes? This CNN piece doesn't think it's a Ponzi scheme. It's wrong

Snopes on what Democrats were saying about Iraqi WMD's

I got into a discussion with a Steve Sailor reader at one of the blog comment forums. Basically he was offering 20/20 hindsight, arm chair quarterbacking insights on W's Iraq invasion. Ignoring WMD's the invasion was morally justifiable based solely the numbers of Iraqi civilians were killing during the 1991-2003 sanctions period. Wikipedia has a good article on this. With W's invasion the sanctions are gone and the killing for the most part has stopped. The blog commenter went on to say that we should have just lifted the sanctions altogether ignoring Saddam Hussein's behavior. How possible was that? Check out the comments made by prominent Democrats, pre-invasion at Snopes.

Samuelson on socialized medicine and the coming Medicare/Social Security Crisis

Robert Samuelson has two columns that do a good job of the insanity of Obama's and the voter's choices.

Obama's Unhealthy Choices:

"What really drives health spending, the study finds, is that Americans
receive more costly medical services than other peoples do, and pay more for
them. On a population-adjusted basis, the number of CT scans in 2005 was 72
percent higher in the United States than in Germany; U.S. reimbursement rates
were four times higher. Knee replacements were 90 percent more frequent than in
the average wealthy country and are growing rapidly. In 2005, there were 750,000 knee and hip replacements, up 70 percent in five years, reports the journal Health Affairs."

In an October 22, 2008 WaPo column he has this:

Young Voters Get Mad

"You're being played for chumps. Barack Obama and John McCain want your votes, but they're ignoring your interests. You face a heavily mortgaged future. You'll pay Social Security and Medicare for aging baby boomers. The needed federal tax increase might total 50 percent over the next 25 years. Pension and health costs for state and local workers have doubtlessly been underestimated. There's the expense of decaying infrastructure -- roads, bridges, water pipes. All this will squeeze other crucial government services: education, defense, police. "

"Obama's your favorite candidate (by 64 percent to 33 percent among 18- to
29-year-olds, according to the latest Post-ABC News poll)."

"Click on the Obama video. You'll see some world-class pandering. There are
three basic ways of reducing the costs of Social Security and Medicare: increase
eligibility ages; trim benefits; and require recipients to pay more for their
Medicare benefits (higher premiums, co-payments or deductibles). In his talk,
Obama effectively rejected all three. "

Why would young voters go against their own interests? Perhaps it's form of generational altruism, knowing in the end they'll take the lumps (huge). I think the answer is simpler than that - they're woefully ignorant of finances and purpose of state-hood. They believe they're voting for security (theirs) when actually they're voting for the financial equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. We'll see in the future that the purpose of state-hood is to provide for an orderly society and not guaranteed financial security.

Delinquent Mortgages Set to Nearly Double in 2009

From WSJ:

The number of consumers with delinquent mortgages is poised to almost double by the end of next year, hitting its highest level in at least 16 years, according to a leading credit bureau. TransUnion LLC, which analyzed about 27 million consumer records in its database, predicted that the proportion of consumers with mortgages that are 60 days or more past-due will hit 7.17% in the fourth quarter of 2009.
That would be the highest level reached since the Chicago credit bureau -- which is releasing the data on Tuesday -- first started tracking ...

Stuff Environmentalists Like, Part 1

Over at Plenty Magazine.

...If an environmentalist invites you over for dinner, do not assume that your host’s primary purpose is to serve you a meal. The goal is education...

...If conversation starts to lull, it’s always a good idea to bring up a paradox that engages the entire table. The most pressing question of our generation is: local or organic?...

...Next week: Brainwashing Children

Income Redistribution

From IBD.com:

Now here's the reality: The rich are being taxed at ever-higher levels,
while more workers at the bottom of the income ladder are paying no taxes at
all. As for spending, resources flowing to those at the bottom far outstrip
those flowing to those at the top.

Worse, a 'what's in it for me?' attitude seems increasingly the norm. Once a
nation of stoic, self-reliant individualists, America now seems full of people
who think other taxpayers owe them something. They see the 'system' as a giant
cow to be milked — and damn the cow. This is backed up by polling data. In a 1994 Pew poll, 57% agreed with the statement 'Government should care for those
who can't care for themselves.' Today, it's 69%.

New Obama Appointee Rubin on Personal Responsibility

This ought to be an interesting 4-8 years. Let's hope it's 4. Robert Rubin on the Citibank mess:

Then there's board member and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who has received over $100 million in compensation from Citi in 10-plus years, according to the New York Post."I don't feel responsible, in light of the facts as I knew them in my role," Rubin told the New York Times back in April. "In hindsight, there are a lot of things we'd do differently. But in the context of the facts as I knew them and my role, I'm inclined to think probably not."

