At the Wall Street Journal Alan Dershowitz states my views about the present trope among the Democratic leadership, that the “beyond reasonable doubt” isn’t the appropriate standard for assessing Brett Kavanaugh, pretty succinctly:

Until Judge Brett Kavanaugh was accused of horrible crimes—sexual assault, lewd conduct and even gang rape—his confirmation hearings could fairly, if not entirely accurately, be characterized as a “job interview.” The burden was on him to demonstrate his suitability to serve on the Supreme Court. He apparently met that burden in the eyes of a majority, a partisan one to be sure, and seemed on the way to getting the job.

But now everything has changed. So should the burden of persuasion. The behavior of which Judge Kavanaugh has been accused is so serious and devastating that it requires a high level of proof before forming the basis for his rejection. There is an enormous and dispositive difference between a candidate’s rejection on ideological grounds, as was the case with Robert Bork, and rejection on the ground that he has committed crimes warranting lifetime imprisonment rather than a lifetime appointment.

Being on the Supreme Court is a privilege, not a right. But being disqualified based on a false accusation of a crime would be a violation of the fundamental right to fairness. Some will argue that the issue of Judge Kavanaugh’s ideological and professional qualifications should be merged with the sexual allegations and that doubts should be resolved against a lifetime appointment.

In some cases that would be a plausible argument. But it is too late for that kind of nuanced approach now, because these accusations have received world-wide attention. Judge Kavanaugh is on trial for his life. At stake are his career, his family, his legacy and a reputation earned over many decades as a lawyer and judge.

What standard would Sens. Feinstein or Hirono propose? Preponderance of the evidence? Since Dr. Ford has presented no evidence other than testimony or hearsay while Judge Kavanaugh has presented his calendars, that won’t do the trick, either. The only standard I can see under which Sen. Hirono’s views prevail is the precautionary principle. I wonder if Sen. Hirono would survive such a standard. At this point based on her employing a Chinese spy for 20 years, Sen. Feinstein certainly wouldn’t.

The Democratic leadership is already pivoting towards the Catch-22 proposition that being outraged is a sign of guilt. Even the editors of the New York Times recognize that denial and outrage are precisely the way both guilty and innocent would respond to charges of the seriousness of those being leveled at Brett Kavanaugh.

I wish the Democrats would just say openly that they won’t vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh under any circumstances.

In his latest New York Times column Paul Krugman turns to potential GDP:

Lehman failed ten years and two weeks ago; this coming Wednesday will be the 10th anniversary of the enactment of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, aka the bailout. In honor of the anniversary, there have been approximately 1,000,000,000 pieces reflecting on the 2008 financial crisis and its effects. Many have suggested, rightly, that the political fallout continues to shape our world today. But as far as I can tell, surprisingly few have focused on the long-run economic effects.

What’s odd about this relative neglect is that even a cursory look at the data suggests that these effects were huge. It’s true that U.S. unemployment is back below it was before the crisis; although it’s not widely realized, euro area unemployment is also way down, not quite to eve-of-crisis levels but well below its pre-crisis average. But in both cases we’ve returned to sort-of full employment at a much lower level of real GDP than informed people projected we’d reach before the crisis struck.

Better late than never, I guess. Where was this Paul Krugman in 2009 and 2010? That’s when continued attention would have done the most good. At this point anyone who gives the slightest credence to Keynes’s theories would realize that after 10 years structural changes would surely have taken place and at least some of that potential GDP was now completely beyond reach. Today the very best evidence that there is still unrealized potential GDP is if the stimulus applied by the Trump Administration actually has any measurable effect.

Additionally, at least to my eye Dr. Krugman persists in an error I frequently encounter. In what is potential GDP denominated?

After listening to the various talking heads programs this morning, I’m concerned that there is a lot of miscalculation going on. The direction in which we’re heading does not lead to another victory for the liberation of women. Quite the opposite. It leads to strict separation of the sexes and, ultimately, purdah.

