Harry Kreisler, executive director Institute of International Studies | 6/30/10 | |
 In ousting General Stanley McChrystal, Obama conjured up images of President Harry Truman firing General Douglas MacArthur. This comparison is misleading because the Truman-MacArthur conflict was over substance. Though Obama was justified in firing McChrystal for showing poor judgment in bad-mouthing his civilian partners in the military led counterinsurgency strategy, McChrystal must have been frustrated by the contradictions in policy at the heart of what is now Obama’s war: limiting collateral damage while winning hearts and minds, building government institutions with a corrupt partner while defeating an insurgency; adding more troops but never enough; and building up in order to … More >
Brad DeLong, professor of economics | 6/29/10 | |
 I had always thought that Barack Obama made a significant mistake in naming the Republican ex-senator Alan Simpson to co-chair the president’s deficit-reduction commission. Simpson was a noted budget arsonist when he was in the Senate. Indeed, he never met a budget-busting, deficit-increasing initiative from a Republican president that he would not lead the charge to pass. Nor did he ever meet a sober deficit-reducing initiative from a Democratic president that he did not oppose with every fiber of his being.
You don’t pick an arsonist to head the fire department, I thought … More >
Vivek Wadhwa, visiting scholar in School of Information | 6/29/10 | |
Meena wants to become a computer engineer. She believes that if she works hard enough, she can build her own “big business” — maybe a Google. So she is determined to complete her schooling and earn an engineering degree. Young girls like Meena, just 16 years old but with the ambition and confidence to enter the tech world, are a rare commodity even in Silicon Valley; but Meena lives in a slum in New Delhi. Her father works as a day laborer. He used to spend half his income on alcohol, and would come home … More >
Rosemary Joyce, anthropology prof | 6/26/10 | |
 “Are dead babies good evidence for a Roman brothel?”
That’s the question raised by a BBC story about analyses of materials from an almost century-old excavation at a Roman villa in the Thames Valley.
The data: remains of 97 infants, all of whom died close to birth. To the researchers, the coincidence suggests deliberate killing of newborn babies:
Archaeologist Dr Jill Eyers said: “The only explanation you keep coming back to is that it’s got to be a brothel”.
Really? Let’s think about the set of assumptions necessary to get from infants dying close to birth, to the place that they … More >
Barry Eichengreen, professor of economics and political science | 6/25/10 | |
 China is getting its exchange rate adjustment whether it likes it or not. While Chinese officials continue to mull the right time to let the renminbi rise, manufacturing workers are voting with their feet — and their picket lines.
Honda has offered its transmission factory workers in China a 24% wage increase to head off a crippling strike. Foxconn, the Taiwanese contract manufacturer for Apple and Dell, has announced wage increases of as much as 70%. Shenzhen, to head off trouble, has announced a 16% increase in the minimum wage. Beijing’s municipal authorities have … More >
Steven Weissman, associate director of the Center for Law, Energy and the Environment | 6/24/10 | |
 If you were President Obama, what would you do about the tar sands fields in Alberta? He is being asked to approve or reject a pipeline extension that would carry 900,000 barrels per day of Canadian crude deep into the United States. It has to be exceedingly tempting to just say “yes”. After all, Canada is our biggest and friendliest source of oil, and at least the oil wouldn’t be coming from offshore. And no one expects the U.S. to cut off its demand for oil overnight. Nonetheless, the tar sands pits in … More >
Ethan Elkind, climate-change research fellow at Berkeley Law | 6/23/10 | |
 Mortgage insurers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have thrown a wrench into one of the most promising programs to finance climate change solutions and promote clean energy. The program, Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE), helps homeowners pay for the upfront costs of environmentally friendly upgrades, from energy efficiency retrofits to solar panels.
Here’s how it works: Municipal governments raise capital by issuing bonds and then use the proceeds to help fund the retrofits. Local governments then charge building owners an assessment on their property tax bills over a period of up to … More >
Robert Reich, professor of public policy | 6/22/10 | |
 The stock market is euphoric over China’s apparent decision to allow its currency to rise against the dollar.
