Elsewhere (247)
Richard Bledsoe on high culture:
Pity the poor Hirshhorn Museum. They occupy a prime piece of real estate, right on the National Mall in the wretched hive of scum and villainy, Washington, DC. And yet, as a museum dedicated to contemporary art, the institute just doesn’t seem to get much love or respect… An article about a recent acquisition the Hirshhorn made may give some insight as to why they lack esteem. Smithsonian.com is eager to explain it in this article: Why the Artist Ragnar Kjartansson Asked his Mother to Spit On Him.
As you’ll no doubt want to behold this artistic spectacle, this feat of aesthetic phlegm projection, here it is.
Glenn Reynolds on campus radicals’ bad counsel:
Deriding the bourgeoisie is de rigueur in the academy… But this contempt is doubly hypocritical since the academy exists largely because others still embrace bourgeois virtues of hard work, education, and upward social mobility. Relatively few students at the University of San Diego Law School are there solely to improve their minds, I suspect. Rather, they hope that they will improve their lives if they work hard and try for success. The faculty — and dean’s — salaries are paid by this phenomenon. If students only went to law school out of intellectual curiosity, there would be a lot fewer law schools. […] These same [bourgeois] behaviours… are even more valuable to people whose social and economic status is poor. Upper middle class families have a lot of social and financial capital to draw on when a kid flunks out, loses a job, gets pregnant outside of marriage, or gets in trouble with the law. For people with less, these experiences are likely to be disastrous and life-ruining. To suggest otherwise is to engage in a monstrous and damaging deception.
See also this. Examples of the aforementioned deriding, and a full-on gale of fashionable hysteria, can be found here and here.
Kyle Smith on race-hustler Ta-Nehisi Coates and his black critics:
Coates rejects out of hand the concept of black-on-black crime, which he believes is simply a natural consequence of white supremacy. Yet Coates, Thomas Chatterton Williams says, is being “comforting to his white readership” when he paints all white people as equally hapless in their sin, notably the white woman who shoved his “dawdling” son years ago, which is “the first, worst and only negative thing we actually see white people do to Coates or his family.” Williams writes, “It doesn’t occur to him that she may not be an avatar of white supremacy but just a nasty person who would have been as likely to push a blonde child or a Chinese one.”
For more on the black-on-black crime that Mr Coates dismisses, see Heather Mac Donald here.
Oh, and at the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of New South Wales, referring to Hall’s Marriage Theorem is apparently problematic and offensive, because of the word marriage.
As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.
Are you suggesting the media pulled the wool over my eyes Hal? I refuse to believe it I tell you.
Given Equifax’s recent security breach *cough*incompetence*cough*I imagine that those scores are not as anonymous as they used to be.
Meanwhile, in the socialist paradise of Venezuela.
The lowest quartile in the credit score distribution accounted for 70% of foreclosures during the boom years, falling to just 35% during the crisis.
Don’t see how this is “complete reverse”. Significant foreclosures, at a 70% rate, is not a good thing for the lender nor the borrower. That this rate dropped to 35% during the crisis is not surprising as the weakest borrowers had been flushed out of the system by then. Either way, leaning on banks to loan money to people who have little chance of paying it back is bad policy and the guaranteeing of those loans by the Feds created the moral hazard. That the banks wanted to salve their losses earlier in the boom by doubling down with the flippers trying to make it back is no surprise given the federal backing.
The point that subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them still holds. It is the values that make people successful. The stuff that they eventually own is a reflection on the success of those values, not a cause. See cargo cult.
I believe you’re misreading the statistic. It’s not about the number of borrowers who defaulted, but rather their share of total foreclosures. I would imagine that the number of defaults among low-credit borrowers probably remained fairly consistent, while defaults among the middle two quartiles doubled.
The crisis didn’t happen because a low-credit family bought the house across the street from me; it happened because all of my middle-class neighbors were buying properties they couldn’t actually afford, either to flip them or to carry them as investments. Great party while it lasted!
Ah…yes, my mistake. There are numerous other factors involved as to what the dollar value of that 70% is vs. the other 30%, etc. However, it still stands that of all foreclosures before the crash, 70% were sub-prime borrowers and that they had been weeded out by the time the 35% number comes into play.
Either way, loaning money to people who lack the means for paying it back, be they rich or poor, flippers or normal home owners, is folly. There are many people in the home owner domain who lack the desire, skills, or understanding of the responsibilities of home ownership, the maintenance required, the ability to see a potentially compromising repair need, how to hire a viable contractor and not simply the cheapest available.
As for “middle-class neighbors were buying properties they couldn’t actually afford, either to flip them or to carry them as investments”, who do you suppose came along after the crash and picked up some of those foreclosures? Other middle class investors and such. Hopefully this time they are ones who can afford them but based on what I’m seeing in housing prices and such, while that may have been the case shortly after the crash, it seems less so now.
Also note that moral hazard is the greatest, and a still on-going, problem. Ultimately, housing/real estate/etc. is not a good indicator of economic health, especially when it is being subsidized by the government. It is a leaf factor, not a root. A society can only afford bigger houses, fancier cars, dinners out, tickets to plays and sporting events if they are producing wealth to a degree that disposable income is increasing.
There’s been some interesting commentary on how the NFL was in financial decline before this crap ever started.
The immense, far reaching, and universal gravity of the NFL, summarized.