I just don't buy this. When we abandon reason and evidence for feelings and truthiness we all lose. People who continuously attach their credibility to dubious claims only have themselves to blame when they're no longer taken seriously.
There was a piece written by Richard Blow a couple years ago about the Rolling Stone UVA hoax where he talked about bias confirmation in media reporting. Sometimes I think public debate would be greatly improved if everyone was required to read the substance of that essay prior to viewing or discussing any other piece of writing not clearly marked as fiction.
Labeling it 'cultural genocide' is ridiculous and seems to be part of the academic trend of using terminology which is both outrageous and detached from the meaning of the words themselves. It's almost like people are afraid to analyze an argument on its own merits.
I guess I'm cool with these Texas folks doing this as long as we can all be in agreement not to care/justify it when a Texan is inevitably killed by a Palestinian. If they want to intervene on behalf of armed religious fanatics colonizing foreign territory and get caught in the crossfire of locals protecting themselves, well that's the risk they take, right?
The biggest thing that needs to change and the hardest to swallow politically is reforming sentencing guidelines. They're no longer mandatory but most judges still largely adhere to them. This blows up the population of incarcerated people in two ways.
First it makes more people accept plea bargains because the enhanced sentencing mechanisms allow for absurdly long sentences that defendants will not risk if they can avoid it, so you've got more people going in to begin with. Second they mandate irrationally lengthy sentences. We keep people in there for decades and decades, often due to conduct committed at a very young age. The cost outweighs any measurable benefit, unless we see being as severe as is constitutionally permissible as some sort of social good.
This. Plus there's the issue of whether or not there's really such a thing as a completely apolitical technocrat. At the very least they all have an interest in keeping their jobs, which itself is a political question.
That Addict Aide stunt is a joke. I'm all for taking addiction seriously but acting as though it can be diagnosed by social media and trying to shame people for 'liking' images of an attractive, scantily clad coed with drinks in her hand seems likely to have the opposite effect. The puritanical undertones are also embarrassingly absurd.
I think over time you're right but there was a little bit of a cult of personality in 2008. Remember the whole women fainting during his speeches thing?
I think it speaks to something deep in the human psyche. We don't have trolls or witches or other supernatural bogeymen to come take children and virgins anymore so we come up with these bizarre conspiracies. Of course it doesn't help that there's a salacious media driving moral panic and whole political/academic industry pushing the idea that there is an epidemic of sex crimes.
I kind of mentioned it in passing below but the way you'd have to start is by opening up Medicare Advantage and phasing out parts A and B over time. After that you'd start bringing in healthier working people on Medicaid, then finally dual eligibles who are the most expensive to cover. The various markets need to be consolidated. Once you've done that improving the incentices becomes easier. What I'm not sure is what would happen with employer backed plans. Maybe it would die out on its own but it would probably need to be regulated away which would be painful, and might never be possible politically.
Maybe there are some fundamental differences in the demand. Whenever applications decline for law schools they seem to just lower standards. Keeps the loan money rolling in.
Wouldn't even have to go that far. Opening Medicare Advantage to people under 65 and consolidating the state exchanges into a single national market is the next logical step. It'd even sort of be in line with his promises and might make imposing some cost controls less painful. You'd also get rid of these artificial member populations that are impossible to insure profitably in places like AZ.
@nevermoor I don't know enough about how medical school works to comment particularly intelligently on it. All I can say is that from an outsider's perspective the medical community seems to have been much more successful at keeping medicine a profession. We'll see if they can keep it up now that they're licensing NPs to do a lot of the stuff that was previously the realm of physicians only.
Outside of certain corners of the public sector law has been overtaken by the business aspect of it. There's nothing like residency and outside of small family owned practices a FYIGM attitude prevails, which is understandable given the economics of the situation.
@pinky you can still "read the law" in a tiny number of jurisdictions. Virginia is one, I'm not sure of others. There are also states that don't require graduation from an ABA accredited school to sit for the bar (I believe California is like this). Passage rates from these institutions tend to be abysmal but I'm not really sure they're to blame for the glut. There are plenty of accredited schools out there pumping out useless lawyers for whom there is no employment that actually requires the skill set.
And so the Republican coalition has been exposed as the undisciplined rabble it is. Of course it does suck that we will probably have to sit around at least another 4 years for a chance at fixing some of the major problems with the ACA, assuming none of the state markets fall into crisis beyond where they already are.
