Some time ago, I mentioned both John Marshall's dictum in McCulloch v. Maryland, that, "A constitution, to contain an accurate detail of all the subdivisions of which its great powers will admit, and of all the means by which they may be carried into execution, would partake of the prolixity of a legal code", as well as Adrian Vermeule's rejoinder, that in a complex world we are stuck with prolix Constitutional Law either way, and the only question is whether it should clog up our Constitution or the U.S. Reports.

Now, via Robert Prather I have finally taken a look at the proposed EU Constitution (PDF), which clocks in at about 325 pages. If the EU has a body in charge of promulgating EU-Constitutional Law, it will be interesting to see whether the legal interpretation is any less complex or prolix than ours has been. I suspect not.

[Incidentally the EU Constitution is full of all sorts of fascinating tidbits. Among others, these include the right to work, the "right" not to have humans cloned, and the right to union policies with a "high level of consumer protection", whatever that means. Free speech rights are guaranteed to children, but they are forbidden from taking jobs.]

Continuing today's mad spate of posting, I realized yesterday that I had all these potatoes left-over from the beef tongue pot au feu the other day. What to do? Well, this. I've finally decided that the best alternative to double fried french fries is a good roast. And dijon mayonnaise helps a lot.

It is circa 11:00 A.M. on a Saturday morning and already this is the 4th Crescat post of the day. Yikes. Since I am blogging on a borrowed computer, a few brief notes.

1: Phoebe Maltz debates whether to get an iPod. I face similar indecision. Think of how many books that money could buy!

2: Chief Justice Rehnquist will not be returning to the bench yet when the Court announces opinions next Tuesday. And those of us who will attempt to spin those opinions into TNR columns will be distractedly refreshing SCOTUSBlog and other sites throughout criminal procedure.

3: Professor Bainbridge discusses scent and memory. Alas, no link to this blog's earlier discussion of them.

Book #13: France in Crisis, by Timothy B. Smith
N.b. - this post is very long, but I'm putting it here as well as on Waddling Thunder because I think it of more general interest.

Right at the end of her profile in the New York Times, which I discuss here, author of French Women Don't Get Fat Mireille Guiliano dropped the following bombshell - it's an astonishing point, given her obvious love for France:

"I could never have done all this in France', she said. 'France is a class society. They will kill you if you want to be an entrepreneur here. I would get an ulcer in three weeks".

As much as I too love France, Guiliano's right. France is a fanatically anti-entrepreneur society, weighing down all efforts to make money from anywhere but the government with multitudinous layers of appalling regulation and tax, as I'll note below. In the course of talking about this issue with my French entrepreneur uncles, I've decided (in a mock-psychological way) that this horrible bias against effort is probably a result of early modern derogation - the practice of actually demoting nobility if they engaged in any business but hereditary landholding. French revolution or not, that kind of long standing taboo must have grafted itself onto the national psyche somewhat. Otherwise, I've got no explanation.

In any case, the author of France in Crisis, Timothy B. Smith, knows all this just as well as I do. But what's interesting about the book is that Smith approaches French economic failure not from the libertarian perspective, but from that of an economically aware socialist. His problems with French policies aren't, in other words, that they're overly redistributionist - rather, Smith is convinced that France somehow combines the worst of regressivity with the kind of anti-business regulation that most hurts the poor and unemployed in the search for jobs and worthy stability.

From my (admitedly second-hand) experiences with French economic policy, I would say that France suffers from three major problems. 1) the costs of hiring employees are far too high. 2) even though all taxation is too high, payroll taxes are particularly so 3) far too many people work and want to work for the government. Smith discusses all three of these issues, and provides facts which I wouldn't have been able to muster alone.

1) The one overpowering impression I had from spending time with my uncles is that hiring an employee was almost impossible. It was expensive, they wouldn't work hard, and you couldn't get rid of them. Unsurprisingly, they made sure to hire as few as humanly possible, and consequently were always understaffed.

