In honor of the 89th Academy Awards ceremony (“the Oscars”) to be televised live tonight, rather than talking about the best Best Pictures I’d rather think about some of the worst—the least deserving winners. Here’s my list:

Cavalcade (1933)

Cavalcade is a sort of 1930s antecedent to Upstairs Downstairs. Maybe it had more reasonance in the aftermath of the Great War. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it but nothing particularly right with it, either. I believe that it suffers when compared with several of the other nominees that year which were 42nd Street, A Farewell to Arms, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, Lady for a Day, Little Women, The Private Life of Henry VIII, She Done Him Wrong, Smilin’ Through, and State Fair. Most of those are iconic in their way and half of them have been remade; Little Women and State Fair have been remade multiple times. Cavalcade is practically unknown now except among film buffs.

Out of Africa (1985)

I guess I just don’t get Out of Africa. I think you could have made just about as good a picture by taking a camera out to the veldt, turning it on, and walking away. Its competitors included the actual best picture, The Color Purple, and Witness.

Dances With Wolves (1990)

I’m sure that there must be fans of Dances With Wolves out there but I found everything about it wooden—direction, acting, and the screenplay which I found almost intolerably patronizing. If you are attracted to this subject matter, watch the 1931 version of The Squaw Man, a better picture in practically every way with a wonderful, touching performance by Lupe Velez.

Keep in mind that Good Fellas and Ghost were among DWW’s competitors.

It’s easy to come up with the best Best Pictures. Which winners of the Best Picture Academy Award do you think are least deserving or worst?

As you listen to the flood of predictions about economic growth being made by the Trump Administration and its supporters, I thought the graph above might be a helpful tonic.

There’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and the lip.

There’s a good post on the politics of immigration policy at The Week by Damon Linker. Here’s a snippet:

Many liberals argue that refugees are among the most vulnerable people on Earth and so must be welcomed with open arms. That forcing undocumented immigrants to leave the country is gratuitously cruel, violates their rights, and so justifies municipalities flouting federal law by turning themselves into “sanctuary cities.” That banning entry to refugees or immigrants not yet within the United States can violate their due process rights under the U.S. Constitution. And that the desire to restrict immigration is invariably an expression of xenophobia, racism, and other forms of irrational animus and so morally (and perhaps constitutionally) indefensible.

All of these claims are, at bottom, expressions of a fundamentally anti-political humanitarian ideology that is unlikely to fare well in the next presidential election. Democrats desperately need to confront the vulnerabilities of this position and stake out a more defensible and pragmatic one if they hope to push back against Trump’s populist-nationalist message in upcoming years.

Many Americans believe that their constitution presumes or appeals to certain timeless, universal moral truths that apply to all human beings. But the U.S. Constitution itself — like the constitutions, fundamental laws, and commonly affirmed norms and rules of all political communities — is nonetheless instantiated in a particular place, rooted in a particular tradition. It also pertains and applies only to people who are members of the political community known as the United States of America.

Those who are members of this community are known as American citizens. They get a say in what laws get passed and how they get enforced. Those who are not members of this community — who are not citizens — don’t get such a say. The community is perfectly within its rights to decide which and how many of these outsiders will be allowed to visit the country, how long they will be allowed to stay, when they will need to go, and how many, if any, will be permitted to join the community permanently by becoming citizens.

When you stake out your position based on transcendent moral truths rather than on cost-benefit analysis, there’s no room for compromise. What is the resolution of a difference of opinion where there’s no room for compromise? The only peaceful resolution I can see is divorce.

I see that George Will has caught wise to a point I’ve made here many times. You can’t judge the scale and reach of the federal government from the number of federal employees. There are about as many federal employees today as there were 50 years ago. However:

Since 1960, the number of state and local government employees has tripled to more than 18 million, a growth driven by federal money: Between the early 1960s and early 2010s, the inflation-adjusted value of federal grants for the states increased more than tenfold. For example, the EPA has fewer than 20,000 employees, but 90 percent of EPA programs are completely administered by thousands of state government employees, largely funded by Washington.

A quarter of the federal budget is administered by the fewer than 5,000 employees of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) — and by the states, at least half of whose administrative costs are paid by CMS. Various federal crime and homeland security bills help fund local police departments. “By conservative estimates,” DiIulio writes, “there are about 3 million state and local government workers” — about 50 percent more than the number of federal workers — “funded via federal grants and contracts.”

