Well, I've now finally seen Return of the King, so I went back and read all of the LOTR-blogging that I'd been leaving aside. If you read only two things online about Tolkien, make them Timothy Burke's sophisticated Return of the King review and Heidi Bond's fantastic Sauron-contract post.

In the New York Times today you'll find:

This interview with Wallace Shawn where he declares, "In an ideal world, people would be preoccupied with reading and writing poetry and having love affairs, "

A long-ish article on how (surprise) blogs are changing what it's like to be a teenager.

This article on the possible costs of Bush's new space dreams.

And this article about Ralph Nader's insistence that if he runs in 2004 he will help the Democrat. (This isn't impossible, but it is unlikely).

So Will and Peter take issue with my support for a manned mission to Mars. As does Unlearned Hand and Chris Lawrence. (A 'dud post' according to Unlearned Hand. Oh dear.) So I suppose I should explain why this project doesn't exactly fill me with sticker shock.

My main source for this is the Washington Post article that Will provided. Now, it mentions $400 billion not $500 billion (and the million in my original post was a typo, no corrected.) But that's a decade-old estimate from NASA, so let's say $500 billion is more the order of the day.

Were Bush to announce that he wants the project accomplished within 10 years (because, well, it's nice Kennedyesque grandeur, I suppose), then that's $50 billion per year, or roughly a tripling of NASA's budget. (According to the Post, that's about $15 billion/year.) Not as much as I'm willing to bet the new prescription drug benefit costs us annually. Indeed, brushing off my copy of Excel and figuring a net-present value for the project (assuming a discount rate of 5%--you can adjust for your estimates for future inflation), the value in today's dollars would be only $386 billion. And that's before you subtract the value of any positive spin-offs from the project.

Furthermore, it's project-based spending. For you deficit hawks out there, that's good stuff. OK, it's a big chunk of change, but it's money that's not spent on entitlements, or what was called in the early 1990s 'relatively uncontrolled spending.' It's money for a definite project, with returns and spin-offs, and when it's done, it's done. Project-based spending is much simpler to cut (either when necessary, or when you want to do so because your budget's tight) than entitlement spending, simply because the constituency is normally narrower.

Much as the gnashing of teeth over 'lost opportunities' is entertaining, I have a gut-level assumption that the American people have a relatively fixed idea of the amount of national income we're happy to turn over in taxes, and that the question becomes how you spend that pie. However, the more of it which is done in entitlement spending (the aforementioned dentistry), the more fixed that spending becomes, and the easier it is to justify gently increasing the size of the pie.

And all I can say to Peter and Will's comparison to the pyramids is: come on. Libertarianism isn't helped by comparing actual physical slavery, the chattel ownership of human beings, to taxation which is decided through a democratic process. Is going to Mars a 'dream [the American people] didn't even know they had', as Peter puts it? So what: getting other people to dream something is what having a dream, having an inspiration is all about. And if enough people don't get inspired by it, well, it bodes badly for Mr. Bush and his successors in upcoming elections. But to compare a President to a Pharoah with the power to cast men into bondage, or to question how many died for the pyramids... really.

(As for Peter's suggestion that an atomic bomb might be an easier and cheaper alternative, I suppose everyone has different ideas of what's noble and romantic.)

It's stuff like this that assuages my fears that my libertarian instincts might be slipping away. The intense, visceral revulsion I feel for such eagerness to buy Americans a $500 billion Mars-mission dream they didn't even know they had (possibly because the stiflingly drab managerial state deadened their ability to dream in suitably bright hues) is comforting evidence that, at the very least, I am in no danger of becoming a national greatness conservative.

What Mr. Rickey likes about the mission to Mars is the sheer scale. So let's pick at this a bit. It really seems that the truly impressive thing about actions like this is that they are so expensive--in forgone resources and sometimes lives (how many died for the pyramids?)--that no sane person or even voluntary group would actually be willing to foot the bill. It makes us feel good that we belong to (simply because we happened to be born here, for most of us, but let's put that particular silliness aside for a second) a collective so rich and powerful that we can flamboyantly break more of our toys than most other collectives even own and still be on top.

