Every so often some trivial thing will evoke a memory of something I haven’t thought about in decades. If I had the gift and the memory-evoking thing were the smell of madeleines, it might inspire me to write thousands of pages of novels. In this case what brought old memories floating back to the surface was just a television commercial and it will only produce a blog post but, since it’s a memory of a world that no longer exists, I thought I’d pass it along.

When I was a kid no more than eight or nine years old every so often I’d walk the half mile or so along the main drag of the gritty neighborhood we lived in at the time from my home to the drug store. Sometimes I’d pick up a few glass bottles along the way I could return for the deposits. At the drug store I’d purchase a comic book, sit at the counter, and order a cherry coke. In those olden days a cherry coke wasn’t the horrible ersatz thing that passes for a cherry coke today and makes you wonder why anyone would ever drink such a thing but was made to order from carbonated water, coca cola syrup, and cherry syrup.

I’d sit there, drink my coke, read my comic book, and be transported to the future or a world of superheroes and grand adventures. These weren’t the dark worlds of today’s comics but the bright, heroic worlds of the comics of my boyhood—a difference so immense I can hardly explain it to you.

Just writing this has evoked another memory. I think the last time I sat at a drug store counter and drank a cherry coke I purchased not a comic book but a paperback book. That was more than thirty-five years ago in a different town and a different drugstore. I think I still have the paperback somewhere around here. It was a novelization of Star Wars, issued before the movie was released. Another bright, heroic world. In a galaxy far, far away.

Two young lawyers’ complaints that they’re not earning enough as Massachusetts public prosecutors do not evoke a lot of sympathy from me:

I graduated from Boston College Law School in 2007. After six and a half years as a public defender, my salary is roughly $53,600 a year. I, like my colleagues, realize many people in Massachusetts are paid less than public defenders. Every single day I work with poor people who don’t have a dime to their name. And I know many people struggle, stay in the middle class, with less than my salary. But $53,600 a year is far too low of a salary to allow me to stay with CPCS. I have over $120,000 in student loans. I have a 2003 Toyota Corolla with 128,000 miles on it. I live in a modest apartment that I share, perhaps tellingly, with another public defender from my office just to make the ends meet. I had a part-time job for five years as a public defender selling wine and liquor at a wine shop until about a year ago when I really had to leave because my social life was nonexistent and I really needed extra time to work on my cases. I live no better than I did when I was a first-year law student at BC. In fact, I probably live less well. I have no savings. I can’t save anything for retirement, and there is no end in sight.

A dozen or more years ago I ran into a classmate in, of all places, a grocery store in San Diego. At that point he was working as a public prosecutor for the county and complained that he wasn’t being paid enough and that was during an historic boom. The reality is that public prosecutors have never been well-paid.

It’s a simple case of supply and demand. Let’s go back to the case of Massachusetts. Massachusetts has the second highest ratio of lawyers to population of any state in the Union (only New York has more).

Add to that the reality that unemployment of newly graduated lawyers is at historic levels.

Finally, incomes among lawyers occur in a bimodal distribution, i.e. they’re not statistically normal. Notions like “average” or “median” don’t mean much when it comes to lawyers. A bimodal distribution has two humps like a camel rather than the familiar normal distribution. Why is that? Lawyers who work for big law firms make big wages. They’re also graduates of a handful of law schools. Lawyers who don’t work for big law firms earn considerably less and lawyers who work for the government even less than that. And the big law firms aren’t hiring the armies of associates they used to, mostly through a combination of automation and offshoring.

The grads of top law schools now compete with grads of lesser law schools who in turn are pushed out of jobs in law altogether.

Larry Sabato explains the likely results of November’s Senate elections:

The calculated takeaway is this: As of now, Democrats are clear underdogs in the two states where they want to play offense. They also are probably no better than 50-50 in any of the seven red states where they are defending seats, and drowning in a couple. A big enough wave could cut into the blue states, too, although probably not as deeply as Republicans fantasize. Put it all together, and the current forecast calls for a wave that’s more than a ripple but less than a tsunami – a four to eight-seat addition for the Republicans, with the higher end of the range being a shade likelier than the lower. For Harry Reid, that would be a big-enough splash.

For a real Republican wave to emerge they would need to do significantly better than that. Two things would both need to happen: the president’s support would need to collapse and Republicans would have to run completely error-free campaigns. Since I don’t believe that both of those things will happen, I think that the Democrats will hold the Senate.

In researching quite a different post I stumbled across an interesting little factoid. The last American president to attend public schools from kindergarten through college was Jimmy Carter.

Of post-war presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Ford, and Carter attended exclusively public schools through college.

Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton attended public schools through high school and private schools for higher education.

George W. Bush attended a public grammar school and private educational institutions thereafter.

Kennedy, George H. W. Bush, and Obama all attended exclusively private schools.