Smith's book quantifies those intuitions. Hiring an employee is expensive not only because the French SMIC (minimum wage) is relatively high, but because it's paid to a lot of workers (an astonishing 11% of the workforce) and has risen far faster than the minimum wage of other countries - the French not only raise the wage each year by 1 to 4% regardless of economic growth (p. 109), but administered "additional 'coups de pouce'" (gratuitous additions to the SMIC) every second year or so throughout the 1980's and 1990s . . . and invariably during election years". (p. 109). Out-of-control wage growth in the face of economic stagnation is uncontroversially harmful - as economists estimated in the late 1990s, even a 1% increase in the value of the SMIC killed 4,000 to 20,000 jobs. SMIC has been piling jobs onto the pire of ideological blindness for the past twenty years, and the French government shows no signs of stopping it.

But that's not all. Sure, SMIC is too high. But the other costs associated with hiring someone are also far too high. The French Code du Travail, the labor law, is "thousands of pages long" (p. 115) , and is completely inflexible - I remember my family's efforts to fire an employee who had physically assaulted his manager taking several months - I can't imagine how long firing someone for economic reasons might take. As I note below, huge additional sums have to be added to SMIC in employer side payroll taxes. Furthermore, the workers won't work after you pay them - instead, they spend only 35 hours in the office or shop floor, take 5 weeks of vacation, and disappear for years after pregnancies with rights to return at any moment. I've heard leftists here in America defend the 35 hour work week, noting that 5 hours less in the office hurts no one. But it does, and obviously so - when my uncles owned a small factory, what the 35 hour week meant was a half day on Friday. Since the factory required a full morning to clean for work (food production facilities, for obvious reasons, have to be clean), the employees would show up, clean the place, and then leave for the weekend. Presto - one fewer day of production and profits! And, incidentally, fewer jobs and growth.

2) If the appalling restrictions above actually helped employees, weaker economic growth might (in a not very convincing world) be a good choice to make in preference to Anglo-America "barbarism". As Smith points out in his argument that France remains a dramatically unequal society, however, the workers don't really end up benefiting from the wages they get - the French state gives with one hand and takes away with the other. Particularly damaging are French payroll taxes, which are extraordinarily high and seem almost designed to be unfair. As the book notes, and I know from experience, the typical SMIC worker earning 10,000 Francs never sees 20.6% of his salary (p. 136), which is funnelled away to provide for a social security system that dramatically advantages the well to do over everyone else. This payroll taxation, as of 1997, was 40.6% of (relatively much higher than any normal country) French tax revenue, meaning that France relies heavily on taxing its low income inhabitants for cash. (p. 137). Of course, the French worker still faces income, property, automobile and residential taxes on top of that, and if he dares buy anything from the market, has to pay another 19.6% in Value Added Tax (Sales Tax). We won't even get into what happens if he's unfortunate enough to have to drive. The result is that French income inequality is almost the same as that in America, but without the salutory effect of high American wages. From the perspective of the author's Canadian leftism, French economic policy is the worst parts of America and Sweden rolled into one, with careful efforts made to exclude anything salutory from either alternative.

3) The French civil service is bloated beyond all conceivable belief for someone in the United States. The sheer figures are enough to stagger the imagination - a full 25% of the French workforce works for the state. (p. 77) But even worse, these public parasites are treated like kings, as if they were producing wealth rather than absorbing it - to take only one example,

"SNCF (the train monopoly) workers can stay in ski chalets in the Alps owned by the company's labor council for about one fifth the cost of a normal vacation, plus their trip via rail is free (including the fares of relatives an children). SNCF employees are entitled to eighteen free trips within Europe per year", while SNCF's annual debt, "paid by taxpayers, is equivalent to 1% of GNP". (p. 24)

One might, if one was insane, turn a blind eye to this mess if these people were actually even remotely efficient. But both the people and the system are broken. Unsurprisingly, state employees who literally can't be fired (p. 24) won't work hard. Not only is "the absentee rate in the public sector twice as high as the private sector" (p. 24), but French state employees go on strikes at almost random to protect their privileges - anyone trying to travel in France during one of its periodic transportation shut downs knows how much fun that is. But even worse, the system is designed to be inefficient - as Smith notes (and this is a fabled example of French inefficiency), "French taxes [uniquely] are assessed by one agency and collected by another", resulting in tax collection costs that are "six times higher as a percentage of GDP than in either Sweden or the United States". (p.25) When the government proposed reform in the late 1990's, the public employees hit the streets in a major strike and torpedoed the proposal. Yes, that's right - a proposal to have the same people tax and collect tax was beaten by bureaucrats on strike.

