May 31, 2011

One Person, One Vote? Not Exactly By DAVID LEONHARDT

WASHINGTON
Two economists, Brian Knight and Nathan Schiff, set out a few years ago to determine how much Iowa, New Hampshire and other early-voting states affected presidential nominations.
Mr. Knight and Mr. Schiff analyzed daily polls in other states before and after an early state had held a contest. The polls tended to change immediately after the contest, and the changes tended to last, which suggested that the early states were even more important than many people realized. The economists estimated that an Iowa or New Hampshire voter had the same impact as five Super Tuesday voters put together.
This system, the two men drily noted in a Journal of Political Economy paper, “represents a deviation from the democratic ideal of ‘one person, one vote.’ ”
A presidential campaign is once again upon us, and Iowa and New Hampshire are again at the center of it all. On Thursday, Mitt Romney will announce his candidacy in Stratham, N.H. Last week, Tim Pawlenty opened his campaign in Des Moines. The two states have dominated the nominating process for so long that it’s easy to think of their role as natural.
But it is not natural. It’s undemocratic, in fact. It is unfair to voters in the other 48 states. And it distorts economic policy in several damaging ways.
Most obviously, the federal government has lavished subsidies on ethanol, even though those subsidies drive up food prices and do little to solve the climate problem, partly because candidates pander to the Iowa corn industry. (Mr. Pawlenty, who now says the subsidies must end, is an admirable exception.) Beyond ethanol, a recent peer-reviewed study found that early-voting states received more federal dollars after a competitive election — so long as they supported the winning candidate.
Pork is hardly the only problem with the voting calendar. In the long run-up to the first votes, Iowa and New Hampshire also distort the national conversation because they are so unrepresentative. They are not better or worse than other states, to be clear. But they are different.
Their populations are growing more slowly than the rest of the country’s. Residents of Iowa and New Hampshire are more likely to have health insurance. They are older than average. They are more likely to work in manufacturing.
Above all, Iowa and New Hampshire lack a single big city, at a time when large metropolitan areas are crucial to lifting economic growth. Big metro areas are where big ideas most often take shape and great new companies are most often born. The country’s 25 largest areas are responsible for 52 percent of the country’s economic output, according to the Brookings Institution, and are home to 42 percent of the population.
Yet metro areas are also struggling with major problems. The quality of schools is spotty. Commutes last longer than ever. Roads, bridges, tunnels and transit systems are aging.
You don’t hear much about these issues in the first year of a presidential campaign, though. No wonder. Iowa, New Hampshire and the next two states to vote, Nevada and South Carolina, do not have a single city among the country’s 25 largest. Las Vegas, the 30th-largest metro area, and the Boston suburbs that stretch into New Hampshire are the closest these states come.
So the presidential calendar becomes another cause of what Edward Glaeser, a conservative-leaning Harvard economist, calls our “anti-urban policy bias.” Suburbs and rural areas receive vastly more per-person federal largess than cities. One big reason, of course, is the structure of the Senate: the 12 million residents of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina have eight United States senators among them, while the 81 million residents of California, New York and Texas have only six.
Bruce Katz, a Brookings vice president and veteran of Democratic administrations, points out that the world’s other economic powers take their cities more seriously. China, in particular, has made urban planning a central part of its economic strategy.
“The United States stands apart as an anti-urban nation in an urbanizing world,” Mr. Katz told me. “Our political tilt toward small states and small towns, in presidential campaigns and the governing that follows, is not only a quaint relic of an earlier era but a dangerous distraction at a time when national prosperity depends on urban prosperity.”
The typical defense from Iowa and New Hampshire is that they care more about politics than the rest of us and therefore do a better job vetting candidates. But the intense 2008 race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton showed that if Iowa and New Hampshire care more, it’s only because of their privileged status. In 2008, turnout soared in states that finally had a primary that mattered, be it Indiana or Texas, North Carolina or Rhode Island.
A more democratic system would allow more voters to see the candidates up close for months at a time. The early states could rotate each year, so that all kinds — big states and small, younger and older, rural and urban — had a turn. In 2016, the first wave could include states that have voted near the end recently, like Indiana, North Carolina, Oregon and South Dakota.
A rotation along these lines would enliven the political debate. Investments in science and education, which are the lifeblood of future economic growth, might play a bigger role in the campaign. You could even imagine — optimistically, I know — that the deficit might prove easier to address if Medicare and Social Security recipients did not make up such a disproportionate share of early voters.
The issues particular to small-town America would still receive extra attention because so many of the 50 states are rural and sparsely populated. It’s just that Iowa and New Hampshire would no longer receive the extreme special treatment they now do.
And that special treatment is a nice thing, indeed. It focuses the entire country, and its next leader, on the concerns of only 1 percent of the population, as if democracy were supposed to work that way.
At a recent candidates’ forum in Des Moines, The Wall Street Journal reported, the moderator did something that seemed perfectly normal: She chided Mr. Romney for not having spent enough time in Iowa lately. “Where have you been?” she asked.
How do you think the rest of us feel?        

Top Colleges, Largely for the EliteBy DAVID LEONHARDT

May 24, 2011


Top Colleges, Largely for the EliteBy DAVID LEONHARDT

The last four presidents of the United States each attended a highly selective college. All nine Supreme Court justices did, too, as did the chief executives of General Electric (Dartmouth), Goldman Sachs (Harvard), Wal-Mart (Georgia Tech), Exxon Mobil (Texas) and Google (Michigan).



Like it or not, these colleges have outsize influence on American society. So their admissions policies don’t matter just to high school seniors; they’re a matter of national interest.



More than seven years ago, a 44-year-old political scientist named Anthony Marx became the president of Amherst College, in western Massachusetts, and set out to change its admissions policies. Mr. Marx argued that elite colleges were neither as good nor as meritocratic as they could be, because they mostly overlooked lower-income students.



For all of the other ways that top colleges had become diverse, their student bodies remained shockingly affluent. At the University of Michigan, more entering freshmen in 2003 came from families earning at least $200,000 a year than came from the entire bottom half of the income distribution. At some private colleges, the numbers were even more extreme.



