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It seems I’ve been channeling the Bursar this evening. Are you looking for a prestigious internship for your teenage child? Are you worried that, despite your best efforts to make Junior respectable in public, the interview skills aren’t quite where they need to be? Do you think s/he would benefit during a college admissions interview [...]
Archive for the ‘Commerce and its discontents’ Category
May 13th, 2013
March 25th, 2013
Keith’s post reminds me that I love almost everything about beer except drinking it (on the latter, I like it with spicy food or on hot summer afternoons, but as often as not I’d be equally happy with a nice cold glass of milk or lemonade). As a beer is any fermented grain [fermented fruit [...]
March 25th, 2013
Category: Commerce and its discontents
In a post about marijuana markets, I mentioned the disorienting experience of seeing affluent San Francisco hipsters who could afford much better brew nonetheless drinking Rolling Rock (a so-so working class beer produced about 70 miles from my hometown). I speculated that such consumption was a form of signalling, as if such an “authentic” Western [...]
August 16th, 2012
Category: Commerce and its discontents, Economics
What’s wrong with this picture, retailed in The Economist [sic] from an air traveler web site where the discussion has some sensible observations about seat pricing? Right: the seat with no legroom, and the original seat with some legroom, are treated as though they are the same good that will sell for the same price, even [...]
July 18th, 2012
A few months ago I argued that one reason Republicans handled the contraception issue so incompetently was that public opinion on premarital sex was strongly divided by age and party: older Republicans, and nobody else, overwhelmingly regard sex outside marriage as inherently wrong. Mitt Romney has a similar problem regarding Bain. According to a Gallup [...]
July 10th, 2012
Category: Commerce and its discontents, Management
Friday afternoon my wife and I stopped into our local Wells Fargo branch to figure out why her ATM card wasn’t working. We had a ten-minute conversation with a nice staffer, solved the problem and went on our way. Tonight the phone rang at about 9PM: it was a nice young woman from Gallup “calling [...]
June 29th, 2012
The guiding principle of the University of California’s Berkeley campus intercollegiate athletics program is something called comprehensive excellence, an idea or at least a slogan originating in a report from decades back (that I now can’t find) that has resonated through years and years of pointing with pride and viewing with alarm. The idea was [...]
June 18th, 2012
Category: Arts and Cultural Policy, Commerce and its discontents, Education policy, Watching Conservatives
The world of higher education is still trying to assess the recent firing of University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan because…well, no one really knows why. The goobledygook spewed out by the University Board of Trustees is just that. But here comes this nugget from the Washington Post’s extensive write-up of the situation: one reason [...]
June 7th, 2012
Category: Commerce and its discontents
In the indispensable G2 section of the Guardian, Louis Theroux describes how free pornography on the Internet has largely destroyed the pornographic movie industry. An actress’ fee for doing a hard-core porn scene used to be around $3,000. It has now dropped to $1,000 for big name performers and much less for unknowns. Theroux comments [...]