Jonathan Chait on Ayn Rand

Will Wilkinson has a characteristically excellent post up schooling Jonathan Chait on Ayn Rand. It should be required reading not only for puffed-up computer engineers threatening to go Galt over small tax increases, but for right of center 20 year old interns at AFF happy hours who think that people who dislike law firm jobs must be inherently incapable of "thinking like winners."

Federalism v. decentralization fail?

Harry Reid: We live in a country that is a Federal Government. What does that mean? It means, as I learned in college, that you have a central whole divided among self-governing parts. What are those self-governing parts? It is the State of Nevada, it is the State of Florida, it is the State of Tennessee, and it is the State of Hawaii-plus 46 others; none better than the other. Hawaii is equal to Florida, to Tennessee, to Nevada. 152 Cong Rec S 5637.

Would that not be simply a decentralized government?

Miscellany

1)A new study indicates that women with masculine first names do better in law than those with conventional first names. I wonder if the cause isn't gender discrimination, but rather that women with masculine sounding first names are more likely to come from a certain type of family background. When I was in college, I had a few female acquaintances with first names like Crosby or Marston. Girls with such names were usually from uber-WASPy backgrounds and had all the privileges -- expensive prep school educations, fancy golf and tennis lessons, excellent connections, etc. -- that come with that kind of upbringing. It's not really surprising that these women do better than other lawyers from less exalted backgrounds.

2)A great column from Gene Healy on the 9/12 protests.

3)Another great essay on "Taking the Right Seriously."

Mail call

As Constant Readers know, Pnin and I recently moved to Arlington. At our new house, we have a wall mount mailbox that looks sort of like this.

We noticed a day or two after moving in that the mailman wasn't picking up outgoing mail. It just sat out in the box. Pnin, vexed at this situation, had me call the Arlington post office early one morning. I explained the issue to our mailman's supervisor, who offered the following:

Mailman's Supervisor: Is there a flag attached to your mailbox?

Isabel: No. It's a wall mount.

Mailman's Supervisor: Well, if there's no flag attached, then there's no way for the mailman to know if there's any new mail for him to pick up. You gotta, you know, let him know there's mail there.

Isabel: I hate to sound snarky, but, like, he could look insidethe mailbox.

Mailman's Supervisor: Well, but they don't always do that. They put the mail in the mailbox and then they don't look to see if there's new mail to pick up.

Isabel: But surely we aren't the only people in America who have a wall mount mailbox. If wall mount mailboxes were really that outre, they, you know, wouldn't be sold at Home Depot.

Mailman's Supervisor: What does outre mean?

Isabel: Foreign. Exotic. Weird. I don't know. The point is... can you please tell your mailmen to look inside the wall mount mailbox when they come to our house?

Mailman's Supervisor: Well, I can, but my men won't always look. You should get a mailbox with a flag. Or you could get a flag for your mailbox.

Isabel: Maybe, but we'd really prefer not to go to the trouble if we can avoid it. And a flag on our existing mailbox would look silly.

So the next day, Pnin posted the following cautionary note to the mailbox:

Dear Postal Worker,

Please make sure to pick up the outgoing mail. Please do not just leave it there, as happened yesterday.

Thank you very much for your attention to this matter. I very much appreciate all of your help and your good work.

[Timofey Pavlovich Pnin
1234 Our Street
Arlington, VA, XXXYZ]

For a week, the note worked like a charm. Pnin took it down on Saturday and, lo and behold, the mailmen left behind the outgoing mail again today.

We are at our wits' end. Do we give in and shell out for a new mailbox -- of the stand-alone and be-flagged variety? As I indicated above, other people have wall mount mailboxes and do not have this problem. How? We could leave Pnin's note out again. But it doesn't seem to be much of a permanent solution. Although I found it sort of cute, he fears that others will not, and he does not want our guests to see it.

Ad coelum FAIL

"Native Hawaiians, like other indigenous cultures, could not grasp the concept of fee simple ownership of land. The concept of owning land was as foreign to them as the concept of owning air would be to us today."

-- Sen. Daniel Akaka, 152 Cong Rec S 5558

Non-lawyer readers, see Wikipedia for a simple explanation of the ad coelum doctrine.

And yes, I really did just need to write a post that had that title.

The self-esteem trap

I was home with the senior Archers this weekend and came upon Polly Young Eisendrafth's The Self-Esteem Trap sitting upon a chair. I'm a sucker for searching essays about the manners and mores of my generation, and the description -- "Today's children and young adults are suffering from a number of symptoms, including obsessive self-focus, restless dissatisfaction, pressures to be exceptional, unreadiness to accept responsibilities and feelings of either superiority or inferiority. According to the author, instead of contentment and positive self-regard, kids raised to believe they are extraordinary or special are more likely to be unhappy and disappointed" -- seemed to fit.