Combined with the fact that public sector wages are unaccountably 20 to 30% higher than in the private sector, these privileges and opportunities for shirking necessarily attract a wide swathe of French youth eager to sink into the comfortable recesses of bureaucratic indolence. As Smith quotes one (avowedly socialist - I'm excluding some bizarre natterings about the proletariat) French social critic,

"We no longer look to work as our key source of income, but rather we seek a 'statut remunerateur' which will protect against the risk of being without a regular income. Securing a job in the post office and marrying a teacher with [access to a municipally] subsidized apartment, has become an individualistic, winning strategy in the long short term, but in the long run it constitutes a losing formula for society". (p. 134)

This effect has particularly negative consequences for France's elite. Instead of fanning out among the liberal professions and (more importantly) business, the best France has to offer are shuffled through its sclerotic grand ecoles. These Napoleonic academies, originally designed to produce the officer-bureaucrats of the Emperor's new France, are almost exclusively designed to produce bureacrats. Indeed, the most prestigous of all, the Ecole National D'Administration (ENA) explicitly purports to do nothing but. Imagine, as I've said to friends, if America's most prestigous university were the National University of Bureacracy! But even worse than the mere idea of channeling smart people towards the government is the fact that the grands ecoles aren't even egalitarian, as originally envisioned - in the period from 1987-1996, "only 5.5% of the students of ENA hailed from working class backgrounds". (p. 140). For a society that purports to value "solidarity", that's a pretty distressing statistic.

Ultimately, of course, I disagree with Smith. I think France should forget its own model, forget the Swedish model, and destroy the social, tax, and benefit systems in favor of relatively liberal capitalism. But the positive part of having Smith write this book and not me is that Smith can't be accused of being a rightist. He wants more spending, more socialism, and more equality. The only problem is that France doesn't provide what he wants, and this book points that out with startling clarity.

Currently in a game of Scrabble with co-blogger Amy and her boyfriend. I find it exceedingly unlikely that she will come up with GALATEAs this turn (which will win the game) but since she continues to believe that she can manufacture a 7-letter word out of AAEGLT?, things drag on.

UPDATE: Nor did she come up with GALLATEs or TALLAGEs. Victory is mine.

Having just read Summers' comments, I'm appalled that anyone was offended. After the initial news reports, I figured I would reserve judgement, especially since many of my very smart friends pointed out ways in which his comments could have proved inappropriate. But finding this offensive doesn't pass any test of reasonability (although I do enjoy Larry's note that: "Jews are substantially underrepresented in farming and in agriculture" as well as his later take on kibbutzim [if you want to know how "out of it" the second most powerful LS is at Harvard (apologies LAES) this is a pretty good example: inoffensive, but obsessed with the Jewish farming deficit]).

One needn't discuss the tiptoe walking caveats that flood Larry-speak like a hail of packing peanuts in a distribution warehouse; ... but what the hell:

"And so we have agreed that I am speaking unofficially and not using this as an occasion to lay out the many things we're doing at Harvard to promote the crucial objective of diversity;" "and again, I am speaking completely descriptively and non-normatively;" "and this is harder to measure;" "So my sense is that the unfortunate truth-I would far prefer to believe something else, because it would be easier to address what is surely a serious social problem if something else were true;" "So, I think, while I would prefer to believe otherwise" [this last comment regards his highly controversial view of his toddler daughters' truck playing habits, his description of which which was met with a resounding hiss from the gallery]; and "They may be all wrong. I will have served my purpose if I have provoked thought on this question and provoked the marshalling of evidence to contradict what I have said."

Well, no. Unfortunately, being President of Harvard is a little bit like being a right-wing President whom the media thinks is stupid; even if you are often wrong, nothing you can say is right. This fact would be sad for academic discourse (Kalven, &c.) save for the fact that the President of Harvard is not a tenured position with academic responsibilities. (As President of Harvard, you can get trashed and hire prostitutes and collapse in New York and be removed by the Officers of the University without censure because of your superlative work in fundraising. But you will still be removed. Contra, say, professors whose wives "just don't understand them" (no more one-on-one tutorials for you, sir) or who record rap CDs and go on speaking tours without taking sabbatical. This is the anti-Terra of tenure.) So this is instead sad for discourse in general.

