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Category: Dartmouth

Published on Leave a comment on Inauguration Week Panels at Dartmouth

This week, we are hosting four panels on opportunities and risks facing the new Presidential administration. My contribution was to yesterday's panel on domestic issues, focusing on budget policy. Here is how I opened my remarks:

Stated plainly, our federal budget policy has been a mess since our first modern experiments with tax cuts in the 1980s. A favorable combination of factors restored some sanity to it in the late 1990s. Our second modern experiment with tax cuts in the 2000s messed it up again.

All the while, the aging of the Baby Boom generation through its peak earnings years made our old-age entitlement programs temporarily less expensive to fund. Its continued aging into retirement and thus beneficiary years will cause Social Security and Medicare to switch to large and growing annual deficits.

So there is serious work to be done, and we haven’t been close to being up for the challenge in at least 6 years. 

The video is available here:

And the other three panels, focusing on global issues, health care, and energy and the environment, can be livestreamed or viewed here.

Enjoy!

Published on Leave a comment on Some Pre-Election Pessimism

From yours truly, in this term's Rockefeller Center newsletter.  Key quote:

The propensity toward gridlock is a risk in any system with direct election of the President.  However, in the United States, this propensity is exacerbated by the low regard and low expectations we have for the Congress.  We seldom reward legislators with a promotion to the White House.  In the postwar period, for example, only John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama have been elected President directly from the Senate.  Quite the contrary, the American public tends to reward governors who make a bid for the White House, particularly when they run as Washington outsiders.  The elections of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush were all based to varying degrees on this strategy.  

Enjoy?

Published on Leave a comment on Ezra Klein on the Ivy League’s Failures

One of the reasons I enjoy Ezra Klein's writing so much is that he will occasionally spin out a column like this one, "How Wall Street Takes Advantage of the Ivy League's Failures."  It is quite provocative, but let me reply with a question.  Has there ever been a time when the Ivy League's graduates have not gone in large numbers to the highest profile, most socially or financially rewarding occupations after college?

I'm going to venture that the answer is no.  The difference today is that the most socially and financially rewarding occupations tend to be disproportionately in finance (or Teach for America, as Ezra repeatedly interrupts himself to note).  And some of what we see in the financial industry today is grotesque, and that's what gives Ezra and the rest of us pause.

I will add, from my own point of view, that the typical Ivy League education needs to be more carefully reconsidered than what most of the Ancient Eight institutions are doing.  If you are curious to see what we are doing in this regard under my direction at the Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth, take a look at our student opportunities.

Published on Leave a comment on Education Accomplished

Last Wednesday, Peter Orszag joined us at Dartmouth for a discussion of the economic, fiscal, and political challenges facing the United States.  (The video will be posted here shortly.)  Read one student's thoughtful account of the lecture and its broader meaning.

Next up at the Rockefeller Center is tomorrow's lecture by Duncan Getchall, Jr.,Solicitor General of the State of Virginia, on "Health Care Litigation: US States v. US Government."

Published on Leave a comment on The Economy in the 2012 Election

I made a presentation to the Dartmouth Club of the Upper Valley on Saturday morning, "The Economy in the 2012 Elections."  In addition to many of the themes I have blogged in recent years, I made the point that the recent dip of the Initial Unemployment Insurance claims below 400,000, if it is sustained, signals the beginning of a robust job market expansion.  I also suggested that the failure of policy makers to recognize how important investment is to the beginnings and ends of business cycles is one of the reasons why we have been stuck in a lackluster economy for longer than we needed to be.  The slides are included below. Samwick DCUV 20120204

Published on Leave a comment on Occupy 2.0

I participated in a panel yesterday on "Occupy Dartmouth: Voices Crying in the Wilderness?" sponsored by the United Campus Ministries.  My contribution to the panel was similar to my newsletter column from earlier in the week.  Here are some quick reactions:

  1. If you ever want to be impressed by the thoughtfulness of the next generation of leaders, you need look no further than Stewart Towle ’12 and Nathan Gusdorf ’12, the two student participants in the panel and two of the most heavily involved members of the Occupy Dartmouth movement.  I don't think we would agree on two many political or policy challenges
  2. They are in no hurry to organize a political movement.  I think they are still experimenting with the cultural process of allowing their individual worldviews to be influenced by direct communication with other sympathetic individuals.  They shared an interesting observation -- that the movement is what democracy "feels like."
  3. I don't think the members of the Occupy movement fully understand how little change they will see in our government's actions through nonviolent means unless the movement fields its own candidates.  I went a step further in my remarks to suggest that effecting change through the political process was a nice alternative to martyring yourself for the cause.

In a moment of reflection, I offered that the Occupy movement is appealing to me based on the contradiction that it exposes in policy rather than individual policy positions.  Specifically:

  1. You could tell me a story in which it is very important to move heaven and earth politically to step in and rescue financial firms that are about to implode.  You could even tell me a story in which, unfortunately, those who broke the law or exercised poor judgment were not held accountable in the process, because we had to move quickly to intervene.
  2. You could tell me a story in which fiscal considerations prevent the government from transferring more public resources to those in need – be they unemployed, uninsured, undereducated, or merely unfortunate.

You cannot tell me both of those stories at the same time without revealing that your priorities are screwed up.  That these two stories have played out in sequence is our national contradiction, and I applaud the members of the Occupy movement for refusing to ignore it and for mobilizing to help change it.

Published on Leave a comment on How Will Occupy Wall Street Become a Political Movement?

In my latest Direct Line column for the Rockefeller Center, I draw some parallels between the Tea Party movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement and then consider the question posed in the title of this post.

As it transitions from a popular movement to a political movement, I will be most interested in how true the Occupy Wall Street movement can stay to its founding principles articulated above.  I see two particular challenges.  First, given the prominence of the “major banks and multinational corporations” that wield the “corrosive power over the democratic process” in our political system, I am curious to see what candidates the movement can draft.  Few incumbents have the purity demanded – look for challengers and outsiders to carry the Occupy Wall Street movement’s message into the political realm.  Second, the Occupy Wall Street movement has defined itself in part based on inequality – the 99% versus the 1% -- and in part based on injustice – the use of one’s current elite position to distort the political system into maintaining that elite position at the expense of those who don’t have it.  Not all inequality is due to injustice, and not all injustice is the result of the most fortunate 1% exerting undue influence.  Making those distinctions clear to the American public will be important if the Occupy Wall Street movement is to build a coalition large enough to gain control of political institutions.

Read the whole thing.  

Published on Leave a comment on Walker, Fiscal Ranger

Former Comptroller General David Walker will join us at the Rockefeller Center on Monday as part of our NH primary programming.  If you are in the Hanover area, stop by Filene Auditorium at 4:30 p.m. for his lecture on "America at a Crossroads: The Fiscal Challenges and a Way Forward."  See this post for more details.

Published on Leave a comment on What’s a Conservative Student to Do?

NPR interviewed three student editors of the Dartmouth Review, to get their perspective on the upcoming New Hampshire primary.  The most interesting part comes near the end:

On The Anti-Intellectualism That Some See Starting To Define The Party
Neff: "There is an intellectual atrophy. Republicans use to be the party of strong fiscal policy. Now it is the party of tax cuts. It's not an intellectual approach to just talk about cutting taxes. I feel there's a lot of populism choking off what could be cool new ideas. On education, on immigration."

Riley: "The most troubling part of the rightward shift, for someone like me who believes in evolution and the climate change issue, has been the anti-intellectualism that has infected that. I don't know if candidates actually believe what they're saying, or are just saying dumb things intentionally to appeal to the lowest common denominator."