In his 2003 inaugural address, Mr. Marx — quoting from a speech President John F. Kennedy had given at Amherst — asked, “What good is a private college unless it is serving a great national purpose?”



On Sunday, Mr. Marx presided over his final Amherst graduation. This summer, he will become head of the New York Public Library. And he can point to some impressive successes at Amherst.



More than 22 percent of students now receive federal Pell Grants (a rough approximation of how many are in the bottom half of the nation’s income distribution). In 2005, only 13 percent did. Over the same period, other elite colleges have also been doing more to recruit low- and middle-income students, and they have made some progress.



It is tempting, then, to point to all these changes and proclaim that elite higher education is at long last a meritocracy. But Mr. Marx doesn’t buy it. If anything, he worries, the progress has the potential to distract people from how troubling the situation remains.



When we spoke recently, he mentioned a Georgetown University study of the class of 2010 at the country’s 193 most selective colleges. As entering freshmen, only 15 percent of students came from the bottom half of the income distribution. Sixty-seven percent came from the highest-earning fourth of the distribution. These statistics mean that on many campuses affluent students outnumber middle-class students.



“We claim to be part of the American dream and of a system based on merit and opportunity and talent,” Mr. Marx says. “Yet if at the top places, two-thirds of the students come from the top quartile and only 5 percent come from the bottom quartile, then we are actually part of the problem of the growing economic divide rather than part of the solution.”



I think Amherst has created a model for attracting talented low- and middle-income students that other colleges can copy. It borrows, in part, from the University of California, which is by far the most economically diverse top university system in the country. But before we get to the details, I want to address a question that often comes up in this discussion:



Does more economic diversity necessarily mean lower admissions standards?



No, it does not.



The truth is that many of the most capable low- and middle-income students attend community colleges or less selective four-year colleges close to their home. Doing so makes them less likely to graduate from college at all, research has shown. Incredibly, only 44 percent of low-income high school seniors with high standardized test scores enroll in a four-year college, according to a Century Foundation report — compared with about 50 percent of high-income seniors who have average test scores.



“The extent of wasted human capital,” wrote the report’s authors, Anthony P. Carnevale and Jeff Strohl, “is phenomenal.”



This comparison understates the problem, too, because SAT scores are hardly a pure measure of merit. Well-off students often receive SAT coaching and take the test more than once, Mr. Marx notes, and top colleges reward them for doing both. Colleges also reward students for overseas travel and elaborate community service projects. “Colleges don’t recognize, in the same way, if you work at the neighborhood 7-Eleven to support your family,” he adds.



Several years ago, William Bowen, a former president of Princeton, and two other researchers found that top colleges gave no admissions advantage to low-income students, despite claims to the contrary. Children of alumni received an advantage. Minorities (except Asians) and athletes received an even bigger advantage. But all else equal, a low-income applicant was no more likely to get in than a high-income applicant with the same SAT score. It’s pretty hard to call that meritocracy.



•



Amherst has shown that building a better meritocracy is possible, by doing, as Mr. Marx says, “everything we can think of.”



The effort starts with financial aid. The college has devoted more of its resources to aid, even if the dining halls don’t end up being as fancy as those at rival colleges. Outright grants have replaced most loans, not just for poor students but for middle-class ones. The college has started a scholarship for low-income foreign students, who don’t qualify for Pell Grants. And Amherst officials visit high schools they had never visited before to spread the word.



The college has also started using its transfer program mostly to admit community college students. This step may be the single easiest way for a college to become more meritocratic. It’s one reason the University of California campuses in Berkeley, Los Angeles and San Diego are so much more diverse than other top colleges.



Many community colleges have horrifically high dropout rates, but the students who succeed there are often inspiring. They include war veterans, single parents and immigrants who have managed to overcome the odds. At Amherst this year, 62 percent of transfer students came from a community college.



Finally, Mr. Marx says Amherst does put a thumb on the scale to give poor students more credit for a given SAT score. Not everyone will love that policy. “Spots at these places are precious,” he notes. But I find it tough to argue that a 1,300 score for most graduates of Phillips Exeter Academy — or most children of Amherst alumni — is as impressive as a 1,250 for someone from McDowell County, W.Va., or the South Bronx.



The result of these changes is that Amherst has a much higher share of low-income students than almost any other elite college. By itself, of course, Amherst is not big enough to influence the American economy. But its policies could affect the economy if more colleges adopted them.



The United States no longer leads the world in educational attainment, partly because so few low-income students — and surprisingly few middle-income students — graduate from four-year colleges. Getting more of these students into the best colleges would make a difference. Many higher-income students would still graduate from college, even if they went to a less elite one. A more educated population, in turn, would probably lift economic growth.



The Amherst model does cost money. And it would be difficult to maintain if Congress cuts the Pell budget, as some members have proposed. But when you add everything up, I think the model isn’t only the fairest one and the right one for the economy. It’s also the best one for the colleges themselves. Attracting the best of the best — not just the best of the affluent — and letting them learn from one another is the whole point of a place like Amherst.



“We did this for educational reasons,” Mr. Marx says. “We aim to be the most diverse college in the country — and the most selective.”



E-mail: leonhardt@nytimes.com; twitter.com/DLeonhardt

A Guide to Happy (and Legal) Tumblr-ing by Luke O'Neil

• 

• TECHNOLOGY
• MAY 21, 2011

A Guide to Happy (and Legal) Tumblr-ing

Blogging without 'stealing' is much easier than you think

By LUKE O'NEIL

Information wants to be free. At least that appears to be the sentiment among bloggers, the majority of whom subscribe to a what's-mine-is-yours-and-what's-yours-is-mine policy (but mostly the latter part). By this point, the blogoverse has become a lot like what Picasso supposedly said about inspiration: A good artist copies, but a great artist steals.

Of course, back in his day you couldn't exactly right click on a canvas in a gallery and drag it over onto your bedroom wall, so what did he know?

Whether or not information should be free is a different matter altogether. On popular blogging platforms like Tumblr, the point is moot. For the bloggers who use these sites, the exchange of copyrighted material and intellectual property—other people's photographs, music, lists of all the amazing things you ate for lunch—isn't just an aspect of the form, it's practically the entire business model.