Mr. Rickey wants "simple, beautiful, magnificent." How about art, literature, sport? Who is he to say that knowing that the government established by a Constitution you never signed, governed by representatives you were in no way pivotal in electing, decided to give massive subsidies to certain industries in certain districts in order to send a handful of folks in a metal container to a distant planet is a finer, more noble pleasure than having white shiny teeth?

I mean, if what we want is wasteful, awe-inspiring spectacle, why don't we just start a few more wars? Nothing says "this is our scale" like incinerating hundreds of thousands of our fellow human beings in one glorious flash, right?

The blogosphere is lining up against the Mars program, with a few notable dissenters, like Dan Moore and our dear guest Anthony Rickey.

Now, unlike Peter, I actually do have some sentimental attachment to the space program myself. You'll find me listening to Frank Sinatra's Fly Me To The Moon (only vaguely NASA-related, I know) several times every day. But I'm very bothered by this because nobody seems to care at all about how much the program costs.

On one side you have those to whom the very grandeur of the operation seems attractive, like Mr. Rickey. On the other side you have those like me-- if we could pull this off for a mere $500 million, I might be ready to throw in my two bucks voluntarily. But no, the costs are more likely in the realm of $500 billion (and President Bush hasn't told us how much he intends to spend himself-- my own harsh opposition to the cost depends a lot on the costs; I wonder if the same could be said about the Mars-trip supporters).

[This, despite the sort of eerie historical analogies one can draw between space programs and the Egyptian pyramids, where heavy taxation (remember, that's about $2000 for each of us) does the work of slave labor.]

So, I guess this a bit of a challenge to those of you who think that, say, $400 billion dollars to put a man on Mars would be money well spent (remember, that was George I's estimate, without adjusting for inflation). How much money is it worth to put a man on Mars? If $400 billion is okay, would $4 trillion be? (That's 20,000 bucks a piece). I'm not demanding an absurdly precise line here, but I'd just like an idea of the order of magnitude it would take to convince you that this is a dream better deferred until a later date.

Will and Amanda both dislike the idea of putting a man on Mars or a permanent space station on the moon, and both of them make the same complaint: why should we do this, when there is only so much money, and so much on this planet is left undone? Much of the blogosphere (including my local university's blog, the Filibuster) has echoed the same sentiment.

How disappointing. Will looks at Dan Moore's enthusiastic comments about the glory of spaceflight and calls it vicarious dreaming. But then he lists a number of alternative goals that are no less vicarious dreams: police protection (the dream of a society without crime); food (the dream of a society without hunger); school vouchers (the dream of an educated society); or dental care (the dream of a society with, I suppose, very nice teeth). So long as government provides any of those, they're just another set of dreams, or another set of priorities.

I'm going to raise my banner with Dan on this one. Even conceding that a manned mission to Mars might give us no valuable new technology, no greater idea of how we fit into the universe, or any other scientific merit (and that's a big concession--it almost certainly will), $500 billion is a cheap price to pay for putting the romanticism and nobility back into our ideas of government. It's been a while.

A few summers back, I drove from El Paso to San Francisco, by way of Nevada. I chose my route so I'd have a chance to go by the Hoover Dam, and I've never regretted the extra time spent. You can only really understand it if you've been there, but suffice it to say that the Dam is big in that way that truly defies words. After driving for days through desert so vast that occasionally my radio could find no signal on any band, and after staring at a canyon deep enough to hide the bright lights of Tokyo, I found myself at a sheer wall of concrete that whispered, "This is the kind of thing we build in this country. This is our scale." Simple, beautiful, magnificent.

Putting a man on the moon, a man on Mars, or building an enormous resevoir in a desert isn't about 'vicarious dreaming' any more than full-employment, fair wages, or the more 'practical' concerns that Will and Amy mention: they're simply a different kind of dream. One is concerned with the daily trivia which touch all our bodies: has Uncle Milbert had enough to eat; does little Amy's classroom have sufficient copies of Heather Has Two Mommies; will little Tommy grow up with enough teeth that he doesn't choke on his Crest Whitening strips when they slip through the gaps. And these are important goals, and in some ways even noble.

