Month: December 2013

Matt Phillips remarks on the sharp decline in law school enrollment over the past two years:

Fresh numbers from the American Bar Association show US law school enrollment tumbling 11% over last year to 39,675. That’s the number of full-time and part-time students who started law school studies in the fall of 2013. Overall, enrollment is down 24% from the 2010 peak. The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog points out that we’re back to 1977 enrollment levels, an era that predated the surging growth of lawyers during the 1980s.

Campos chimes in:

What’s particularly striking about these numbers is that first year enrollment is down by 24.4% even though admissions standards have been slashed all across legal academia (Yale, Harvard and Stanford are the only elite schools that haven’t dropped admissions standards, and many non-elite schools have cut median LSAT scores for admits by ten percentage points or more). … [I]f law schools had maintained the admissions standards that prevailed a decade ago, next fall’s incoming class would feature about 24,600 matriculants, which is a number about 13% larger than the average annual total of jobs for lawyers that the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates will become available over the course of this decade.

Jed S. Rakoff, a US District Court judge for the Southern District of New York, contemplates why no high-level executives have gone to jail. The factor that he thinks is “arguably the most important”:

It is the shift that has occurred, over the past thirty years or more, from focusing on prosecuting high-level individuals to focusing on prosecuting companies and other institutions. It is true that prosecutors have brought criminal charges against companies for well over a hundred years, but until relatively recently, such prosecutions were the exception, and prosecutions of companies without simultaneous prosecutions of their managerial agents were even rarer.

The reasons were obvious. Companies do not commit crimes; only their agents do. And while a company might get the benefit of some such crimes, prosecuting the company would inevitably punish, directly or indirectly, the many employees and shareholders who were totally innocent. Moreover, under the law of most US jurisdictions, a company cannot be criminally liable unless at least one managerial agent has committed the crime in question; so why not prosecute the agent who actually committed the crime?

In recent decades, however, prosecutors have been increasingly attracted to prosecuting companies, often even without indicting a single person. This shift has often been rationalized as part of an attempt to transform “corporate cultures,” so as to prevent future such crimes; and as a result, government policy has taken the form of “deferred prosecution agreements” or even “nonprosecution agreements,” in which the company, under threat of criminal prosecution, agrees to take various prophylactic measures to prevent future wrongdoing. Such agreements have become, in the words of Lanny Breuer, the former head of the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, “a mainstay of white-collar criminal law enforcement,” with the department entering into 233 such agreements over the last decade. But in practice, I suggest, this approach has led to some lax and dubious behavior on the part of prosecutors, with deleterious results.

Tracing the term’s history, Jennifer Szalai finds that it “exudes a false note, a mix of self-consciousness and self-congratulation”:

When “guilty pleasure” first appeared in the New York Times, in 1860, it was used to describe a brothel. The term appeared only a handful of times in the paper of record until the late nineteen-nineties, when it started coming up in its contemporary incarnation again and again, at the tail end of the culture wars. (According to the online Times archives, “guilty pleasure” shows up approximately a twelve hundred and sixty times—twelve hundred and forty-seven of those since 1996.) In some ways, the timing seems strange; the guilty pleasure was becoming a part of the cultural vocabulary right around the time cultural distinctions were ceasing to matter. But maybe it was precisely because those distinctions were becoming moot that people felt emboldened to use it. The guilty pleasure could then function as a signalling mechanism, an indicator that one takes pleasure in something but knows (the knowingness is key) that one really shouldn’t. Once distinctions were blurred, you could announce a love for pop culture that, in an earlier era, you would have been too ashamed to admit.

Her conclusion:

The guilty pleasure is a vestige of America’s disappearing middlebrow culture, of that anxious mediation between high and low, which at its best generated a desire to learn, to value cultural literacy and to accept some of the challenges it requires. General magazines once flourished because of it; even Ladies’ Home Journal, better known now as a chipper dispenser of service journalism and horoscopes, used to publish the likes of Edith Wharton and W. H. Auden. But the guilty pleasure seems to me the distillation of all the worst qualities of the middlebrow—the condescension of the highbrow without the expenditure of effort, along with mass culture’s pleasure-seeking without the unequivocal enjoyment.

If you want to listen to Rihanna while reading the latest from Dean Koontz, just go ahead and do it. Don’t try to suggest you know better. Forget the pretense and get over yourself. You have nothing to lose but your guilt.

Paula Marantz Cohen labels the Coca-Cola franchise “a religion of Americana”:

Not an American religion, but a religion devoted to the idea of America — which is to say, to those Norman Rockwell scenes of homecoming, fly fishing, and presents under the tree.