Brian Stauffer for The Wall Street Journal

Call it the copy(paste)right approach to creativity, where much of the allure is in reblogging posts from contacts in your network in an Internet version of the telephone game. Each repetition takes you further and further away from the work's original creator.

It doesn't have to be that way. There are services that make content available for bloggers to reuse on their own sites, free of thorny ethical issues and legal complications. Most bloggers aren't aware of these resources or don't seem to know what the appropriate standards actually are.

Posting a photograph that belongs to someone else, for example, even with attribution and a link is illegal if done without the author's authorization. I know, really scary right? No, the Internet police probably aren't going to be kicking down your door to ask questions about that copyrighted photo of Ke$ha you just posted, but when it's almost as easy to do things the right way, why not at least try?

"It's a willful ignorance," says Bert Krages, a Portland, Ore., lawyer who specializes in intellectual property issues, and has written "Legal Handbook for Photographers: The Rights and Liabilities of Making Images." He says, "A lot of people are disinclined to find out what their legal obligations are for fear of finding out they aren't as broad as they think."

Posting someone else's intellectual property on your blog basically comes down to stealing, says Mr. Krages, particularly when it comes to professional photographers. "Even a minor usage of a photo on a blog can destroy the value of an image with regard to licensing it for other uses."

There are a few ways to lessen your unlawful-blogging footprint, though. Much like a chef who cooks with only the happiest free-range chickens, there's such a thing as ethical blogging as well. Here's how:

Use Creative Commons

One of the most bountiful and convenient ways to ensure you're blogging with a clear conscience is to utilize services that operate under a Creative Commons license. Creative Commons is an organization that works with websites like Flickr, Picasa, Vimeo, SoundCloud and Scribd, as well as individual producers of creative content, to provide standardized and streamlined licensing solutions under a variety of different permission levels. "We want information to be free when the people who have created the content want it to be free, and to have an easy way to make it free under their terms," says Eric Steuer, Creative Commons's creative director.

Get content from sites like Flickr

Flickr alone has some 100 million images that are available to use under sharing guidelines. Picasa, another vast photo database, owned by Google, also offers the option to search for photos that are free to use by bloggers. Other smaller, more creativity-focused sites like moregueFile are sprouting up now as well.

"The purpose of the site has been for allowing people to use images in the least restrictive way," says Johannes Seemann, morgueFile's business lead.

While photos make up the majority of reblogged content, music, video and large pieces of other people's writing also regularly show up. Like Flickr and Picasa do for photos, sites like SoundCloud, Vimeo, Blip.tv, SpinXpress and Wikimedia Commons offer more writing, songs and video than you could ever possibly use.

Refine your Web searches

If you're looking for the right photo to match an essay on your blog, take the extra step to enable a customized Creative Commons search. From Google.com select "advanced search." From there, click "usage rights." Searches can then be further narrowed down with options like "free to use or share." Or simply go to search.creativecommons.org where you can find content that's been approved for commercial use or further modification and tweaking. Yes, this is the Internet, where suffering through five extra seconds is an eternity, but like anything else that's good for you, once you get in the habit, it will become second nature.

Ask nicely

Perhaps the best advice for bloggers is to simply be mindful of where their content is coming from. You'd be surprised how far a little common courtesy will get you.

"The best thing to do is let the photographer know that you would like to use their image," says Zack Sheppard, senior community manager at Flickr. "Photographers are often happy to have their image used on a blog without asking a fee."

When in doubt, cite your source

As Katherine Barna, Tumblr's director of communications, puts it, "Be fair. Use proper credit and attribution if sharing content that wasn't originated by you."

"Reputational currency is important," says Mr. Steuer of Creative Commons. "Do the best job you can to attribute it to the person that created the content, linking back, saying their name." It won't get you off the hook legally, but compared to no attribution, it's a start. You'll appreciate it when your own blog gets big and the credit comes back around.

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703421204576327761347965794.html#ixzz1MyOZ1rR6

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Sharing Information Corrupts Wisdom of Crowds By Brandon Keim

• May 16, 2011  | 
• 6:30 pm  | 
• Categories: Brains and Behavior

When people can learn what others think, the wisdom of crowds may veer towards ignorance.
In a new study of crowd wisdom — the statistical phenomenon by which individual biases cancel each other out, distilling hundreds or thousands of individual guesses into uncannily accurate average answers — researchers told test participants about their peers’ guesses. As a result, their group insight went awry.
“Although groups are initially ‘wise,’ knowledge about estimates of others narrows the diversity of opinions to such an extent that it undermines” collective wisdom, wrote researchers led by mathematician Jan Lorenz and sociologist Heiko Rahut of Switzerland’s ETH Zurich, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on May 16. “Even mild social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect.”
The effect — perhaps better described as the accuracy of crowds, since it best applies to questions involving quantifiable estimates — has been described for decades, beginning with Francis Galton’s 1907 account of fairgoers guessing an ox’s weight< It reached mainstream prominence with economist James Surowiecki's 2004 bestseller, The Wisdom of Crowds.

Study participants were asked how many murders occurred in Switzerland in 2006. At the end of each round of questioning, they were given small payments for coming close to the actual answer (signified by the gray bar). At left is the range of responses among participants who received no information about others.