That is, Larry probably should refrain from political speech, because even when disclaimed, his word is taken as bull. And really, his place is to be an organizational shepherd. He's a CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation now, which means the economics scholarship has to take a hit. Doesn't matter if his speech is right or wrong, if it's not about Allston or the GSAS/FAS/HBS/HLS/KSG/HSPH/HSE budget infighting, it's distracting from his effectiveness as a leader. This is just a sad fact of business. If he were say, Dean of the Faculty, these would be much more acceptable comments: acceptable not for any change in their content, which is both unimpeachable and (pace Kalven) irrelevant, but because of their context. As a CEO, he doesn't have that luxury (or obligation).

[ed.: But doesn't being President of Harvard mean that he is the steward of an academic organization, with a moral obligation to defend academic inquiry? Defend yes, promote maybe, advance specific inquiries probably not. A Summers gaffe makes the C6 of Pravda and Pravda Jr. and Pravda: The Discovery Classroom Learning Edition (by the way, and hugely off-topic, how were there not more parodies like: "The Blair Bitch Project: A Howell Raines Horror Show: Jayson's Back for Revenge! [starring Shannon Doherty]) It doesn't make it right, but it wasn't Carly's fault that HP's non-core divisions were shitty before the Compaq merger either. It's just that strutting at Davos took everyone's eyes off the ball. Enough.]

More important than Larry (for those keeping score at home: boo! for snarky "Camp Harvard" remarks; wink/giggle for Dr. New; sigh for continuous tenuous connection of rhetorical smallness at home with murderous persecution abroad; polite applause for Allston; motion sickness for continual press coverage) is the fact that smart persons, let alone tenured professors, were outraged by Dr. Summers' remarks. Which says something very troubling. His extended summation (which unfortunately, Dr. Hopkins missed) is exactly the sort of thing a smart economist not in his position should be proposing, and which persons on all sides of the explanatory issues in discrimination (for surely, very few people are on multiple sides of the issue of discrimination) must be able to agree to:

What's to be done? And what further questions should one know the answers to? Let me take a second, first to just remark on a few questions that it seems to me are ripe for research, and for all I know, some of them have been researched. First, it would be very useful to know, with hard data, what the quality of marginal hires are when major diversity efforts are mounted. When major diversity efforts are mounted, and consciousness is raised, and special efforts are made, and you look five years later at the quality of the people who have been hired during that period, how many are there who have turned out to be much better than the institutional norm who wouldn't have been found without a greater search. And how many of them are plausible compromises that aren't unreasonable, and how many of them are what the right-wing critics of all of this suppose represent clear abandonments of quality standards. I don't know the answer, but I think if people want to move the world on this question, they have to be willing to ask the question in ways that could face any possible answer that came out. Second, and by the way, I think a more systematic effort to look at citation records of male and female scholars in disciplines where citations are relatively well-correlated with academic rank and with people's judgments of quality would be very valuable. Of course, most of the critiques of citations go to reasons why they should not be useful in judging an individual scholar. Most of them are not reasons why they would not be useful in comparing two large groups of scholars and so there is significant potential, it seems to me, for citation analysis in this regard. Second, what about objective versus subjective factors in hiring? I've been exposed, by those who want to see the university hiring practices changed to favor women more and to assure more diversity, to two very different views. One group has urged that we make the processes consistently more clear-cut and objective, based on papers, numbers of papers published, numbers of articles cited, objectivity, measurement of performance, no judgments of potential, no reference to other things, because if it's made more objective, the subjectivity that is associated with discrimination and which invariably works to the disadvantage of minority groups will not be present. I've also been exposed to exactly the opposite view, that those criteria and those objective criteria systematically bias the comparisons away from many attributes that those who contribute to the diversity have: a greater sense of collegiality, a greater sense of institutional responsibility. Somebody ought to be able to figure out the answer to the question of, if you did it more objectively versus less objectively, what would happen. Then you can debate whether you should or whether you shouldn't, if objective or subjective is better. But that question ought to be a question that has an answer, that people can find. Third, the third kind of question is, what do we know about search procedures in universities? Is it the case that more systematic comprehensive search processes lead to minority group members who otherwise would have not been noticed being noticed? Or does fetishizing the search procedure make it very difficult to pursue the targets of opportunity that are often available arising out of particular family situations or particular moments, and does fetishizing and formalizing search procedures further actually work to the disadvantage of minority group members. Again, everybody's got an opinion; I don't think anybody actually has a clue as to what the answer is. Fourth, what do we actually know about the incidence of financial incentives and other support for child care in terms of what happens to people's career patterns. I've been struck at Harvard that there's something unfortunate and ironic about the fact that if you're a faculty member and you have a kid who's 18 who goes to college, we in effect, through an interest-free loan, give you about $9,000. If you have a six-year-old, we give you nothing. And I don't think we're very different from most other universities in this regard, but there is something odd about that strategic choice, if the goal is to recruit people to come to the university. But I don't think we know much about the child care issue. The fifth question-which it seems to me would be useful to study and to actually learn the answer to-is what do we know, or what can we learn, about the costs of career interruptions. There is something we would like to believe. We would like to believe that you can take a year off, or two years off, or three years off, or be half-time for five years, and it affects your productivity during the time, but that it really doesn't have any fundamental effect on the career path. And a whole set of conclusions would follow from that in terms of flexible work arrangements and so forth. And the question is, in what areas of academic life and in what ways is it actually true. Somebody reported to me on a study that they found, I don't remember who had told me about this-maybe it was you, Richard-that there was a very clear correlation between the average length of time, from the time a paper was cited. That is, in fields where the average papers cited had been written nine months ago, women had a much harder time than in fields where the average thing cited had been written ten years ago. And that is suggestive in this regard. On the discouraging side of it, someone remarked once that no economist who had gone to work at the President's Council of Economic Advisors for two years had done highly important academic work after they returned. Now, I'm sure there are counterexamples to that, and I'm sure people are kind of processing that Tobin's Q is the best-known counterexample to that proposition, and there are obviously different kinds of effects that happen from working in Washington for two years. But it would be useful to explore a variety of kinds of natural interruption experiments, to see what actual difference it makes, and to see whether it's actually true, and to see in what ways interruptions can be managed, and in what fields it makes a difference. I think it's an area in which there's conviction but where it doesn't seem to me there's an enormous amount of evidence. What should we all do? I think the case is overwhelming for employers trying to be the [unintelligible] employer who responds to everybody else's discrimination by competing effectively to locate people who others are discriminating against, or to provide different compensation packages that will attract the people who would otherwise have enormous difficulty with child care. I think a lot of discussion of issues around child care, issues around extending tenure clocks, issues around providing family benefits, are enormously important. I think there's a strong case for monitoring and making sure that searches are done very carefully and that there are enough people looking and watching that that pattern of choosing people like yourself is not allowed to take insidious effect. But I think it's something that has to be done with very great care because it slides easily into pressure to achieve given fractions in given years, which runs the enormous risk of people who were hired because they were terrific being made to feel, or even if not made to feel, being seen by others as having been hired for some other reason. And I think that's something we all need to be enormously careful of as we approach these issues, and it's something we need to do, but I think it's something that we need to do with great care.

Amen.

I know this issue is politicized, but the introduction of speech codes, formal or informal, as a way to avoid debate on the merits of controversial issues was a losing proposition long before it became the unofficial policy of the left in this country. It is bad enough when juridicial man is killed by the soft banalities of corporate expectation and poorly written workplace law, but in the arena-like agora, he should at least have a fighting chance.

Enough heavy weather. On to risk. I got a speeding ticket today on the New Jersey Turnpike. But thanks to New York law, this doesn't effect my NYS Driver's License. Although it could effect my insurance. While this has nothing to do with Larry, this has much to do with riskyness, as discussed below and elsewhere. Mostly because, had the cop had me on the radar gun, as opposed to pacing me, I wouldn't have a license right now. So instead of hazardous and reckless, I am only legally speedy and careless, which is, all other things being equal, kind of cute.