Disney might be compared with Coke in having something of the same religious aspirations, but Disney has a more complicated apparatus — movies and theme parks (a visit to one of which is liable to bankrupt a family of four), not to mention the dubious figure of its founder, Walt Disney, a misanthropic anti-Semite (OK, Coke’s Colonel Pemberton was a drug-addicted Confederate soldier, but never mind). To worship at the altar of Coke, you just have to like the drink and put out the paltry sum required to buy it — which, even if it may produce rotten teeth, diabetes, and obesity, isn’t creating centuries of civil war and ethnic cleansing. It tastes good and it’s refreshing, especially after you’ve spent the afternoon trying to assemble an IKEA cabinet or five hours in heavy traffic to eat overcooked turkey at your Aunt Leona’s. …

Part of what makes Coke’s triumphal history go down so easily is that no one around today was alive before the beverage existed. Coke is “real,” as the promotional slogans remind us, because, artificial sweeteners, colorings, and preservatives aside, it has endured in more or less the same form for as long as anyone can remember. It is moving to see those old, round-cornered Coca Cola machines and those small, green-tinted glass bottles. The red on white Coca Cola script is a kind of Madeleine experience for childhood. Even if you never experienced anything like the America of Norman Rockwell (who did many of the Saturday Evening Post advertisements for Coca Cola during the 1940s and 50s) there’s something about that Coca Cola script that makes you think you did. I suspect individuals around the world feel this, even if they hate everything else that America stands for.

Ann Friedman disagrees with Douthat as to what worries today’s young women:

Now, I’m doubtful that educated twentysomething women are itching to reform and marry every L-train Peter Pan they swipe right on Tinder. But fertility is a legitimate back-of-the-mind anxiety for many young women, and we tend to imagine (explicitly or otherwise) timelines for ourselves as we try to navigate the limitations of biology. Douthat is wrong in assuming that the challenge lies mostly in getting the Nathaniels of the world to grow up and commit. It’s a much bigger question of how women successfully combine family and career. We’re well aware that we lose fertility at a certain age, but also that we lose professional power after we have kids. This is a generation of women who were raised on movies portraying the plight of the working mother, came of age in one of the worst economies in recent history, have read dozens of trend stories about the expense and trauma of IVF, yet still hope to have “it all.” They know the tough decisions that await them in their thirties. And so, they figure, better put in the professional work now — get as far as you can before it’s time to procreate. I wasn’t surprised to read a report from the Pew Research Center last week that women in their twenties are out-earning their male colleagues. The pressure is intense: Do it all now so you can have it all later.

Douthat pulls out some more sociology in his response to his critics:

If there’s evidence that 1) women’s stated sexual preferences are somewhat more conservative than what men say they want and what our cultural norms encourage, that 2) women’s happiness increases when their sex lives conform to their own preferences rather than to the culture’s more libertine script, and that (at least anecdotally) 3) men tend toward a kind of indecisive, listless, semi-exploitative relationship style when their preferences are too easily fulfilled, then perhaps — just perhaps — what we have here is a case for a somewhat more conservative sexual culture. Not a culture where the Ministry of Virtue locks Nathaniel P. away for crimes against chastity; not a culture where nobody ever has a one-night stand or a friend with benefits; not a culture where women are treated like porcelain or taught to quiver in fear of the ravening lusts of lecherous males. Just a culture where it’s a little easier for women (and men) to act on attitudes and preferences that, in the aggregate (!!!!), seem to correlate more with happiness and flourishing than many social liberals are willing to acknowledge or admit.

Andrew Gelman points to another study that found the exact opposite effect from the one Douthat cited in his column:

[T]he existence of two published results in the exact opposite direction suggest, at the very least, that any effects are likely to be lower than claimed in the published articles. As always, multiple comparisons problems are all over the place here — the Conley and Rauscher paper also had some “the difference between significant and non-significant is not itself statistically significant” moments — and I think reporters should be careful before taking the claims based on this sample and assuming that they apply to the population. The sex of your children is going to have all sorts of effects on your behavior and attitudes. With so many possible outcome measurements and various small effects in different directions, we can’t expect a sample size of 600 or 1,000 to form a coherent story, and I think there is a problem in that the conventions of scientific research papers, and of journalism, are that all the results should cohere.

He has a problem with this whole line of inquiry, however:

Why is it all about “the effect of daughters”? Why not “Does having sons make you support the Democrats?” … Lots of discussion about how you, as a parent, might change your views of the world if you have a girl. But not so much about how you might change your views if you have a boy. Lots of discussion of how having a girl might affect your attitudes on abortion, not so much discussion about how having a boy might affect your attitudes on issues such as gun control or war, which disproportionately affect young men. This is a real problem, when issues of girls and boys, men and women, are treated asymmetrically.