Keep in mind that such liberation as women have experienced over the last several generations in Europe and the United States is an aberration from the standpoint of the rest of the world and the rest of history. For most people it is viewed that way rather than as received wisdom.

At RealClearPolicy Brent Orrell reveals a secret that has been known to thinking people for generations:

For the better part of the last 40 years, employers, educators at all levels, and workforce development authorities have campaigned successfully to increase the number of students graduating with degrees and credentials in STEM occupations. Between 1960 and 2013, the number of U.S. STEM workers grew by 3 percent compared to 2 percent growth in all other fields, with the STEM workforce enjoying a median pay roughly twice that of non-STEM workers. Most importantly, the STEM workforce skews young, suggesting that in this area youth and exuberance are more important than age and wisdom.

The hidden downside — as the study by David Deming, a Harvard University professor of public policy, education and economics, and Kadeem Noray, a Harvard Ph.D. student, shows — is that while STEM fields pay well for recent graduates, these premiums are short-lived. They are highest at the outset of a career and decline by more than 50 percent in the first 10 years of working life. The higher the rate of technological change in a particular specialty, the flatter the rate of wage increase. This pattern is particularly true in applied STEM fields like engineering and computer science. (Other STEM majors like biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics — the pure STEM categories — do not show similar wage effects.)

More than 50 years ago my dad explained it to me like this. Engineers have high starting salaries but they plateau quickly, too. The salaries for other professions, like the law or the practice of medicine, tend to rise throughout life.

Over that period things have been clouded a bit. Physicians now have far larger income expectations than the other professions. But otherwise the situation remains the same.

I would go a bit farther than the linked article does. Engineering will be a dead end in the United States as long as we export so much of our industrial production overseas. Production engineers necessarily follow production and design engineers inevitably will follow production engineers.

How should young people respond? I can only offer my opinion. Law is a bad choice. Non-lawyers routinely provide services now that used to require lawyers. Top tier law firms are decreasing the number of associates they hire. Wages for lawyers will inevitably decline. Certain narrow, highly specialized engineering disciplines, e.g. petroleum engineering, will continue to provide good incomes for some time to come. It will be increasingly difficult to get a job earning a decent income as a electrical, chemical, mechanical, or industrial engineer other than in those narrow specialties. Those jobs are going to China and India.

MBAs from top tier B-schools will have no difficulty finding lucrative jobs for the foreseeable future but those account for, perhaps, a few thousand graduates a year.

We’re probably at peak higher education at this point. Don’t expect job openings for college professors or their wages to increase.

Higher education is worthwhile but it’s a luxury good, not a mass market commodity. For most people the trades or skilled blue collar work is probably a better choice and those require training but not higher education.

In response to Cullen Roche’s complaints about the national anthem being sung before ballgames, I think he’s misreading history and events. The custom took hold in 1941-1942. Circumstances were very different then. The United States was facing attack from east and west and there was genuine concern and doubt about whether we would survive. Singing the national anthem wasn’t enforced by the government or promoted by politicians. It was adopted by the people as a way of showing determination and promoting solidarity during a shared near-death experience.

If we’re having a near-death experience today, it’s being provoked by internal forces and it does not seems to me that singing the national anthem shows determination or promotes solidarity any longer. Is it time for professional sports teams to end the custom of singing the national anthem before games?

Said another way I think we’re divided and our politics merely reflects how divided we are. Yes, politicians are promoting division for personal gain. What’s the solution for that?

Last night my wife and I streamed the first episode of the Murphy Brown reboot. To my ear any encomiums it has received have been unearned. The old, original program was never distinguished by fine acting. Candace Bergen’s delivery has always been as though she were reading from a teleprompter. The only genuinely funny person on the old program, Robert Pastorelli, is dead. You know there’s a problem when Faith Ford is carrying the comedic weight. She’s still pretty and funny but I don’t think that menopause jokes will carry the show.

