Category: News

If you need a reminder of why the First Amendment is so important, look no further than this recent story in The Washington Post about the crimes with which Marine Le Pen has been charged. The event in question is reported as follows:

Le Pen, well known and often criticized for inveighing against Islam, posted the tweets at issue in December 2015, not long after the Islamic State claimed credit for a string of coordinated terrorist attacks, including explosions, suicide bombings and shootings that left 130 people dead in the French capital. 

At the time, a French expert on Islam compared the National Front’s growing popularity among French conservatives to “jihadism,” as Le Monde reported. 

In response, an outraged Le Pen tweeted three grisly photographs with the text “That is Daesh!” using a nickname for the Islamic State.

Much as I disapprove of what Le Pen represents as a politician, the onus would now be on the so-called expert on Islam to provide evidence that the National Front engages in behavior comparable to the gruesome actions of the jihadists depicted in the photos Le Pen posted or to disavow the comparison (which is a bit more nuanced in the original source than reported above).

But why let grownups engage in such debate. Here is how the incident has recently played out:

Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right nationalist party, was charged in criminal court on Thursday for posting images to Twitter showing brutal killings by Islamic State fighters.

Prosecutors in the Paris suburb Nanterre accuse Le Pen, president of the National Front party and a member of parliament, of distributing “violent messages that incite terrorism or pornography or seriously harm human dignity,” as reported in the Guardian.

The crime under French law barring extreme speech carries up to three years in prison and a roughly $90,000 fine, though Le Pen’s status as a political figure would probably shield her from a stiff sentence were she convicted.

[...]

The charges came about four months after France’s National Assembly voted to strip Le Pen of immunity from prosecution, triggering an investigation into the 2015 tweets.

Some days, I really wonder if the Republican Party can get its act together. In my Inbox today:

That is all.

Abridged version of the story: man makes investment, man tries to recoup investment through voluntary transactions in the private sector, government agents seek to nationalize his investment.  

Photo Credit: Fareed Khan, AP

Another take on fiscal stimulus:

Wii-bates

The 2007 Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Disability Insurance Trust Funds was issued yesterday. You can read it here, with a summary here. You can find commentary around the blogosphere (Angry Bear, Brad DeLong, Atrios, Kash).

There is not much that is new here, as expected. The challenges facing Social Security are a demographic shift caused by improving longevity and fertility rates hovering around 2 children per woman. We should expect each year to look like the last, with a slow deterioration in the system's finance as the years of projected annual deficits approach, possibly tempered by differences in realized values of uncertain factors, like productivity growth, that are embedded in the projections.

I'll take the occasion of the report to reiterate some of the themes that have characterized my writing on Social Security and the need for reform over the past few years:

1) The most prominent number in the report is the 75-year actuarial balance, which now stands at 1.95 percent of taxable payroll, down from 2.02 percent in last year's report. This is a flawed metric, as it does not acknowledge the fact that the annual balances have a trend over this period. You can see this in the following figure

Money should follow the recipient. It should not be given to providers who claim to serve the recipients. Historically--the GI Bill.

Centralization is the enemy--leads to large, anonymous experiences. That's dangerous, particularly for young adolescent boys.

Children can tell when playing fields are not level, they have extremely sensitive ears and eyes for bullshit and hypocrisy.

They have to see that they matter--and that must be personal, face-to-face, even intimate.

Greg Mankiw sets up the two ends of the spectrum for undergraduate education at highly competitive colleges:

The most important choice a high-school senior faces when choosing where to be an undergrad is between research-oriented universities and teaching-oriented colleges. If you go to a place like Harvard, Princeton, or Yale, you get a famous faculty. But the first priority of that faculty is their own research and writing (and blogging!?), and they are more likely to shower attention on grad students than undergrads. If you go to a place like Amherst, Swarthmore, or Williams, you get a faculty whose first priority is undergraduate teaching. But you do not have a menu of graduate courses to sample from, and you do not have as vibrant a research atmosphere to experience. It is a tough choice.

That's the way people typically see it. But what about the places intermediate between the two? Dartmouth fancies itself to be a place that provides the best of both worlds--the resources to support a research environment combined with an emphasis on undergraduate rather than graduate (Ph.D.) education.