But mankind is filled not only by bread (and as Amanda would dismiss it, 'circuses'), and often government should seek not only the practical and managerial, but the ministerial and majestic. As much as I love economics, allocative efficiency of resources is not something that trips off the tongue or inspires the soul. In the pageantry of great American images, the heart doesn't stir at the sign of the golden arches (though they feed the masses) or thousands of pages of health-care reform documents, but in those first pictures of the strange blue marble-like sphere that is our home. In a way, we should go to Mars simply because it is there, and in order to say that we can.

The dreams are the difference between a Good World and a World of Great Things, and as you might gather, I'm a partisan of the Great. Suppose that $500 million were spent on food, rent, dental care--the things that Will suggests. That $500 million of government money does no more than to place the world where it should be: it makes sure that families prioritize medical insurance over a new TV, for instance, or that individuals place as much value on education as they would in a well-managed world. It ensures that individuals have made the private choices that, all being equal, they should have made in the first place. And once we have our houses in order, well, then maybe we can see about building that dam in the desert, putting that man on the moon.

But those dreams will forever stay out of reach: however well you allocate resources, the very process of allocating them creates new desires, new dreams, and they can never be perfectly apportioned. The minimum level is never reached, and so you get the dull, drab greyness of managerial government, where 'federally funded day care for all' is a rallying cry. Every so often, we need to dream something bigger, something greater than ourselves, to invest in learning something as a species and a civilization. Maybe it isn't a man on Mars, or a permanent presence on the Moon. Maybe there's some other great dream that we're missing, but it's not perfect teeth for the nation. I'm happy to see something like this. And my guess is the electorate will be, too.

Hello, everyone. Sorry for the delay in actually posting here, but Will was kind enough to invite me while I was coming home from the holidays, and a combination of illness and pre-semester preparations have conspired to keep me away from the computer. For those who don't know me, I'm Anthony Rickey, and I run the blog Three Years of Hell.

Whatever my other qualifications, I may be the first guest blogger to guest administrate Crescat, and I'm going to use that as my excuse for a delay in posting. Last night, I spent a few hours with Amy fiddling with the templates and getting MT-Medic up and running. It's a very useful little CGI program for those who run guest weblogs, because it lets you change information about your authors, view various technical details about your blog, and otherwise shift things around without having to go into a mySQL database. Most importantly, you can reset an author's password if he's lost it. It installs in minutes, so I recommend it to any readers who run their own blogs in Moveabletype.

Alas, alack, whatever my other talents, the Crescateers haven't given me extensive access to their servers and templates, which is unfortunate. I was hoping I might be the first guest blogger to implement comments on here in defiance of Will--but that will have to wait.

In any event, thank you to Crescat for inviting me, and I hope you enjoy my stay here as much as I will.

All this talk about the ninja got me thinking about ninjas in general, and after reexamining the official ninja webpage, I had a sudden realization.

Now, what do we know about ninjas? Let's quote the source:

Facts:

Ninjas are mammals.

Ninjas fight ALL the time.

The purpose of the ninja is to flip out and kill people.

Suddenly, it all makes sense.

Contra Amanda, Dan Moore thinks that Bush's space dreams are a smashing idea:

But the fact is that this is one of those programs that won't be done by other means (it can't be done either - with the current amount of capital required to do it only the government can authorize the funding for it) and if the U.S.A. doesn't do it - who will? We are the best at Space exploration (as the recent twin Mars landings have shown us) and Americans are the people who dream. The society that went from Kitty Hawk to the Moon in 70 years is the only one that can and will bring us to Mars in the next 20. We are going to go to Mars because we must. Because it is next. Because it is the frontier. Exploration is the reason. Exploration is what dreams are made of.

I'm not sure that, when considering policy, fiscal sanity should always be the most important thing. Or even in the top five.

Six days before the State of the Union, Bush says he wants a settlement on the moon and a manned exploration to Mars?