As Surowiecki explained, certain conditions must be met for crowd wisdom to emerge. Members of the crowd ought to have a variety of opinions, and to arrive at those opinions independently.
Take those away, and crowd intelligence fails, as evidenced in some market bubbles. Computer modeling of crowd behavior also hints at dynamics underlying crowd breakdowns, with he balance between information flow and diverse opinions becoming skewed.
Lorenz and Rahut’s experiment fits between large-scale, real-world messiness and theoretical investigation. They recruited 144 students from ETH Zurich, sitting them in isolated cubicles and asking them to guess Switzerland’s population density, the length of its border with Italy, the number of new immigrants to Zurich and how many crimes were committed in 2006.
After answering, test subjects were given a small monetary reward based on their answer’s accuracy, then asked again. This proceeded for four more rounds; and while some students didn’t learn what their peers guessed, others were told.
As testing progressed, the average answers of independent test subjects became more accurate, in keeping with the wisdom-of-crowds phenomenon. Socially influenced test subjects, however, actually became less accurate.
The researchers attributed this to three effects. The first they called “social influence”: Opinions became less diverse. The second effect was “range reduction”: In mathematical terms, correct answers became clustered at the group’s edges. Exacerbating it all was the “confidence effect,” in which students became more certain about their guesses.
“The truth becomes less central if social influence is allowed,” wrote Lorenz and Rahut, who think this problem could be intensified in markets and politics — systems that rely on collective assessment.
“Opinion polls and the mass media largely promote information feedback and therefore trigger convergence of how we judge the facts,” they wrote. The wisdom of crowds is valuable, but used improperly it “creates overconfidence in possibly false beliefs.”

May 12, 2011

What Good Is Sitting Alone in Your Room? Cabaret Is a Steal By ERIK PIEPENBURG

Fans of the American Songbook can get their fix of torch songs and 11 o’clock numbers on almost any night in New York. This weekend alone brings the husband-and-wife duo of Jason Danieley and Marin Mazzie to the Café Carlyle; K T Sullivan saluting Dorothy Fields at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel; and Nnenna Freelon covering songs made popular by Lena Horne at Feinstein’s at Loews Regency.

But in tough economic times a night at one of those venerable Manhattan rooms can cost a small fortune. Seats at the Carlyle, for example, are $40 to $135; add cocktails and dinner, and a night out for two requires a few hundred dollars. Luckily, for thrifty lovers of standards there are several night spots in New York where the repertory is being sung for a song.

At the 70-seat cabaret theater at the Duplex in the West Village, the cover charge is never more than $20 and a moderately priced two-drink minimum.  On a recent night the singer Colleen McHugh and a jazz trio — the pianist Chuck Larkin, the guitarist Sean Harkness and the bassist Steve Doyle — performed an intimate show that included Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies,” Cole Porter’s “I’m in Love Again” and Dorothy Fields and Jerome Kern’s “April Fooled Me.”

At the Laurie Beechman Theater, a 100-seat space in Clinton, the actress Emily Bergl began a recent evening by asking the audience, “Do you ever feel you were born in the wrong era?”

 “Yes!” shouted the crowd. And with that Ms. Bergl and her pianist, G. Scott Lacy, jump-kicked into a 90-minute set that included Noël Coward’s “Mad About the Boy” and the Fats Waller classic “Ain’t Misbehavin’.”

Bob Bokor, who was in the front row, said afterward: “I’m a dance music and ’70s rock guy. This isn’t normally my style. But I wanted a change. I enjoyed it.”

Sidney Myer, the booking manager at Don’t Tell Mama, a cabaret space on West 46th Street in the theater district, described the Duplex and the Beechman — as well as the Metropolitan Room, Le Poisson Rouge, Joe’s Pub and Cast Party at Birdland — as proving grounds for performers who come to New York with nothing more than a voice and a dream.

“Traditionally, cabaret in New York is the first and only door that’s open to people when they come here,” Mr. Myer said. “Before anyone knows anyone to put them in a show, they put themselves in their own show.”

That’s a bonus for audiences with limited funds. A show at Don’t Tell Mama, Mr. Myer said, “costs less than parking your car.” Ms. McHugh said that her show was “less than a soda and movie tickets.” And both the Duplex and Don’t Tell Mama offer separate piano bars with no cover.

For Ms. McHugh, 43, cabaret lets her indulge in music she’s come to feel passionate about. “I’d always been a Top 40 girl growing up as a child of the ’80s,” she said.  “But this is always the soundtrack that was on in the background.”

The American Songbook is an umbrella term for popular music from the ’20s through the ’60s, whether from Broadway, Tin Pan Alley or Hollywood. Its songwriters include the likes of Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, George Gershwin and Irving Berlin, with Fields being one of the few women in the overwhelmingly male bunch.

“ ‘The American Songbook’ sounds like this thing that your mom liked or you were supposed to study in college,” said Ms. McHugh, who works by day as a writer and producer at WNET-TV.  “But then people say, oh, ‘Stormy Weather’? I love that. That’s Harold Arlen? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of Harold Arlen.’  Then I do a Harold Arlen show, and my friends that I force to come love every song.”

During Ms. Bergl’s show, perhaps as a nod to the younger people there who knew her from appearances on “Desperate Housewives,” she stripped from a full-length gown into a leg-baring beaded unitard and delivered a torch-song version of Madonna’s “Material Girl.” The performance cost $20, with a $15 food-and-drink minimum.

“At one point in time it was cheaper to see a Broadway show than it was to see a movie,” Ms. Bergl, 36, said before her performance.  “I want to do a show where you can spend $20 or $25 to get in, maybe you have to buy a couple of drinks, but you have an evening of live entertainment.”

For many singers the downtown cabaret scene is a good fit, though performing in a more gilded room remains an aspiration. “I have my dreams-slash-delusions of grandeur of moving my way uptown, like the Jeffersons,” Ms. McHugh said.  “But being downtown and having this opportunity to be at an accessible and affordable place that lets me try out new material every month is exactly where I’m supposed to be.”

Not that cheap comes at the expense of quality.

“There are so many people working in these clubs that have Broadway credits,” Mr. Myer said.  “When you walk into a piano bar you’re hearing talent that you’d hear in another setting for more money.  But the economy has prevented people from having their own showcase.”

He continued: “Remember, you don’t start out as an oak at the Oak Room.  You were an acorn somewhere first.”

CAST PARTY AT BIRDLAND 315 West 44th Street, Clinton; (212) 581-3080, castpartynyc.com.

DON’T TELL MAMA 343 West 46th Street, Clinton; (212) 757-0788, donttellmamanyc.com.

THE DUPLEX 61 Christopher Street, at Seventh Avenue South, West Village; (212) 255-5438, theduplex.com.

JOE’S PUB 425 Lafayette Street, at Astor Place, East Village; (212) 967-7555, joespub.com.

LAURIE BEECHMAN THEATER 407 West 42nd Street, Clinton; (212) 695-6909, westbankcafe.com.

