In their latest salvo against net neutrality which, judging from the most recent pronouncements of the FCC, is what the Obama Administration favors, there are a few things that the editors of the Wall Street Journal don’t seem to understand. The first is that the Internet service providers didn’t gain their positions under competitive systems. They did so through government franchises and monopoly power. They didn’t even develop or promote their own technologies. That was done for them by the government, too. They’re just reaping the profits.

The second thing is that consumers deserve to get what they pay for. The editors write:

The Wheeler cover story is that such antiquated rules are necessary to provide “net neutrality,” the concept that all Internet traffic should be treated equally and not blocked from reaching consumers—in other words, to allow the Internet to function pretty much as it does now.

but that’s not true. Nobody knows how the Internet actually functions now. Sure, you may be paying for a 10Mbps pipe but you don’t know for certain that you’re not being throttled twenty times a day. The providers are free to advertise one thing and deliver something completely different. They can throttle certain sites and leave others alone. They can throttle at certain times. And never tell you about any of it.

As I’ve written before in the 30 years I’ve lived in this house, I’ve lost telephone service twice, lost power a dozen times, and I lose my Internet connection on average about once a week. One of these things is not like the others and it darned well should be.

In his most recent column George Will tallies the economy’s performance. It goes something like this:

• In 2014 we had one quarter of 5% growth.
• Economic growth for the year was phlegmatic. Under 2%.
• At the rate at which new jobs are being produced those who lost their jobs in the late recession will never find work.
• The jobs that are being created are either a) in protected sectors or b) pay a lot less than the jobs that were lost during the recession.
• The rate of new business formation is at the lowest rate since 1980 when the Baby Boomers hit their stride.
• The rate at which households are being formed is lower, too.
• The birth rate’s down, too.
• The present expansion has continued for 73 months.
• Of the twelve post-war recessions only four have been longer. The expansion that followed the 1945 recession was 80 months long; the expansion that followed the 1970 recession was 106 months longs; the expansion that followed the 1990-1991 recession was 92 months long; the expansion that followed the 2001 recession was 120 months long.

It appears to me that we have been in a pitched battle over what constitutes a good life, what constitutes a good country. I think we’re losing.

There’s more commentary on Mr. Will’s column at memeorandum.

I found this post at the New York Times interesting but unsurprising:

The New York State attorney general’s office accused four major retailers on Monday of selling fraudulent and potentially dangerous herbal supplements and demanded that they remove the products from their shelves.

The authorities said they had conducted tests on top-selling store brands of herbal supplements at four national retailers — GNC, Target, Walgreens and Walmart — and found that four out of five of the products did not contain any of the herbs on their labels. The tests showed that pills labeled medicinal herbs often contained little more than cheap fillers like powdered rice, asparagus and houseplants, and in some cases substances that could be dangerous to those with allergies.

[…]

“Mislabeling, contamination and false advertising are illegal,” said Eric T. Schneiderman, the state attorney general. “They also pose unacceptable risks to New York families — especially those with allergies to hidden ingredients.”

The attorney general’s investigation was prompted by an article in the New York Times in 2013 that raised questions about widespread labeling fraud in the supplement industry. The article referred to research at the University of Guelph in Canada that found that as many as a third of herbal supplements tested did not contain the plants listed on their labels — only cheap fillers instead.

Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds

What’s missing from the article is why? It’s not simple greed on the part of the “major retailers”. Walgreens, Target, GNC, and Walmart don’t manufacture the supplements and, presumably, although they’re the ones getting sued they’re victims of fraud as certainly as their customers are. Even the private label supplements that bear their brand names aren’t manufactured by them.

I strongly suspect that even Walgreens et al.’s suppliers aren’t the actual culprits. I’m guessing that they’re paying for and using ingredients in the things they’re compounding under the mistaken assumption that they’re the real deal.

You may not be aware of this but practically all food additives, whether for nutrition, color, or texture are made in China and I’m guessing that the same is true of many of the ingredients used in the supplements in question. As was clear from the dog food adulteration scandal of a couple of years ago and which I wrote about extensively, practically nobody up or down the supply chain does any kind of quality assurance. They just hope for the best.

I find American foreign policy increasingly baffling. In Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen we’re killing people who aren’t our enemies on behalf of governments that aren’t our friends. In Libya and Egypt we brought down dictators on behalf of people who weren’t our friends and there are some in the Congress and, presumably, the White House who want to do the same thing in Syria.

Robert Samuelson reports on a new study that contradicts what many people believe about the late financial crisis:

Now comes a study that rejects or qualifies much of this received wisdom. Conducted by economists Manuel Adelino of Duke University, Antoinette Schoar of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Felipe Severino of Dartmouth College, the study — recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research — reached three central conclusions.

What were the conclusions?

