Conglomerate

Ann Althouse: Born to Blog

2008-12-02T06:38:28-07:00

Ann is a natural-born blogger. Her interview in connection with the ABA Journal 100 is short, but it reminds me of sitting across the hall from her, talking about blogging. She really hasn't changed her attitude about blogging in over four years, and that's pretty amazing ...

ABA Journal: How long did it take you to find your voice?

Althouse: I think I had my voice on the first post. From day one, it felt like I'd been dying to do this.

ABA Journal: Tell me about some of the biggest hurdles to doing regular posts.

Althouse: I have none. I wake up every morning ready to blog, and I do that before anything else. During the day, when I can, I go back to the blog. The real problem for me is overblogging, not underblogging.

ABA Journal: Have you ever experienced burnout or writers block? And how did you get over it?

Althouse: Blogging is energizing for me, and I never feel burned out. Sometimes it takes me a while, reading through things, to find something I want to write about, but I consider that part of writing. You need to read with a flexible, open mind and have an eye for the bloggable. Once you see something that is bloggable, start writing. Let it flow. I like to write to see what I think, to observe my mind at work. I free associate, and since I'm pretty old, I have a lot of material to weave in. Another thing I do is photography. If I take a photo-walk, I come back with things I can make into posts.

ABA Journal: What have you learned from the blog world regarding direct, immediate feedback? Does that cause trouble for you in your day job?

Althouse: I'm fortunate to be a tenured law professor and to work with people who appreciate nontraditional writing, including a lot of writing that is only tangentially about law (or not about law at all). As for the direct feedback, I love it. I'm always checking the traffic statistics, seeing who's linking, and reading the comments. Even when people get mad at me, call me a fool, and slander me, I love being one of the characters on the Internet stage.

ABA Journal: Would you encourage other legal professionals to blog? What advice/cautions would you share?

Althouse: If you want to blog, blog. Otherwise, don't. If you don't find it intrinsically rewarding to live freely and continually in writing, on display to the world, then don't waste your time. If you're contemplating a website that will work as PR for your legal practice, I don't care what you do. I'm not interested, and I won't read you.

The last paragraph is a classic: If you want to blog, blog. Otherwise, don't. Substitute any intransitive verb for "blog," and you have some pretty good life advice.

As for the dismissal of PR blogs, it's all about authenticity ... if that word is not too dated.

The Glom Repeats on ABA Journal Blawg 100!

2008-12-02T06:15:17-07:00

The Conglomerate was again included in the ABA Journal's top 100 best websites by lawyers, and we are very honored. This is from the press release:

"New legal blogs are springing up on a daily basis – we now have more than 2,000 in our online directory. Competition for the time and attention of lawyers is getting fiercer," says Edward A. Adams, the Journal’s editor and publisher. "Half the blogs on last year’s inaugural Blawg 100 list didn’t make the cut this year. That’s a testament to the quality of this year’s honorees, and evidence of the increasing amount of valuable information all legal blogs are publishing."

But the funnier part is their description of our blog:

The Wall Street crisis has kept these law profs focused on the blog’s marketing pitch: business/law/economics/society. We all hope to be as relevant and analytical. But these profs aren’t all work and no play—their Twitter feed, “The Glom,” is a riot.

If you would like to vote for our blog -- please do! -- you can find the voting page here.

What Next For the Bailout?

2008-12-01T23:42:55-07:00

Yesterday every bank stock fell in value 20%. JPMorgan just crushed government-mandated acquiree Washington Mutual's payroll. Since stock price falls (and less so layoffs) are what seems to get the government moving, should we conclude that this week will bring yet another TARP innovation? Perhaps an emergency uptick rule?

Predictions are foolish, but foolish is the coin of the blogosphere. So here's a prediction. We're in the implementation phase of the government bailout. That's different than the crisis phase, and the Fed's ever resourceful monetary machinations will continue regardless of the TARP. So I suspect that as the administrators of the bailout get ready to leave office, and as the new administrators try to figure out what, exactly, they have been saddled with, what we'll see in the coming weeks are FDIC-directed one bank at a time mortgage relief, some regulator directed mergers, but not very interesting ones, and maybe some regulatory specifications of the bailout statute's provisions, in an effort to forestall the Obama administration's opportunity to zero out bank CEO pay and so on.

These predictions are guaranteed inaccurate. If you have other views, do leave them in the comments.

And finally, a little housekeeping. We are a much loved blawg. And this article on Richard Fuld is well worth your time.