LE POISSON ROUGE 158 Bleecker Street, near Thompson Street, Greenwich Village; (212) 505-3474, lepoissonrouge.com.

METROPOLITAN ROOM 34 West 22nd Street, Manhattan; (212) 206-0440, metropolitanroom.com.

Rent or Buy, a Matter of Lifestyle By DAVID LEONHARDT

May 10, 2011


Rent or Buy, a Matter of Lifestyle By DAVID LEONHARDT

WASHINGTON



Real estate agents across the country are aggressively making the case that now is a good time to buy a house. Mortgage rates are near record lows and will probably rise in coming years. Home prices may not be done falling, but they probably don’t have much further to go in most places either. Rents, on the other hand, seem set to increase, thanks to low vacancy rates.



“Renters beware,” warned a newsletter that I recently received from a real estate agents’ group.



Individually, each of these points is unobjectionable. But it’s important to remember the source. Real estate agents, like mortgage brokers and home builders, have a big financial stake in persuading people to buy homes. That’s why many agents are always pushing home buying, whatever the rationale of the moment happens to be.



The truth is that you can make just as strong a case in many places for renting. For starters, neither mortgage rates nor rents are likely to rise rapidly. Even more important, house prices, relative to rents, remain higher than their long-term average, especially in much of California, the Pacific Northwest and the New York region. In these places, among others, renting is often cheaper than buying — still.



I’ve made a near-annual habit in this column of looking at the rent-versus-buy decision, and The Times has built an online calculator so that readers can make their own comparisons. The idea isn’t only to help potential buyers but also to figure out whether and where house prices are overvalued. That question is of obvious importance to homeowners and to the American economy.



As this year’s spring buying season nears its peak, the relative merits of renting and buying are closer than they have been since the housing bubble began inflating almost a decade ago. So the best single piece of advice for most people is to make a decision based mainly on their stage of life, rather than on any complex financial calculations.



If you think you are ready to settle in one place for at least five years, if not more, buying often makes a lot of sense. That’s why I bought my first house, in the Washington area, a few years ago, despite thinking local prices remained high.



But if the chances are good that you will move again in the next few years, renting is usually the better bet. The various closing costs, including real estate agents’ fees, are just too high. Owning a house also makes it much harder to move when you want to because selling a house is complicated.



Within this basic framework, the numbers — specifically, something called rent ratios — are the next place to turn. A rent ratio is the sale price of a house divided by the annual cost of renting an equivalent house. When the ratio is below 15, most people should lean toward buying.



To see why, look at the Atlanta area, where the average ratio is now about 13. Combined with today’s low interest rates, that ratio means that the typical monthly mortgage payment is several hundred dollars lower than the rent on an equivalent house. Over time, this difference helps make up for the other costs of owning, like closing costs and borrowing costs. And, yes, a mortgage costs money, despite the tax deduction.



Only if home prices in Atlanta fall further and don’t recover for years would most buyers today have reason for regret. The other areas where the average ratio is below 15, according to Moody’s Analytics, include Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Las Vegas, Cleveland, Detroit, Phoenix, Pittsburgh and Tampa, Fla.



On the other end of the spectrum are metropolitan areas where prices still look bubbly. In San Diego, the ratio was 22 at the end of last year (and most ratios have fallen only slightly since then). In northern and central New Jersey, it was 25, and it was 29 in Manhattan. In Silicon Valley and the nearby East Bay in California, the ratio was above 30.



All these numbers are well down from their peaks from about five years ago. But they’re still higher than they were in the decades before the housing bubble. They are also high enough to make the monthly costs of owning steeper than the costs of renting.



As a rule of thumb, a ratio above roughly 20 means that a monthly mortgage bill is higher than rent for a similar house. In Silicon Valley, the after-tax mortgage payment on a typical house might be $3,500 — while the rent on the same house would be only about $2,500.



The arithmetic of owning then gets mighty tough. On top of closing costs and mortgage costs, owners are also falling further behind renters each month. To make up that ground, house prices would have to rise significantly over the next few years. Does that sound like a good bet?



When you look at the numbers this way, it’s easy to conclude that the excesses of the housing bubble are mostly gone in much of the country. Yet you also start wondering whether New York, San Francisco, Seattle and a few other places still have a housing crash in their future.



I realize there are some important caveats here. Affluent people tend to want to own their houses, even when the dollars don’t make sense, and the Northeast and West Coast are home to much more wealth than a few decades ago. That could cause future rent ratios to be higher than those in the 1990s or even the 1980s, a better decade for real estate. Meanwhile, the coming rise in rents — maybe 4 or 5 percent a year, for the next few years — will reduce rent ratios even if prices don’t fall.



Yet the fact remains that a lot of New Yorkers and Californians, among others, are paying a hefty premium for the privilege of owning. Eventually, some of them may decide it’s not worth it, much as homebuyers in Las Vegas, Phoenix and Florida ultimately decided that prices were too high. If that happens, prices in New York and California will fall, too.



A crash strikes me as unlikely. But any potential homebuyers should know that real estate exuberance — irrational exuberance, it seems — has survived in at least a few places.

DRAMA DESK NOMINATIONS FOR THE 2010-2011 SEASON

The following awards were voted by the nominating committee and will be presented by the Drama Desk at its awards ceremony:



Outstanding Ensemble Performances



This year the nominators chose to bestow special ensemble awards for acting to the casts of two shows. Therefore, individual cast members for these shows were not eligible for acting awards in the competitive categories.



•In Transit

•The Normal Heart

Special Awards



Each year, the Drama Desk votes special awards to recognize excellence and significant contributions to the theater. For 2010-2011, these awards are:





•To A.R. Gurney for his enduring, keenly observed portraits of American life over a prolific four-decade-long career.

•To Reed Birney for his versatile and finely nuanced performances over the past thirty-five years, and for his exceptional work this season in Tigers Be Still, A Small Fire and The Dream of the Burning Boy.

•To The New Group and Artistic Director Scott Elliott for presenting contemporary new voices, and for uncompromisingly raw and powerful productions.