Then there are for-profit contractors, used, DiIulio says, “by every federal department, bureau and agency.” For almost a decade, the Defense Department’s full-time equivalent of 700,000 to 800,000 civilian workers have been supplemented by the full-time equivalent of 620,000 to 770,000 for-profit contract employees. “During the first Gulf War in 1991,” DiIulio says, “American soldiers outnumbered private contractors in the region by about 60-to-1; but, by 2006, there were nearly as many private contractors as soldiers in Iraq — about 100,000 contract employees, not counting subcontractor employees, versus 140,000 troops.” Today, the government spends more (about $350 billion) on defense contractors than on all official federal bureaucrats ($250 billion).

Finally, “employment in the tax-exempt or independent sector more than doubled between 1977 and 2012 to more than 11 million.” Approximately a third of the revenues to nonprofits (e.g., Planned Parenthood) flow in one way or another from government. “If,” DiIulio calculates, “only one-fifth of the 11 million nonprofit sector employees owe their jobs to federal or intergovernmental grant, contract or fee funding, that’s 2.2 million workers” — slightly more than the official federal workforce.

To which add the estimated 7.5 million for-profit contractors. Plus the conservative estimate of 3 million federally funded employees of state and local governments. To this total of more than 12 million add the approximately 2 million federal employees. This 14 million is about 10 million more than the estimated 4 million federal employees and contractors during the Eisenhower administration.

So, today’s government is indeed big (3.5 times bigger than 5½ decades ago), but dispersed to disguise its size. This government is, DiIulio says, “both debt-financed and proxy-administered.”

If anything that understates the situation. Upwards of half the entire healthcare sector—more than one sixth of the economy—is paid for by the federal government. In effect half of the millions of workers in the healthcare sector are government workers.

It is now more than 50 years since President Lyndon Johnson went all-in on the Vietnam War. At the New York Times Mark D. Updegrove muses:

After the French left Vietnam in 1954 and the country was partitioned, Dwight D. Eisenhower and, after him, John F. Kennedy sent billions in aid and advisers to support the South Vietnamese government under Ngo Dinh Diem. His weak regime needed the money to ward off the Communist insurgency of the Vietcong, a guerrilla force aided by the north’s Ho Chi Minh, who had designs to reunify Vietnam. It was an outcome the Americans couldn’t accept: According to the so-called domino theory, a Communist victory in Vietnam would inevitably snowball across the region.

And yet Vietnam remained a trouble spot that continued to fester. With the tacit backing of the Kennedy administration, a military coup occurred on Nov. 1, 1963, resulting in Diem’s assassination.

It was a move about which Johnson had deep misgivings. “I don’t believe assassination is ever justified,” he said later. “They were ruthless people. Ho Chi Minh was. But I mean it was ruthless of the United States government, with our boasted list of freedoms, to condone assassination because you don’t approve of a political philosophy.” Still, after Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson dived into Vietnam immediately. “Those first few days,” he remembered, “Vietnam was on top of the agenda, before the visiting heads of state got home from the funeral.”

It’s easy enough to explain. He was minimizing personal downside risk. If he had “lost Vietnam” he would have paid for it at the polls. He made the cynical calculation to escalate the U. S. involvement, presumably under the mistaken impression that the war could be won quickly and at little cost.

As it turned out it cost him another term as president and his reputation, still in tatters with the Democratic Party, and cost more than 50,000 young Americans including many of my friends and acquaintances their lives and many more their health and youth.

When this story first came out it gave me a certain amount of blackhearted amusement. I was a bit surprised to see it make national news. The editors of the Wall Street Journal remark on the state of Wisconsin’s crackdown on Irish butter:

We all know how unpopular President Trump has made himself in Mexico (see nearby). But Wisconsin state regulators seem determined to outdo him by making themselves as unpopular in Ireland by banning state grocery stores from selling one of the Emerald Isle’s most popular (and tasty) products: Kerrygold butter.

Never mind that Wisconsinites have been buying Kerrygold for years with no problems. Or that it remains legal in the 49 other states. Badger State bureaucrats, trying to protect the state dairy industry, are suddenly enforcing a 1970 law that requires all butter sold in the state to go through a complicated evaluation by a state panel. This is the same state that once banned margarine because it was a competitive threat to local dairies.