Bailout, University of Illinois and People Magazine

2008-12-01T11:03:12-07:00

So, what is in the Venn diagram that has the financial bailout, the University of Illinois and People magazine meeting in an intersection? Neel Kashkari. Kashkari, who was tapped by Paulson to lead the $700 billion infusion some weeks ago, holds both a B.A. and master's degree in engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (as well as an M.B.A. from Wharton). Now, he can add to his resume that in 2008 he was included in the "Sexiest Man Alive!" issue of People magazine. Trying to keep everyone's publicist happy, People lists not only the "sexiest man alive," but other sexy men in various categories. Kashkari is in the "Sexy A-Z" category under "B. . . is for Bailout Guru." The editors are saying that Kashkari is sexy, but I guess in a miscellaneous sort of way.

Interestingly, UIUC is overrepresented in the "Sexy A-Z" category, so you may wonder what's going on out here in Champaign-Urbana. Nathan Gunn, a tenured professor of voice in the School of Music, was "O. . . is for Opera Singer."

The Oil Market

2008-12-01T01:30:35-07:00

Going to the gas station is such a pleasure these days, which is exactly the wrong way to think about low gasoline prices, according to Allan Sloan, who wants us to "jack them up, sharply, by adopting a big honking tax on gasoline." This part of his argument is highly entertaining:

Unless we can summon the political will to slap a big tax on gasoline, we'll be setting ourselves up for the next spike in oil prices. History shows that there will be a spike, whether it comes from a world economic recovery or a terrorist strike against oil facilities or something else that we can't predict.

So ... unless we jack up gas prices, we will be setting ourselves up for a big increase in gas prices!

I realize that there is more to the idea than just this silly argument, but the other arguments seem pretty silly to me, too. Like the one where Sloan suggests that he would "let the market ... guided by a high gas tax ... rule." The market Sloan has in mind is the one that produces high-mileage vehicles and lots of customers to buy them. Even if the federal government has to create that market with a "big honking tax on gasoline."

In fairness, nothing about oil and gasoline seems to resemble a functioning market. Remember when we were speculating about $200/barrel oil earlier this year? Oil is now selling for $54/barrel. Of course, Saudi Arabia thinks that's too low because it would rather get a higher price. Here is how we arrive at the new "fair price" of $75/barrel:

Saudi oil minister, Ali Naimi, argued [in Cairo this weekend] that oil prices should be around $20 a barrel higher than they are now. Mr. Naimi's remarks represented an unusual departure for Saudi Arabia, which has long avoided the appearance of trying to set the price of oil. Saudi King Abdullah also used the $75-a-barrel price tag in an interview on Saturday with a Kuwaiti newspaper. Other OPEC ministers quickly seized on the $75 target, saying that current prices were too low to sustain needed investments in oil exploration and production in higher-cost areas.

The big question is whether the OPEC countries can actually pull off a price maintenance strategy. Even if they succeed, $75 sounds a lot better to me than $150 or $200, unless Allan Sloan gets his way, in which case it won't make any difference.

"We must all stand together to fight out this menace."

2008-12-01T00:55:19-07:00

Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan’s president, appeals to India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, not to strike out at Pakistan, even if the Mumbai terrorists are linked to Pakistan. Zardari is desperate:

The architects of this calamity in Mumbai have managed to raise a threat on our other (eastern) border. As we have these people (militants) on the run along our western border (with Afghanistan), our attention is being diverted at this critical time.

In other news, President-elect Obama will announce his new foreign policy team on Monday. Before this latest news from India, Obama had big ideas about foreign policy:

The shift would create a greatly expanded corps of diplomats and aid workers that, in the vision of the incoming Obama administration, would be engaged in projects around the world aimed at preventing conflicts and rebuilding failed states. However, it is unclear whether the financing would be shifted from the Pentagon; Mr. Obama has also committed to increasing the number of American combat troops.Whether they can make the change — one that Mr. Obama started talking about in the summer of 2007, when his candidacy was a long shot at best — “will be the great foreign policy experiment of the Obama presidency,” one of his senior advisers said recently.

The great foreign policy experiment.

Like so many other ideas floated during this campaign, this one would cost a lot of money. Especially if new ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, has her way and we start taking "dramatic action" against genocide. Again.

Preventing conflicts, rebuilding failed states, and taking dramatic action against genocide all seem like winning ideas, but with bailouts and pleas for bailouts springing up right and left -- and now potentially India v. Pakistan -- you have to wonder about the feasibility of being proactive.

