In response to my post below, John Lanius writes:
In addition to dropping trade barriers, a new technology may be responsible for increasing demand for avocados - I know it has for my family. The process (see http://www.fresherunderpressure.com/) uses pressure rather than heat to pasteurize foods. This makes things like orange juice (and - relevant to this discussion - avocados) taste fresh and unprocessed for weeks.
AvoClassic (http://www.avoclassic.com/) uses the technology to make their tasty and extremely inexpensive pre-made guacamole. For many years I was a die-hard about making guacamole using only fresh, ripe avocados, garlic, limes, and salt (with an occasional minced chili pepper). But at a price per pouch of fresh-tasting guacamole that is about equal to the price of a single [frequently unripe] Haas avocado, AvoClassic guacamole is responsible for multiplying my family's consumption of avocados over the last two years by 5-10 times the previous rate.
The technology predates the drop of trade barriers, but it seems to have hitched a ride on the booming avocado market. Some nice synergy there.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 06, 2005 • Comments
Reader Leslie Watkins writes:
I wanted to compliment you on and thank you for your comments on the nomination of Harriet Miers for U.S. Supreme Court. Very even-handed and informative. As someone who lived in Dallas during Miers's college years (though I was a good bit younger), I can attest to your acute observations about Big D civic and social life in the 1960s. Miers strikes me, too, as competent and detail oriented. And I bet your observations on how she'll likely approach the job of being an associate justice are dead on. This, of course, is what makes her likely confirmation so deflating.
Through all the years of the Bush presidency, I've tended to err on the side of seeing a good portion of the criticism being flayed against him as personal lashing out by people disappointed by modern life. I'm not in love with the idea of the presidency or my sense of any previous president, save for a couple I'm way too young to know (not Kennedy, not Nixon, not even Reagan, though I see him far more favorably than I did at the time). And I don't have overblown expectations of folks on either side of the aisle, so I'm rarely deeply disappointed, as most people are most of the time (on both the left and right).
Also, I happen to support the cause in Iraq. And, I was pleased that he broached the idea of allowing people to invest a small percentage of their Social Security payments on their own. (It's simply immoral, in my view, to call it our retirement money when have no right to invest any of it on our own.) And tax cuts were a good idea at the time. But his follow through has been lackluster and patently unsuccessful. Not to mention that his proposal to have churches dispense social services--wrongheaded in practically every way--only made the culture wars worse. But now, this absent-minded appointment of Harriet Miers. Well . . . I think he and his coterie have finally fallen prey to bitterness. (God knows it would have been hard not to succumb. I think the hysteria around Bush has been worse even than that around Clinton.) For what other reason except to get back at your milieu would you nominate someone to the nation's highest, most important court who wouldn't be on the short list of anyone else in government or business or higher education? Even folks on your side of the political spectrum? It's a deal-breaking, childish act on his part. (Ack! I'm sounding like Maureen Dowd!)
Giving nominees an oral grilling on the law and the separation of powers seems so obvious, so necessary. Perhaps it's not done because, as you suggested, so many of those asking the questions would reveal how little they know.
The anti-snobbery defense of Miers is an understandable but wrong-headed one--doubly so when it comes from graduates of large, research-oriented public universities that attract great students with low tuitions. My father, a math and physics major at Davidson (a far more academically oriented school then and now than SMU), always had that same southern chip on his shoulder about the Ivy League. Then I went to Princeton, and he discovered that they really do teach you more there. Most important, of course, is that nobody would care where Miers had gone to school if she had a track record, whether as a scholar, a policy maker, or a litigator, on constitutional law.
Let's just hope that Bush doesn't try to apply his populist instincts to the Fed chairmanship. (I'm rooting for Ben Bernanke.)
UPDATE: Greetings, Drezernites. For fuller context on what I think about Miers's education, please read down the main blog page. There's a lot there, beginning with this post.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 06, 2005 • Comments
In response to readers' emails, here's a PDF file of the SMU math department's curriculum when Harriet Miers was an undergraduate.