I was an undergraduate at Harvard in the late 1980s, and until I started working with Martin Feldstein on my thesis, I thought the experience was an exercise in anonymity--not enough interaction with the "famous faculty" relative to the big lecture courses that seem designed to support the graduate student teaching fellows. (That's not to say there were no luminaries involved. My Teaching Fellow for Principles of Economics was Dan Dolan, who at the time was a law school student at Harvard. He is currently the CEO of this company--you can see him in the video at the bottom of the page or in virtually every in-flight magazine in the domestic airspace. I thought he did a pretty good job as an instructor.)

I did some snooping on the Harvard website to see if the undergraduate economics program looks much different than it did nearly 20 years ago. The two files of relevance are Economics department's list of courses and the Registrar's file of enrollments for the spring term.

• Greg's introductory course (Social Analysis 10) has 662 students this term.
• The intermediate macro course has two flavors, one with lots of math that has 148 students (Econ 1011b) and one with less math that has 259 students (Econ 1010b).
• The econometrics classes come in two flavors as well, Econ 1123 with 176 students and Econ 1126 with 56 students.

These numbers are about the same as I remember (fewer in the introductory course, more in the macro course). With the exception of the last one, I think the enrollments are too large to suggest that there is anything but an anonymous relationship between the faculty member and most of the enrolled students. And to me, that was a real turnoff.

One thing that has changed is the number and size of interesting field classes, where enrollments can be smaller. The idea

Breadth of offerings--way more than we can offer at Dartmouth
There are 37 undergraduates enrolled in the graduate courses

So it's the best of the both worlds if the product of time with faculty x quality of faculty is higher.

Last Wednesday and Thursday, the Rockefeller Center welcomed Hernando De Soto as its Class of 1930 Fellow. He gave a public lecture, visited a class, and met with several groups of students and faculty. Here is how I introduced him at the public lecture:

In remarks delivered at the Rockefeller Center’s dedication in September 1983, Rodman Rockefeller noted that his father was interested in the "conversion of intellectual excellence to the realities of public life," and he charged the center to promote this same vision to Dartmouth students. This is a challenge that we take seriously at the Center, and we rise to that challenge today as we open our fall term public programming by welcoming Hernando de Soto as the Class of 1930 Fellow.

In 1980, Mr. de Soto returned to his native Peru after a successful career in Europe, armed with a question: What makes some countries rich and other countries poor? And it was the research that he and his think tank (the Institute for Liberty and Democracy) conducted to answer this question that has ultimately transformed the developing world.

In Peru, de Soto observed an energetic and industrious people relegated to poverty by a legal system that marginalized and excluded them from his nation’s formal economy. "They have houses but not titles; crops but not deeds; businesses but not statutes of incorporation." It was not the lack of entrepreneurial energy, or even the lack of assets, that made them poor. It was their confinement to an extralegal status. Overhaul that legal system, and you will provide an opportunity for a whole nation to lift itself out of poverty.

This revolutionary concept—that the lack of formal property rights was a key source of poverty in poor countries—has become Hernando de Soto’s life’s work. His writings and his advocacy embody a liberal and expansive view of humanity—that the capacity to meaningfully improve one’s lot in life is widely and broadly distributed. He has traveled the globe to help governments take the steps necessary to permit economic freedom to flourish.

His work has not gone unnoticed. As just a few of his accolades, in 1999, Time magazine chose de Soto as one of the five leading Latin American innovators of the century. Forbes magazine highlighted him as one of 15 innovators "who will re-invent your future." The Economist magazine identified his Institute for Liberty and Democracy as one of the top two think tanks in the world. His two books, The Other Path,and The Mystery of Capital,are becoming the guidebooks to legal reform in pursuit of economic development around the world.

Hernando de Soto should be an inspiration to us all. He shows that someone who researches carefully, who writes clearly, who speaks thoughtfully, who advocates passionately, who works tirelessly—such a person can make a difference. There is no one more concretely engaged in the "realities of public life" than he. For a man whose time is so precious, we are delighted to have him with us this evening.

He is quite simply one of the most remarkable people that I have ever met.

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