Sources involved in the discussions said Bush and his advisers view the new plans for human space travel as a way to unify the country behind a gigantic common purpose at a time when relations between the parties are strained and polls show that Americans are closely divided on many issues. . . .

The sources said Bush aides also view the initiative as a huge jobs program, and one that will stimulate business in the many parts of the country where space and military contractors are located.

I admit I don't entirely understand why people get so wowed by flight and spaceflight as they do, but it sells. The Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum is the most visited museum in the world. Ah, circuses. But I'd prefer some bread. If you want to fund science, the NSF could do with some more funding. NIH too, but it would be nice if they dropped their decision to only fund "hypothesis-driven" research. And don't forget the land-grant universities. Worthy causes, all. I just don't really feel like paying taxes to put a man on Mars or a house on the moon (eesh, how libertarian of me. . . If I weren't about to head out the door, I'd think of something liberal to say to balance it out).

Tossing Frisby?, Mr. Bashman asked. No! Don't do that! The parade of horrible events that could follow started running through my head -- what if they hired the people who cruise by campus in Lyndon LaRouche soundtrucks?

I can't for the life of me imagine what I would ever do that would cause the world to beat a path to my door to come yell at me. Should I ever generate such animosity, I hope it's for something I'm proud of. That said, I'm glad that Frisby protects against targeted residential picketing. If I were living alone in a studio on the top of a high-rise apartment building, I might not feel as threatened by picketers -- they'd still have 17 floors and front-desk security to contend with before they ever got anywhere near me, and I could probably avoid hearing them or seeing them. But if I were living in a house, even in the sanctuary where I should feel safe, I would probably not be able to rest easily, knowing how near the people angry at me are to me. And should I ever have hypothetical future children, they wouldn't have asked (or been responsible for) the hell that I as their mother had just brought upon them (I only could hope they'd bear it with more grace than Jenna and Barbara Bush).

I think bans on targeted residential picketing constitute a legitimate form of time, place, and manner regulation that is permitted by the First Amendment. Maybe there is, maybe there isn't a right to be left alone, but that question isn't at issue during this picketing case. But hey! the majority opinion in Dean v. Byerley, agrees with me: Frisby's standard that it's permissible for communities to enact legitimate restrictions on how much protestors can wave "You belong in hell!" signs around someone's front door isn't threatened by this decision; the opinion simply notes that in the abscence of such legislation, picketing a home isn't unconstitutional. There is more of a case here -- the majority and dissent argue whether Michigan's statute on home picketing refers only to labor picketing, and whether this case is a labor dispute. It even includes a delve into legislative intent. My sympathies here say that the statute does forbid targeted residential picketing to the extent possible under the Constitution. But even if the picketing weren't forbidden under any law on Michigan's books, Frisby would still be safe. Or so I figure.

Thanks for the fright . . . it's good to know that How Appealing has picked up pointers from the tabloids on how to get people to read the long inside stories.

This isn't only a blog for sex, libertarianism, and booze -- it's also a blog for countries that don't get much coverage in the press.*

Mongolia has cleared its finances. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mongolia was stuck with a $11.4 billion dollar debt to Russia for the money it had started to borrow, as loans, since 1921. The country's GDP is roughly a tenth of that. Russia helped it get out of the red by canceling 98% of the debt. There are some complaints, though, that Russia should have forgiven the whole debt rather than demanding the token $250 million. France and the US have given the same to creditors in the past, the reasoning goes, and the Soviet gained at the hands of Mongolian suffering. Perhaps Mongolia wouldn't have needed so many expatriate Soviet Communists managing their country had not purges left Mongolia with only five citizens with a secondary school education in 1940.

See also: the top 10 news stories of 2003 for Mongolia: land privatization, exanded mobile telecommunications, 173 peacekeepers in Iraq.

* Some may remember that I have occasionally blogged on news from Nauru, a country of dwindling guana deposits, banks that are too shady to even be effective money laundering sites for the Russian Mafia, and 300 Afghan asylum seekers who just suspended their hunger strike in protest against Australia's refusal to accept them as refugees. Ah, Nauru, I've had a soft spot for it ever since I was in the third grade and my sister did a country report on it (you remember those from elementary school). . . It would be a nice place for Pinky and the Brain schemes if they only invited in idealistic young gung-ho dreamers.