Watch your wallets.
China isn’t really changing anything. It’s only doing the minimum to prevent Congress from listing China as a currency manipulator, leading to a squeeze on Chinese imports.
Over time – and I’m talking about months if not years – China will raise its currency to where it was before the global meltdown in 2008. Big deal.
Even then, a stronger yuan won’t generate lots of new jobs in the United States
That’s because most of the gains of … More >
Barry Krisberg, distinguished senior fellow at the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice | 6/22/10 | |
 America’s foremost legal philosopher, Roscoe Pound (1870-1964), once observed that the American juvenile court was the greatest step forward in Anglo-American law since the Magna Carta. He was referring to an ideal of justice that was individualized, compassionate and infused with the value of human redemption. This was the vision of Jane Addams, Judge Ben Lindsey and the youth advocates who lobbied to create the juvenile court in Illinois and Colorado in 1899.
Sadly, this ennobling model of justice has been honored more in the breach than in reality.
The juvenile court system has never had the resources or widespread political support … More >
Chris Hoofnagle, director of BCLT's privacy programs | 6/19/10 | |
 Oh noes! The Wall Street Journal’s Robin Sidel misreports the end of free checking:
Bank of America Corp. and other banks are preparing new fees on basic banking services as they try to replace revenue lost to regulatory rules, in a push that is expected to spell an end to free checking accounts for many Americans.
Free checking isn’t dead. It never existed!
“Free” comes with hidden fees. And that’s why the new rules ending “free checking” are good for consumers and competition. In the past decade, financial services innovation has focused upon creating new fees that are … More >
Rosemary Joyce, anthropology prof | 6/19/10 | |
“She was a beautiful English princess who married one of Europe’s most powerful monarchs and dazzled subjects with her charity and charm.”
Thus did AP reporter Raphael G. Satter start a widely-reproduced story in January that the LA Daily News headline writer reduced to “Lady Di of the 10th Century“. (The Huffington Post more soberly titled it “Princess Eadgyth Body: Experts May Have Found Bones of English Princess“.)
The actual archaeology, which has fueled a new wave of articles this week, is exemplary of new approaches that are letting us understand more … More >
Claude Fischer, professor of sociology | 6/18/10 | |
 A June 6 story in the New York Times, “Rise in Suicides of Middle-Aged is Continuing,” reported that 45-to-54 year-olds have the highest rate of suicide and that their rate is rising (see here, and a complex follow-up on June 13 here ). Although there are technical reasons to put a big asterisk on that claim* [see endnote below], it appears to be true that Baby Boomers’ lives have turned out to be a bit different — in unfortunate ways — from those of their parents and of their children. Americans who came into adulthood in the ‘60s were distinct.
“The … More >
Robert Reich, professor of public policy | 6/17/10 | |
The man who electrified the nation with his speech at the Democratic National Convention of 2004 put it to sleep tonight (June 15). President Obama’s address to the nation from the Oval Office was, to be frank, vapid. If you watched with the sound off you might have thought he was giving a lecture on the history of the Interstate Highway System. He didn’t have to be angry but he had at least to show passion and conviction. It is, after all, the worst environmental crisis in the history of the nation.
With the sound on, his words hung in the … More >
Jonathan Simon, professor of law | 6/17/10 | |
 When I talk to people about how the “war on crime” transformed American politics and law since the late 1960s (the subject of the book Governing through Crime) one of the most interesting questions I get is whether the problem is more with making “crime” such a privileged target of national anxiety and identity, or whether the problem isn’t with the “war on” metaphor itself, whether it attaches to cancer, poverty, terrorism, or crime. My short answer is that “crime” is the problem, and the “war” metaphor is a historically durable feature of at least US national governance. President Obama’s … More >
Claude Fischer, professor of sociology | 6/16/10 | |
Violent crime went down in America again last year. According to preliminary statistics from the FBI, the number of violent crimes dropped by about 5 percent from 2008 to 2009. Given population growth, that means that the rate of violent crime dropped even more. (So did property crime.)