First, mortgage lending wasn’t aimed mainly at the poor. Earlier research studied lending by Zip codes and found sharp growth in poorer neighborhoods. Borrowers were assumed to reflect the average characteristics of residents in these neighborhoods. But the new study examined the actual borrowers and found this wasn’t true. They were much richer than average residents. In 2002, home buyers in these poor neighborhoods had average incomes of $63,000, double the neighborhoods’ average of $31,000.

Second, borrowers were not saddled with progressively larger mortgage debt burdens. One way of measuring this is the debt-to-income ratio: Someone with a $100,000 mortgage and $50,000 of income has a debt-to-income ratio of 2. In 2002, the mortgage-debt-to-income ratio of the poorest borrowers was 2; in 2006, it was still 2. Ratios for wealthier borrowers also remained stable during the housing boom. The essence of the boom was not that typical debt burdens shot through the roof; it was that more and more people were borrowing.

Third, the bulk of mortgage lending and losses — measured by dollar volume — occurred among middle-class and high-income borrowers. In 2006, the wealthiest 40 percent of borrowers represented 55 percent of new loans and nearly 60 percent of delinquencies (defined as payments at least 90 days overdue) in the next three years.

That dovetails nicely with observations I made early on in the crisis. It wasn’t wrongdoing that made the crisis. It was bad policy. Everyone was acting consistently with the incentives they had. Lenders were protected from the adverse effects of loans defaulting both by the apparently monotonic increases in the prices of houses and the certainty based on experience they’d be protected from the consequences of their folly. Borrowers were similarly protected. Consequently, lenders lent and borrowers borrowed until the who house of cards collapsed.

Not a lot has changed since then.

In a 649 word editorial the editors of the New York Times have only these as suggestions for actions the federal government could take to improve U. S. economic growth:

The economy, in short, is still wounded, and the route to recovery runs through government. Direct policies could raise wages in the near term, including the minimum wage. Policies can also change norms that keep wages depressed. Currently, for example, corporate executives are fighting to delay a new rule under the Dodd-Frank law to require companies to disclose the ratio of a chief executive’s pay to the median pay of the company’s employees. The information could expose indefensible disparities and lead to higher employee pay. Still other policies could set the stage for healthy growth in the longer term, including immigration reform, infrastructure spending and education initiatives.

and unless I’m mistaken not one of those would do much to improve economic growth. Pretty clearly they’re so intent on divvying up a shrinking income they have no ideas on how to increase it.

I’ll present several. Reduce the amount of money spent on roads and bridges. Increase the amount spent on energy and communications infrastructure. More mass engineering projects. The federal government’s history with those has been pretty successful and they inevitably prepare the way for future economic growth.

Charles Blow laments the low percentage of African American or women students seeking science degrees:

The Associated Press said in 2011 that “the percentage of African-Americans earning STEM degrees has fallen during the last decade” and that this was very likely a result of “a complex equation of self-doubt, stereotypes, discouragement and economics — and sometimes just wrong perceptions of what math and science are all about.”

It continued: “Black people are 12 percent of the United States population and 11 percent of all students beyond high school. In 2009, they received just 7 percent of all STEM bachelor’s degrees, 4 percent of master’s degrees and 2 percent of Ph.D.s, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.”

It doesn’t get better in the workplace. In a 2013 editorial, The New York Times pointed out: “Women make up nearly half the work force but have just 26 percent of science, technology, engineering or math jobs, according to the Census Bureau. Blacks make up 11 percent of the work force but just 6 percent of such jobs and Hispanics make up nearly 15 percent of the work force but hold 7 percent of those positions.”

I think there are all sorts of reasons for this. Science is hard. If you’ve received a poor preparation for college, college science will be that much harder and people tend not to participate in activities in which they believe they will inevitably fail. Regardless of the advance press other than in healthcare and education there aren’t that many science jobs out there these days and it might be that African American or women students recognize this.

It might be prejudice as Mr. Blow suggests in his column.

It also might be that they just do not see jobs in science as a possibility for themselves. No role models. When most of the adults you’ve seen who have jobs have jobs as teachers, cops, firefighters, in fast food, or as retail clerks it’s not all that surprising that you wouldn’t think of a job in science.

I had one major objection to Mr. Blow’s column. When he writes “minorities” he appears to actually mean blacks. Off-hand I’d guess that if by minorities he meant Asians his conclusions about the proportions of students pursuing STEM degrees might be somewhat different.

When I was in college (and dinosaurs ruled the earth), out of a couple of hundred students in each year in the engineering school you could count the number of black or women students on the fingers of one hand. Apparently, despite all of the other changes that have occurred since then that hasn’t changed that much.

Chicago received 16 inches of snow yesterday. That makes it the 7^th heaviest snowfall on record here.

The snow we’re having today isn’t your New England postcard sort of snow, falling gently and silently from the sky. It’s not a snow as it’s expereienced in the Great Plains states like Kansas or Nebraska where snow is a horizontal phenomenon rather than a vertical one.

Today our snow defies photography. It’s a swirling, roaring snow, horizontal and vertical at the same time. It surrounds and envelopes you.