Timothy Burke, one of my favorite bloggers, has proposed a few ground rules for the use of historical analogies in discussing current events. He writes:

Doing without historical analogy would be like trying to do without metaphor--and in some ways, it would also be like doing without the empirical substance of informed policy making. We can only predict what might happen by thinking about what has happened: it is the only data we have. Though one of the things we know about the past is how unreliable conventional wisdom about the applicability of historical analogies to new situations often has been. (I confess that one of my private, shameful pleasures as a historian is reading old newspapers in sequence and feeling a kind of unholy delight about how wrong the pundits of the day are about what’s going to happen next.)

Most present-day historians explicitly disavow attempts to analogize their work to present-day events, a tendency of which I disapprove (for more, see this essay on Nietzsche), as any justification for the pursuit of history as an academic discipline must ultimately rest upon its ability to teach us things about the present. Therefore, I find it highly encouraging to see a professional historian attempting to tackle the important question of how exactly one should go about mining the past for currently applicable wisdom. Go read.

I don't usually like to link to big-media pieces without adding any more commentary, but Michael Kinsley pretty much gets it all right.

In a post with the title "Why TNR Sucks" (thus my own), Chris Geidner explains, well, why he thinks that The New Republic sucks.

It's not, he tells us, because The New Republic endorsed the ninja, (?) but because "it's a pay site that is trying to influence opinion. How the hell can you influence opinion if you're charging people to view your opinions?"

This is an entirely fair point, previously made by Tyler Cowen, among others (the post is someplace on Volokh, but until they enable a better search engine, I can't easily find it). I used to subscribe to The New Republic, and I'd like online access enough that I would be tempted to subscribe again just to be able to read the website. But even if I could, I wouldn't be able to blog effectively on a lot of their stuff because most of the people who read this site probably don't have New Republic access, and I don't have Matthew Yglesias's skills for turning up back-door links.

But Geidner's post does not, alas, end there.

He goes on to indict TNR for being . . . well, I'm still not quite sure what.

As I pointed out at the other place, Kos also wrote recently abut the ever-present idea that TNR isn't even a Democratic journal any longer . . .

The retort from TNR's publisher in an LA Times article is weak at best, and throws into question what the magazine is even doing in existence:

"The Nation, the Weekly Standard and the National Review are all terrific magazines," said Stephanie Sandberg, the New Republic's publisher, "but they are causes in a way. They carry the banner for a group of people with a certain set of political values. The New Republic is an interesting magazine, but we are not a cause. We tend to write articles that are iconoclastic politically."

We are not a cause? What the hell does that mean? TNR sure isn't an objective newsmagazine. (I know, US News and Newsweek have slants, but they don't compare to TNR's writing at all.) What is it then? It's just an idea depository with no real aim or purpose? Then why bother? [Links are in the original text]

[NOTE: nothing in this post should be taken to suggest that I disapprove of professors' using foul language.]

On Tuesday, despite his attempts at riling us up, Dan Drezner's use of foul language paled in comparison to his immediate predecessor, Emily Kadens. [I have class with Kadens and then Drezner in immediate succession in the same classroom.]

Today, though, Drezner beat out Kadens. Drezner used both the s-word (when describing indelicately the principle export of Nauru-- bat guano) and the a-word (when quoting the social stabilists' opinion of free trade (and what exactly it was that free trade sucked)). Kadens, on the other hand, didn't use any verboten words that I can recall.

Score to date: Drezner 1, Kadens 1. Tie.

If you're into this sort of thing, Steven Pincus will be presenting his paper on "The State and Civil Society: Capitalism, Causation and Habermas's Bourgeois Public Sphere," thanks to The Workshop on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Modern France.

The presentation will be Friday, January 16th at 4:00 P.M. in Wiebolt 207, and copies of the paper are available in Wieboly 205B, Social Sciences 225, Cochrane-Woods 161, and HMW 504. I had a class (the second quarter of the now-moribund Western-Civ) with Pincus a couple of years ago, which was fun, though I'm sure he's now forgotten our tedious arguments about lay investiture.

