Representative Artur Davis (D-AL)

Yesterday, the Rockefeller Center closed out its winter term public programs with a lecture by Artur Davis (D-AL). It was the second installment of our New Voices in Washington series, in which we bring emerging leaders from the Capitol to campus to interact with Dartmouth students. He spoke about the lack of progress that's been made on big issues over the last two decades and admonished the students to play an active role in overcoming that stalemate.

Congressman Davis represents the 7th District in Alabama, which includes Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, Selma, and much of the rest of central western Alabama. It will be interesting to see whether he can eventually win a statewide election, whether for governor or senator, from his home state.

Read the coverage in The Dartmouth here.

Add this to the list ...

... of things you just shouldn't do. From the AP, via ESPN.com:

Ames was on the practice range Monday afternoon when he was asked if he would take a carefree attitude into his match against the No. 1 player in the world because not many expected him to win. Ames shook his head.

"Anything can happen," Ames said, breaking into a big smile. "Especially where he's hitting the ball."

Woods apparently took his comments seriously. As he climbed into a van behind the 10th green after halving the hole with pars, he was asked he had seen what Ames said.

"Yes."

Did it motivate him?

"Yes."

Asked if he cared to elaborate, Woods smiled.

"No."

Woods dispatched him 9 & 8 in Match Play. Ames is now on the wrong side of the record book.

Cold and Blustery on the Charles

Judging by the way the wind is blowing in Cambridge, February is officially "Not Larry Summers" month in the city on the Charles. After staying on as Harvard's president despite a no-confidence vote by its faculty last year, but in the face another such vote scheduled for next week, President Summers has resigned.

Last year, the Summers found himself in hot water over some widely misunderstood remarks he made at an academic conference regarding why differences in the variability of intrinsic aptitude across the sexes may lead to fewer women in elite university science departments. Some with better vantage points than I are saying that by now most people have moved on to some of his other offenses.

There is merit in that argument, but not to be underestimated is an impact of a change in norms. When it is not considered appropriate to criticize someone in a position of power, too few people do it. But once it becomes acceptable or even commendable to do so, the inertia shifts, and the new norm is to offer too much rather than too little criticism. Shifting norms become much more important at a place like a university, where there is very little relevance of the conventional "bottom line" that keeps for-profit institutions from straying too far afield.

What I find most interesting about the episode (apart from the fact that many Harvard faculty seem to be in need of a good elementary statistics class) is that there is a strong contingent of support for Summers among the undergraduates. The editorial page of The Harvard Crimson is eloquent today:

More importantly, the seeds sown for improvement in the undergraduate experience under Summers’ presidency are indicative of his larger willingness to press for change at an institution by nature resistant to it.

Summers unforgivingly, and often publicly, made known his prioritization of certain academic initiatives over others. Given the occasion to address a crowd, Summers rarely failed to mention his belief that this era would be defined by a revolution in the life sciences and by the quickening pace of globalization. His acting on these beliefs has led, for example, to the bolstering of the Broad Institute, the planning of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, and the establishment of the Harvard Initiative for Global Health and a Chilean office of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. It was his brazen trumpeting of these priorities that increased his popularity with students and with a public uninterested in the more esoteric aspects of academia.

Through these and other initiatives, Summers hoped to fashion Harvard into a university that more directly served his conception of the public good. To this end, he has emphasized (and correspondingly obtained funding for) increased research in the life sciences and in expanding Harvard’s global footprint.

It is the prerogative of and, more, the duty of a university president to shift a university’s focus when the demands of the era require it. After all, Harvard, like most other schools founded in colonial days, was established primarily as a training institute for clergy. Reform has come only in battles against the wishes of the entrenched interests of the time. Harvard’s greatest leaps of progress have come when its presidents have fought to modernize the University and redefine its role in accordance with the progressive goals of their respective eras.

Ultimately, too many of today’s entrenched interests felt threatened—justified or not—by Summers’ vision, or by the manner in which he sought to bring his vision to fruition. That was his ultimate undoing.

Well put. As the title of the editorial makes clear, this truly is "Harvard's Loss."

Social Security in the President's Budget

Frequent commenter bakho points out that the President's Budget includes modifications to the Social Security system that look like personal accounts plus progressive indexation of benefits:

The President has proposed reforms to address the system’s long-term financial shortfall while making Social Security a better deal for today’s young workers. Under the President's approach, Social Security would include voluntary personal accounts funded by a portion of workers’ payroll taxes. The 2007 President’s Budget includes the estimated impact from the creation of personal accounts. The accounts will be funded through the Social Security payroll tax. In the first year of the accounts, contributions will be capped at four percent of Social Security taxable earnings, up to a $1,100 limit in 2010, increasing by $100 each year through 2016. The President has also embraced the idea of indexing the future benefits of the highest wage workers to inflation while providing for a higher rate of benefit growth for lower-wage workers. This measure would significantly contribute to the solvency of the system. By adjusting the way benefits are calculated, progressive indexing would eliminate nearly 70 percent of annual cash shortfalls by the end of the Social Security Trustees' long-range (75 year) valuation period, trending towards greater improvement thereafter. Because progressive indexing would index benefits for lower-wage workers to wage growth, which generally grows faster than inflation, benefits would grow faster than the poverty level. This will keep a greater portion of future seniors out of poverty than today.

By adopting progressive indexing and allowing young workers to create voluntary personal retirement accounts within the Social Security system, the President’s recommendations would provide future seniors with real money instead of the current system’s empty promises. Indexing benefits partially to inflation rather than wages allows the Government to save significant sums in future decades, money that would be used to maintain faster benefit growth for low-income seniors. Without Social Security reform, benefits for future seniors will have to be cut about 30 percent across-the-board.