UPDATE: Reading the fine print, reader Mike Beversluis says I underestimated Advanced Calculus. "I'm sorry to be pedantic, but since Courses 37-39 include integral and differential calculus, they are equivalent to Princeton's freshman Calculus. Advanced Calculus is the proof class, and probably fell between Princeton's current MAT215 and MAT315 listings." I was an English major--you expect me to read?
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 06, 2005 • Comments
My latest NYT column looks at rebuilding after disasters. Here's an excerpt:
Rebuilding lives and communities does not, however, mean returning the economy to exactly where it was before. Rather, a disaster tends to accelerate economic changes that are already under way. That is because some physical assets, whether outdated manufacturing plants or homes in declining areas, are worth keeping only because they were paid for long ago and cost next to nothing to use. They would cost more to replace than they are worth.
"Any modern economy is normally in constant flux," Professor Horwich wrote. "As such, the destruction of physical assets is a form of accelerated depreciation that hastens the adoption of new technologies and varieties of investment." In Kobe, the plastic shoe industry never came back after the earthquake, and air freight expanded at the expense of the port.
The more flexibility businesses and individuals have, the more adaptable they can be and the faster recovery can take place. That is one reason money helps more than in-kind gifts. Donors, Professor Horwich said, "can only guess what recipients want most" and often provide gifts of clothes or food in forms that are hard to use.
The same principle applies to the rebuilding commitments now being made in Washington. The final cost of Katrina relief is widely expected to top $100 billion, and the Louisiana Congressional delegation has submitted its own $250 billion wish list.
Those are very big numbers. With $100 billion, the government could give every man, woman and child from New Orleans a check for $200,000. Expanding these payments to the entire metropolitan area would allow a generous $75,000 per resident.
Yet nobody expects the displaced residents of New Orleans to see anything close to those potentially life-changing amounts. Federal spending is aimed not at "rebuilding lives" but at "rebuilding communities," primarily by spending a lot of money on construction projects and on government services.
But, the Harvard economist Edward L. Glaeser argues, such an approach is backward. "If there is disaster insurance, then it is, presumably, the people of New Orleans who are insured, not the place itself," he writes in an article for The Economists' Voice, an online journal (www.bepress.com/ev). The article is called "Should the Government Rebuild New Orleans, or Just Give Residents Checks?" He favors the latter.
Read the whole thing. It's free!
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 06, 2005 • Comments
Reader James Ingram explains:
Another reason a lawyer planning to practice in Dallas might stay at SMU for law school is that the personal and professional contacts acquired there would be infinitely more valuable than those acquired at say, Harvard or Stanford. In most of the South, and much of the Midwest for that matter, the business, professional and political elites are alumni of the flagship state university (say Ole Miss or UNC Chapel Hill) or a handful of elite regional private colleges and universities (SMU, Vanderbilt, William & Mary). Ivy League backgrounds are not an asset in this part of the world.
A good example of this is Hillary Clinton. Much of the Whitewater saga revolved around her attempts, as a young partner in a Southern law firm, to develop legal business. Despite the fact that she is bright, a world champion networker and has stellar credentials she ended up falling back on her husband's political cronies like Jim McDougal. Her Wellesley/Yale axis of contacts, so valuable in New York or Washington, proved useless in Arkansas. (How many Wellesley grads have ever been to Arkansas, for Heaven's sake?)
This is quite right. Texas is certainly run by UT, SMU, and A&M grads, with the occasional Bush thrown in for diversity.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 06, 2005 • Comments
Over on Volokh Conspiracy Jim Lindgren wonders whether Harriet Miers really writes as badly as excerpts in Time suggest. The answer is no.