Part of me kind of wonders what a Trump presidency would look like with a Democratic majority in Congress. Not to be overly optimistic but maybe he'd sign a reasonable reform bill as long as he got a lot of the credit.
I actually don't really get the hand wringing over this and I'm about as close to a free speech absolutist as I think possible. Amazon can sell or not sell whatever it wants. If there's a market for things they won't sell someone else will step in. They aren't a public institution, nor does their refusal to carry an item effectively remove it from the market. Wal-Mart refusing to sell albums with explicit lyrics back in the day did nothing to keep anyone from locating unedited versions.
I don't even see the negative societal implications I worry about with some of the calls for boycotts of various businesses as a response to the political views of an owner or officer. Now they of course are opening themselves up to charges of hypocracy depending on how they police this, and I think anyone who believes this has anything to do with morality and not marketing is a fool, but that's not my business.
I started law school in 2007. That first year even people who didn't do well seemed to get ok jobs at title companies and similar places where you could start building a legit resume and getting some useful skills. Then the next year it was like you said. No summer associates, no recruiting, previous offers rescinded.
There are some assholes out there in law, just like in any industry, and as I said above, there are certainly groups who are much more hard pressed than lawyers. However as usual in America, the popular narrative prefers to see the losers in structural market upheavals through the lense of a morality play.
Fully agree with the premise. People need to move on to the extent they can and there are no free lunches. But there are policies we could consider which might help that and avert similar crisis in the future for all people, not just law students. A good start might be putting some cost control requirements in place as a condition of institutions receiving federally backed loan money. Another good idea would be making it easier to discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy (something that is virtually impossible under the current code).
Most of my court room experience involved an assembly line of people going through the motions (no pun intended) of accepting their plea deal, or asking the judge (again) for a body attachment on someone who hadn't shown up (again).
That's fair enough. Still for all my expectations about being an attorney that didn't come true I do find it a bit baffling that anyone would be surprised that it's an adversarial line of work. Even in its most romanticized form I don't think it's ever been seen as something for tea cups.
Worth reading on this issue is Savage Continent by Keith Lowe. The occupation of post war Europe and the settling of various little local and regional conflicts wasn't nearly as clean as in the popular American imagination of it.
I agree and disagree. On the one hand you're right. Underemployed lawyers aren't ever going to top anyone's list of people we should have sympathy for. A lot of the scam blog whining is insufferable, and given that most people who attend law school have at least middle class backgrounds, most do have the resources to figure something else out even if the debt will always be an encumberance.
On the other hand I think there's some blaming the victim going on. The law school situation is an extreme microcosm of the structural problems we have in higher education generally. People take on high debt in the hopes of jobs that aren't there or don't pay enough to make the debt worth it. Even the ones who come out on top don't have the ability to consume the way their parents did which has rippling effects throughout the economy.
When I started law school it was considered a mercenary move, everyone told me how smart I was being. During the time I was in the bottom fell out of the industry and an outdated model crumbled into something much less auspicious than what it had been. People who used to think it was a great idea roll their eyes at it now, in light of better media reporting on the trade-offs, none of which existed when I was considering applying to law school.
Now we talk about the STEM shortage (and tomorrow it'll be some other shortage) which may or may not exist and are going to put a lot of people into debt to fill those jobs. The thing is those industries might also change in profound ways that few had foreseen.
Then we will decide if we should roll our eyes and laugh at the comeuppance of those rubes who made such stupid, short sighted decisions or if we should do some serious thinking about how we finance higher education. I know which I think is more likely.
Georgetown is indeed a top law school. That's all awesome for her (no sarcasm at all). I'm sure it took serious intelligence and working her ass off to get there and I never begrudge anyone their success.
I will say it sounds like she was able to follow the track of roughly what most people think they will do when they graduate. What seems to hit a lot of people hard (in addition to the hellish debt) is getting out into an industry completely different from what you prepared for. I was lucky that like your sister I worked for a couple years before taking the law school plunge so it wasn't as shocking for me when the world turned out to be a bit different. I think it can be harder to swallow for a lot of the K-JD crowd.
I have heard there are similar debt-income issues with veterinarians but suspect there is less griping since at least most of them are doing largely what they thought they'd be.
Correct me if I'm wrong but it sounds like your sister made it to big or at least medium law right out of school? That in itself makes her experience atypical in that she probably started off in a much better position to deal with her debt plus something on her resume that would get her in the door at desirable places. This isn't to say there aren't a lot of challenges for those attorneys but at least you're kind of doing what you probably thought you'd be and the money is good.
