A Roback model not to follow

From the Journal of Political Economy to insulting everyone who suffered under communism by equating them with the people who celebrated "Chik-fil-A Appreciation Day".

An indefensible waste of human capital, I would say, though I suspect Dr. Roback would disagree.

Hat tip on the Chik-fil-A piece: Mel Stephens

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Michigan 31, Air Force 25

Michigan was lucky to get out of this one with a win. The annarbor.com article makes lots of excuses, but the fact of the matter is that the team was over-rated at the start of the season. Hopefully last week's debacle at Alabama and this week's squeaker at home will put an end to the media hype and get the team focused on working hard to get better.

The most interesting bit is perhaps the adjustment to the defense that involved putting in a freshman who had been on an option team in high school and so was experienced at defending it.  The defense did become noticeably better towards the end of the game; apparently that was why.

At least now no one can say that the Alabama loss had much of anything to do with the one-game suspension of the starting running back. He did almost nothing yesterday.

Like Washington, Michigan has an easy one next week, playing Massachusetts in the Big House.

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Interesting ways to lose your job

From the Daily Mail, the sad story of a Chicago executive who lost his cool, lost his job, and lost his lawsuit.

I would have thought that they covered this in the first week of busyness school.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

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A British view of Tim Tebow

How To Spend It considers religious extrovert Tim Tebow, but prefers Peyton Manning in the end.

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LSU 41, Washington 3

To be honest, this is about what I expected. LSU was in the national championship game last year for a reason and the Huskies were playing them on their field. Not a good recipe for success, especially not in the second week of the season with a young team.

My views about the likely outcome for the season, somewhere between six and nine wins, have not really changed. If anything, the defense played a bit better than I expected against LSU, particularly given that they were on the field most of the game due to Washington's offensive woes. If this had been last year's defense it would have been 70-3.

Perhaps the real bad news yesterday was the play of UCLA, Arizona, Arizona State and the lowly beavers, who upended Wisconsin in Corvalis. Suddenly the second half of Washington's schedule does not look as easy as it did a week ago.

Next week Washington plays Portland State at home. Given the situation with the PAC-12 network, I expect I will be listening rather than watching, which is irritating. I sent an email to the Comcast regional pooh-bah last Wednesday but have yet to receive a reply. Hard to imagine why so many people dislike them.

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ECONJEFF at AEI

I spent yesterday morning taking part in a panel on US active labor market programs put on by the American Enterprise Institute in DC. This is the first time I have ever done a sort of think tank policy "event" - all the AEI folks called it the "event" - in my career.  It was more fun than I expected.

You can watch videos of the event at the AEI web page and on the C-Span (another first for me) web page. AEI excerpted my comments comparing the cost information available at Farrell's Ice Cream Parlor, where I worked in high school, with that typically available about job training programs in a separate video snippet. This made me happy because my Farrell's reference got cut by the editors of the WIA book chapter I posted about a few days ago.

Not counting moderators, the following people spoke: Steve Davis, Larry Katz, Harry Holzer, me, Gary Burtless, Paul Decker, Betsey Stevenson, and Ken Troske. Five speakers wore dark suits, two, Larry and Gary, wore summery light suits, and yours truly, who does not own a suit jacket, wore a short-sleeve dress shirt and a tie. I am not sure what model explains the sartorial variation.

I was impressed that AEI, which is usually labeled center-right, put on a panel where most of the speakers were democrats. Indeed, three of the eight speakers are former chief economists at DOL under democrat presidents: Katz, Holzer and Stevenson. Perhaps the explanation is that, at the end of the day, the speakers agreed on nearly every point. This is one of those areas where, at least for marginal changes, it is the economists versus the politicians and (more deeply) the self-interested stakeholders.

Regular readers know  that I pay attention to social networks. Among the panelists, there are many connections: Ken and I went to college and grad school together. Paul and I have known each other for years; we met when we were both consulting on program evaluations in Canada. These days, he is occasionally my boss when I consult for Mathematica. Steve Davis was on Ken's dissertation committee at Chicago and, as I recall, employed Ken as a research assistant. Harry and I are working on a paper together. Betsey is now my colleague at Michigan. Oh, and the AEI moderator for my panel worked at the NY Fed with one of my graduate students. Academic economics is a small world., particularly once you condition on being interested in job training programs.

The lunch at AEI was as good as I remembered from the one other time I had been there, back in my Maryland days, despite being surprisingly healthy.

It will interesting to see if anything comes of this effort.

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Washington 21, San Jose State 12

Washington's first game of the season was a lot closer than it should have been. That's the bad news. The good news is that the defense looked much improved from last year.

Seattle Times story here.

Next week: LSU in Baton Rouge. Ugh. I am unsure of the point of putting LSU on the schedule.

The other bad news is that Comcast is not carrying the Pac-12 network in Ann Arbor, as well as many other places. Given that they provide hundreds of channels of worthless drivel, this seems an odd choice, particularly given the long-standing rivalry between the Pac-12 and the Big Ten..

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