There’s an interesting article at City Journal about the challenges that automation is posing to the practice of law:

Law schools are in crisis, facing their most substantial decline in enrollment in decades, if not in the history of legal education. Applications have fallen over 40 percent since 2004. The legal workplace is troubled, too. Benjamin Barton, of the University of Tennessee College of Law, has shown that attorneys in “small law,” such as solo practitioners, have been hurting for a decade. Attorney job growth has been flat; partner incomes at large firms have recently recovered from the economic downturn, but the going rate for associates, even at the best firms, has stagnated since 2007.

Some observers, not implausibly, blame the recession for these developments. But the plight of legal education and of the attorney workplace is also a harbinger of a looming transformation in the legal profession. Law is, in effect, an information technology—a code that regulates social life. And as the machinery of information technology grows exponentially in power, the legal profession faces a great disruption not unlike that already experienced by journalism, which has seen employment drop by about a third and the market value of newspapers devastated. The effects on law will take longer to play themselves out, but they will likely be even greater because of the central role that lawyers play in public life.

I’ll offer one caution about the article: it’s written by a law professor who, based on his CV, probably hasn’t taken a math course since he was in high school 35 years ago and has the respect for the boundless powers of computers common to people who don’t know anything about them.

Jurimetrics (the application of science to law) is still in its infancy and will probably remain so as long as most lawyers and, more importantly, judges are classical languages majors rather than science or engineering majors which is to say forever. I can’t remember who first said it but one of the reasons that physics is so orderly is that the people who are attracted to studying it tend to have orderly minds while the social sciences are a mess because the people who are attracted to studying them don’t.

At Bloomberg Jeffrey Goldberg provides a very positive and, I think, balanced review of President Obama’s foreign policy:

American troops continue not to die in Iraq. American troops are exiting Afghanistan with, so far at least, limited consequence. The Iran nuclear talks may not succeed, but trying to resolve this crisis peacefully is indispensably important — even if only to justify later, more dramatic, responses to the Iranian threat. It’s politically risky as well, and the president should be praised for trying.

A nationalist Russia has not been completely contained by the U.S. and its Western allies, but no would-be president — not John McCain or Mitt Romney or Hillary Clinton — would have developed a military option that could have prevented the conquest of Crimea. North Korea remains insane, but again, it’s unlikely that any other occupant of the Oval Office would have had better luck managing the threat it poses. China is flexing its muscles, but U.S. alliances across Asia are strong, and in some cases getting stronger. (Obama gets little to no credit for reopening the Philippines to a regular U.S. naval presence, and the U.S. now has a permanent Marine Corps contingent stationed in northern Australia.)

He concludes with what I think is a puzzler:

On domestic issues — health care, most notably — Obama sets grand goals. They may not all be attained, but he sets them anyway. I don’t want to see overreach in foreign policy. But more ambition and a bit more idealism? Over the past year, I’ve visited almost two dozen countries. Generally speaking, these countries — their leaders and people — want more American leadership in the world, not less.

Foreign leaders want American leadership until it gores their oxen. Then we’re imperialists. My own view is that American foreign policy should be calibrated to secure American interests narrowly understood. If you want to make the world a better place, don’t use force to do it. Take a longer view. As Confucius said, if your plan is a one year plan, plant rice. If your plan is a ten year plan, plant trees. If your plan is a hundred year plan, teach children. Life is not television. We can’t make the world a better place over the course of an hour.

George Will summarizes the state of the post-recession economy:

June begins the sixth year of the anemic recovery from the 18-month recession. Even if what Obama’s administration calls “historically severe” weather — a.k.a., winter — reduced GDP growth by up to 1.4 percentage points, growth of 1.5 percent would still be grotesque.

[…]

The more than $1.1 trillion of student loan debt — the fastest-growing debt category, larger than credit card or auto loan debt — is restraining consumption, as is the retirement of baby boomers. In 2012, more than 70 percent of college graduates had student loan debts averaging about $30,000. This commencement season’s diploma recipients are entering an economy where more than 40 percent of recent college graduates are either unemployed or in jobs that do not require a college degree. This is understandable, given that 44 percent of the job growth since the recession ended has been in food services, retail clerking or other low-wage jobs.

In April, the number of people younger than 25 in the workforce declined by 484,000. Unsurprisingly, almost one in three (31 percent) people age 18 to 34 are living with their parents, including 25 percent who have jobs.

