As IF Times

link Study: Attractive women overlooked for certain jobs – Yahoo! News.

Those damn glass ceilings.  If not for the rampant discrimination embedded in western culture, we’d likely have more attractive female tow truck drivers and prison guards. Instead, all these plum jobs go to privileged overweight fat guys characterized by their equal amounts of hair and tattoos on body areas not including head.   There’s no reason that a 110 pound Heidi Klum lookalike couldn’t keep unruly inmates in line, it’s only a matter of training.  Also, it’s well known that  most young girls, especially attractive ones, yearn to be tow truck drivers, but the prejudices of society prevent this from becoming a reality.  Instead, they are forced into stereotypical and dead end jobs in modelling, sales, law or medicine.

Perhaps the time is right for more affirmative action.  Young girls should be encouraged to aggressively pursue those jobs that have been off-limits to them just because of their comely appearance.  Who would you rather have empty your trash; Vito the unibrow guy, or someone resembling Katherine Heigl tossing the cans around? If plumbers looked like Carla Gugino, I’d be throwing sand in my toilet weekly.  But wait!  This article goes on to note the following:

“… Johnson (the researcher)  said beautiful people still enjoyed a significant edge when it came to the workplace. They tended to get higher salaries, better performance evaluations, higher levels of admission to college, better voter ratings when running for public office, and more favorable judgments in trials…”

So this is about plain greed and entitlements.  The attractive people (women) have advantages in most other areas of the job market.  It appears that they are trying to get ALL the jobs.  It’s not as if the non attractives have access to the jobs given to the attractive job applicants.  How many women who look like Michael Moore are featured in Got Milk commercials…or should?  The not so attractive had better start organizing soon or else their employment opportunity window will be just a small slit.  After all, there are only so many openings for daytime talk show hosts.

link Examiner Editorial: Time to admit that Obamanomics has failed | San Francisco Examiner.

If a San Francisco newspaper questions the policies and directions of the Administration, you know there is unrest among the plain folk.  Christina Romer, the academic who was brought in to chair the White House council of economic advisers has decided to go back to teaching at Berkeley after almost 2 years of poor results in the nation’s economic numbers.  Hmm.

According to Wikipedia, Romer, jointly with her husband David, worked on the study of how tax policies affect economic growth during their academic careers.  No slouch, she received her doctorate in economics from M.I.T.   The net conclusion?

“…Romer and Romer also find “no support for the hypothesis that tax cuts restrain government spending; indeed … tax cuts may increase spending. The results also indicate that the main effect of tax cuts on the government budget is to induce subsequent legislated tax increases.”However, she notes that “Our baseline specification suggests that an exogenous tax increase of one percent of GDP lowers real GDP by roughly three percent…”

I know to most people this is as interesting as the Dewey decimal system, but put very simply, (1) tax cuts can result in higher government spending (eventually) and (2) tax increases reduce GDP by a factor of 3 times according to their work.

While the latter conclusion is rather intuitive and we’ve discussed this in previous comments, the first conclusion is suspect.  No doubt a gripping read, the Romers’ thesis that lower taxes leads to higher government spending implies a rather spurious link (in my opinion )  between the two events.  Government spending always has at its roots, wants, not needs.  Wants are a result of politics and lobbying and to a large degree, prevailing culture.  For example, if someone were to put a number on the amount of government money spent on global warming over the past 5 years, it would skew the spending statistic, but would have nothing to do with tax cuts. 

As fascinating as discussions of economic theory are to everyone, the point of this commentary is to underline the fact again that academics with very little life experience outside of the ivory tower are drawing road maps for public policy.  Some, like Paul Krugman, get Nobel prizes for their theories, while others like Romer, get to actually implement their views.  Over the past 2 years, it’s clear that what looked good on paper, fails miserably in real life.  So, it’s abandon ship and back to the world of academia for her. 

But that begs the question.  If it didn’t work in real life,  is she going back to teaching it?  Will her views on economic theories change now that she’s seen them enacted in real time?  If not, the world had better be leery of Berkeley economics grads years down the road.