As nice as waterproof boots are, it would be even nicer if they had waterproof laces.

Browsing Invisible Adjunct for my daily dose of despair, I discover that Britney Spears has gotten hitched at a Las Vegas chapel, although she may get it annulled by the time I finish posting this.

Now, I'm grateful to IA for tipping me off to this exciting development. But then I continue reading her post, and find this tidbit:

I'd like to suggest that the case of Ms. Spears serves as a timely reminder of the enormous value of higher ed: can anyone deny that this young woman would have benefitted from a college education?

Well, yes. Yes, I can. Or at least, I'd like to take a minute to analyze that claim a bit more rigorously.

It seems there are a couple of possible readings of this assertion. The first, and least plausible, is that this particular embarassment alone is of such magnitude that it would have been worth the opportunity costs to Ms. Spears to head off to college instead of pursuing superstardom in order to avoid it--which, incidentally, entails the causal claim that college makes such marriages a great deal less likely; I'm not convinced that the effect is all that large, when you take out the selection bias inherent in who goes to college in the first place.

At any rate, an assertion like this almost has to be wrong. Say college cuts in half one's propensity to get married on a whim; how much is this really worth, given the lack of serious permanent repercussions? More importantly, is it worth the sacrifices that college would have entailed for Britney? Let's keep in mind that, as I recall, her career took off just as she might otherwise have been considering school. As things stand, she's become an international star, worth something on the order of $100
million. I seriously doubt she could have achieved this as a full-time student, and had she chosen to put her career on hold, the notoriously short-attention-span world of pop music might have passed her by. It seems fair to say that going to school might have had a negative expected value in the tens of millions of dollars. Heck, I'd be willing to get married to almost anybody in a Las Vegas chapel for quite a bit less than that.

As I said before, though, this is really a straw man. I'm guessing IA is actually making something like the claim that this particular embarassment is simply evidence of the sort of person Britney has become, and that college would have benefitted her by making her a different sort of person--the sort who, among other things, doesn't have Vegas weddings.

The problem is that this is a much, much harder claim to make. What does it even mean to have preferences about preferences? Of course, on some level we do it all the time: I'd like to be the sort of graduate student who writes his papers diligently instead of blogging about Britney. But I think this because of who I already am. Making a consequentialist, preference-based case about character formation--Britney would be better off as not-quite-Britney, Britney-but-less-shallow--comes near to incoherence.

J.S. Mill, famously, tried to work around this by something of a revealed-preference framework: if everybody who has the opportunity to try both X and Y, where X and Y are both pleasurable activities, prefers X, then we can say that X is the more desirable pleasure. He then asserts that

it is an unquestionable fact that those who are equally acquainted with, and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying, both, do give a most marked preference to the manner of existence which employs their higher faculties. ... It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.

But this just isn't true. Plenty of people, to be sure, are happier after sampling the higher pleasures of learning and art, but history is full of those who gleefully plunge downwards--indeed, the extent to which drugs, sex, and alcohol are rampant on university campuses should make one hesitant to sign onto Mill's purely empirical claim. Now, Mill tries to dodge this by definitional fiat--anybody who goes from higher to lower pleasures does so because they've addicted themselves, ruined their ability to experience the good.

This may or may not be true, but it's sneaking in some heavy-duty substantive assumptions into what was claimed to be a purely hedonistic, revealed-preference argument. I could just as easily assert that those who have fallen off the path of true bliss--the life devoted to wine, women, and Warcraft III--have hopelessly and irrevocably corrupted themselves, and are no longer able to choose properly.

All of which is just to say that while we the educated would probably be happier believing that we're better off by some uncontroversial metric relative to those benighted souls who live empty lives at the top of the billboard charts, and that they chose poorly in not giving up their obscenely lucrative careers in order to expose themselves to the life of the mind, it takes a bit more than mere assertion to make it so.

That was always my least favorite line in the days when my mother taught me math, and one I tried to include in my proofs for calculus, but the lecturer didn't seem to care for it. I would like an explanation of certain things which the author presumes I understand.

From Felix Frankfurter's Mr. Justice Holmes and the Supreme Court, published 1939:

"Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of constitutional clauses. First are specific provisions designed to guard against the recurrence of well-defined historical grievances or to impose some specific limitation of power either upon the states or the central government in the distribution of authority under our federalism. These provisions are so definite in our terms and in their history that they canalize interpretation within narrow limits. For that reason they are seldom brought into question and even more rarely excite conflicting views about their meaning. Whether a "fact tried by jury" has been "re-examined in any Court of the United States" otherwise than "according to the rules of the common law," whether a crime is "infamous," whether a tax has been laid upon articles exported from any state, even whether the prohibition against "unreasonable searches and seizures" has been violated, allow comparatively meager play for individual judgement as to policy [emphasis mine]; they are neither frequent nor fighting issues before the Court.

"In the second category are the broad, undefined clauses of the Constitution. . ."

Well, ladies and germs, it is time for me to end my latest guest-blogging stint. It's been fun as always, and that was without blogging about sex. (Or, wait, did just blogging about blogging about sex mean I've blogged about sex? My head just exploded.)

I'm sure the days when I did not inhabit this space must seem so dark and distant to all of you! Worry not, my friends, for a new hope arrives soon.

In any event, as always, if you've enjoyed my posts, feel free to join me back at my place anytime. And if you ever miss me, I'm conveniently located in the blogr--Wait a second....

(Now that, folks, is a very, very shameless plug. Not that I've ever hidden the fact that I have no shame!)

Do you know Elvish? Go try your hand . . .

A panda walks into a cafe.
The panda orders a sandwich, eats it and then fires a gun into the air. On his way out, he tosses a badly punctuated wildlife manual at the confused bartender and directs him to the entry marked "Panda."
Whereupon the bartender reads: "Panda. Large black-and-white bearlike mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves." [From the New York Times]

Graduations and other goings-on have left with me without several of my normal companions for chess and Scrabble. If you're in the Chicago (especially Hyde Park) area and have hankerings for either or both, send along an email.

Sigh. We manage to get a link out of Professor Drezner during "being Andrew Sullivan" week, but not from his borrowed blog.

This week brings epiphany, the start of classes at the University of Chicago, and another Crescat guest-blogger-- Anthony Rickey of Three Years of Hell, a Columbia Law Student. I'll let any further introduction come from him.