The reality for many, maybe most new lawyers, especially those from lower tier schools, is years in some combination of temp work and what we in the industry refer to as shit law (low level crim, family, and real estate work, often with eat what you kill compensation structures). The jobs are low paying, inconsistent, and thankless. And thats if you can even land a job that requires a JD and/or license at all.
This results in a lot of people bitter about being sold on a false bag of goods. Law schools recruit people on fantasies of a JD as sort of a BA plus for humanities people who aren't quite sure what to do after college. This wouldn't necessarily be so bad if not for the high premium schools get away with charging due to outdated perceptions of what law is and what lawyers earn.
As for my personal experience I really enjoy research, writing, and negotiating so in house has turned out to be ok for me. That said, it's not the dream I had of being in court everyday, sticking it to prosecutors and cops (something that strangely never actually happened even in my defense days) and I despise the asinine culture of corporate America I'm stuck in. But it turns out that's the price of paying off my debt and having a moderately comfortable standard of living. Of course it took a lot of hard work and some very lucky breaks to even make it to a compromise I can live with. A lot of post 2008 grads never even get this far. Believe me, I know plenty of people in 6 figures of debt still out trying to hustle for 45-70k a year.
I think all of that is true but also beside the point. I'm not that interested in what Republicans (or Democrats for that matter) say they believe but rather in what they actually do when they have power. I see the fact that the electorate largely associates the GOP with fiscal restraint as one of the more baffling triumphs of rhetoric over substance in American political debate.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Morning Ed: World {2017.03.30.Th}”
I just don't buy this. When we abandon reason and evidence for feelings and truthiness we all lose. People who continuously attach their credibility to dubious claims only have themselves to blame when they're no longer taken seriously.
"
There was a piece written by Richard Blow a couple years ago about the Rolling Stone UVA hoax where he talked about bias confirmation in media reporting. Sometimes I think public debate would be greatly improved if everyone was required to read the substance of that essay prior to viewing or discussing any other piece of writing not clearly marked as fiction.
"
It's as real as Finland.
"
Labeling it 'cultural genocide' is ridiculous and seems to be part of the academic trend of using terminology which is both outrageous and detached from the meaning of the words themselves. It's almost like people are afraid to analyze an argument on its own merits.
"
I guess I'm cool with these Texas folks doing this as long as we can all be in agreement not to care/justify it when a Texan is inevitably killed by a Palestinian. If they want to intervene on behalf of armed religious fanatics colonizing foreign territory and get caught in the crossfire of locals protecting themselves, well that's the risk they take, right?
On “Pitchfork Republic”
The biggest thing that needs to change and the hardest to swallow politically is reforming sentencing guidelines. They're no longer mandatory but most judges still largely adhere to them. This blows up the population of incarcerated people in two ways.
First it makes more people accept plea bargains because the enhanced sentencing mechanisms allow for absurdly long sentences that defendants will not risk if they can avoid it, so you've got more people going in to begin with. Second they mandate irrationally lengthy sentences. We keep people in there for decades and decades, often due to conduct committed at a very young age. The cost outweighs any measurable benefit, unless we see being as severe as is constitutionally permissible as some sort of social good.
On “Tim Harford: Some things are best left to the technocrats”
This. Plus there's the issue of whether or not there's really such a thing as a completely apolitical technocrat. At the very least they all have an interest in keeping their jobs, which itself is a political question.
On “Morning Ed: Health {2017.03.27.M}”
That Addict Aide stunt is a joke. I'm all for taking addiction seriously but acting as though it can be diagnosed by social media and trying to shame people for 'liking' images of an attractive, scantily clad coed with drinks in her hand seems likely to have the opposite effect. The puritanical undertones are also embarrassingly absurd.
On “Morning Ed: Politics {2017.03.26.Su}”
I think over time you're right but there was a little bit of a cult of personality in 2008. Remember the whole women fainting during his speeches thing?
"
I think it speaks to something deep in the human psyche. We don't have trolls or witches or other supernatural bogeymen to come take children and virgins anymore so we come up with these bizarre conspiracies. Of course it doesn't help that there's a salacious media driving moral panic and whole political/academic industry pushing the idea that there is an epidemic of sex crimes.