So the rate of household formation has, Neil Irwin reports in the New York Times, slowed from a yearly average of 1.35 million in 2001-06 to 569,000 in 2007-13. And investment in residential property is at the lowest level (as a share of the economy) since World War II. “If,” Irwin writes, “building activity returned merely to its postwar average proportion of the economy, growth would jump this year to a booming, 1990s-like level of 4 percent.”

The obvious retort to this is that the 2007-2009 recession was a balance sheet recession and that may well be.

The recession ended five years ago. Over that period what specific actions has the administration taken to address the balance sheet problem? As I see it the administration has responded as though it were an ordinary cyclic recession with pseudo-Keynesian pump-priming.

I agree with the principles that President Obama laid out in his commencement address at West Point yesterday:

This is as close as we have gotten to an Obama Doctrine, and here it is : The United States “will use military force, unilaterally if necessary, when our core interests demand it — when our people are threatened; when our livelihoods are at stake; when the security of our allies is in danger.”

But in other cases, “when issues of global concern do not pose a direct threat to the United States . . . we should not go it alone.” Instead, Obama said, “we must mobilize allies and partners to take collective action” and “broaden our tools to include diplomacy and development; sanctions and isolation; appeals to international law and — if just, necessary and effective — multilateral military action.”

I’m having a bit more difficulty in relating them to the actual actions he’s taken over the course of his presidency, cf. here:

“U.S. citizens currently in Libya should exercise extreme caution and depart immediately,” the department said in a statement.

“The problem that Libya is going through right now is a war for power,” said Rawad Radwan, a Libyan blogger who lives in the capital, Tripoli. “Everyone wants to gain power, and they all believe that whoever controls oil will rule the country.”

Earlier this month, renegade Libyan general Khalifa Hifter launched a bloody military offensive in the east to crush Islamist extremists. On May 18, the general’s allied militias attacked parliament in the capital to try to unsuccessfully force the legislature to disband.

Over the weekend, the embattled parliament approved an Islamist-backed government led by Prime Minister Ahmed Maiteeq despite boycotts from non-Islamists and Hifter’s complaints that the parliament is illegitimate.

Also, over the weekend, thousands of demonstrators gathered in cities across Libya to show support for Hifter, who later claimed the protests gave him a mandate to fight terrorism.

Broader conflict now looms as militias once united to overthrow Gadhafi are rallying behind opposing political sides. On May 20, Libya’s election commission set June 25 for a parliamentary election in hopes of dampening the unrest through a vote that would give lawmakers clear legitimacy.

and here:

(CNN) — Two Americans were injured Wednesday in Afghanistan when a U.S. Consulate vehicle was attacked while traveling through the western city of Herat, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul said.

The Americans were “lightly injured” and are being treated in a hospital in the city, the embassy said.

The U.S. government is working with Afghan authorities to investigate the attack and bring those behind it to justice, it said. No one has claimed responsibility.

Last week, four gunmen attempted to attack the Indian Consulate in Herat. Two gunmen were killed, but no one else was injured and the consulate building was not damaged.

I would think that President Obama, applying his own standards, would have refrained from attacking Libya and would have removed our troops from Afghanistan long since under the “effective” portion of the second clause of the statement of principles above. Our intervention in Libya which resulted in the ouster of Moammar Qaddafi was effective in that objective. It was also effective in plunging the country into an anarchy from which it has yet to emerge. The continuing use of our military in Afghanistan has largely just prolonged the agony.

Here’s an exercise for the interested. List the major foreign policy challenges of President Obama’s presidency, noting where force has been used or threatened and where it has not. Then relate that to his statement of principles.

Update

The editors of the Washington Post are more critical:

In his address Wednesday to the graduating cadets at West Point
, Mr. Obama marshaled a virtual corps of straw men, dismissing those who “say that every problem has a military solution,” who “think military intervention is the only way for America to avoid looking weak,” who favor putting “American troops into the middle of [Syria’s] increasingly sectarian civil war,” who propose “invading every country that harbors terrorist networks” and who think that “working through international institutions . . . or respecting international law is a sign of weakness.”

Few, if any, of those who question the president’s record hold such views.

They continue by listing responses short of military force that could be taken in response to a number of foreign policy challenges which the president has also not done.

I won’t even bother repeating John Bolton’s reaction to the president’s speech (over at the Wall Street Journal) other than to say that he found that the president “had somehow combined the worst features of isolationism and multilateralism”.

I disagree with the conclusion of Ron Fournier’s National Journal column:

In politics and in everyday life, rarely are both sides equally wrong, which is why journalists shouldn’t draw false equivalence. Balz is an example of how to measure blame fairly, not necessarily equally.