At the SMU library I got an original of her 1992 Texas Lawyer article. The worst writing quoted in Time-- "freedom of liberties," for instance--in fact reflects Nexis typos. (Miers wrote "freedom of religion," in that case.) The prose is indeed clunky, however, and the article is banal in that well-known corporate way, where you make an argument--her main point is that the courts need more money--without any sharp points.
To see for yourself, download my .pdf scan of the piece, minus the headline, which wouldn't fit on the microfiche reader's copy space.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 05, 2005 • Comments
Despite her lack of any record, Harriet Miers may be God's gift to constitutional law. How can we tell? Well, you could give her a test. Seriously. Instead of asking political-spin questions about abortion, somebody on the Judiciary Committee ought to ask her some tough exam questions from smart Con Law professors. She doesn't even have to say what her own position would be, simply to accurately explain different views of the law. Unfortunately, the Judiciary Committee isn't exactly made up of smart Con Law professors--so grading would be a problem.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 05, 2005 • Comments
Harriet Miers was a math major at SMU. What does that mean? I checked the SMU catalogue for her era.
To major in math, students had to take one semester of Advanced Calculus (the catalogue lists no non-Advanced Calculus, so I take this to be what was known at Princeton as "freshman calculus"), Differential Equations, Introduction to Linear Algebra, and "nine additional semester-hours of advanced work in the department or in physics." The math department's advanced courses included a second semester of calculus, several actuarial and finance-oriented courses, College Geometry ("modern synthetica plane geometry...a continuation of classical high school geometry"), probability and statistics, the Teaching of Mathematics, Introduction to Modern Algebra ("an introduction to the principal modern algebraic systems; integral domains; groups, rings, and fields"), and a directed readings option. The department also offered a number of high-school-level algebra, geometry, and trig courses, though presumably majors took a more demanding curriculum. Grad courses were also open to seniors.
UPDATE: Here's a PDF file of SMU's math curriculum when Miers was an undergrad.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 05, 2005 • Comments
After reading this Hit and Run post and the comments that followed, it's clear that a lot of people have absolutely no idea what Harriet Miers's graduation from Southern Methodist University and SMU Law School suggests about her brainpower or academic record.
It does not, first of all, imply that she "could not get into" a school with a national reputation. Until very, very recently, southerners--even incredibly smart southerners--almost never considered leaving the region to go to college. (The exceptions were a few legacies from prep-school-oriented families.) For a bright woman in the early 1960s, a good private school like SMU would have been plenty ambitious. In Dallas, people today are still impressed by an SMU degree and even more by an SMU Law School degree. And, aside from her White House stint, Miers has spent her life in Dallas.
In Miers's day, SMU was a predominantly female undergraduate institution with an almost entirely male law school. Then, as now, it was a rich kids' school, a lot like the University of Southern California until recently. You can get a fine education there, but too few students bother. (To upgrade its program, the university has in recent years aggressively recruited scholarship students.) Miers appears to have been an unusually serious SMU student and, as far as I can tell from the one yearbook from her undergrad days left in the SMU library, she did not join a sorority--which would make her quite unusual. Kids at SMU take partying much more seriously than they take academics. (I often joke that while the UCLA library has many more books, the great thing about SMU's library is that none of the books are ever checked out.) From her academic record alone, it's clear that Miers is a self-directed person who does not simply follow the crowd.
But I'm still not impressed. SMU, which provides most of the Postrel family income, is a decent school. But it is not a place that demands that a student stretch her mind. Miers has never been in a scholarly environment where she was surrounded by people who were smarter than she and just as hard working. She has had a demanding, successful career in a fairly parochial environment where she could easily impress people. And she appears to be a legal technician, not part of the cosmopolitan debate over legal ideas, a debate that emphatically includes conservative voices.
Maybe the Supreme Court needs parochial judges--though David Souter already fills that role--just as it arguably needs people who've practiced law. But I'm skeptical
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 05, 2005 • Comments
Manolo makes me laugh out loud.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on October 03, 2005 • Comments