Kerrygold is a premium butter made from the milk of free-roaming, grass-fed cows. But as a result of the ban, Kerrygold-loving Wisconsinites have been forced to make butter runs across the state border, bringing back suitcases stuffed with the import. In Ireland, meanwhile, the ban is leading to headlines such as this in the Irish Mirror: “Shopkeepers in Wisconsin could face JAIL if they sell Kerrygold butter.”

Let me put that into a little perspective for you. Dairy farming and related businesses account for about 25% of Wisconsin’s economy, 10% of the jobs in the state, and a substantial chunk of labor income. Nearly 50% of the state’s land is devoted to dairy-farming.

Needless to say dairy farmers and particularly the dairy industry wield a lot of clout with the state legislature in Wisconsin. A couple of years back I took a cheesemaking class. The teacher of the class was a long-time professional cheesemaker and noted rather sadly that in Wisconsin (where the class was taught) it was easier to buy cocaine than it was to buy raw milk—preferred for cheesemaking. He claimed that there were industry narcs routinely driving up and down rural Wisconsin roads looking for people selling small quantities of raw milk for cheesemaking to turn them in to the state authorities.

In response to a specific question about the debt load carried by millennials here’s what I’ve learned:

• Millennials (defined as those born after 1981) carry a very heavy load of mostly educational debt:
  

  Our research using data from the National Financial Capability Study shows that two-thirds of millennials (those aged 23-35 in 2012) have at least one source of long-term debt outstanding—whether student loans, home mortgages or car payments—and 30% have more than one. Among the college-educated, a staggering 81% have at least one source of long-term debt.

  Not only do millennials carry debt, but they struggle with it. A majority report having too much debt, difficulty in making payments, and worries about it. Specifically, the ability to pay off student loans troubles more than half of millennials who have such loans. Low-income respondents tend to be more concerned than higher-income earners, but even 34% of millennials with annual household income above $75,000 doubt they will be able to repay their student loans. Moreover, even several years after college, the percentage of those worried about repaying student loans remains high. Fifty-four percent of millennials who are over age 30 and have student loans are worried about repaying them.

• Millennials may not be carrying more debt than previous cohorts:
  

  A chart from Deutsche Bank Economist Torsten Sløk shows that millennials, ages 20 to 35, have less debt than the same age cohort did in 2003.

  “It is an urban myth that the young generation today is more indebted, it is the older generations that have higher debt levels,” said Sløk in a note. “The reason is that since 2009 it has been difficult for Millennials to get a loan. As a result, 25 to 35 year olds today have less debt than in 2003.”

• Lack of credit-worthiness not preference is the main reason that Millennials have lower rates of homeownership than previous cohorts:
  

  Rising student debt — which results in a lack of available funds to put toward a down payment — is a primary factor in reduced homeownership among young people ages 25-34, according to Irene Lew, research assistant at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. In addition, delinquency and default on those loans means debtors have trouble qualifying for low interest rates or a mortgage.

Whether millennials’ and their parents’ investment in education will prove to be a good one remains to be seen. My own opinion is that most people, not just millennials, seek higher education because of the competitive advantage it gives them in looking for jobs. That’s a mug’s game.

For a quick, shorthand explanation of why it’s a mug’s game, there are more Indians with college educations than there are Americans period. And there are a lot with post-graduate degrees as well.

I don’t know that I’m trying to convey any particular message with this post other than that the life expectations of the last four cohorts of Americans are probably pretty different from one another. The graph above was taken from an excellent post by sociologist Lane Kenworthy who remarks:

The lower line shows median income among families with a “head” aged 25 to 34. The top line shows median income among the same cohort of families twenty years later, when their heads are aged 45 to 54. Consider the year 1979, for instance. The lower line tells us that in 1979 the median income of families with a 25-to-34-year-old head was about $58,000 (in 2013 dollars). The data point for 1979 in the top line looks at the median income of that same group of families twenty years later, in 1999, when they are 45 to 54 years old. This is the peak earning stage for most people, and their median income is now about $91,000.

In each year, the gap between the two lines is roughly $33,000. This tells us that the incomes of middle-class Americans tend to increase substantially as they move from the early years of the work career to the peak years.