More from the Seattle Times.

Although Rubin has been cagey about his role at Citigroup, what is
indisputable is that all of the decisions that have led to the recent troubles
were taken while he was chairman of the executive committee and were made by
executives whom he supported and with whom he worked closely day to
day.

‘Teaching Unprepared Students’

Over at Insidehighered.com:

Many experts say that the United States can only truly see gains in the
percentages of adults who have a college degree if colleges and universities get
better at teaching students who arrived on campus unprepared for college-level
work. But many professors find themselves frustrated by teaching such students — and many of the students drop out....

The comments:

I never had a problem reaching and teaching underprepared students who
wanted to learn. However, the students who are both underprepared and who lack
any semblance of a work ethic are another matter. When these students have been
taught for twelve years that they will advance to the next grade regardless of
how little they have learned or how little effort they have invested, they are
incapable of performing at a college level. That is because many of them have
never even achieved a junior high school level of self-discipline. Such students
are doomed to fail not only in school, but in life. They are tomorrow’s blue-
and white-collar criminals.

The subject of the interview states “However, the reality is that right now
we have freshmen and transfer students who are not prepared, but who are
enrolled in our classes and want to learn.”
I challenge that logic. Too many
students are enrolled because they have been sold a bill of goods. They are not
their to learn. Rather, they are there to get a job. They have been told this by
high school teachers, family members, public policy makers, admission officers,
etc. All of them have said the key to getting a good job, making lots of money,
and having a great life is, all together now, a college degree.
These
students fail to take to ownership of their education. They will blame the
instructor for having grading standards, for demanding their work meet certain
criteria, and for inconveniencing their lives. These people do not care about
knowledge.

I work in a Catholic, college prep high school that sends over 95% of our
students to college. We are facing the same issues of unprepared and unmotivated
students as discussed in the article & comments. Every year it seems, we
(and all of our peer institutions in NH) admit very intelligent (high test
score) students, some who have a pathetic work-ethic; who want education to be
entertainment; and who lack basic academic skills. We have implemented a
“front-loaded” program for freshmen that involves a core of battle hardened
teachers along with various support services. Most kids catch on and eventually
become successful. But every year, there are more and more kids who arrive
without an adequate foundation. It’s scary to think about the students coming
up, what they’re going to need, and how many resources they will require. I wish
I could be optimistic but I see all of us caught in the cultural demise of what
learning and education is all about.

I would tend to agree with those regarding lack of work ethic. I see it
everyday. Some students have a sense of entitlement regarding their academic
performance, while others realize that their performance is a reflection of
their hard work and effort. For many students, there is a disconnect between
effort and performance. After many years of schooling this disconnect means
these students are at the bottom of a very large hill. They will need an
extraordinary amount of assistance to make any progress up the hill (forget
about getting to the top). My question is: Is this the job of the university
faculty?

“Everything must be learner-centered.” I have seen first-hand, at the
secondary and post-secondary level, the debilitating effects this mantra has had
on the learning environment. Life beyond the Ivory Tower is not, and the sooner
we teach our self-absorbed students this fact, the better learners (and people)
they will become. The kumbaya feel-good vibe is something I save for students
who give a damn; I’ve been burned far too many times by diverting positive
emotional capital towards students who end up dropping or failing anyway.

Financial Hits - Hitler in a Bunker

Hitler in a bunker is a bit overused as a schtick but here we go, pretty funny:



Found at Mangan's

30 reasons for Great Depression 2 by 2011

Paul Farrell over at Martketwatch lists his 30 reasons why we'll be in a depression by 2011. He Cites greed several times, that's obvious but what about envy? It seems to me that envy drove the subprime mess. The feeling of wanting that house despite the lack of fiscal discipline and the politicians that fed that envy drove all of this. I've blogged before on the lack of fiscal discipline among groups of people (link 1, 2). It seems to me that we can't face up to the fact that we have equal oppurtunity but that doesn't give equal outcomes. And what if everyone couldn't be a homeowner? Renting, is that inhumane?

On that list of 30 items, here's the largest:

25. The 800-pound gorillas: Social Security, Medicare with $60 trillion in unfunded liabilities

We just voted in the political party least likely to fix this mess.

The American Voter

Over at Verum Serum:

Zogby Poll from http://www.howobamagotelected.com/

57.4% could NOT correctly say which party controls congress (50/50 shot just by guessing)81.8% could NOT correctly say Joe Biden quit a previous campaign because of plagiarism (25% chance by guessing)

82.6% could NOT correctly say that Barack Obama won his first election by getting opponents kicked off the ballot (25% chance by guessing)

88.4% could NOT correctly say that Obama said his policies would likely bankrupt the coal industry and make energy rates skyrocket (25% chance by guessing)

56.1% could NOT correctly say Obama started his political career at the home of two former members of the Weather Underground (25% chance by guessing).