In other words until George H. W. Bush public education was the norm for American presidents during the post-war period.

I don’t think that can be explained by a decline in the system of public education. I think the only viable explanation is that we’ve become increasingly elitist over the last 30 years.

Present Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has only attended private schools. He’s now our primary standard bearer for public education. Not precisely a shining exemplar. I think there’s something wrong with this picture.

The editors of the Washington Post state the case for the Common Core:

The Common Core is a set of objectives for student learning — not a mandated curriculum — that arose from governors, state education officials and others who understood that American children needed to raise their game to compete in the global economy. It is designed to move away from rote learning toward critical thinking and group effort. It assumes that parents will want to measure school and student progress. In many places, officials are saying that teachers should be evaluated in part on how well they are teaching, with good teachers being rewarded.

In this sentence they inadvertently make an argument for educational reform:

The critique about process is a straw man for the main objection: use of test results as a factor in evaluating teacher effectiveness.

I do not believe they mean “straw man”, i.e. an argument (usually that of your opponent) that you set up to be defeated easily. I think they mean “stalking horse”—a false pretext intended to conceal your true intentions.

than convincing people there is a problem and convincing people there is a problem has remained elusive. It might be easier if the people who telling us to be worried about climate change behaved as though there were a problem but they can’t be convinced to do that so there’s an impasse.

Meanwhile, I note that somebody, in this case Robert Samuelson, has noticed the difficulty of solving the problem, something I’ve been pointing out for some time:

It’s useful for environmental groups to have global warming “deniers” (and, of course, behind them the sinister oil companies) as foils. The subliminal message is that once the views of these Neanderthals are swept away, we can adopt sensible policies to “do something” about global warming.

The reality is otherwise. The central truth for public policy is: We have no solution.

From 2010 to 2040, the U.S. Energy Information Administration projects global emissions will increase almost 50 percent. About 80 percent of global energy comes from fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas), which are also the major sources of carbon dioxide emissions. At present, we have no practical replacement for this energy. No sane government will sacrifice its economy today — by dramatically curtailing fossil-fuel use — for the uncertain benefits of less global warming sometime in the foggy future. (The focus of the U.S. global warming report on the present seems aimed at bridging this gap.)

I think the problem is actually slightly worse than he’s painting it. I think that any conceivable reductions in U. S. emissions will be more than offset by Chinese and Indian increases.

It seems to me that people who are genuinely serious would be paying a lot more attention to projects like Sandia National Laboratory’s “Sunshine to Petrol” project.

Or we could produce much, much more energy, presumably using nuclear reactors. With enough energy the problem becomes relatively easy to solve.

If this, reported by E. J. Dionne, is the pitch that Democrats deploy in the fall:

More than anyone, President Obama can expound on how much better things are now than they were when the economy was near collapse in 2009. But a campaign speech he offered at a Democratic fundraiser last week in La Jolla, Calif., nicely captured the party’s two-track argument.

Yes, he began by accentuating the positive. “When I came into office, the American economy was in a freefall that people don’t still fully appreciate,” Obama said. “And by most measures, what we’ve accomplished together as a country over the last five years has been significant: 9.2 million new jobs, an auto industry that has come roaring back, a financial system that’s stabilized, trillions of dollars of wealth recovered and restored because housing came back and people’s 401 pensions bounced back.”

it presents a significant problem. Just about everyone has a family member, neighbor, or friend who’s been out of a job for years. Car sales are still lower than they were in 2008.

The financial system has perhaps stabilized somewhat. Just how much we’ll know when the next cyclic downturn occurs as it will eventually. However, wealth has not so much been recovered as transferred. Wealth in the form of home equity has decreased over the last 7 years while wealth in the form of equities has risen. That’s a transfer from ordinary people to the financial sector rather than restoration. It’s a bit hard to complain about income inequality while praising policies that have produced more income inequality.

Finally, only 15% of Americans have 401Ks and those are mostly the richest Americans. That’s not a winning strategy for Democrats.

Consequently, that won’t be their strategy.

My own view is that Democrats should avoid a national strategy and concentrate on the head-to-head contests in the hope that their candidates are better than their Republican opponents. It’s a wild idea but it just might work.

Fats Waller “Your Feet’s Too Big” 1941 Soundie from Mike Beyer / MindsiMedia on Vimeo.

This song was written in 1936 by Fred Fisher and it was recorded by the Ink Spots among others but it’s associated with Fats Waller.

Well, there’s a sight I won’t be seeing:

Brave tourists have been trying out Chicago’s newest attraction – a 1000ft-high viewing platform that offers spectacular downward facing views over the city.

TILT is housed on the 94th floor of the 360 Chicago skyscraper and, as the names suggests, the enclosed glass and steel platform tilts visitors forward for a unique perspective of the city’s The Magnificent Mile.

It offers a jumper’s eye view of the city. You can count me out.