•To The Pearl Theatre Company for notable productions of classic plays and nurturing a stalwart resident company of actors.

•To the creative team of War Horse for thrilling stagecraft: Paule Constable, Marianne Elliott, 59 Productions, Adrian Kohler with Basil Jones for Handspring Puppet Company, Tom Morris, Rae Smith, Christopher Shutt, Toby Sedgwick, Adrian Sutton and John Tams.

The following are the nominations for the competitive categories. Winners will be selected by the voting membership of the Drama Desk:



Note: Eligibility and award category designations for the productions under consideration this season were determined by the Drama Desk board of directors, with recommendations from the nominating committee. Because of the abundance of great work throughout the season, the board also authorized the increase in the number of nominees allowed in select categories. Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Brief Encounter and The Scottsboro Boys were considered for their productions Off Broadway in the 2009-2010 season. Under Drama Desk rules, only new elements in their transfers to Broadway were eligible this season.



Outstanding Play



•Jon Robin Baitz, Other Desert Cities

•Adam Bock, A Small Fire

•Stephen Adly Guirgis, The Motherf**ker With the Hat

•Samuel D. Hunter, A Bright New Boise

•Rajiv Joseph, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

•David Lindsay-Abaire, Good People

•Nick Stafford, War Horse



Outstanding Musical



•In Transit

•Priscilla Queen of the Desert: The Musical

•See Rock City & Other Destinations

•Sister Act

•The Book of Mormon

•The Kid



Outstanding Revival of a Play



•Born Yesterday

•The House of Blue Leaves

•The Importance of Being Earnest

•The Merchant of Venice

•The Normal Heart

•Three Sisters



Outstanding Revival of a Musical



•Anything Goes

•Hello Again

•How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying



Outstanding Actor in a Play



•Charles Busch, The Divine Sister

•Bobby Cannavale, The Motherf**ker With the Hat

•Al Pacino, The Merchant of Venice

•Geoffrey Rush, The Diary of a Madman

•Mark Rylance, Jerusalem

•Michael Shannon, Mistakes Were Made

•Paul Sparks, Dusk Rings a Bell



Outstanding Actress in a Play



•Nina Arianda, Born Yesterday

•Stockard Channing, Other Desert Cities

•Frances McDormand, Good People

•Laurie Metcalf, The Other Place

•Michele Pawk, A Small Fire

•Lily Rabe, The Merchant of Venice



Outstanding Actor in a Musical



•Norbert Leo Butz, Catch Me if You Can

•Colin Donnell, Anything Goes

•Daniel Radcliffe, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

•Andrew Rannells, The Book of Mormon

•Tony Sheldon, Priscilla Queen of the Desert:The Musical

•Christopher Sieber, The Kid



Outstanding Actress in a Musical



•Sutton Foster, Anything Goes

•Beth Leavel, Baby It's You!

•Patina Miller, Sister Act

•Donna Murphy, The People in the Picture

•Sherie Rene Scott, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown



Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play



•Brian Bedford, The Importance of Being Earnest

•Christian Borle, Peter and the Starcatcher

•Boyd Gaines, The Grand Manner

•Logan Marshall-Green, The Hallway Trilogy

•Zachary Quinto, Angels in America

•Tom Riley, Arcadia

•Yul Vazquez, The Motherf**ker With the Hat



Outstanding Featured Actress in a Play



•Lisa Emery, The Collection & A Kind of Alaska

•Edie Falco, The House of Blue Leaves

•Julie Halston, The Divine Sister

•Sarah Nina Hayon, A Bright New Boise

•Celia Keenan-Bolger, Peter and the Starcatcher

•Linda Lavin, Other Desert Cities

•Judith Light, Lombardi



Outstanding Featured Actor in a Musical



•Adam Godley, Anything Goes

•John Larroquette, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

•Brian Stokes Mitchell, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

•Rory O'Malley, The Book of Mormon

•Bob Stillman, Hello Again

•Tom Wopat, Catch Me if You Can



Outstanding Featured Actress in a Musical



•Laura Benanti, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

•Kerry Butler, Catch Me if You Can

•Victoria Clark, Sister Act

•Jill Eikenberry, The Kid

•Nikki M. James, The Book of Mormon

•Patti LuPone, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

•Laura Osnes, Anything Goes



Outstanding Director of a Play



•Trip Cullman, A Small Fire

•Joel Grey and George C. Wolfe, The Normal Heart

•Moises Kaufman, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

•Davis McCallum, A Bright New Boise

•Daniel Sullivan,The Merchant of Venice

•Kirjan Waage and Gwendolyn Warnock, Baby Universe



Outstanding Director of a Musical



•Rob Ashford, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

•Joe Calarco, In Transit

•Jack Cummings III, Hello Again

•Jack Cummings III, See Rock City & Other Destinations

•Kathleen Marshall, Anything Goes

•Casey Nicholaw and Trey Parker, The Book of Mormon



Outstanding Choreography



•Rob Ashford, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

•Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett, Beautiful Burnout

•Steven Hoggett, Peter and the Starcatcher

•Kathleen Marshall, Anything Goes

•Casey Nicholaw, The Book of Mormon

•Siudy, Between Worlds



Outstanding Music



•Brad Alexander, See Rock City & Other Destinations

•Alan Menken, Sister Act

•Trey Parker, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone, The Book of Mormon

•Marc Shaiman, Catch Me if You Can

•Mike Stoller and Artie Butler, The People in the Picture

•David Yazbek, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown



Outstanding Lyrics



•Rick Crom, Newsical The Musical - Full Spin Ahead

•Jack Lechner, The Kid

•Adam Mathias, See Rock City & Other Destinations

•Trey Parker, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone, The Book of Mormon

•Glenn Slater, Sister Act

•Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman, Catch Me if You Can



Outstanding Book of a Musical



•Kristen Anderson-Lopez, James-Allen Ford, Russ Kaplan and Sara Wordsworth, In Transit

•Iris Rainer Dart, The People in the Picture

•Stephan Elliott and Allan Scott, Priscilla Queen of the Desert: The Musical

•Adam Mathias, See Rock City & Other Destinations

•Trey Parker, Robert Lopez and Matt Stone, The Book of Mormon

•Michael Zam, The Kid



Outstanding Orchestrations



•Mary-Mitchell Campbell, Hello Again

•Bruce Coughlin, The Burnt Part Boys

•Simon Hale, Jim Abbott and David Yazbek, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

•Larry Hochman and Stephen Oremus, The Book of Mormon

•Marc Shaiman and Larry Blank, Catch Me if You Can

•Lynne Shankel, The Extraordinary Ordinary



Outstanding Music in a Play



•Wayne Barker, Peter and the Starcatcher

•Kathryn Bostic, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

•Lars Petter Hagen, Baby Universe

•Alan John, The Diary of a Madman

•Tom Kitt, The Winter's Tale

•Dan Moses Schreier,The Merchant of Venice



Outstanding Revue



•Fyvush Finkel Live!

