Today is a good opportunity to engage in my annual exercise in humility, evaluating how well my predictions for 2011 fared.

Things I Got Right

• Kim Jong-Il will die this year and be succeeded by his son, Kim Jong-Un. Whether Kim John-Un will actually have control of the reins of governments appears to be up for grabs at this point.
• GDP growth for the year will be at or below 3%. Growth will be sufficiently concentrated that it will feel worse.
• There will be no anti-austerity riots by public employees in the United States like those in Greece.
• PPACA will not be repealed or declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
• Rahm Emanuel will be allowed to run in the primary for Chicago mayor.
• American forces will leave Iraq on schedule.
• At least 90,000 American soldiers will be in Afghanistan at the end of 2011.
• Julian Assange will not be convicted of sex charges in Sweden or of espionage in the United States.
• Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld, Natalie Portman, Colin Firth, and Geoffrey Rush will all be nominated for Academy Awards.
• The Coen Brothers will not announce that they’re beginning production of a new version of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Oklahoma. (this was a rumor that was going around)
• There will still be prisoners at Guantanamo at the end of 2011. Like the Bush Administration before it the Obama Administration doesn’t know what else to do with them and it’s unwilling to take the heat for making the wrong decision.
• The EU’s actions will be successful in deferring the sovereign debt crisis among its member nations through 2011. The problems haven’t been solved—the can has just been kicked down the road.

Things I Got Wrong

• At least one state will either default, be bailed out by the federal government, or be allowed to declare bankruptcy. The city of Harrisburg has and one county (in the biggest bankruptcy in U. S. history). So far the states have managed to tread water.
• The Social Network will win the Academy Award as Best Picture. I’m gratified at the actual result (The King’s Speech). It does the Academy credit.
• House prices as measured by the Case-Shiller index of twenty leading markets will decline at least an additional 10%. The actual decline was about 4%. I continue to think that prices have significantly farther to fall but I underestimated the effects that trafficking the foreclosure process would have in slowing the decline.

Things I Got Part Right

• At the end of 2011 unemployment in the U. S. will be no less than 9%. BEA’s actual estimate, 8.6%, is close enough that I’m giving myself partial credit. My excuse it that a) I underestimated how well the BEA could jigger the numbers and b) I underestimated how quickly so many of the unemployed would become discouraged and, due to the arcane way in which unemployment is calculated, no longer be deemed unemployed.
• Colin Firth and Natalie Portman won Academy Awards. I didn’t figure on Melissa Leo but, again, I think the decision does the Academy credit.
• The Tea Party Movement will prove to be a genuine populist movement rather than just another name for regular Republicans. That Mitt Romney is having as much difficulty in securing the nomination as he is proves my point but, since I didn’t predict the rise of the “Occupy” movement which I think is one of the stories of the year, I’m only giving myself partial credit.
• President Obama’s approval rating as measured by the RCP average will not go over 50%. His approval rating (as calculated by the RCP average has been below 50% nearly all year and is currently below 50%. It did go a bit above 50% very briefly so I’m giving myself partial credit.

The final tally is 12-3-4. Once again that’s roughly the same as last year. As usual I missed some of the biggest stories of the year which by my reckoning are the “Arab Spring” and the “Occupy” movement.

In a post reacting to an NYT piece on young people and higher education, Bill MacBride makes the following observation:

But in the long run, more education is a positive for the economy – and Rampell’s article suggests the kids (well, young adults) are alright!

I really wish he’d show his work on this. It concerns me that this may be more an article of faith than a provable fact.

The difference in the unemployment rate for those with college degrees or better and those without is widely published. I don’t think this means what those touting it seem to think. If the credentials race is a zero-sum game in which those with PhDs out-compete those with MAs who out-compete those with BAs who out-compete those with AAs who out-compete those with high school degrees who out-compete those who didn’t graduate from high school in an environment like today’s in which the number of new jobs created barely keeps up with the natural increase or, worse, fails to do so, where’s the positive? Since those who’ve pursued further credentials are undertaking greater consumer debt to do so, pursuing higher credentials the better to compete for the few jobs that are materializing doesn’t make the economy more vibrant, it merely exacerbates existing social problems. As I’ve documented here before the rate of on-time high school graduation rate in major urban areas has remained persistently high for generations.