Rarer still is one side 100 percent right, which is why Obama is guilty of false purity. Obama’s intellectual dishonesty has prevented him from learning on the job, which is what’s required of great presidents—the kind who overcome obstacles that others whine about.

While I think there’s merit to the first part of his column in which he suggests that blaming everything on Republicans is a gross oversimplification, I disagree that the president is “guilty of false purity” or intellectual dishonesty. I just think he’s mistaken.

The president can’t escape the belief that if he just had a House majority, if he just had more votes in the Senate, if there weren’t so many right-wing ideologues in the Supreme Court, he could accomplish everything he dreams of. Both he and I have lived under just such a system here in Illinois and, far from being a parousia, it could hardly be more messed up.

Faction is forever. Even under single party rule there are factional differences, personal ambitions, personal rivalries.

Hmmm. I think that James Taranto may be on to something:

Our argument was that the horrors of the exchanges would give workers newfound appreciation for their employer plans, increasing the pressure on both companies and politicians to preserve the existing system. To judge by this story in the New York Times, we were right:

Many employers had thought they could shift health costs to the government by sending their employees to a health insurance exchange with a tax-free contribution of cash to help pay premiums, but the Obama administration has squelched the idea in a new ruling. Such arrangements do not satisfy the health care law, the administration said, and employers may be subject to a tax penalty of $100 a day–or $36,500 a year–for each employee who goes into the individual marketplace.

The ruling this month, by the Internal Revenue Service, blocks any wholesale move by employers to dump employees into the exchanges.

The key word here is tax-free: Employers can give raises in lieu of medical insurance, but the former, unlike the latter, are taxable income. “The I.R.S. is going out of its way to keep employers in the group insurance market and to reduce the incentives for them to drop coverage,” Richard Lindquist, president of a benefits software company, tells the Times.

The word that got our attention, though, is dump. It appears in the headline, too: “I.R.S. Bars Employers From Dumping Workers Into Health Exchanges.” If the New York Times were our only source of news, we’d be very confused right now. (Well, OK, we’d be very confused almost always.) For months the Times has been touting the quality of ObamaCare policies, scoffing at those who liked their previous plans and were victimized by President Obama’s fraudulent promise that they could keep them.

Now all of a sudden the exchanges are a garbage dump? Or is it that the exchanges are a pristine wilderness into which workers are the garbage being dumped?

What I think is evolving under the PPACA is that we will become a country in which it is understood that there are tiers of care. At the highest tier are those with employer-provided plans or, for the time being at least, Medicare. The next tier will be occupied with those who are insured under the exchanges and the lowest tier will be Medicaid.

That’s been implicit for a long time but it’s becoming much more explicit now.

The media are all a-twitter over President Obama’s announcement yesterday that American forces in Afghanistan would be reduced to 10,000 and removed from the country entirely by the end of 2016:

President Obama revealed his long-awaited plan for Afghanistan on Tuesday, announcing that a residual force of 9,800 U.S. troops will remain there for one year following the end of combat operations in December. That number will be cut in half at the end of 2015, and reduced at the end of 2016 to a small military presence at the U.S. Embassy.

The plan, despite White House warnings early this year of a possible “zero option,” is largely in line with what the U.S. military had requested. It also is in line with what NATO and other international partners said was necessary for them to retain a presence in Afghanistan.

Missing from the president’s statement are any definition of what has been accomplished since 2008 or will be accomplished by 2016 other than the passage of time. I think the problem is rooted in this statement:

Asked about the reason for the post-2014 timetable, a senior official said, “We never signed up to be a permanent security force in Afghanistan.” Obama decided early in his first term that his objective would not be “eliminating the Taliban and al-Qaeda,” the official said, but preventing al-Qaeda from again attacking the United States.

When we acted to remove the Taliban from control of Afghanistan that’s precisely what we committed to. If Afghanistan is, indeed, the “good war” as opposed to Iraq’s “bad war”, then preserving whatever gains have been made there must be worthwhile, too.

Missing, too, from the president’s remarks are how the Afghanistan military will be able to secure the country without U. S. support or how U. S. material support for Afghanistan’s military will be maintained in the absence of the U. S. forces there that ensure American political support for it. We have seen this movie before.

Afghanistan is incapable of supporting a military that is capable of defending it and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Update

The editors of the New York Times echo my remarks:

It is reasonable to ask how two more years of a sizable American troop presence — which one official said could cost $20 billion in 2015 — will advance a stable Afghanistan in a way that 13 years of war and the 100,000 troops deployed there at the peak were unable to guarantee. Mr. Obama insists the objectives will be limited to using Special Operations forces to disrupt threats posed by Al Qaeda and to train and advise Afghan security personnel, pursuits American troops have been deeply engaged in throughout the war.