To Eisendrath-Young's credit, some of what she describes sounds familiar. At the same time, I came across psychological studies in college suggesting that sufficiently broadly based personality descriptions resonate with almost everyone. I recall one in which a college professor gave his students a personality test; gave all 100 exactly the same description; and something like 70% of them called the results very accurate. So I fear that nearly everyone feels "pressures to be exceptional" or "unreadiness to accept responsibilities" at some point or other -- self-esteem movement or none.

Eisendrath-Young does a good job excoriating the excesses of the self-esteem movement. That's all well and good, but I'm not sure how many parents and teachers ever embraced the most extreme claims of the self-esteem trend even at its zenith. I fear also her proposed solution -- recognizing that being ordinary and connected to human communities leads to happiness -- may be a cure as bad as the disease. The self-esteem movement was silly because it bred arrogance, yes, but also because most kids intuitively mistrusted the fake egalitarianism at its core. The excellent writers, violinists, and athletes in any middle school are often successful not merely because of superior work ethics; talent also matters. It was farcical to pretend that everyone was the same merely for the sake of ensuring that everyone's self-esteem stayed high. Contra Eisendrath-Young, it's equally farcical to pretend that everyone is equally ordinary so that nobody suffers from feeling exceptional. The point particularly comes out when Eisendrath-Young sighs about the problems of one young woman who has an Ivy League undergrad degree and another Ivy graduate degree and secondly about a 14-year-old boy who's taking college courses. These young people have gifts that aren't strictly ordinary; why pretend that they are, and why expect them to fall for it?

Eisendrath-Young contrasts her angsty ex-Ivy Leaguers with her own blue collar childhood. Her family had its problems, she acknowledges. But kids had greater autonomy then, were less coddled and sheltered from the world's problems, and therefore became more resilient. Also, families obsessed over education less, which meant that even bright children like her grew up without feeling arrogant about their academic achievements. Maybe, although there were plenty of working-class families in the 1950s that were obsessed with education; I'd cite my own mother's family as an example, along with virtually every novel or memoir ever written by a New York Jew. Second, Eisendrath-Young doesn't the possibility that families changed not in response to the self-esteem movement, but in response to the increasing returns on investment in higher education. The lucrative blue collar jobs that Eisendrath-Young's male high-school classmates easily secured simply no longer exist. Given these economic changes, isn't it rational for parents to value education more -- even if there are problems that come along with that mentality?

Not a glorious profession, because it is not a glorious class

Forgive the possible violation of anticipatory nepotism, but the Volokh Conspiracy's Kenneth Anderson has interesting post in which he links to a long essay titled "A New Class of Lawyers: The Therapeutic as Rights Talk." There's much in there that relates back to my project of trying to answer definitively whether libertarians should go to law school.

1)Anderson's observations about how the problem with law is not the deficit of professionalism, but rather an excess in professionalism that overwhelms all else, ring true to my experiences. Anderson's description of the "good" large law firm lawyer as a therapeutic authoritarian also sounds much like the ideal to which my law school classmates and I were taught to aspire.

I chuckled particularly when I read his description of "good" large firm lawyers at p. 1076 as the advance guards of the EEOC; when I tried to convince law firms that I was interested in employment discrimination during OCI, several firms asked me how I as a woman felt about defending employers in harassment cases. I sensed an honest answer -- "I'm president of my law school's Fed Soc, idiot; please see line 3 of my resume" --- would have been impolitic. So I mouthed bromides I didn't really believe about the important work that corporate firms do to bring about "compliance" with laws I'm not convinced are just.

What's relevant to other libertarians here is that I imagine many of them will respond the way I did to this sort of rhetoric. Most of us are ornery Randian individualists deep down. We don't particularly like guilds, and sweeping conceptions of the demands of professional life kind of creep us out.

2)Not related to my larger blogging project, but I'm struck by how much closer my understanding of social deviance (p. 1082-3) is to Herbert Morris's than to most normal right-wingers. I still think there are huge Hayekian knowledge problems with trying to cure deviance via state-imposed solutions, many more than nearly anyone on the left acknowledges. After all, even if one accepts the state as therapist analogy, a good therapist first does no harm. But I recognize that this moral intuition puts me at oods with most other conservatives and libertarians. I'll have to think more about that.