There are other reasons to believe we’re not creating jobs that require ever-higher levels of education but requiring ever-higher levels of education as credentials for jobs that don’t require them. For example, the length and number of post-docs in physics, chemistry, and the other sciences have been increasing over the last decade. That doesn’t suggest a robust demand for science PhDs so much as a lack of better jobs for science PhDs.

There are exceptions to this. Healthcare, for example. But since healthcare is so heavily subsidized the question becomes does whatever additional economic activity is produced outweigh the deadweight loss? I don’t know the answer to that but I have my suspicions. I don’t think the answer is self-evident.

The experience of other countries, e.g. Germany, China, and Japan, also provides counter-evidence of the assertion. All three have lower rates of graduation from university than the U. S. and lower rates of unemployment. Clearly, there is no straight-line connection between the two factors.

Additionally, in recent years China has seen something similar to what’s been seen here: increasing numbers of young people with university degrees who must take factory jobs in which the skills they’ve presumably acquired at university are wasted and who are, understandably, dissatisfied. They call them “the ant tribe”.

The editors of The New Republic have produced their list of the most under-covered stories of 2011. Here’s the list:

• Lawrence Kaplan: America’s Silent Withdrawal From Iraq
• Tim Noah: Declining Illegal Immigration
• Walter Shapiro: Obama’s Failed Fireside Chat
• Noam Scheiber: The False Start Recovery
• David Greenberg: The Decline of Turkish Democracy
• Alec MacGillis: The Higher Ed Bubble and The Survival of Germany’s Welfare State
• William Galston: Obama’s Ambiguous Endgame For Iran
• John Judis: The Subversion of the Do Not Call Registry
• Isaac Chotiner: The Return of Blood Diamonds
• Ed Kilgore: The Conservative Assault On the Constitution
• John McWhorter: The Debunking of the Obesity Epidemic
• Jon Cohn: Budget Slashing On the State Level

I think the list is kind of a mixed bag. Some of the items on the list, e.g. the higher ed bubble, U. S. withdrawal from Iraq, can only be considered overlooked if you don’t read blogs. There are byways in the political blogosphere that have covered both of those stories obsessively.

Some of them, e.g. the decline in migration from Mexico, I’ve mentioned here.

Some of them are interesting, e.g. I really don’t know why the return of blood diamonds and Turkey’s slide away from the secularism that has dominated its politics for the last century have received so little attention. Other than that by and large Americans are completely uninterested in foreign affairs.

And, yes, I get calls from “Cardholder Services” incessantly, too. Maybe three or four a day.

I can’t honestly say that I’m an admirer of any of the men and women in the top ten of Gallup’s annual “Most Admired” list. In the entire list of those mentioned maybe Aung San Suu Kyi and Liu Xiaobo. Otherwise, the list looks more to me like name recognition.

I see that Billy Graham has made the top ten among men for the 65th consecutive year.

James Hamilton parts company with some prominent economists on what we need to do to start our economy growing again:

I recommend that, rather than wring our hands in despair, America should respond to our long-term challenges by making note of the natural advantages we already enjoy and figuring out how to make the best use of them.

Clearly, since the examples he gives are oil and natural gas production and rare earth production, he means the mineral assets, the natural resource assets.

I have some sympathy with his proposal having recommended some of the same things myself but I think a distinction is necessary. I’m all in favor of the things he advocates but I also think that the key to a robust economy in the future will be enhancing our standing as a producer and exporter of processed materials. Exporting unprocessed raw materials won’t be any more help today than shipping unprocessed timber to Japan was 30 years ago. I can think of dozens of things that we’re producing and just shipping without processing from minerals to mohair.

Also, I can’t help but wonder if he’s not fighting the last war. That the raw materials producing and exporting countries (like Canada and Austrialia) have done well over the last several years is no indication that it will last forever. A crash in demand from China, which seems likely in the event of a collapse in the China’s construction boom, could change that picture dramatically.