•Newsical The Musical - Full Spin Ahead

•Rain: A Tribute to the Beatles on Broadway



Outstanding Set Design



•Rachel Hauck, Orange, Hat & Grace

•David Korins and Zachary Borovay (projection design), Lombardi

•Derek McLane, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

•Derek McLane, Anything Goes

•Tony Straiges, Treasure Island

•Mark Wendland, The Merchant of Venice



Outstanding Costume Design



•Tim Chappel and Lizzy Gardiner, Priscilla Queen of the Desert: The Musical

•Desmond Heeley, The Importance of Being Earnest

•Ann Hould-Ward, A Free Man of Color

•Martin Pakledinaz, Anything Goes

•Ann Roth, The Book of Mormon

•Paloma Young, Peter and the Starcatcher



Outstanding Lighting Design



•Jean Kalman, John Gabriel Borkman

•R. Lee Kennedy, See Rock City & Other Destinations

•David Lander, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

•Laura Mroczkowski, Spy Garbo

•Ben Stanton, The Whipping Man

•David Weiner, A Small Fire



Outstanding Sound Design in a Musical



•Lindsay Jones, The Burnt Part Boys

•Michael Rasbury, Hello Again

•Brian Ronan, Anything Goes

•Brian Ronan, The Book of Mormon

•Jon Weston, In Transit



Outstanding Sound Design in a Play



•Acme Sound Partners, The Merchant of Venice

•Acme Sound Partners and Cricket S. Myers, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

•Ian Dickinson, John Gabriel Borkman

•Brett Jarvis, Baby Universe

•Bray Poor, Wings

•Eric Shimelonis, The Hallway Trilogy



Outstanding Solo Performance



•Daniel Beaty, Through the Night

•Mike Birbiglia, Mike Birbiglia's My Girlfriend's Boyfriend

•Juliette Jeffers, Batman and Robin in the Boogie Down

•John Leguizamo, Ghetto Klown

•Colin Quinn, Colin Quinn Long Story Short

•Joanna Tope, The Promise



Unique Theatrical Experience



•Being Harold Pinter

•Circus Incognitus

•Gatz

•Play Dead

•Room 17B

•Sleep No More



PRODUCTIONS WITH MULTIPLE NOMINATIONS



12 The Book of Mormon

10 Anything Goes

7 The Merchant of Venice

6 Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo

6 Catch Me if You Can

6 See Rock City & Other Destinations

6 Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

5 Hello Again

5 How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying

5 Peter and the Starcatcher

5 Sister Act

5 The Kid

4 A Small Fire

4 In Transit

4 Priscilla Queen of the Desert: The Musical

3 A Bright New Boise

3 Baby Universe

3 Other Desert Cities

3 The Importance of Being Earnest

3 The Motherf**ker With the Hat

3 The People in the Picture

2 Born Yesterday

2 Good People

2 John Gabriel Borkman

2 Lombardi

2 Newsical The Musical - Full Spin Ahead

2 The Burnt Part Boys

2 The Diary of a Madman

2 The Divine Sister

2 The Hallway Trilogy

2 The House of Blue Leaves

2 The Normal Heart

Running in the red: How the U.S., on the road to surplus, detoured to massive debt By Lori Montgomery, Saturday, April 30, 8:02 PM