He does not claim that the residual force will ensure Afghanistan’s success. But administration officials say — and this is the only argument that makes some sense — that a continued, albeit much smaller, American military role would provide a stabilizing bridge at a sensitive time when Afghanistan is choosing a new leader to succeed President Hamid Karzai. There also are doubts about how much Congress and the international community will be willing to invest in Afghanistan if American troops, along with a much smaller contingent of NATO forces, are not in the country.

I strongly suspect that the answers to these questions will not be forthcoming.

So do the editors of the Washington Post:

The Afghan decision would be understandable had Mr. Obama’s previous choices proved out. But what’s remarkable is that the results also have been consistent — consistently bad. Iraq has slid into something close to civil war, with al-Qaeda retaking territory that U.S. Marines once died to liberate. In Syria, al-Qaeda has carved out safe zones that senior U.S. officials warn will be used as staging grounds for attacks against Europe and the United States. Libya is falling apart, with Islamists, secularists, military and other factions battling for control.

We hope Afghanistan can avoid that fate. But the last time the United States cut and ran from there, after the Soviet Union withdrew, the result was the Taliban takeover, al-Qaeda’s safe havens and, eventually, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, after which everyone said, well, we won’t make that mistake again.

and

For years the United States promised to be a partner to a democratic Afghanistan, to help ensure that girls can keep going to school and to lock in the gains that have been won at such a high price by U.S. and other NATO troops. Mr. Obama’s implicit message Tuesday was: “Not so much.” If al-Qaeda can wait out the United States, it may get another chance. If Afghans have thrown their lot in with the Americans, they will be left on their own.

The president cannot have his cake and eat it, too. If President Bush erred in attacking Afghanistan and removing the Taliban, President Obama should have acknowledged that much earlier and withdrawn our forces years ago. Thousands of American lives would have been saved. If President Bush did not err, can whatever has been achieved there be maintained with the course of action on which President Obama is embarked?

Much as I like Michael Hodin’s remarks on the government response to the Pfizer-Astrzeneca deal:

On both sides of the Atlantic, exactly the wrong questions are being asked. Nor is Read, however convenient a scapegoat, the right person to be interrogating.

Instead, they should be asking what could be done to ensure that the R&D pharmaceutical sector remains vibrant, ambitious, and well-funded. In the coming decades, with over two billion people growing into old age, and health care costs still rising ahead of inflation, the “miracles” of the 20th century that contributed mightily to our current longevity will be essential. These are not questions for a CEO, but for policymakers who create the conditions that enable or discourage investment that leads to jobs, innovation and economic growth.Instead of asking Ian Read about Pfizer’s plans to hire or fire, government leaders should be asking their health, science and finance ministers what kinds of R&D programs could be put in place to enable the British population to age with more vitality.

I don’t think he “gets it”, either. Pharmaceutical companies don’t view R&D as a profit center but as overhead. From their point of view it should be minimized.

IMO among the questions that should be asked is whether the regulatory framework that’s in place is encouraging or discouraging more R&D and developing new pharmaceuticals. I think you need to look beyond single companies and at the industry as a whole.

There’s a great article at Fiscal Times on how the federal government’s sloppy accounting for its software inventory costs hundreds of millions, even billions:

Two dozen major government agencies have failed to put in place the kind of systems needed to manage the hundreds of millions of dollars in software that they purchase and license each year, according to the Government Accountability Office. The fact that federal agencies are bad at monitoring their software use isn’t just annoying, it’s expensive, the GAO found. One agency that managed to consolidate its licensing agreements in 2012 saved approximately $181 million, even though the GAO determined the process it used to do so was ad hoc.

On the whole, the GAO said in a letter to Sen. Tom Carper (D-DE), the head of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs, “Federal agencies are not adequately managing their software licenses because they generally do not follow leading practices in this area.” The agency identified five best practices that major companies follow to monitor their software contracts: centralized management, established software license inventory, tracking and maintaining inventory, analyzing software license data, and providing sufficient training.

There’s an app for that.

Good management AKA prudent stewardship is an attitude not a task. Getting control over software licenses need not require a multi-million dollar system for doing it although I’m sure they could turn it into something that did. This is something that’s well within the president’s discretion but Congressional support would be welcome, too. Not that they have a mind to.