And yet…..

Only 13.7% failed to identify Sarah Palin as the person on which their party spent $150,000 in clothes

Only 6.2% failed to identify Palin as the one with a pregnant teenage daughter

And 86.9 % thought that Palin said that she could see Russia from her “house,” even though that was Tina Fey who said that!!

Only 2.4% got at least 11 correct.

Underwater Equity Hotspots

From Zillow's blog.

The End of Wall Street's Boom?

Over at Portfolio.com. Found at Steve Sailer's Blog:

...Long Beach Financial was moving money out the door as fast as it could, few questions asked, in loans built to self-destruct. It specialized in asking home­owners with bad credit and no proof of income to put no money down and defer interest payments for as long as possible. In Bakersfield, California, a Mexican strawberry picker with an income of $14,000 and no English was lent every penny he needed to buy a house for $720,000....

...Moses actually flew down to Miami and wandered around neighborhoods built with subprime loans to see how bad things were. “He’d call me and say, ‘Oh my God, this is a calamity here,’ ” recalls Eisman. All that was required for the BBB bonds to go to zero was for the default rate on the underlying loans to reach 14 percent. Eisman thought that, in certain sections of the country, it would go far, far higher....

...But he couldn’t figure out exactly how the rating agencies justified turning BBB loans into AAA-rated bonds. “I didn’t understand how they were turning all this garbage into gold,” he says. He brought some of the bond people from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and UBS over for a visit. “We always asked the same question,” says Eisman. “Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I’d always get the same reaction. It was a smirk.” He called Standard & Poor’s and asked what would happen to default rates if real estate prices fell. The man at S&P couldn’t say; its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number. “They were just assuming home prices would keep going up,” Eisman says...

...“With all due respect, sir,” Daniel told the C.E.O. deferentially as they left the meeting, “you’re delusional.” This wasn’t Fitch or even S&P. This was Moody’s, the aristocrats of the rating business, 20 percent owned by Warren Buffett. And the company’s C.E.O. was being told he was either a fool or a crook by one Vincent Daniel, from Queens....

Uncle Sam's Credit Line Running Out?

Over at Baron's.

Big Five

I'm a O95-C69-E53-A69-N27 Big Five!!

http://www.outofservice.com/bigfive/

Derbyshire on his Obama-ness

Over at the NRO Corner Blog.

The sputtering-Left component of my email bag took particular exception to my calling Obama "shallow, ignorant, and self-obsessed." How dare I? Well, let's unpack it.

Shallow: Have you ever heard Obama say anything interesting? Me neither. I saw him on the telly the other day fielding a question about illegal immigrants. He said something like: "We can't deport ten million people. We need to find a way to bring them out of the shadows. Thet should have to pay a fine, learn English, and go to the back of the line for citizenship." Now, here is an issue that's of major concern to millions of Americans, who feel they are losing the nation they grew up in. It's been argued for years at high levels of discourse, with many fine books written. (Most recently, one by our own Mark Krikorian.) Yet Obama can address it only with the tiredest, most threadbare clichés of the open-borders Left. It's plain he has never given a moment's real thought to the issue. Shallow.

Ignorant: Obama strikes me as a very intelligent person, but with that intelligence narrowly focused. He has spent his adult life among the tiny sub-class of black Americans who have grown wealthy, or hope to, via the affirmative-action rackets. He has never ventured outside that milieu, and I seriously doubt he knows much about life outside it. I doubt, for example, that he knows anything much at all about business, the military, science, work (other than paper-shuffling), or high culture. I'll be glad to be proved wrong, but nothing I've heard him say, nor my (admittedly incomplete) acquaintance with what he's written, refutes that.

Self-obsessed: A guy who publishes a 464-page autobiography at age 34 is self-obsessed, what can I tell ya? If he publishes a second autobiography at age 45, you can print "self-obsessed" in capital letters. (Yeah, I know, it's a "campaign book." The content is mainly autobiographical, though.)

WSJ on the Death of Michael Crichton

His viewpoints will be missed. He was respected by most, and his well-founded but contrarian views were at least considered by those holding conventional wisdom.

"Crichton was sometimes accused of being a Luddite. In fact, he was a champion of good science, and never more so than in a 2003 lecture at Caltech, hilariously titled "Aliens Cause Global Warming."

"As the 20th century drew to a close," he warned, "the connection between hard scientific fact and public policy became increasingly elastic. In part this was possible because of the complacency of the scientific profession; in part because of the lack of good science education among the public; in part because of the rise of specialized advocacy groups which have been enormously effective in getting publicity and shaping policy; and in great part because of the decline of the media as an independent assessor of fact."