Should this reduce our concern about the over-time pattern shown in figures 4 and 5 above? No, it shouldn’t. Look again at figure 6. Between the mid-1940s and the mid-1970s, the median income of families in early adulthood (the lower line) rose steadily. In the mid-1940s median income for these young families was around $27,000; by the mid-1970s it had doubled. Americans during this period experienced income gains over the life course, but they also tended to have higher incomes than their predecessors, both in their early work years and in their peak years. That’s because the economy was growing at a healthy clip and the economic growth was trickling down to Americans in the middle.

After the mid-1970s, this steady gain disappeared. From the mid-1970s to 2013 the median income of families with a 25-to-34-year-old head was flat. They continued to achieve income gains during the life course. (Actually, we don’t yet know about those who started out after the mid-1990s, as they’re just now beginning to reach age 45 to 54. The question marks in the chart show what their incomes will be if the historical trajectory holds true.) But the improvement across cohorts that characterized the period from the mid-1940s through the 1970s — each cohort starting higher and ending higher than earlier ones — disappeared.

I’ve annotated the graph to highlight the last four cohorts: Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials. I won’t belabor the point by explaining in tedious detail how very different the experiences of the four cohorts are. The graph really says it all.

I don’t believe that either demographics or economics are destiny but I do believe that they can tell you a lot. It’s too early to know what the courses of life for Millennials will be—they’re only represented by the very tail end of the chart. However, we can speculate, as this USA Today article suggests:

SOUTH MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin (AP) — Baby Boomers: your millennial children are worse off than you.

With a median household income of $40,581, millennials earn 20 percent less than boomers did at the same stage of life, despite being better educated, according to a new analysis of Federal Reserve data by the advocacy group Young Invincibles.

The analysis being released Friday gives concrete details about a troubling generational divide that helps to explain much of the anxiety that defined the 2016 election. Millennials have half the net worth of boomers. Their home ownership rate is lower, while their student debt is drastically higher.

It would be interesting to know what has happened over the last four or five years. My guess is that gap between the lines will narrow.

A quote that has stuck with me through the years is something attributed to Morrie Mages, the founder of a small Chicago-area chain of sporting goods stores. In response to complaints about the quality of the goods sold in his stores he said “These aren’t sporting goods to use; they’re sporting goods to sell.”

I think there are quite a few valuable observations in Ian Bogost’s plaint in Atlantic that nothing works anymore:

What adult hasn’t suffered the pneumatic public toilet’s whirlwind underneath them? Or again when attempting to exit the stall? So many ordinary objects and experiences have become technologized—made dependent on computers, sensors, and other apparatuses meant to improve them—that they have also ceased to work in their usual manner. It’s common to think of such defects as matters of bad design. That’s true, in part. But technology is also more precarious than it once was. Unstable, and unpredictable. At least from the perspective of human users. From the vantage point of technology, if it can be said to have a vantage point, it’s evolving separately from human use.

But it’s something of a grab bag. It tangles true statements with misunderstandings.

From my point of view toilets stopped working when the federal government got into the act of determining how much water a toilet should use. It was well-intentioned as so many of the federal government’s ill-conceived schemes are but micromanagement is not the federal government’s forte. When the objective is to reduce water use, I believe that it’s reasonable for the Congress or even bureaucrats to set targets but should leave the details of implementation or how meeting the targets is accomplished to private companies and individuals. Taxes can be levied; penalties could be imposed (if they dare) on states and municipalities. Once you’ve gotten to the level of detail of how much water should be used per flush and, importantly, ignored actually reducing water utilization, you’ve entered the realm of fanaticism.

As to voice response systems, why do big businesses have phones at all any more? I know that some don’t. Phone systems used to be part of the entire customer relationship management systems of companies. Now they’re labyrinths with the presumed objective of losing customers in their twists and turns. That isn’t a technological problem; it’s a management problem and the sad reality is that good management is always in short supply.

This:

Digital distribution has also made media access more precarious. Try explaining to a toddler that the episodes of “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” that were freely available to watch yesterday via subscription are suddenly available only via on-demand purchase.

is just a misunderstanding. Mass media targeted at children have never been public services. They now serve and always have served the purpose of making money in the present and in the future. I blame Howdy Doody.

If you want to keep your children from being trained to be good little consumers or dragoon their parents into ever-increasing consumption, throw out your television and homeschool them. Even then you’re merely fighting a delaying action. Otherwise be prepared to ante up or give explanations.