Opening ourselves up to greatly increased materials production and processing without sacrificing environmental considerations will require a substantial change not just in policies but in viewpoints. The reason we’re no longer exporting rare earths isn’t the price. It’s environmental concerns.

From Lillian Gish’s autobiography, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me:

In the tail end of the nineteenth century, a new phenomenon had captured the imagination of the American public. In places called “penny arcades,” which were usually rented stores, people could see “moving pictures”—strips of film on assorted subjects—by dropping a penny into a slot and peering into a machine called the Kinetoscope. A few years after the Kinetoscope made its appearance, it was superseded by the Mutoscope, a peep-show machine owned by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, one of the leading motion picture companies. By 1896 film images were being projected on screens, usually in vaudeville houses. These early movies, which were mostly photographed vaudeville acts, were greeted enthusiastically. But the novelty was short-lived. By 1900 movies were the last act on the programs in the vaudeville theaters in which they were shown.

Movies seemed to have no future until, in the first year of the century, vaudeville actors struck for higher wages. Theater owners had no choice but to show movies exclusively. Film equipment was purchased in large quantities—until the end of the strike. Projection manufacturers, who had responded to the demand while it lasted, suddenly found themselves overstocked; theater owners were willing to sell their machines cheaply. The penny arcade owners, who had long wanted to show films on screens but had been unable to compete with the theater owners, now had an opportunity to buy the equipment at bargain prices.

Not only arcade owners but small-time entrepeneurs everywhere found a new and quick source of income. They rented unused stores, fitted them with projection machines, a screen, and some chairs, and charged a nickel admission. Called “nickelodeons,” these new movie houses, cheap and accessible to everyone, enjoyed phenomenal success, and were established in small towns and large cities throughout the country.

I found quite a number of things interesting about this little snippet of history. First, notice how the delivery system and the creation of a mass market drove the format of motion pictures? The first movies were short: sometimes just a few frames, then longer. But looking through a peephole at the flickering pictures limited the length of a movie—it’s just too uncomfortable to peer into a mutoscope for longer than a few minutes. And each viewer needed his or her own mutoscope. By projecting the movie onto a screen and packing chairs into a darkened room an arcade owner could get a lot more return for a lower capital investment—just one motion picture projector, a screen, and some chairs. Since the movies themselves were rented by the week, that presented the possibility of a lot more revenue at a lower cost than had otherwise been possible.

However, when sitting in a chair rather than leaning over a mutoscope, the members of the audience could watch longer movies. The very first feature length motion picture was an Australian picture produced in 1906. With the technical, financial, and market building blocks in place, feature length films blossomed.

Supply and demand were essential factors in creating a mass market. It took a supply shock (the actors’ strike) to nudge tastes in a different direction along with a fall in the capital requirements (the glut of projection equipment resulting in price drops).

It illustrates some other things that have been recurrent themes here, too. The vaudeville theater owners had a very restrictive view of what business they were in. Rather than seeing themselves as mass entertainment emporiums their preference was to identify themselves as places for live entertainment (there were status issues involved in this decision, too). The key point here is that the vaudeville theater owners didn’t see the penny arcades as competition. How wrong they were!

Fast forward all of this to today. The systems for delivering entertainment to a mass audience are evolving very rapidly. First came Internet shorts, then serials and movies. Now the proliferation of smartphones and tablets provide even more media.

I don’t think the blockbusters that have been the mainstay of the Hollywood film industry for the last thirty some-odd years are well-adapted to these new entertainment delivery systems. The studios and production companies are geared up to promote their products so I don’t expect them to die out but I think there are openings for new adaptations of old forms to come to the forefront.

Note that box office receipts haven’t been great this year and the game industry’s grosses are higher than the movie industry’s with better margins.

The comments of this post at OTB for some reason or other has turned to the educational system. I find it incredible that anybody could think that the K-12 public educational system today is not “dumbed down” relative to what it was, say, 90 years ago.

Consider, for example, this front page from a newspaper of 90 years ago and the articles on the front page of USA Today this morning. At least to my eye the vocabulary, grammatical constructions, and assumptions about supporting knowledge were much greater in years gone by than they are now. See also, for example, the standard fourth grade reader from 1899.