[Incidentally, if the talk sounds utterly boring to you but you're pleased or peeved by the use of the comma in the title, read Dan Moore's discussion of the comma.]

Dan Drezner in U.S. Economic Foreign Policy:

Land weve pretty much settled on; we're not going to be conquering Canada any time soon.

(Long pause, then ominous voice). But we could.

Dr. Emily Kadens, in Prosecuting Crime:

"The Constitution is the law of the land, and the Constitution says, 'Innocent till proven guilty'.

How do we get to a formalist world? Lawrence Solum explains.

For those of you who think that Pete Rose's gambling ought to be cause to keep him out of the hall of fame-- how would you feel about the following hypothetical scenarios?

1: A player who regularly commits domestic battery against his wife.

2: A player who is convicted of murder.

3: A player convicted of using cocaine.

4: A player convicted of using performance-enhancing drugs.

5: A player convicted of using a corked bat.

Which of these crimes (if any) ought to also be cause to keep players out of the HoF?

[Incidentally, I'm not asking about what the Hall of Fame's rules are-- my question is, if Pete Rose's crimes are so bad, which of the above crimes also meet that threshold?]

Email or blog your thoughts.

Contrary to Russell Arben Fox's and Steve Dunn's jibes, I do write about things other than Libertarianism and various (legal) vices. For example, food.

My favorite food columnist (minimalist Mark Bittman) has a column this week discussing sherry-cooked clams. (Enough to make me wish I knew where around here to find fresh clams).

Bittman also notes that sherry keeps a little longer than normal wine. Similarly, in his risotto post, Waddling Thunder suggests using vermouth instead of normal white wine if you don't like to keep a bottle of wine open all the time (which he doesn't).

But my co-blogger Amy Lamboley pointed out to me that what Bittman doesn't mention (surprisingly, given his cook-friendly proclivities) is that if wine is going to be cooked in a pretty flavorful dish anyway, then a week in the refrigerator won't cost you much. For drinking and fine wines, that time makes a big difference, but for the white wines that I can afford to throw into my risottos (where the wine is going to meet some stock and maybe some basil or onions or something else) the flavor difference is minimal.

Jane Galt has an interesting post on (among other things) the decline of the bank robber. Towards the end, she quotes this line from the Economist:

The rise of unskilled robbery—junkies with guns and no previous experience—is bad news for shop workers, who are less well trained in dealing with guns than are bank tellers; it is also bad for the police, who tend to find ill-thought-out crimes harder to solve than planned ones.

At Begging to Differ, Steve Dunn makes a martini. A very good martini, from the sound of it.

I know I can be thin-skinned when it comes to New York Times coverage of events in my home state, but I can't shake the impression that a bit of scorn creeps into the reporter's language when they write their stories. For instance,

She, like, broke his heart.

This is not a quote. "Like" is the flavoring word that the NYT (Mr. Jeffrey Gentleman, to be precise) threw in to describe the reaction in Kentwood, Louisiana to Britney Spears and Jason Alexander's Vegas wedding. The article isn't written in a particularly casual style -- everyone interviewed is "Ms. __" or "Mr. __" after the full name is used once -- but it might violate accepted ratios for fluff to actual news. Mr. Gentleman may have had difficulties finding facts, or even opinions, to report.

"I'm getting really aggravated with all this!" Mr. Alexander shouted this week to a gaggle of journalists hanging around for a quote. "I want y'all off my property!"

I realize that other, much more important issues, also seem to be clouded by the media into uniform opinions. Europeans' thoughts on headscarfs in public schools is the prime example of the day. That might be worth a crackdown on such styles of reporting by the Public Editor.

For what it's worth, the Baton Rouge paper doesn't seem to find the story worth covering at all. There's no mention of it in the section devoted to events in the Florida parishes, or in the entertainment section. Searching for "Spears" brings up LSU football player Marcus Spears, and "Britney" and "Vegas" both get you nothing relevant.