This is a puzzle because (a) violent crime is more common among the poor; (b) the percentage of Americans who are poor has been trending up since about 2000; and (c) the economy tanked last year. One would have expected a rise, not a fall, in violent … More >
David Kirp, professor of public policy | 6/15/10 | |
 Kids’ advocates stood on the sidelines last March, watching helplessly as the Early Learning Challenge Fund, a $1 billion-a-year initiative to strengthen the quality of early education and child care, was stricken from the health care reform bill. The fact that early education wasn’t important enough to merit an up-or-down vote, instead becoming ensnared in the debates over health care and the restructuring of the college loan program, says a lot about what has happened—more precisely, what hasn’t happened—on the early education front. Despite the widespread recognition that good early education … More >
Jonathan Simon, professor of law | 6/14/10 | |
The opening of the murder trial of Johannes Mehserle on June 10 in Los Angeles once again brings the issues of race, criminality, and police violence back to the foreground where they have so often been in Los Angeles and Oakland, the city where Mehserle admittedly shot Oscar Grant on the platform adjoining a BART station on January 1, 2009. Such trials, like the one nearly twenty years ago of LAPD officers for beating Rodney King, provide multiple opportunities to work and rework all the themes of America’s racial nightmare. But while these trials often reinvest meaning in this emotional … More >
Robin Lakoff, professor of linguistics | 6/13/10 | |
 The results of last Tuesday’s primary elections were mixed. But one result gives me hope: the failure of Prop 16, PG&E’s so-called Taxpayers Right to Vote ballot initiative. I am cheered not so much because of what the proposition was about (requiring a vote to municipalize utilities), as because of the way in which it was sold to potential voters. The pro-16 campaign was bankrolled very largely by PG&E, to the tune of $46 million dollars. The no-on-16 side had virtually no money at all ($100,000, to be exact). For a couple of months before the election, TV was blanketed … More >
David Zilberman, professor of agriculture and resource economics | 6/12/10 | |
 During 2009 I was a member of a National Resource Council (NRC) committee assessing the impact of genetically engineered (GE) crops in US agriculture. When I joined the committee I thought that the main finding will be those of economists, like myself, who realize that GE crops did a lot of good by increasing yields and reducing costs. The two main types of GE crops that have been adopted widely are pest-resistant varieties that control insects and herbicide-resistant varieties that allow the use of herbicides like RoundUp to control weeds. GE varieties have been adopted to a large extent in … More >
Michael Eisen, Associate Professor of Molecular and Cell Biology | 6/10/10 | |
 Last week a letter was sent to UC faculty by librarians from the 10 UC campuses describing a 400% increase in the cost of access to the 67 journals published by Nature Publishing Group (including the prestigious research journal Nature). The letter also described plans being set in motion by some prominent faculty to organize a boycott of NPG journals, in which faculty would no longer publish in or volunteer their time for any NPG journals until they backed off of their exorbitant demands.
As a long-term critic of the scientific publishing industry, I am all for anything that would strike … More >
Rosemary Joyce, anthropology prof | 6/10/10 | |
“Her name is synonymous with power and glamour”: so starts an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer prompted by the opening of a new exhibit last week at The Franklin Institute.
This opening, and the exhibit itself, reflects the long-standing fascination of the public, shared by archaeologists, for women who ruled in ancient states, and the ambiguous way they are regarded.
Cleopatra represents an extreme example: along with Hatshepsut, one of two pharaohs widely known to have been women, and like Nefertiti, celebrated as an icon of beauty — hence the Inquirer‘s pairing of the terms “power and glamour”.
The article goes on to … More >
Robin Lakoff, professor of linguistics | 6/8/10 | |
In the wake of the Gulf oil tragedy, almost as much attention has been given to the President’s demeanor as to the spill itself. The punditry has been offering advice: show anger, get in BP’s face, shake a moralizing finger, share the pain. Two questions arise in response to these suggestions. First, why are so many people so concerned with Presidential style? Second, is the advice any good?