I think the better question is not whether the educational system (not to mention the public discourse) has descended to the lowest common denominator. I think it’s obvious that it has. The better question is whether, in a system of universal education, you can or should expect anything else and whether a system of universal education is better than what prevailed 90 years ago. I think it is, that “dumbing down” is inevitable under such a system, and, all things considered, that’s not a bad thing.

To put things in the context of my own family in 1920 nobody in my family had an education beyond the third grade (although they were expected by that time to be completely literate, to be able to figure, and to have a substantial body of knowledge, particularly of literature) and I would claim that at that point that was the norm or even beyond the norm. Large numbers of Americans, particularly blacks in the south, had no formal education whatever. Illiteracy was still extremely common. I think I might characterize what we’ve got now as “elective illiteracy”.http://www.usatoday.com/

It’s the time of year in which lists of most notable this or that, persons of the year, etc. appear. Today I began thinking about something and the more I thought about it the more maddeningly difficult I found it.

This year what individual or institution has made the greatest contributions for good?

When you put aside the politics and posturing and focus on actual good rather than a symbol for good, I find this question pretty difficult. Perhaps this is something that can only be reckoned at a more considerable distance than a year.

This year for Christmas one of the presents my wife gave me was a DVD of Vincente Minnelli’s 1944 picture Meet Me in St. Louis. What made the purchase completely worthwhile was the add-on features which included a commentary track, a “Making of…&148; short, the original trailer, and some other associated shorts.

Some of the info in the commentary and “Making of…” short I already knew about. For example, I’ve heard interviews with Hugh Martin, the composer of the movie’s most enduring song, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”, in which he explained that the version of the song that made its way into the finished movie was markedly different from the song as originally conceived. As originally written the opening lines of the song were

Have yourself a merry little Christmas
It could be the last.
From now on we’ll all be living in the past.

and continued on in a similar vein. Judy Garland, cognizant of her own fan base and what we’d now call her “brand” refused outright to sing it. I didn’t, however, that after a few weeks of uneasy truce between Martin and Garland Ms. Garland’s co-star, Tom Drake, prevailed upon Martin to re-write the lyrics for what was obviously a lovely and nostalgia-evoking melody, the movie’s likeliest candidate for a hit song, to be a bit more cheerful. Martin relented and the result is the song we know.

However, considered closely as lovely as it is, it is both incoherent and inconsistent with what’s going on in the movie at that point. The emphasis has been transferred to the joys of Christmas with family and friends and away from “Have yourself a merry little Christmas now” because the future will be different, not necessarily for the better.

Another of the features included on the DVD was a pilot for a television sitcom based on the movie starring Shelley Fabares as Esther and Celeste Holm, completely wasted, as Mrs. Smith and featuring the wonderful Reta Shaw as Katie, their housekeeper (played in the movie by the inimitable Marjorie Main). The pilot is a thoroughgoing disaster with ghastly writing and direction, little or no music, and completely lacking in the loving attention to detail that gives much of the hit movie its charm. Really, the only good thing about the pilot is that it gives us some hints about what Shaw’s Katie in the 1955 television production must have been like.

Which brings me to my sole complaint about the DVD: it doesn’t include the TV production. It starred Jane Powell as Esther, Walter Pidgeon as Mr. Smith, Myrna Loy as Mrs. Smith, and a pre-The Miracle Worker Patti Duke as Tootie (the part for which Margaret O’Brien won a juvenile Oscar for her performance in the original movie). The kinescope of the live production appears to be extant and with that cast I’d love to see it.

Unlike the commenter on the DVD I don’t believe that Meet Me in St. Louis is the all-time greatest movie musical (I think that Seven Brides for Seven Brothers holds that distinction). It is too much a vehicle for Judy Garland, the dance routines don’t meet the standards of the music or Ms. Garland’s singing, etc. However, in one sense, the loving, meticulous, obsessive attention to detail while MMISL may not be the greatest movie musical it is perhaps the finest example of what the studios could accomplish when they had an inclination to and when they gave, ,essentially, a free hand to a director with that kind of vision if it can be said that anybody other than Vincente Minnelli has.

Maybe that long ago live television production will show up in some other future release of Meet Me in St. Louis.