Dana Goldstein commented on the first person account of Alex Kucynski’s outsources pregnancy in the most recent New York Times Magazine:

Yet there’s no mistaking that Hilling and Kuczynski come from vastly different worlds. Hilling is small town America to Kuczynski’s Manhattan; she is pink fleece to Kuczynski’s little black dress. The divide between them is brought home by an accompanying photo of Kuczynski standing in the yard of her lavish colonial in Southampton, New York, holding her son. Behind her, standing at attention and wearing a uniform, is Margo Clements, whom the caption tells us is Kuczynski’s “baby nurse.”

Hilling, I’m sure, had no baby nurse to help raise her three kids. And while, at least according to Kuczynski’s narrative, Hilling enters into surrogacy cheerfully, happy to help an infertile couple, it’s hard to miss the underside to this story. Inequality and trouble paying for basics — like a college education — push some women to carry other women’s pregnancies. Unless this inequality is addressed, bearing wealthy women’s children (and the children of wealthy gay couples) will become some of the most financially rewarding work available to low and middle-income women, further cementing their identity as primarily reproductive. I believe surrogacy should be regulated and legal. But I don’t want to live in a country where women turn to surrogacy in order to pay their own children’s college bills.

It seems to me that the issue in this realm to really keep one’s eye on is the international domain. Even very rapid economic growth in, say, India will still leave it the case that there are hundreds of millions of Indian women who are dramatically poorer than well-off first-world women for quite some time yet. Kuczynski paid Hilling $25,000 for carrying her fetus which is a decent chunk of change in the United States but over six times per capita GDP in India. And there’s just no realistic prospect for closing these kind of global wealth gaps on a rapid time frame. When you think about the kind of difficulties that Mexicans are often willing to endure for a shot at low-wage, unpleasant jobs in the US service economy then I think you have to assume that there could be a lot of people who’d be eager to make thousands of dollars carrying another couple’s fetus if there were a regularized, legal way to do so.

Joe The Plumber has a list of recommended books and the only non-plumbing volume is written by Ludwig von Mises? How is it, exactly, that we were supposed to believe this guy was a swing voter?

Aaron Ross Sorkin offers a dire warning about the perils of low-paid bankers:

Mr. Pandit and others — to the extent you believe they are the right leaders of Citigroup — or whoever takes their roles are unlikely to hang around if they’re not amply paid.

The risk, Mr. Johnson said, is that if we taxpayers don’t offer the possibility of a payday, we won’t get the performance. “If you were in senior management and you knew you’d never get paid, you’re not going to work as hard or you’ll leave,” he said. “It’s actually worse if they stay. If you have a bunch of demoralized people hanging around, it will kill you.”

This seems like an odd worry to me. What would happen if we staffed the banks with a bunch of second-rate people? Would they drive their institutions into the ground, requiring billions in government funds to keep their firms afloat, and in the meantime drive the entire world economy into a serious recession? Oh, right, that’s what already happened. Felix Salmon adds the observation that “insofar as lower bank salaries would drive America’s best and brightest into other sectors of the economy, that would surely be a good thing.”

That last part seems important to me. I think it should be viewed as pretty distressing that over the past twenty years a large proportion of people with high-level quantitative skills have gone into the finance profession rather than working in the science and engineering fields they were trained in. That influx of quants into finance could, in principle, have been about developing a much more efficient allocation of capital, but I see little reason to believe that actually took place. Instead, their role seems to have been something more like that of a celebrity endorser for a product. The fact that LeBron James wears Nikes in exchange for money doesn’t actually do anything to improve the quality of their sneakers, but his association with the product gives it an air of legitimacy and helps the marketing a lot. And running a hedge fund or an investment bank or a private equity whatsits is, yes, in part a question of making savvy financial decisions. But it’s also in large part a question of running a savvy marketing campaign, of tricking people into believing convincing people that they can get super-normal risk-adjusted returns by going with your firm. Having a lot of kids with fancy degrees and weird Russian physics PhDs on hand might help you do that. But long-run growth and productivity would be better-served by having those people do basic research or make stuff.

Thanassis Cambanis, who’s covered the Middle East for The Boston Globe and The New York Times, has an original commentary out for Middle East Progress on how to deal with the new Lebanese realities rather than the fantasies of the Cedar Revolution:

In short, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran are stronger in Lebanon that any point in the last decade. In order to foster better ties with a Lebanese government that includes Hezbollah as well as the pro-Western coalition, U.S. policy makers should consider building stronger relations with ambiguous Lebanese politicians who must deal with Hezbollah as a practical matter. And Washington might have to make a thorny choice: find a way to deal with a government dominated by Hezbollah, or else cut off all ties and relations with one of the few states in the Middle East where a real battle of ideas has been joined. The dialogue in Lebanon is no less critical because of the struggle between Hezbollah, which maintains its own independent military, and those who want the state at last to exercise a real monopoly on security.

It will no doubt be awkward to find a way to forge relations with a state that has at its center a group defined as terrorist by Washington and several European countries including Britain, and which remains in a state of war with Israel, America’s closest Middle East ally. But more complex political quandaries have been resolved, and in this case the formula will probably involve Americans talking directly to independents that have close ties to Hezbollah, rather than party officials themselves.

To add an obvious addendum to this, clearly policy toward Lebanon will be impacted by whether or not the United States chooses to aggressively pursue the seemingly promising possibility of Israel-Syria peace talks. But it seems to me that this kind of approach to Lebanon would be a useful complement to an approach to Syria.