The nation’s unnerving descent into debt began a decade ago with a choice, not a crisis.
In January 2001, with the budget balanced and clear sailing ahead, the Congressional Budget Office forecast ever-larger annual surpluses indefinitely. The outlook was so rosy, the CBO said, that Washington would have enough money by the end of the decade to pay off everything it owed.
Voices of caution were swept aside in the rush to take advantage of the apparent bounty. Political leaders chose to cut taxes, jack up spending and, for the first time in U.S. history, wage two wars solely with borrowed funds. “In the end, the floodgates opened,” said former senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), who chaired the Senate Budget Committee when the first tax-cut bill hit Capitol Hill in early 2001.
Now, instead of tending a nest egg of more than $2 trillion, the federal government expects to owe more than $10 trillion to outside investors by the end of this year. The national debt is larger, as a percentage of the economy, than at any time in U.S. history except for the period shortly after World War II.
Polls show that a large majority of Americans blame wasteful or unnecessary federal programs for the nation’s budget problems. But routine increases in defense and domestic spending account for only about 15 percent of the financial deterioration, according to a new analysis of CBO data.
The biggest culprit, by far, has been an erosion of tax revenue triggered largely by two recessions and multiple rounds of tax cuts. Together, the economy and the tax bills enacted under former president George W. Bush, and to a lesser extent by President Obama, wiped out $6.3 trillion in anticipated revenue. That’s nearly half of the $12.7 trillion swing from projected surpluses to real debt. Federal tax collections now stand at their lowest level as a percentage of the economy in 60 years.
Big-ticket spending initiated by the Bush administration accounts for 12 percent of the shift. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have added $1.3 trillion in new borrowing. A new prescription drug benefit for Medicare recipients contributed another $272 billion. The Troubled Assets Relief Program bank bailout, which infuriated voters and led to the defeat of several legislators in 2010, added just $16 billion — and TARP may eventually cost nothing as financial institutions repay the Treasury.
Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus, a favorite target of Republicans who blame Democrats for the mounting debt, has added $719 billion — 6 percent of the total shift, according to the new analysis of CBO data by the nonprofit Pew Fiscal Analysis Initiative. All told, Obama-era choices account for about $1.7 trillion in new debt, according to a separate Washington Post analysis of CBO data over the past decade. Bush-era policies, meanwhile, account for more than $7 trillion and are a major contributor to the trillion-dollar annual budget deficits that are dominating the political debate.
As Congress prepares this week to launch a high-stakes battle over whether to raise the legal limit on borrowing, the analyses offer a clearer view of the drivers of the debt — and of the difficulty of re-balancing the budget without new tax revenue.
Most Republicans reject raising taxes as part of the solution; House Speaker John A. Boehner (Ohio) has called it a “non-starter.” But Democrats won’t go for a proposal based solely on spending cuts. The“Gang of Six,” a bipartisan Senate group dedicated to debt reduction, is expected to unveil a strategy as soon as this week that couples sharp spending cuts with a rewrite of the tax code that would raise additional revenue.
(The debt ceiling, set at $14.3 trillion, covers all federal debt, including money the Treasury owes other federal entities, such as the Social Security trust fund. The CBO data focus on the portion of the debt borrowed from outside investors. The debt is the accumulation of annual deficits; if annual budgets are in surplus, the nation can pay down the debt.)
The annual surpluses that set the nation on this course emerged in the final years of the Clinton administration. In the typical American household, a surplus comes as welcome news. But the White House is not a typical household. When Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin saw the budget shift into the black in 1998, he immediately warned President Bill Clinton that, politically, it was a mixed blessing.
Rubin wanted to use the surplus to start repaying the debt, which was then just more than $3 trillion. The White House billed it as “saving Social Security first,” viewing the surplus as an opportunity to shore up the nation’s finances before huge numbers of the baby boom generation began claiming federal retirement benefits. “The problem was a whole other part of the political spectrum wanted to use the surplus for tax cuts,” Rubin said in an interview. “They said they wanted to give the people back their money. Of course, it was also the people’s debt.”
What to do with the surplus became a central issue of the 2000 presidential campaign, with Vice President Al Gore arguing that much of it should be put in a “lockbox” to protect Social Security and Medicare. Bush pushed for a broad tax cut, arguing that taxpayers at all income levels were owed a refund. “Some say that the growing federal surplus means Washington has more money to spend, but they’ve got it backwards,” Bush said as he accepted the GOP nomination in August 2000. “The surplus is not the government’s money. The surplus is the people’s money.”
As soon as he took office, Bush pushed Congress to make good on his tax pledge. Less than a week after his inauguration, he got a boost from Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, who testified before the Senate Budget Committee that “tax reduction appears required” to prevent the federal government from accumulating too much cash. Greenspan feared that large surpluses would turn the government into the nation’s largest investor, creating distortions in the markets.
A chorus of skeptics warned against spending the surplus. Some stressed the inherent uncertainty of the CBO projections. Others said a big tax cut would unleash pent-up desire in both parties to pursue expensive priorities without the pay-as-you-go restraints that had helped produce the surplus.
Congress approved a $1.35 trillion tax cut in record time. A second package, worth $350 billion, followed in 2003. Together, they constituted one of the largest tax cuts since World War II, according to the conservative Tax Foundation.
Bush’s first Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, resigned after the White House decided to pursue the 2003 measure. “I believed we needed the money to facilitate fundamental tax reform and begin working on unfunded liabilities for Social Security and Medicare,” O’Neill said in an interview. But the White House, he said, was focused on improving economic growth for the fourth quarter of 2004. “They wanted to make sure economic conditions were great going into the president’s reelection.”
Proponents of tax cuts argue that the legislation merely returned tax collections to their appropriate levels. They note that the CBO’s 2001 forecast assumed that tax collections would stay above 20 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (defined as the total of all economic output) — well above the historic average of 18 percent of GDP.
“It’s not obvious that America was ready to have taxes at a level this high persistently,” said Donald Marron, a former CBO director who now heads the nonprofit Tax Policy Center. “Some degree of tax cutting was inevitable.”
But some key advocates of the tax cuts now say such a large reduction was probably ill-advised.
“Nobody would have thought that all these things would have happened after you cut taxes,” Domenici said. “That you’d have two wars and not pay for them. That you’d have another recession. A huge extravaganza of expenditures” for the military and homeland security after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. “You would pause before you did it, if you knew.”
Bill Thomas, the former House Ways and Means Committee chairman who helped shepherd the tax cuts through Congress, defended the 2003 package as “fuel for the economy.” But he said in an interview that the 2001 measure was larded with “stuff that I was not all that wild about,” including bipartisan priorities such as a big increase in the child tax credit and a break for married couples — provisions Thomas believes did little to promote economic growth and amounted to “throwing money out the window.”
“I couldn’t do anything about it,” said Thomas, a California Republican who retired in 2006. “You’re the candy man when you advocate those kinds of tax cuts.”
In the end, Bush cut taxes and spent more money. Good times masked the impact, as surging tax revenues reduced the size of year-to-year deficits during the first three years of his second term. But after the economy collapsed during Bush’s final year in office, deficits — and therefore the debt — began to explode as Obama sought to revive economic activity with more tax cuts and federal spending.
Today, the CBO forecasts are unrelievedly gloomy, showing huge deficits essentially forever. As policymakers grapple with the legacy of the past decade, a demographic wave of senior citizens is crashing at their doorstep, driving up the cost of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
William Hoagland, who was for years a top budget aide to Domenici and other GOP Senate leaders, said it is simplistic to think today’s fiscal problems began just 10 years ago. In 1976, as a young CBO analyst, Hoagland produced a long-term simulation that showed entitlement costs gradually overwhelming the rest of the federal budget.
“This situation really goes back to long before [the Bush administration], which is to say to old dead men that have long left the Congress,” he said.
Still, Hoagland said, the abandonment of fiscal discipline in the wake of the surpluses clearly didn’t help. “Nobody pushed for paying for this stuff,” he said. Not even after “it became very clear in the middle of 2003 that the line had turned on us. And the surpluses as far as the eye could see were no longer there.”