On “Ultimatums Usually Work, Except When They Don’t”
@michael-cain
I kind of mentioned it in passing below but the way you'd have to start is by opening up Medicare Advantage and phasing out parts A and B over time. After that you'd start bringing in healthier working people on Medicaid, then finally dual eligibles who are the most expensive to cover. The various markets need to be consolidated. Once you've done that improving the incentices becomes easier. What I'm not sure is what would happen with employer backed plans. Maybe it would die out on its own but it would probably need to be regulated away which would be painful, and might never be possible politically.
On “Will Dropping the LSAT Requirement Create More Miserable Lawyers?”
Maybe there are some fundamental differences in the demand. Whenever applications decline for law schools they seem to just lower standards. Keeps the loan money rolling in.
On “Ultimatums Usually Work, Except When They Don’t”
Wouldn't even have to go that far. Opening Medicare Advantage to people under 65 and consolidating the state exchanges into a single national market is the next logical step. It'd even sort of be in line with his promises and might make imposing some cost controls less painful. You'd also get rid of these artificial member populations that are impossible to insure profitably in places like AZ.
On “Will Dropping the LSAT Requirement Create More Miserable Lawyers?”
@nevermoor I don't know enough about how medical school works to comment particularly intelligently on it. All I can say is that from an outsider's perspective the medical community seems to have been much more successful at keeping medicine a profession. We'll see if they can keep it up now that they're licensing NPs to do a lot of the stuff that was previously the realm of physicians only.
Outside of certain corners of the public sector law has been overtaken by the business aspect of it. There's nothing like residency and outside of small family owned practices a FYIGM attitude prevails, which is understandable given the economics of the situation.
@pinky you can still "read the law" in a tiny number of jurisdictions. Virginia is one, I'm not sure of others. There are also states that don't require graduation from an ABA accredited school to sit for the bar (I believe California is like this). Passage rates from these institutions tend to be abysmal but I'm not really sure they're to blame for the glut. There are plenty of accredited schools out there pumping out useless lawyers for whom there is no employment that actually requires the skill set.
On “Ultimatums Usually Work, Except When They Don’t”
And so the Republican coalition has been exposed as the undisciplined rabble it is. Of course it does suck that we will probably have to sit around at least another 4 years for a chance at fixing some of the major problems with the ACA, assuming none of the state markets fall into crisis beyond where they already are.
Part of me kind of wonders what a Trump presidency would look like with a Democratic majority in Congress. Not to be overly optimistic but maybe he'd sign a reasonable reform bill as long as he got a lot of the credit.
On “The Hoover Hog: My “Open Letter” Concerning the Amazon Blacklist and Freedom of Speech”
I actually don't really get the hand wringing over this and I'm about as close to a free speech absolutist as I think possible. Amazon can sell or not sell whatever it wants. If there's a market for things they won't sell someone else will step in. They aren't a public institution, nor does their refusal to carry an item effectively remove it from the market. Wal-Mart refusing to sell albums with explicit lyrics back in the day did nothing to keep anyone from locating unedited versions.
I don't even see the negative societal implications I worry about with some of the calls for boycotts of various businesses as a response to the political views of an owner or officer. Now they of course are opening themselves up to charges of hypocracy depending on how they police this, and I think anyone who believes this has anything to do with morality and not marketing is a fool, but that's not my business.
On “Will Dropping the LSAT Requirement Create More Miserable Lawyers?”
@saul-degraw
I started law school in 2007. That first year even people who didn't do well seemed to get ok jobs at title companies and similar places where you could start building a legit resume and getting some useful skills. Then the next year it was like you said. No summer associates, no recruiting, previous offers rescinded.
There are some assholes out there in law, just like in any industry, and as I said above, there are certainly groups who are much more hard pressed than lawyers. However as usual in America, the popular narrative prefers to see the losers in structural market upheavals through the lense of a morality play.
"
Fully agree with the premise. People need to move on to the extent they can and there are no free lunches. But there are policies we could consider which might help that and avert similar crisis in the future for all people, not just law students. A good start might be putting some cost control requirements in place as a condition of institutions receiving federally backed loan money. Another good idea would be making it easier to discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy (something that is virtually impossible under the current code).
"
Most of my court room experience involved an assembly line of people going through the motions (no pun intended) of accepting their plea deal, or asking the judge (again) for a body attachment on someone who hadn't shown up (again).
