Noam Scheiber says yes:

I don’t doubt this is the case. My point is just that the cultural change is as important as the intellectual change, if not more, in creating our dodgy financial system. That is, the problem isn’t smart people per se. It’s smart people driven to use their brainpower and creativity to outdo the other guy, something even the smart guys from the earlier, inbred era (and there were a few of them) didn’t often attempt. It was the creation of a meritocracy, which rewarded intelligence and encouraged competition.

Now, as I said in the previous item, I’m a huge believer in meritocracy and in including previously excluded outsiders. And I think that cultural change had real benefits on Wall St., too. The only problem is that meritocracy can lead to excesses–too many people trying to outdo one another–and excesses can be really, really costly when it’s the global financial system you’re talking about. So I mention the old lazy, self-satisfied days not to suggest we restore the WASP establishment. But to suggest we rearrange things so there’s a smaller premium on entrepreneurialism and innovation in the financial sector.

There’s probably something to this. Part of the way the well-regulated Canadian banking system works is that it’s essentially a closed cartel. In part that makes it easier for regulators to monitor. But it probably also means that it attracts lazy, self-satisfied types to go work in it. Which, in turn, makes their antics easier to keep track of. And I would say the problem isn’t so much that “meritocracy can lead to excesses” as it is that bankers’ excesses wind up getting paid for by taxpayers. Silicon Valley has a lot of hard-charging meritocrats and a lot of excesses, but when Pets.com crashes and burns that’s not my problem.

The good news is that as best I can tell, we Jews are getting lazier and more self-satisfied. My parents even joined a yacht club. So perhaps the real question is whether we can avoid an influx of hard-working Asians. Alternatively, the popularity of Mad Men may inspire the whole society to start acting like lazy, self-satisfied WASPs and start drinking at lunch again, thus solving the problem. After all, I believe the French banking system has proven to be pretty sound despite the scarcity of WASPs, suggesting to me that lunchtime alcohol consumption may be the real key.

Jane Harman (D-CA) is one of the most hawkish House Democrats. She even showed up at the launch party for a new neocon outfit called The Foreign Policy Initiative back in March. So this seems significant:

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), often hawkish on national security issues, is lining up with liberal Democrats against any further combat troop increases in Afghanistan.

Harman, a longtime Intelligence Committee member, told a Brookings Institution gathering today that any further increases “wouldn’t be well received” on Capitol Hill.

Harman’s view is that the Obama administration should deal with government corruption, and build up Afghan forces, before Congress is asked to pay for more U.S. troops. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U,S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has asked for 40,000 additional troops.

Combined with David Obey’s views I hope this is a sign that members of Congress are going to start seriously looking at questions of cost and overall impact on the national interest. It’s not really General McChrystal’s place to restrain himself in the quantity of resources he asks for. Probably ever senior level manager of any public or private sector endeavor thinks his bosses should give him more money and personnel to work with. But it’s the job of Congress and the White House to reach an overall judgment about all the considerations in play.

I was considering trying to do a post on how the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts its inflation indexes together, but the BLS FAQs here and here are really quite good and people should just read them.

I would just make a few quick points. Even the broadest measure of inflation, the CPI-U (“for all urban consumers”) doesn’t really try to measure the prices paid by the 20 percent or so of consumers who don’t live in Census Bureau-designated Metropolitan Statistical Areas or Urban Places. There’s a sound logistical reason for that, but 20 percent is a pretty large number. The other thing is that to construct the index you need to decide how much weight to give to different categories of expenditure. They do this by using the data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. And one thing you’ll see if you look up the CES data tables is that, just as intuition would lead you to believe, different kinds of households buy pretty different stuff. For example, if you compare households by education level, people with bachelor’s degrees spend a way lower proportion of their income on housing and tobacco products than do non-college households. People in the 25-34 age bracket (that’s me) spend a much higher proportion of income on food away from home than do people in the 55-64 age bracket.

None of that is a “problem” with the measurement, but it serves as a reminder that any particular family’s experience of price fluctuations can diverge substantially from the national average. It also seems to lead to the conclusion that Social Security benefits should be tied to a special index linked to seniors’ consumption basket since the price of things seniors don’t buy isn’t really relevant.

Last, the BLS tries (hard!) to make calculations about changes in the quality of goods. But when you think about it, this isn’t really possible to do in a definitive way.

I can’t speak in detail to the merits of the project being condemned in this ad, though I do have a generic “pro tall buildings” bias and it strikes me as particularly absurd to argue that a building is too tall for midtown Manhattan:

What I really wanted to talk about, though, was the rhetorical device of invoking a “Texas developer” as the bad guy in this scenario because it highlights some of the trouble progressive urbanists have in making our arguments. Roughly speaking, people on the political left tend to have a tribal suspicion of business people. And I’ll fully admit that I share it. At the same time, there’s a tribal admiration of the figure of the activist and the organizer. So when you see a dispute that pits a developer in a suit who’s probably a huge jackass against some community activists who probably love farmer’s markets and good music, you want to side with the activists against the jackass. But from the point of view of things progressives are actually trying to accomplish on a policy level, it’s generally desirable to build as densely as is feasible on already-developed parcels. And that’s often what jackass developers are trying to do, and it’s often what local activists are trying to block. The developers are not, of course, out to save the environment, it’s just greed. But the activists, too, are basically being greedy—they’ve got theirs already.