David Trinh

1. Too Big To Fail (Andrew Ross Sorkin): Sorkin does a superb job of providing an entertaining narrative of the financial crisis.  Honestly, while the subject matter itself might be a little dry to some and the acronyms and last names a little overwhelming, this is an extremely well constructed account, filled with reconstructed dialogue, of the crash.  Don’t miss the scene where Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson dry heaves into a trash can in Nancy Pelosi’s office.  Priceless.

My only criticism of the work is that there is little in the way of analysis or explanation of exactly what contributed to the crisis.  Save for a brief overview of CDS and sub-prime mortgages, Sorkin largely leaves it up to the reader to figure out the intricacies of the investment banking and mortgage trading realms on their lonesome.  This is fine if you have a decent understanding of the crisis to begin with (and honestly, if you’re willing to page through a 550 page tome on the subject you probably already have a passing interest in the US financial system) but if not I highly recommend that you take a listen to this excellent This American Life episode as a primer.

2. Transforming America’s Israel Lobby (Dan Fleshler): Overall an excellent read. Fleshler does a good job providing a relatively even-handed account of the power of the Israel Lobby inside the United States and provides a solid plan for strengthening the left in the debate over the future of Palestine and Israel. Further, Fleshler manages to do this while avoiding many of the cliches (he even does a good job of lampooning many of them) that one frequently hears bandied about during discussions of the Middle East.

The only problem I had with Fleshler’s work is that he repeatedly cites random bloggers, or, even worse, random commentators on random blogs to score points against the far-left. I know that Fleshler needs to keep up appearances and criticize some lefties to avoid appearing entirely one-sided but the strawmanning becomes extremely obvious at the point where he’s citing a comment by “Cogit8″ on the “Mondoweiss” blog. I read a ton of blogs and I can assure you that I have never heard of Mondoweiss, nevermind Cogit8. If Fleshler wanted to criticize the left for supposedly over-the-top rhetoric it would have does his credibility to mention some names that actually command some respect in the academic community.

3. Lost in the Meritocracy (Walter Kirn): I was really excited to read this autobiographical work by Walter Kirn that details his journey from small town Minnesota to the Ivy League–albeit a school that doesn’t really matter.  Unfortunately, my excitement was sorely misplaced.  Kirn spends most of the book either bitching about Minnesota or castigating Princeton for teaching him how to test well and act smart instead of instructing him on how to understand the ideas of others.  I can sympathize with this to a point.  After all, as a former denizen of rural Minnesota, I can appreciate how some of the people there can be painfully stupid (Marx didn’t complain about the idiocy of rural life for nothing); however, I really would stop short of characterizing everyone as a rube, a distinction that Kirn doesn’t seem to quite grasp.  I can also see where Kirn is coming from when he lambasts the Ivy Tower for its approach to education.  (It doesn’t help that Kirn was a comp lit major– a particularly useless and vapid field of study.)  Sadly, it gets a bit tedious to listen to Kirn complain page after page about his classes considering (1) there are other, more meaningful, majors he could have pursued and (2) he was getting access to some of the best educational resources in the country.  Other people had it worse than you Kirn, get over it.

Moreover, Kirn genuinely comes off as a bit unstable and bratty.  There is one instance in particular where he appears to be legitimately deranged.  Three of his suitemates buy a new set of furtiture and expect him to contribute towards the cost.  Not being from means and not having been consulted about the purchase in the first place, Kirn declines only to be told by his suitemates that he will not be allowed to touch any of the furniture in the common room for the rest of the year.  Obviously, this is a dick move on their part but Kirn unfortunately chooses to reply to this provocation by cutting the wires of his suitemate’s Steinway, pouring champagne on the rugs, and generally destroying the entire suite before he leaves for winter break.  Not only is this totally unproportional to the offense but it betrays a lack of maturity in Kirn’s character that makes it nearly impossible for a reader to sympathize with the author for the duration of the book.

I wanted to like Kirn, as we hail from similar places and ended up at similar schools.  I dunno what went wrong for Kirn (maybe Princeton is just that bad) but I can attest that I am capable of mustering up much more joy and appreciation for the Ivy League (and Minnesota) than Kirn.