"
@saul-degraw
That's fair enough. Still for all my expectations about being an attorney that didn't come true I do find it a bit baffling that anyone would be surprised that it's an adversarial line of work. Even in its most romanticized form I don't think it's ever been seen as something for tea cups.
On “Morning Ed: World {2017.03.22.W}”
Worth reading on this issue is Savage Continent by Keith Lowe. The occupation of post war Europe and the settling of various little local and regional conflicts wasn't nearly as clean as in the popular American imagination of it.
On “Will Dropping the LSAT Requirement Create More Miserable Lawyers?”
I agree and disagree. On the one hand you're right. Underemployed lawyers aren't ever going to top anyone's list of people we should have sympathy for. A lot of the scam blog whining is insufferable, and given that most people who attend law school have at least middle class backgrounds, most do have the resources to figure something else out even if the debt will always be an encumberance.
On the other hand I think there's some blaming the victim going on. The law school situation is an extreme microcosm of the structural problems we have in higher education generally. People take on high debt in the hopes of jobs that aren't there or don't pay enough to make the debt worth it. Even the ones who come out on top don't have the ability to consume the way their parents did which has rippling effects throughout the economy.
When I started law school it was considered a mercenary move, everyone told me how smart I was being. During the time I was in the bottom fell out of the industry and an outdated model crumbled into something much less auspicious than what it had been. People who used to think it was a great idea roll their eyes at it now, in light of better media reporting on the trade-offs, none of which existed when I was considering applying to law school.
Now we talk about the STEM shortage (and tomorrow it'll be some other shortage) which may or may not exist and are going to put a lot of people into debt to fill those jobs. The thing is those industries might also change in profound ways that few had foreseen.
Then we will decide if we should roll our eyes and laugh at the comeuppance of those rubes who made such stupid, short sighted decisions or if we should do some serious thinking about how we finance higher education. I know which I think is more likely.
"
Georgetown is indeed a top law school. That's all awesome for her (no sarcasm at all). I'm sure it took serious intelligence and working her ass off to get there and I never begrudge anyone their success.
I will say it sounds like she was able to follow the track of roughly what most people think they will do when they graduate. What seems to hit a lot of people hard (in addition to the hellish debt) is getting out into an industry completely different from what you prepared for. I was lucky that like your sister I worked for a couple years before taking the law school plunge so it wasn't as shocking for me when the world turned out to be a bit different. I think it can be harder to swallow for a lot of the K-JD crowd.
I have heard there are similar debt-income issues with veterinarians but suspect there is less griping since at least most of them are doing largely what they thought they'd be.
"
@kazzy
Correct me if I'm wrong but it sounds like your sister made it to big or at least medium law right out of school? That in itself makes her experience atypical in that she probably started off in a much better position to deal with her debt plus something on her resume that would get her in the door at desirable places. This isn't to say there aren't a lot of challenges for those attorneys but at least you're kind of doing what you probably thought you'd be and the money is good.
The reality for many, maybe most new lawyers, especially those from lower tier schools, is years in some combination of temp work and what we in the industry refer to as shit law (low level crim, family, and real estate work, often with eat what you kill compensation structures). The jobs are low paying, inconsistent, and thankless. And thats if you can even land a job that requires a JD and/or license at all.
This results in a lot of people bitter about being sold on a false bag of goods. Law schools recruit people on fantasies of a JD as sort of a BA plus for humanities people who aren't quite sure what to do after college. This wouldn't necessarily be so bad if not for the high premium schools get away with charging due to outdated perceptions of what law is and what lawyers earn.
As for my personal experience I really enjoy research, writing, and negotiating so in house has turned out to be ok for me. That said, it's not the dream I had of being in court everyday, sticking it to prosecutors and cops (something that strangely never actually happened even in my defense days) and I despise the asinine culture of corporate America I'm stuck in. But it turns out that's the price of paying off my debt and having a moderately comfortable standard of living. Of course it took a lot of hard work and some very lucky breaks to even make it to a compromise I can live with. A lot of post 2008 grads never even get this far. Believe me, I know plenty of people in 6 figures of debt still out trying to hustle for 45-70k a year.
On “Conservatives should look to Robert Peel”
I think all of that is true but also beside the point. I'm not that interested in what Republicans (or Democrats for that matter) say they believe but rather in what they actually do when they have power. I see the fact that the electorate largely associates the GOP with fiscal restraint as one of the more baffling triumphs of rhetoric over substance in American political debate.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.