I have taken issue in the past with some of the language being used here--a presumption that the poverty level grows only with prices and not with wages and referring to the "empty promises" of the current system. But I still like this plan relative to the status quo (though not relative to the LMS plan).

Writing in today's Washington Post, Allen Sloan discusses the financial impact of the proposal:

Unlike Bush's generalized privatization talk of last year, we're now talking detailed numbers. On page 321 of the budget proposal, you see the privatization costs: $24.182 billion in fiscal 2010, $57.429 billion in fiscal 2011 and another $630.533 billion for the five years after that, for a seven-year total of $712.144 billion.

I view this as a positive step. If the President is serious about the proposal, it should be in his Budget. His Budget is not the law, but at least it gives other policy makers a more concrete place to start, and it competes with other budgetary initiatives for those years. The next step is to specify it in enough detail so that the actuaries at the Social Security Administration can evaluate its long-term effects as a standalone plan, as they have done for other proposals here. Like bakho and Sloan, I share the surprise of having to uncover this in the Budget, rather than hear about it in the State of the Union address.

Stitching a New Safety Net

So goes the title of the latest Econoblog, where Mark Thoma of Economist's View and I discuss the changing resources and expectations of social insurance. The teaser:

For many years, workers could manage their medical expenses with employer-provided health insurance and Medicare and look forward to underwriting their golden years with payments from a defined-benefit pension and Social Security.

But the landscape of social insurance is shifting. Many large corporations are moving their employees from traditional pensions to riskier 401(k)s and asking workers to pay more out of their own pockets for health insurance. At the same time, Social Security and Medicare, the two venerable entitlement programs, are facing growing demographic strains as the vast baby boom generation reaches retirement age.

The Wall Street Journal Online asked economist bloggers Mark Thoma and Andrew Samwick to explore how we how arrived at this point and discuss what workers and retirees might expect in the future, as the composition of the social safety net continues to shift.

Thanks to Mark for exchanging ideas. Enjoy!

Three Links for Social Security in the SOTU

I took the Thomas Jefferson option for the State of the Union Address and just read the printed word. I had three reactions to the material on Social Security:

1) With the failure to move the issue forward last year, I thought the issue would be difficult to handle rhetorically. See Jane Galt's fine analysis of how the President managed to pull it off:

[T]here were the Democrats, clapping joyously at the news that they'd voted down Social Security reform. They looked like adolescents mocking authority. Memo to Dems: if the American voter wanted sullen, rebellious adolescents in Congress, they would have sent their own, if for no other reason than to get them out of the basement. George Bush let them applaud their intransigence for a while, then said, "Now we still have a giant entitlement problem." This made the Dems look foolish enough. But, in keeping with the role of teen rebel who is not paying close attention to teacher, they kept applauding. Brilliant! Why didn't those Machiavellian Republicans think of positioning themselves as the party that's glad we have a gigantic, intractable entitlement problem? About halfway through the moment, some of the brighter senators seemed to realise that they were applauding something that they oughtn't to be. But by then, they apparently figured it was too late to back down, and the best course of action was to bull through as if they'd intended all along to celebrate multi-trillion dollar budget shortfalls.

(Her observations on the word "responsible," as in responsible fiscal policy, are also quite accurate.)

2) I share Kash's skepticism that what we need is another Commission on entitlements. He conjures up the image of Ross Perot in the 1992 Presidential debates and then goes through the trouble of listing many of the recent government publications that analyze the likely impact of the Baby Boomers and others on the federal budget. The part that we need is the bipartisan. I suppose that means a Commission these days, since the other entity that is supposed to be bipartisan--Congress--doesn't seem to act that way.

3) Kash concludes his post with the question:

When will it actually be time to put forward some new solutions to these well-documented problems?

If you want ways to address Social Security's challenges that are not narrowly partisan, then by all means, start here.

Perhaps more later on the other elements of the speech.

Justice Alito

The Senate voted 58-42 to confirm Samuel Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court, with one Republican voting against and four Democrats voting in favor.

David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times provides an interesting analysis, in "Two Nominee Strategies. One Worked," particularly with respect to Monday-morning quarterbacking by the Democrats:

As the last obstacles to confirmation faded away Monday, Democratic aides said their party had initially expected Judge Alito to live up to his reputation as "Scalito," suggesting a conservative firebrand in the mold of Justice Antonin Scalia. Failing to adjust to his meekness, Democratic aides admit they searched too hard for scandal in Judge Alito's past.

And some gloating by the White House:

The White House, meanwhile, sought to take advantage of Judge Alito's low-key, almost shy demeanor to build sympathy for him. They say they succeeded beyond all expectations when Judge Alito's wife, Martha-Ann, walked out in tears from his confirmation hearings.

"Any time they are yelling, preaching, lecturing, and you are cool and calm and breathing deep, you are winning," the administration official said the White House team told Judge Alito. "What that means on television sets where the American people are watching this is, you look good and they look bad. It was the central operating premise."

And what seems to be an accurate assessment by Senator Reid's spokesman:

Jim Manley, a spokesman for Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, agreed. "It was a classic rope-a-dope," Mr. Manley said, referring to the boxing tactic of leaning against the ropes to let an opponent exhaust himself punching.

In light of my last two posts on the topic, I don't think that there was much that the Democrats could have productively done here. This confirmation process is broken and needs to be repaired. Toward that end, perhaps another "centrist" group of Senators will coalesce around the idea of agreeing to vote against the confirmation of any nominee who refuses to answer sensible questions about prior about the opinions in prior Supreme Court cases.