Members of marked and historically non-powerful groups (like women, children, and people of color) are typically considered open to explicit interpretation and critique: not of what they are saying, but how they are … More >
Robert Reich, professor of public policy | 6/8/10 | |
1. Why hasn’t BP moved more of its rigs and tankers to the site? Because BP’s first responsibility is to maximize shareholder value, and moving more rigs and tankers would be too expensive. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the government’s man on the scene, said BP planned to move another rig to the spill site June 14, which would enable the company to boost its capacity to collect oil from the ruptured well to 28,000 barrels (1.18 million gallons/4.45 million liters) a day.
2. Why isn’t BP leveling with the American people about … More >
Bruce Cain, political science professor and director of the UC Washington Center | 6/7/10 |
 Tuesday is Election Day in California, with primary races for governor and U.S. Senate that have received much national attention. But when it comes to national politics, is California a bellwether, an outlier, a mirror, or a little of each? From a distance, appearances can be deceiving.
1. California is a high-taxing, big-spending state.
Although California’s prolonged budget battles and eye-popping deficits have made it America’s poster child for fiscal recklessness, the case is not so clear. Factoring in personal income levels, California’s per capita state and local tax burden ranks 18th among all states.
Meg Whitman, … More >
Rosemary Joyce, anthropology prof | 6/5/10 | |
An editorial in Oregon’s The Daily Astorian argues that the attraction of archaeology for 90% of the public is treasure. That would be discouraging news for at least 90% of archaeologists. We think what we do is interesting because it illuminates otherwise unknown aspects of human life in the past, and sheds light on human life today.
The Daily Astorian‘s claim is consistent with museum exhibits like the recently opened Cleopatra: The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt. The Philadelphia Inquirer quotes the (non-archaeologist) organizer of that exhibit: “As each new treasure is discovered, it could be the … More >
Robert Reich, professor of public policy | 6/3/10 | |
Just before his daily briefing Wednesday, Admiral Thad Allen, the President’s military point man in the Gulf, had the BP logo removed from the podium. The White House apparently wants to distance itself from Bad Petroleum.
But confusion over who’s in charge – BP or the White House – continues to reign. Questioned about whether BP can successfully shear off the well pipe in order to fit a cap over it, Allen answered “I don’t think the issue is whether or not we can make the second cut. It’s about how fine we can … More >
Steve Shortell, dean of the School of Public Health | 6/2/10 | |
 The news of health care reform has settled down, but the work in making it work has not. There are some serious challenges ahead. The new law promises to bring more people into the U.S. healthcare system, so it’s even more important to find better ways to keep people healthier, deliver higher quality medical care, and curb the growth in health care costs. We’re going to see changes in the health care market and a greater focus on value.
I’ve co-authored a policy brief that highlights a concept that deserves more attention: the Accountable Care Organization (ACO). An ACO is a … More >
Dan Farber, professor of law | 6/2/10 |
 We’ve known all along that offshore drilling in the Gulf placed at risk exceptionally valuable and sensitive coastal areas. We need look no further than a forty-year-old court decision on Gulf oil drilling, which made the dangers abundantly clear.
In 1971, President Nixon announced a new energy plan involving greatly expanded offshore drilling. In a landmark early NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) decision, the D.C. Circuit held that the environmental impact statement (EIS) gave insufficient consideration to alternative energy strategies. The opinion begins with a discussion of the risks of oil spills, drawn largely … More >
George Lakoff, professor of linguistics | 6/1/10 | |
 Barack Obama may be one of the best communicators of this generation, but he is not living up to his own talents. In a year of disasters, communication failure doubles the crises.
If, as he says, the monster spill was his highest priority from Day 1, he needed to communicate that from Day 1 — or at least Day 3 or 4. It took five weeks for him to tell the nation what he and his administration were doing. The result was visible in his recent press conference. He was on the defensive. He needed … More >
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