4. Taking Rights Seriously (Ronald Dworkin): Wonderful.  Impossible to describe.  If you’re interested in human rights, constitutional law, or social contract theory (particularly as applied to Rawls) I highly recommend it.  In other words, this is a book for debaters.

5. Castles, Battles, and Bombs: How Economics Explains Military History (Brauer and Tuyll): One of the worst books I have ever read.  I thought Castles, Battles and Bombs would provide me with a good opportunity to use some of my newly acquired econ knowledge to better understand military history.  Instead I got to read a series of essays explaining how ‘there’s opportunity costs associated with building castles’ and why ‘an asymmetry of information can influence warfare!’  All of this, of course, is painfully obvious and could probably be summarized in a few short phrases (err, sort of like I just did).  I’m generally a big fan of Marginal Revolution and Tyler Cowen but I can’t for the life of me figure out why he recommended this book.

As a future law-school student, scholarships like this should make me swoon:

Costs are rising rapidly throughout the University of California system, but its newest law school, at Irvine, announced this week that the 80 students chosen for the second entering class will get privately financed scholarships covering at least half their tuition for all three years…

Most of the scholarship money, Mr. Chemerinsky said, comes from Southern California lawyers. Just last week, Mark Robinson, an Orange County trial lawyer who had donated $1 million for the inaugural class, made an additional $400,000 contribution.

However, I can’t help wondering if it’s a good idea to so aggressively subsidize legal education.  By all indications, there’s currently a glut of lawyers in the United States, a surplus that’s only expected to swell as more and more people enter law school to escape the economic downturn.  Further, it’s not entirely clear to me what the marginal benefit of adding another lawyer to our society is.  Do we really need more litigation in our society, our worthy cases being missed because of a dearth of lawyers?  If the marginal benefit is low and if there are few jobs for newly minted lawyers to take, then it seems as if we’d want to encourage fewer people to attend law school rather than providing a huge incentive to pursue a legal education.

After all, if the status-quo holds, most of these new lawyers are going to have wasted three years of their lives and thousands of dollars on tuition (if they go to a conventional law school, unlike UC: Irvine) by the time they discover that they can’t find a job.  Even worse, a surplus of lawyers means that the cost of litigation will fall and a whole host of marginal lawsuits that would otherwise be unprofitable to launch will enter the legal system, further gumming up our legal system. I think SoCo lawyers could find a better cause with which to commit their dollars.

I just got back from a quick two day vacation to Montreal.  A few thoughts:

1. The food was good.  The service was excellent.  Surprisingly enough I was more impressed by the service in Montreal than the food.  Don’t get me wrong, the restaurants were all quite good (Au Pied de Cochon, in particular was a real treat) but there are certainly places in Minneapolis that more than surpass what Montreal has to offer.  While the food wasn’t mind-blowing though, the level of service was incredible.  No snootiness, no French attitude (something I was prepared for after hosting two French cousins this past summer), and no sass.  I was impressed.
2. Businesses in Montreal have a strange aversion to accepting credit cards—only about one in three shops that I visited accepted plastic.
3. The subway in Montreal is one of the better mass transit systems that I’ve seen.  By American standards it was incredibly clean and I never waited more than five minutes for a train.  Evidentially nationalized transportation works in Canada.
4. Hotwire saved the day again by furnishing an incredibly nice room for a stunningly low price.  I highly recommend it.  Use betterbidding.com if you want a better idea of which hotel you’ll be landing before you commit.
5. Tim Horton’s is nothing special.

Glad to see that some grownups are getting real about nuclear energy:

Ramping up the pressure to repeal a 15-year-old ban on building more nuclear power plants in Minnesota, union officials, business leaders and politicians — including U.S. Reps. Tim Walz, a Democrat, and Erik Paulsen, a Republican — urged the Legislature on Tuesday to lift the moratorium.

“Everything must be on the table,” Walz said.

Hear hear.  Honestly, one of the most nonsensical positions taken by the environmentalist crowd has been their rigid opposition to any expansion of nuclear energy in Minnesota.  It’s all well and good to talk about harnessing wind power (a la Matt Entenza) but if we’re actually going to take real measures to curb global warming—without knocking our standard of living down a few decades in the process—nuclear power is really our only option.  I’m not a huge fan of Erik Paulsen for obvious reasons, but I have to commend both Representative Walz and him for taking this sound policy position.

