Author Archive | Kenneth Anderson

If you’d like an entertaining techno-social satire with a reasonable amount of wit and bite, try Max Barry’s Machine Man.  I just finished it late last night and thought it was excellent summer reading fun.  The protagonist is a young STEMmie who, following a horrible lab accident that results in a leg amputation, discovers a […]

H/T Jonathan Zittrain, this new article in MIT’s Technology Review, The Cause of Riots and the Price of Food. Marco Lagi and buddies at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, say they’ve found a single factor that seems to trigger riots around the world. This single factor is the price of food. Lagi […]

Tyler Cowen’s column in the New York Times today takes up the disturbing problem of productivity that seems not just to be growing more slowly, but actually weakening: The overlooked piece of news came this month from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the second quarter this year, it reported, nonfarm business labor productivity fell […]

Glenn Reynolds points us to an article by Steve Cohen in the Daily Beast on increasing numbers of out-of-state students accepted at state universities.  The reason for this is collecting full-fare out-of-state tuition dollars by cash strapped public universities.  (In every place I’m aware of, and as a parent of a DC child just starting […]

This is a further comment to my two posts below on the rating agencies, here and here. I probably should have titled the post on regulators investigating the rating agencies differently.  Although the post starts out talking about US government civil investigations into the rating agencies, it is mostly about theories of liability that might […]

Update 2:  Please see the further comment above, in its own separate post, as well as this earlier one.  And thanks to Glenn for the Insta link. US regulators, including the Department of Justice and the SEC, are reported to be undertaking civil (apparently not criminal) investigations into the rating agencies’ practices in rating mortgage-backed […]

One way to carve up the categories of failure of past and continuing financial regulation is complexity, conflicts, and complacency.  That’s taking cupidity for granted.  The rating agencies appeared to offer a way to outsource the agency problems inherent in investors seeking to evaluate complex financial instruments that, in any case, trucked in assets a […]

From the Guardian: Monks at the 15th century church of San Salvatore al Monte, which was a favourite of Michelangelo, were irritated when a rare and expensive bible disappeared from the lectern, and they flew off the handle when a replacement bible donated by a worshipper also went missing and within a few hours.  In […]

Amid the debates over rising student loan debt that is undischargeable in bankruptcy, I have not seen a lot of public discussion over provisions of law that provide special forgiveness benefits to those who go to work for government or nonprofits.  I’m thinking of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program (2007), described here at the […]

A:  When they send a child off to college. I don’t know who first said that, but it’s true in my case.  Apologies for the light posting this summer; our daughter has been dropped off at Rice University (Baker College) as of Sunday, I’m back  in DC and blogging again.  I’ve talked in the past […]

Well, this is just sad. Tooth Fairy payouts are down.  Presumably number of proffered teeth remains roughly constant. A recent survey found that the national going rate has seen a 40-cent decline this year: From $3 to $2.60.  What’s worse? A full 10% of kids are reaching under their pillows … and coming up empty. […]

Returning to the debt negotiations for a moment. A fellow law blogger, Professor Jonah Gelbach, takes up the first question I asked in my earlier post on the negotiations — what happens if you take away the pressure of the debt ceiling altogether? It’s an important short post at PrawfsBlawg. His answer, based on looking […]

One additional comment about the nature of consensus.  Consensus is sometimes offered as a sign of a respectful political system – one that respects every stakeholder so much that each is given the possibility of a true hold-up.  It would be more accurate to say that consensus only works where the community of stakeholders has […]

Watching the current negotiations unfold, I remain puzzled by a couple of things. First, what would happen – purely hypothetically, obviously – if the Republicans suddenly announced that they would support raising the debt ceiling to a trillion trillion dollars – infinity.  The immediate effect is to remove the (contested) matter of default from the […]

My friend and Washington College of Law colleague Ira Robbins offers the following advice on FB to students taking the July bar.  I’m pleased to pass it along.  And, to everyone taking the bar next week, Good Luck! To WCL grads taking the Bar exam next week: 1) Good luck!! 2) On the night between […]