UPDATE: I decided to email the Public Editor to get his take. His assistant, Arthur Bovino, responded "'Like' was only used as to exemplify typical teenager language." I'm not sure why typical teenager language was used in an article that is not about teenagers, but I suppose there were reasons. The reply was fairly prompt -- only 5 hours after I sent the email.

Audrey Hepburn fans, rejoice! Doc Films at The University of Chicago is showing great Audrey Hepburn films every Wednesday evening.

With the Athens Olympic Games a mere seven months away, you might want to take some time to brush up on the scoring of the most difficult, graceful, and beautiful of all sports: gymnastics. (Note: the linked article is only useful if you know anything about scoring golf.)

And now the ulterior motive of my public service announcement emerges...

If you continue to read the article, you'll notice the author's peeved tone at the decline of collegiate gymnastics over the past twenty five or so years. I share her angst at watching colleges drop their gymnastics programs like hot potatoes (and personally crusaded the University of Chicago to keep its gymnastics program) but there's a lot at work in the disappearance of collegiate gymnastics and appeals to gymnast success statistics are not likely to be persuasive to college administrators.

First, gymnastics equipment takes up a lot of space and requires high ceilings. Second, gymnastics equipment is very expensive. Third, gymnastics does not bring in anywhere near the money that football and basketball do. Fourth, gymnastics is quite dangerous and liability concerns are legitimate. Fifth, gymnastics is difficult and there is a narrow pool of participants and qualified coaches. By now you must be thinking, "Jeez, with all of this against it, how could this sport have survived as long as it has?"

I don't really have a good answer to that question so I'll just say that there are a lot of activities that universities subsidize just because administrators or the student body or donors or someone pulling strings finds them valuable in some way. Music, art, dance, skywatching, skydiving, aikido, African drumming, and concerts are just a few extra-curriculars that universities proudly boast about and I doubt that any student would argue that extra-curriculars don't provide enrichment as valuable as coursework.

But I digress. Getting back to the subject at hand, I think that there is something more insidious than budget crunches at work to undermine the magnificent sport of gymnastics. That insidious beast goes by the title "Nine." Men's gymnastics (and other men's sports) are not the only ones disappearing at the hands of Title IX. The author of the aforementioned article points out that women's sports also suffer, as universities try to engineer sport programs that include a large proportion of women to satisfy the propotionality requirement of the legislation, often to the detriment of established women's sports with fewer participants (like gymnastics).

When burdened with demonstrating that a certain percentage of athletes are women and allocating monies accordingly, how can a university accommodate real student interests and needs?

For now, I suppose that I should count my lucky stars that budgets and Title IX haven't yet snatched away the Number 1 ranked Buckeye Men's Gymnastics team and hope that the Olympics won't soon be the only forum to enjoy this magnificent sport.

(Via Greg Goelzhauser): William Henderson of IU-Bloomington has a neat article on SSRN called The LSAT, Law School Exams and Meritocracy: The Surprising and Under-Theorized Role of Test-Taking Speed.

Greg at Begging to Differ has a post about the evils of legacy admissions, arguing that the only possible justification for them is the money-- that selling spaces in the class to the children of the rich is too lucrative of a business to avoid.

I think this is probably right. I suppose one could also make ancillary claims-- that the children of alumni are more likely to enroll if admitted (increasing the not-so-precious yield rate) or that they're more likely to have a special passion for attending the school while there and therefore to excel. Of course, those are both easily contestable empirical claims and I've never seen the data to back them up (after all, the children of alumni might instead feel pressured by their parents to go to a school they do not really love; I knew a girl in high school who secretly added spelling and grammatical errors to her application to an Ivy League School that her father had attended because her parents had forced her to apply but she didn't want to have to go).

Anyway, brushing aside those justifications, we return to the basic (probably) truth-- that making alumni happy about their college/university is a good way to get money out of them, and that acquiring money is one of the principle jobs of a college or university. But where do we go from there?