I’m getting sort of sick of Tim Pawlenty’s new-found affinity for stupid gimmicks:

The state’s general fund budget would be frozen in line with revenue received during the previous budget period under a constitutional amendment proposed today by Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

The amendment, if placed on next year’s ballot by legislators and approved by voters, would limit government spending and force legislators to set firmer priorities, Pawlenty said.

This is really stupid idea.  For one, any sort of policy that forces the government to slash spending during an economic downturn is necessarily going to lead to some pretty perverse cyclical consequences. Further, on a more philosophical note, I’m extremely uncomfortable with putting checks in the State Constitution that are not needed to ensure a functioning democracy.  What I mean by this is that Pawlenty’s proposal, while debatable on its meager merits, is a policy proposal, not a constitutional matter.  It’s important to constrain the powers of the legislature when it comes to issues like freedom of speech and other fundamental rights which are necessarily to ensure a healthy democracy; it is very dangerous, and frankly a little bizarre, to limit the power of legislature when it comes to policy measures.

Policy should be debated and voted on by the state legislature, not by the voters.  Let too many referendums pass and too many constitutional constraints slip into place and you’re looking at the prospect of Minnesota devolving into a Californiaesque quagmire.  I think that’s something we would all like to avoid.  Pawlenty’s silly constitutional amendment should fall on that point alone.

Kevin Drum, writing in Mother Jones, has a good article on the unique power of big ag to force through incredibly damaging environmental legislation.  In particular, the legislative language in Waxman-Markey concerning ethanol is especially galling:

But that still wasn’t enough for the ag lobby. Next on their hit list was protection for ethanol. For years corn farmers have argued that ethanol has a lower carbon footprint than gasoline. It turns out that this isn’t true if you take into account the land-use changes that accompany ethanol production: The corn grown for ethanol displaces feed corn, which displaces soybean crops, which causes Brazilian farmers 6,000 miles away to make up the difference by growing more soybeans on their pastureland. This in turn displaces their cattle to new pastures created by clearcutting the rainforest, thus wiping out all of ethanol’s carbon benefits. The net effect, the EPA’s scientists have concluded, is that ethanol’s real carbon footprint is about the same as gasoline’s—or even worse.

The ag lobby’s response was simple and direct: They insisted that Waxman-Markey be changed to forbid federal agencies from considering indirect land-use changes when assessing the greenhouse gas footprint of ethanol. End of discussion.

The experts were agog. “This is not a close scientific call,” wrote Michael O’Hare, a public policy professor at UC-Berkeley who’s studied land-use issues extensively for the California Air Resources Board. “If we are willing to make stuff up and stifle the science with legislation like this, countries like India and China and the Europeans have no reason to get on board…It will be a catastrophe.”

Too true.  And while Drum doesn’t go out of his way to mention names, I’d like to note that Minnesota’s own Collin Peterson is the number one reason why these terrible agriculture policies make their way into critical pieces of environmental legislation.  But hey, Representative Peterson is just voting in the best interests of the people who sign his paychecks, the voters in MN-07 big ag PACs.  After all, these particular constituents are responsible for more than three-quarters of his campaign donations, a higher proportion—by a factor of one half—than any other Minnesotan representative.

The average Israeli apparently has no idea that Israel’s illegal settlements precipitate Palestinian outrage:

For most Israelis, the occupied territories are located somewhere beyond the world’s edge. After the Second Intifada began in 2000, the army banned Israelis from visiting Area A — the parts of the West Bank under full Palestinian control — for their own safety. Except for settlers, Israeli civilians are unlikely to visit the other areas. They don’t see how the suburban houses of the settlements have spread on the hills, how illegal outposts have sprung up between the established settlements, how the 200-foot-wide security barrier meandering through the countryside further hems in Palestinians. (The settlers look at this every day, but in their own way they are blind to it.)