At least for me poking fun at Donald Trump and Fox News isn’t enough to earn my praise. The laughs were few and far between. The show needs to up its writing game.

Almost the opposite was true of the rebirth of Last Man Standing. The writers and performers took the opportunity of mercilessly ribbing ABC and themselves and they got it out of the way from the very opening scene. Despite having replaced the only one of actresses playing one of Tim Allen’s daughters who had decent comedic timing, the show was still funny and with that single exception it brought back the entire cast. The great Hector Elizondo continues to show that he can do just about anything.

Last Man Standing didn’t just win its time slot; it won Friday night. By comparison Murphy Brown didn’t even win its time slot and dragged down the shows that followed it.

Alfred Hemsworth, the Rupert Murdoch of his time, once quipped “When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.”

Chicago has gone nearly a day, 22 hours, without anyone having been shot. From the Chicago Tribune:

No one was shot in Chicago for more than 22 hours Friday, according to police. But two men were wounded in separate shootings early in the morning and late at night.

Between 12:35 a.m. and shortly after 10:55 p.m., shootings citywide did not result in any reported deaths or injuries.

Then a 39-year-old man walking down the 5200 block of Lake Street in South Austin heard gunshots, police said. A bullet grazed his right leg. He went to West Suburban Hospital, where he’s in good condition, police said. No arrests had been made, and no further information was released about the shooting.

That this should make the news at all is testimony to decades of governmental malfeasance that has led to a half dozen of Chicago’s neighborhoods on the South and West Sides having become shooting galleries and the city reaching its highest per capita homicide rate in history even as other major cities rates decline. And, make no mistake, governmental malfeasance is a major cause. Police have tortured suspects for years with impunity, the city has had massive judicial corruption, and the abuses have persisted right down to the present day. There is presently a trial in progress in which a police officer is accused of executing a young man, the events caught on video. The abuses go all the way to the highest levels of Chicago government. It is not credible that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel did not know about the video or connive in its concealment until after election day.

Chicago has among the highest rates of pay among American cities and the number of police officers per 100K population is higher here than in New York, Los Angeles, or Philadelphia so it’s not that there are not enough police or they are underpaid.

There is a solution but it’s one that won’t be taken. Stop voting for the same schmucks year after year after year. Don’t kid yourself. None of the leading candidates are a bit better than the one presently in office.

I give Tesla a year.

At Bloomberg Opinion Barry Ritholtz tries to explain why we have a two-track economy:

Which of these two scenarios describes the U.S. economy?

No. 1. The economy is better than ever: The stock market is near a record high, wages are rising, there are more job openings than applicants, household wealth has hit a record, gross domestic product is growing briskly, house values have recovered from the bust, and consumer confidence is back — and so is America!

No. 2. Real Americans are suffering: Inflation-adjusted wages are stagnant or even declining, economic mobility is nonexistent, gasoline is getting expensive as oil prices rise, labor force participation rates are stuck at levels not seen since the late 1970s, health care is brutally expensive and getting more so, and rents have been rising. There is a looming retirement crisis coming, as households have too little savings, and pensions are underfunded — the average American is getting crushed!

As he notes, they’re both true depending on who and where you are. Read the whole thing.

He offers four potential explanations:

1. The credit crisis changed everything
2. Unions declined
3. Capital was rewarded instead of labor
4. The vast American middle class was a historical aberration

which I find variously wrong, inadequate, or dependent variables. Let me offer a single umbrella explanation.

In a global managed economy whatever is subsidized flourishes and whatever is not subsidized languishes. By “global managed economy” I do not mean an economy that is managed globally but a global economy in which all of the competing parties manage their economies. The Powers That Be take active steps to exploit weaknesses in other economies while ensuring that their own circumstances continue to be treated favorably.

That single understanding explains the credit crisis, the decline in the influence of private sector unions (public sector unions have never had it so good), rewarding capital, and stagnation of middle class incomes. To that I would only add that culture matters. Why should we be surprised that our culture increasingly comes to resemble that of Mexico?