One possibility is to eliminate legacy admissions altogether. This is a noble course, but a costly one. The money that rich folks give to schools they like (whether for right or wrong reasons) gives real benefits to the less-rich folks and medium folks and poor folks who also attend those schools. And since schools have to get money from someplace, they have to decide which options are the least distasteful and most effective. Raise tuitions? Cut financial aid? Cut professorial salaries? Increase student quality-of-life in hopes of reaping benefits from happier alums down the road? Steer more students toward business and law and medicine to reap money from richer alums down the road? Accept corporate advertising on classroom walls? Send professors to class in Nike jerseys?

I don't know that legacy admissions are the most cost-effective way for a university (here the cost is in things like integrity, status of having been admitted to the university, etc.) but I wouldn't want to be the president in charge of deciding which students, faculty, and facilities would bear the financial brunt of keeping out the rich-but-unworthy.

And while legacy admissions are of course unfair, they're tempered by the fact that no school (so far as I know) gives out legacy grades or legacy degrees. Of course it's unfair when a rich kid's mom buys him a place at Harvard. But for the most part, the rich kid does still have to attend classes with the poor kids, and earn grades from some instructors who don't answer to the folks in the budget office. Sure, at some schools a kid's mom might be so influential that even a low level instructor (but surely never Harvey Mansfield) can be made to quake in fear. Sure his parents might be able to buy him more books and a better computer, but the obsession over legacy admissions is, I think, a result of a misplaced emphasis on the importance of college admission in the first place.

[This is also one of the reasons that I get a little less worked up about affirmative action than many folks; if a kid really doesn't belong at a school, well then he'll do worse there. Whether it's worth it to expend finite resources on underperforming kids is often a tough choice, and depends on how you value things like race-blindness, class-blindness, racial aesthetics, public opinion, and big donations from rich parents.]

In a first-best world, a first-best university would admit kids only on merit, who would love their university and the integrity it stands for so much that money would roll in by the cartload once the kids acheived success. In our world, institutions that spend large amounts of money doing good things often must do bad things to get more money with which to do good. Legacy admissions are indeed bad, but I'm withholding judgment on whether they're worth it.

As to Greg's "not-so-modest proposal":

Make 75% of all admissions completely merit based, 20% based on some form of assistance to underprivileged students of promise (not to be solely determined based on race), and 5% based on legacy. The legacy students can get in no matter what their SAT or ACT test scores are, or even whether they took the college entrance exams at all. But make legacy tuition 50 times as expensive as regular tuition. For a mere $1.5 million tuition contribution, the richest of the rich could ensure that even their stupidest, laziest children could attend an ivy league school for a year. Pay all four years up front, and the school could kick in a guaranteed degree in general studies.

Yes, I think it's definitely high time for the Supreme Court to do something interesting so we can write about it.

Russell Arben Fox writes:

Oh yes, Crescat Sententia. They basically just blog about sex and libertarianism, but it's entertaining, and undergraduates are allowed their obsessions, after all.

I'm very happy to announce the debut of trackbacks on Crescat Sententia. While the blog may not be a democracy, we welcome comments from our subjects readers.

PG of En Banc has a long post responding to seven Crescat posts over on her own blog. My favorite is part of her response to my post on the U of C essay questions:

I retain a fondness for Chicago because they accepted me (as they did about half their applicants that year, apparently on the theory that if you're crazy enough to go to Chicago, they certainly won't stand in your way by refusing you entrance)...

Scipio defends the Manhattan (which I blogged on here):

[T]here are certain bourbons which are so fine, that drinking them in any fashion often beats making tedious small talk with the most beautiful girl in the world. These are: Maker's Mark, Knob Creek, Baker's, Booker's, Woodford Reserve, Jefferson's Reserve, and perhaps one or two others.

From Dan Drezner's first day of class:

You're at the University of friggin' Chicago; if you can't have your sensibilities offended once in four years, you're in the wrong friggin' plae. Go to Harvard for that.

What good is a university where people don't attack each other hammer and tongs? Where nobody is going to get hurt?

Andrew Abbott, The Idea of the University

Thanks to Christina Rios-Roman for emailing the certain prestigious midwestern university's official policy on student-faculty rel