Threat level reports that the Election Assistance Commission will soon be collecting comments on the latest draft of new e-voting security guidelines.
At Burning Man last week, I came across a young fellow whose backpack had been stolen – with it, his ID, car keys, and credit cards. Among his stresses was getting on a plane to return home without ID. I explained to him that the TSA doesn’t require you to show ID, they just pretend to require it, and I told him about the Great No-ID Airport Challenge. Even the local sheriff who took the report on the theft didn’t know what the TSA’s rules were.
Happily, Chris Soghoian has been bird-dogging the no-ID issue through the auspices of Senator John Warner’s office. He has finally received written confirmation from the Transportation Security Administration that people are not required to show ID at the airport. (His discussion here.)
I also explained to the stressed young man that merchants and his credit card association would absorb the liability for wrongful use of his credit cards. His remaining problem was conjuring car keys from Reno out to the Black Rock Desert. Now that’s a tough one.
Clay Shirky is one of my favorite commentators about the economic and social changes that the Internet is bringing to the media world. Last year I linked to his fantastic essays on the folly of micropayments. Last month, Shirky wrote this excellent post about what’s wrong with the Nick Carr brand of Internet old-fogeyism:
Prior to unlimited perfect copyability, media was defined by profound physical and economic constraints, and now it’s not. Fewer constraints and better matching of supply and demand are good for business, because business is not concerned with historical continuity. Fewer constraints and better matching of supply and demand are bad for current culture, because culture continually mistakes current exigencies for eternal verities.
This isn’t just Carr of course. As people come to realize that freedom destroys old forms just as surely as it creates new ones, the lament for the long-lost present is going up everywhere. As another example, Sven Birkerts, the literary critic, has a post in the Boston Globe, Lost in the blogosphere, that is almost indescribably self-involved. His two complaints are that newspapers are reducing the space allotted to literary criticism, and too many people on the Web are writing about books. In other words, literary criticism, as practiced during Birkerts’ lifetime, was just right, and having either fewer or more writers are both lamentable situations.
In order that the “Life was better when I was younger” flavor of his complaint not become too obvious, Birkerts frames the changing landscape not as a personal annoyance but as A Threat To Culture Itself. As he puts it “…what we have been calling “culture” at least since the Enlightenment — is the emergent maturity that constrains unbounded freedom in the interest of mattering.”
Tyler Cowen’s New York Times piece on health care reform.
Which brings me to the topic of Deer Hunting With Jesus, which in its later chapters touches on the troubles of the health care system. This book has gotten a good bit of attention in liberal circles.
I think the Golan decision is a good thing from a policy perspective, given how hard the copyright cartel has worked to keep anything from ever falling into the public domain. However, I share Joe’s puzzlement about exactly how the First Amendment is relevant:
The Tenth Circuit remanded the case to the district court. Its instructions on remand are a little curious. It asks the district court to determine whether the URAA is a content-based or a content-neutral restriction on speech. I’m not sure why, for two reasons. First, whether a law is content-based or content-neutral ought to be a pure question of law; there aren’t any facts to find, so I’m not sure why the district court gets first crack. Second, I can’t imagine a way to find that any copyright law is content-neutral. If I stand on a soapbox in the middle of town and recite a certain poem that begins “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?,” the law does not punish me. If I stand on the same soapbox and recite — at the same volume, in the same tone of voice — a different poem that begins “Oh baby baby, how was I supposed to know?,” the law punishes me. That’s the very definition of a content-based restriction. We’ll see what the district court does.
It seems to me that if the courts find a particular grant of copyright exceeds Congress’s power under the Progress Clause, that, in and of itself, should be sufficient to declare the law in question unconstitutional. Otherwise, why would the framers have gone to the trouble of specifying the precise limits of Congress’s powers to grant patents and copyrights?
Perhaps the legal theory here is that Congress has the power to do whatever it likes unless it runs afoul of a right enumerated in the Bill of Rights, but that, if a Congressional action falls within the scope of the Progress Clause, then it’s constitutional even if it runs afoul of the Bill of Rights. That seems bass-ackwards to me, but of course, I was equally perplexed when the Supreme Court decided that growing pot in your backyard for personal use is “interstate commerce.”
Various toy recalls, particularly those affecting Thomas the Tank Engine, have the parental blogging community alarmed, with the expected calls for more regulation, more testing, more more more. But I wonder if several key factors in product safety having to do with the operation of markets might have been forgotten. And I won’t even mention product liability (except just there).