I’ve heard statements along this line before and I never cease to be astonished by the apparent ambivalence of the Israeli electorate towards the settlements.  I mean, the American electorate is chronically uninformed, but I would still wager that if the United States began annexing swathes of Mexico (and the Mexicans responded  with an armed insurgency!) most American voters would take notice and demand some shift in policy.  What gives Israel?

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this very excellent CityPages profile of Rep. Paul Thissen, one of the many DFLers currently vying for the Democratic nomination.  The whole thing is really good journalism and you should definitely go read the piece— if nothing else it will give you an idea of what a grueling ordeal running for statewide office is.  The only commentary I would add is that Thissen comes off as a very cerebral candidate in his profile.  As a DFL loyalist I certainly admire this quality but I must say that in the past Democrats have gotten into a bit of trouble with the electorate for running overly intelligent candidates who lacked the personal polish to sell themselves to voters.  If Thissen is actually a candidate who can bridge these two qualities, and I have to say I’m certainly impressed so far, he’s probably going to be the first DFL governor of Minnesota in twenty years.

A few days ago Ezra Klein composed a little ode to the postal service in which he used a cute personal anecdote to champion a public postal system:

I had to mail a package today. I was late to do it, and busy, and there’s a Fed-Ex/Kinkos storefront steps from my office. Compared to the post office, mailing my package was at least twice as expensive. But the real fun came while figuring out which speed to mail it at. I asked the guy at the front for their “standard shipping.” I explained that it wasn’t time sensitive. He steered me directly towards “Express Saver” shipping. “Saver,” huh? That sounded good. He’d even give me the envelope for free, he promised. A deal! He rang me up. A shade over $15.

Huh?

Turns out there’s also a “ground” shipping that he didn’t mention. That was “only” $8, plus a bit for the envelope. The salesman had been steering me towards a costlier item that I didn’t really understand, which is sort of what you’d expect, given that he’s in business to make a profit. But I’m not shipping things to help him make a profit, and don’t want to pay $15, or even $8. Good thing I have a public option to choose in the future.

Nevermind the fact that I could regale you with tales of my own postal service woe—the station here at Yale sometimes slips weeks behind sorting mail—but Ezra’s little story doesn’t even make sense.  The salesman maliciously ‘steered’ Ezra towards a more expensive option?  Give me a break.  I sincerely doubt that the guy at the front really stands that much to gain from FedEx corporate or his boss for squeezing a few more dollars out of a customer.  It’s far more likely that either Klein or the clerk (or both!) got confused and Klein accidentally ended up with the pricier option.

Moreover, this whole assailment of the profit motive is pretty dumb.  One of the strongest debate cases I’ve run this year is a little gem about postal service privatization—it’s yet to be defeated—and undoubtedly one of the stupidest opps to this case is some nonsense about how abolishing the postal service is going to lead to greedy companies harming the general welfare.  If this is true why don’t we abolish all for-profit business and turn everything over to the benevolent hand of the state?  Seriously. I hate to run up the red flag of communism but, by Klein’s logic, if we can only expect to be mislead and cheated by people who are “in business to make a profit,” we might as well make sure there’s a private option for everything (and while we’re at it we should probably just make profit illegal altogether).

Sure am looking forward to buying my public option car, making calls on my public option phone and drinking my public option wine.

Can’t say I entirely agree with this assessment of the GOP field of gubernatorial candidates:

State Rep. Emmer and former State Auditor Anderson are both well-known enough to garner significant support, but both are targeting the same intraparty demographics. If at any point one of these two candidates pulls away and unites the 37-39% who are supporting one of them, that could be a pretty effective counterweight to Seifert’s superior name recognition. (Bold mine-DT)

It’s always been my understanding that Pat Anderson is mostly trying to tap into the Paulite/libertarian segment of the GOP base, while Tom Emmer is more of a mainstream Republican aiming for the type of Republicans likely to vote for frontrunner Marty Seifert.  If this is true, which I’m reasonably confident it is, neither Anderson nor Emmer has access to a universe of voters that could coalesce into some sort of grand anti-Seifert coalition.

What I expect will happen over the next few months is that Emmer will struggle to peel voters away from the Seifert column and Anderson will try to cobble together enough Ron Paul supporters to overwhelm party regulars at poorly attended precinct caucuses.  Personally, I’m not putting much stock in either strategy panning out.