I’ve seen this Mark Twain line dug up by a number of people: “I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”

Seems about right.

And what a time it was:

Memories.

We’re still waiting for the President’s speech, but it seems that US forces have killed Osama bin Laden.

Obviously, it feels good. But the question is what does it mean in policy terms? At first blush, if US national security required a massive military presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan last week then it still requires one this week whether or not bin Laden is dead. Then again, my inclination would have been to say last week that such a presence wasn’t actually required. And obtaining a major symbolic/emotional victory, combined with the winds of political change sweeping across the Arab world, might provide an opportune movement to reorient our posture.

Paul Campos writes about the merit scholarship bait and switch at America’s law schools:

There’s a good piece in the NYT this morning on how law schools hand out merit scholarships to significantly more students than will end up being able to retain them, given traditional law school grading practices (Paul Caron has a useful summary of the article here). This practice, which is quite new — a generation ago law schools handed out almost no merit scholarships — is driven, like so many other questionable things law schools do, by the rankings game. The GPA and test scores of entering students account for nearly a quarter of a school’s ranking, so, just as in the case of graduate employment figures, there’s a powerful incentive to game the numbers.

This phenomenon of ranking based on inputs exists across the board in higher education and it creates a very unusual market. Most businesses either try to sell more stuff to their existing base of customers, or else are trying to expand their existing base of customers. Schools are more often trying to ditch their existing customer base in favor of obtaining a different, more prestigious set of customers.

Two annoying (and related) tropes are the idea that what the government really needs is a smart businessman to step in and clean things up, and the idea that we should understand the federal government through analogies to a small firm. Via Neil Sinhababu, a Wikipedia account of earning a profit selling state-themed quarters helps illustrate some of the problems with this:

The “50 State” series of quarters (25-cent coins) was launched in the U.S. in 1999. The U.S. government planned on a large number of people collecting each new quarter as it rolled out of the U.S. Mint, thus taking the pieces out of circulation. Each set of 50 quarters is worth $12.50. Since it costs the Mint about five cents for each 25-cent piece it produces, the government made a profit whenever someone “bought” a coin and chose not to spend it. The U.S. Treasury estimates that it has earned about US$6.3 billion in seigniorage from the quarters over the course of the entire program.

There’s nothing false about this, but talking about the government making a profit by selling quarters is a bit odd. If the government were a business, you’d say that it’s buying up five cents of metal and labor and machinery and then selling the resulting coins for 25 cents a piece and that these profits arise since the US Mint is somehow created 20 cents worth of value per coin. But of course that’s not really what’s happening at all. The “profits” made here really have nothing to do with the selling of the quarters and everything to do with the fact that a quarter is stipulated to have a value of $0.25 so ever time the government makes a new quarter it’s “making money.” The limit on the process is that if the government makes tons and tons and tons of additional currency, people may start wanting the currency less and the dollar-denominated price of the stuff quarters are made out of might rise.

Some smart May Day reflections from John Quiggin:

I’m a worker and a union member, but on a higher income than many employers, and (thanks to research grants) effectively an employer myself. Where Marx and others in the 19th century foresaw a sharpening of the divide between capitalists and proletarians, the actual outcome has been that the lines have been increasingly blurred. A term like ‘working class’ is more of a cultural and occupational label than a statement about economic position – I read somewhere that ‘working class’ households in the US have about the same average income as households in general.

The stat he’s thinking of may be the point that in the United States the median income of white working class households is somewhat higher than the national median income, so there’s not really a great explanatory mystery about white working class conservatism.

Not only is the blurring of the lines significant, but one important way in which the current moment differs from the Gilded Age of yore is that labor income now constitutes a much more important source of money for the richest people. 100 years ago the prototypical super-rich person was a coupon-clipping rentier living off investment income. Today it’s a hedge fund manager or a Fortune 500 CEO. Someone who is, in some sense, more worker than owner.