For reasons I don’t really understand, Apple has slashed its high-end iPhone from $599 to $399. You know what that means? If you move fast you can get the old, discontinued, 4 GB model for $299. That sound you hear is Jerry groaning.
Via Marc Andreessen comes the latest silly example of a foreign government trying to use industrial policy to help its companies catch up to the Silicon Valley. I’ll give you three guesses on how well this plan will work.
Of course, making fun of foreign governments and their search engine projects is old hat here on TLF. More interesting, from my perspective, is this tidbit:
Some blame Japan’s copyright laws for holding back the development of web services. Services such as Google hold copies of other companies’ web pages on their servers. Because Japanese law forbids the duplication of copyrighted works without the rights holders’ permission, Yahoo Japan, Google Japan and other search engines offered in Japan operate from US-based servers.
One wonders how the Internet might have evolved had a similar rule been imposed on the United States in the mid-1990s.
The other thing to say about Paul Graham’s essay is that success at founding startups seems like almost the worst possible metric for judging the value of an Ivy League education. At least the way Graham tells it, to succeed at a startup, you have to be reasonably smart, extremely dedicated, and willing to break a few rules in order to find a new way of doing things. Intelligence is useful for getting into a good college as well, but the other major criteria are almost exactly the opposite. To get into an Ivy League school, you need to be good at following rules, sucking up to grown-ups, and performing activities that look good on your resume whether or not you’re actually interested in them. In some cases, getting into an elite school is helped by having access to good tutors, career counselors, test prep coaching, and in some cases parents willing to make 5-figure donations to their alma maters. The sort of intense, deep, and sustained interest in a single subject that is essential to success at a startup is hard to convey on a college application form or a resume.
Now, the thing is, the skills that are required to get into an elite school actually are useful in a lot of high-status careers. For example, becoming a good doctor involves achieving proficiency at a lot of different aspects of medical practice. You don’t really care if your doctor is capable of devoting months of intense effort to a hard technical problem, as long as he can correctly diagnose your condition and competently administer the remedy.
So I think the question of whether someone’s Ivy League background matters is largely a function of what qualities you’re looking for. An Ivy League degree is a good signal for the kinds of qualities that allow people to get admitted to Ivy League schools. If you’re in a business in which those qualities aren’t important, as Graham is, then it obviously doesn’t make sense to pay attention to where someone went to school.
As someone in a status-conscious profession who didn’t go to an Ivy League school, I would like to believe that Paul Granam is right about this. But although I certainly think it’s true that the value of an Ivy League education is often overstated, I don’t think it’s true that it doesn’t matter where you went to college.
To get the obvious point out of the way first, I believe him that an Ivy League education won’t make you any smarter. If you were smart when they accepted you, you’ll be just as smart when you leave. And since to a first approximation career success is a function of intelligence and determination, neither of which an Ivy League college can impart, I’m not surprised that studies have found little correlation between Ivy League attendance and lifetime earnings.
However, I think an Ivy League institution offers two important advantages, both relating to who your classmates are. First, the intelligence of your classmates determines the pace and intellectual of your classes. Professors pace their classes to be understandable to the average student. If you’re significantly smarter than the average student in a class, you’re not going to learn as much as you could be learning, and if you’re lazy and undisciplined, like I was at 19, you might get bored and stop showing up for class entirely.
Second, in most professions, who you know does matter. It matters more in some professions than others, of course, but there are hardly any professions in which it doesn’t matter at all. Indeed, Graham himself has noted that one of the best ways to meet possible startup-founder-partners is to meet them in college. And although there are smart people at every college, on the margin there will certainly be more smart people at Ivy League schools than non-Ivies.
It matters even more in public policy (this might be largely a reflection of the fact that public policy isn’t an especially meritocratic field, but I don’t think that’s the entire explanation). Being a good journalist, policy analyst, lawyer, lobbyist, etc is largely a function of knowing a lot of people who are doing things related to what you’re doing, preferably in prominent positions. If I’ve got a question on education policy, for example, it’s helpful to have in my rolodex a friend who works on education policy. People who go to Ivy League schools are likely to have a larger number of people in positions of power and influence than people who go to non-Ivies.
I would note that at least from an outsider’s perspective, at least, academia seems to be a bit of a special case in the sense that who your professors were actually does matter. Going to a good school for a PhD allows you to develop relationships with people whose recommendations will carry more weight on the academic job market. This seems to be the same mechanism that makes going to a good law school important to getting good clerkships, which in turn is a major qualification for being a law professor or judge. If you aspire to a profession in which a limited number of slots are doled out using subjective by existing elites, where you went to school can matter quite a lot.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.