"A Scholar's Quest"

2008-11-30T20:43:30-07:00

On his retirement from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, legendary organizational theorist Jim March addressed his faculty colleagues, reflecting on the varied motivations for human action, one of the enduring themes of his scholarship. March observed that the social sciences, particularly economics, portrayed human action as the result of a rational choice. March called this form of reasoning the “logic of consequence.” It is the domain of incentives and calculation.

But March cautioned his colleagues not to forget “a second grand tradition for understanding, motivating, and justifying action,” a tradition that views action as “based not on anticipations of consequences,” but as “attempts to fulfill obligations of personal and social identities and senses of self.” He called this the “logic of appropriateness.”

While these observations may seem incongruous, given the occasion and the audience, March assured his colleagues that they held “some mundane implications for those of us who claim to be educators.” We teach and write, March said, partly because those activities produce consequences that we value, but we also engage in those activities as an expression of our faith in the intrinsic value of ideas. We teach and write because we feel impelled to do these things, not for potential rewards, but because being a teacher or a scholar is who we are. March compared institutions of higher learning to temples:

A university is … a temple dedicated to knowledge and a human spirit of inquiry. It is a place where learning and scholarship are revered, not primarily for what they contribute to personal or social well being but for the vision of humanity that they symbolize, sustain, and pass on…. Higher education is a vision, not a calculation. It is a commitment, not a choice. Students are not customers; they are acolytes. Teaching is not a job; it is a sacrament. Research is not an investment; it is a testament.

Does this resonate with you? It does with me. For March, this attitude toward higher education has real-world implications:

The complications of confronting the ordinary realities of day-to-day life often confound such lofty sentiments, and I would not pretend that it is possible or desirable to ignore consequences altogether. But in order to sustain the temple of education, we probably need to rescue it from those deans, donors, faculty, and students who respond to incentives and calculate consequences and restore it to those who respond to senses of themselves and their callings, who support and pursue knowledge and learning because they represent a proper life, who read books not because they are relevant to their jobs but because they are not, who do research not in order to secure their reputations or improve the world but in order to honor scholarship, and who are committed to sustaining an institution of learning as an object of beauty and an affirmation of humanity.

I don't know the backstory here, whether March was reacting to a particular dean, but it reads like he has had some experiences with "deans, donors, faculty, and students who respond to incentives and calculate consequence." I count myself fortunate that my deans have been uniformly excellent on this front.

If you want to read March's entire speech, the published version of it is here.

What makes a dealmaker?

2008-11-29T05:40:06-07:00

My prolific fellow blogger Dave, and equally productive Steven Davidoff have a terrific article up on SSRN, a third rough draft of history that does a great job of placing the events of the last year in context. For me one of their most intriguing themes was of the government as dealmaker, led by Paulson, who as former CEO of Goldman Sachs qualifies as a "veteran dealmaker."

What makes a dealmaker? According to the authors, dealmakers use contract to avoid legal constraint. They are reactive and suffer from path dependency (like generals, they always try to fight the last war). Sensitive to reputational effects, dealmakers sometimes walk away from deals (viz. Lehman Brothers). They focus on arm's length negotiation for legitimacy, rather than legislative authorization. Dealmakers forget a deal once it's done, always looking towards the next deal. The authors recount how the government's response shifted from dealmaking to a more comprehensive response.

The article's thesis thus makes an interesting move, recasting behavior that most have described simply as as "ad hoc decisionmaking" into something more quintessesntially characteristic of Wall Street dealmakers. Is it a fair portrait the dealmakers you have known?

BYU v. Utah

2008-11-26T20:25:57-07:00

If you are in any way clued into the rivalry between BYU and the University of Utah, you have to appreciate the creativity of the Utah fan who produced the following video. The subtitles are genius.

Warning: the video is entitled "Hitler reacts to BYU loss." Obviously, the idea of using Hitler in a comedic role can be dicey, but this video is consistent with the hyperbolic nature of the interactions between fans from these two schools.

We Are Scientists

2008-11-26T08:58:16-07:00

According to Typealyzer, which reads the content of a blog, and classifies the sort of person who writes said words, we are scientists. Scientists! Here's what it means your Glom writers are like:

The long-range thinking and individualistic type. They are especially good at looking at almost anything and figuring out a way of improving it - often with a highly creative and imaginative touch. They are intellectually curious and daring, but might be physically hesitant to try new things.

The Scientists enjoy theoretical work that allows them to use their strong minds and bold creativity. Since they tend to be so abstract and theoretical in their communication they often have a problem communicating their visions to other people and need to learn patience and use concrete examples. Since they are extremely good at concentrating they often have no trouble working alone.

Via.