In my irregular series of postings on Britain’s social decline I bring you a column by Theodore Dalrymple concerning a young under-class woman. It’s Jerry Springer-esque, of course, not just paid for but practically ordered by a welfare state that has more or less abandoned all pretense of fostering or even supporting decent citizenship.

***Update***
Associated Press reports that Vaakya Viswanathan’s publisher Little, Brown and Company has asked book stores to pull “How Opal Mehta…” off the bookshelves and return all copies to the publisher.
***End update***

I love the smell of plagiarized-driven outrage and outrage moderation in the blogosphere. It smells like… I don’t know what that smell could be, but if my first two Opal Mehta posts weren’t enough, here comes number three!

(Spot the unattributed pop-culture references so far in this post!)

In high-end real estate it is apparently not uncommon to give listings insane For Sale prices, like $60 million for a Long Island mansion. The actual sale price might turn out to be something far less impressive, like $30 million. But both buyer and seller benefit from the deceptive price tag: The seller gets publicity and the buyer can show the world what a hard-broiled negotiator he is (plus, in the minds of many, he’ll still be the guy who bought a $60 million mansion, which clearly means his is bigger than yours). Similar tactics were used in the dotcom bubble, where Merger & Acquistion deals or other contracts were given headline-grabbing dollar amounts. In fact, the announced price was pure bull and the real price much less dramatic thanks to financial or markets goals that were deliberately set to be impossible to meet.

With such contract-size manipulations in mind, I’ve been wondering whether Kaavya Viswanathan’s $500,000 contract was really a $50,000 contract, but, no, I haven’t seen any reports indicating that the “half-a-rock” deal is really just a few pebbles.

I have a feeling that the Opal Mehta story is going to have legs well into next week. Here’s where we are right now:

Writer and editor Lee Kottner can’t believe the treacherous path down which Miss Kaayva Viswanathan was lead by her counselor, agent, packagers and editors:

Viswanathan… is a very young, untried, uncoached, first-time author, and her account of how her book came to be is an appalling tale of publisher’s greed and editorial negligence. Her editor claims that “We went through a couple of drafts.”

My jaw dropped when I read that, only because this was “a couple of drafts” based on a manuscript of 4 chapters and a synopsis (largely unheard of in fiction publishing, where agents usually want to see an entire manuscript) after they were bought by the publisher. After! Forgive me if I’m a little shrill, but everyone I’ve ever talked to in publishing, everything I’ve ever read by professionals has said in no uncertain terms that you need to have a complete, professional, edited manuscript of your novel before even thinking of writing query letters. This means a couple of drafts, at least, before anybody but you and possibly your writing group sees it.

What the hell was going on there? A crash course in creative writing? This poor young woman is sucked in the door by a “book packager,” handed off to the William Morris Agency, who then secures her an absurd advance (half of which went to the “book packager”) where she’s paired up with an editor who doesn’t know anything about Young Adult fiction. Another editor, one more familiar with the genre, might have caught the similarities before the book went to press. But the real point is that Viswanathan is an accidental author given next to no guidance. Hello? No wonder she’s in trouble.

In Ms. Kottner’s eyes, the circumstances exonerate Miss Viswanathan, or at least give her the benefit of doubt.

In yesterday’s post, Bend it like Viswanathan, I quoted a high school teacher lamenting widespread acceptance of cheating. Livejournalist montchan is Teacher’s Exhibit A:

God knows during my school days I plagiarized plenty. Why bother struggling on my own when others, much more qualified to do so anyway, had already done the work? Rarely, if ever have I written an essay which was my own. No excuse really, other than the ever-present pressure to achieve. However my readership was limited to 1 person, and Ms. Viswanathan apparently missed that point. Or maybe she did think she was smarter than the rest of us.

High school english teacher Michael Hobson sees in Miss Viswanathan a “real-world example” for his students. He also quotes two articles to illustrate the young plagiarist’s fall from grace.

Bill Poser at Language Log tries to make the case that Miss Viswanathan didn’t plagiarize. He doesn’t come close to persuading me, but perhaps he can sway you:

The question is, is there any plausible parallel scenario in which, if we assume, for the sake of argument, that Ms. Viswanathan is dishonest but of normal rationality, she would have plagiarized the passages in question?

I submit that there is not. On the one hand, unlike term papers and obscure academic journal articles, best-selling novels are read by a lot of people, and novels of the same sort are likely to be read by the same people. The risk of detection is therefore fairly high. On the other hand, what had she to gain? Remember, the passages in question are a miniscule part of her book and of no particular importance or salience. What could she possibly have hoped to gain by copying a few passages out of an entire book? With the risk of detection high and the potential gain nonexistent, to believe that Ms. Viswanathan engaged in plagiarism requires us to believe that she was utterly irrational.

What’s irrational about desperately wanting to finish a book that got you half of a $500,000 book contract? Especially if you convince yourself that by changing a few words you’re nore really plagiarizing anyway.

Heck, what rational good did rampant plagiarizing do Ben Domenech?

There is a good deal of jealousy and schadenfreude out there, and I don’t begrudge it one bit. I write for fun, not for profit, but for aspiring and made authors alike, it must be frustrating to see a nobody with not even a finished manuscript - not even a concept of her own - snag a big contract. Well, frustrating it is, apparently, and Livejournalist ribbonbelt isn’t afraid of saying it.

Donny B. in Chicago takes a shot at the edu-cultural Ivy League East Coast elites:

(On somewhat of a side note, I understand that a college sophomore with a huge book deal makes for an interesting read, but I don’t see the New York times profiling a lot of young writers, especially teenagers, in general. The incestuous, insular nature of New York and Ivy League schools (both with each other and in their own circles) is just plain annoying. There are plenty of young, talented writers with book deals in this country who actually write their own material. Rea Frey of Columbia College, my alma mater, wrote a well-received book while graduating as the valedictorian - where’s her profile?)

Not that Columbia isn’t a tad Ivy League, a tad East Coast, and a tad New York. Except Donny said Columbia College and not Columbia University. Donny’s point stands and mine is obliterated.

But there’s, understandably, also sympathy out there for Miss Viswanataha.

My Pet Goat notes two of the many irregularities we’ve witnessed at Harvard over the last few years:

I’m not saying that what Viswanathan did was OK, but I wonder to what extent she reflects her surroundings.

She also has a fun little parody song. Let’s call it “Springtime for Opal”

Livejournalist Rachel is singing a similar tune:

[S]he was SEVENTEEN when this whole thing started. I see a bright girl with dreams of being a published author. I see her parents putting incredible pressure on her to do well in school and become a doctor or lawyer or whatever it is that pushy parents want their daughters to be these days. I see her being approached by an agent, I see her seeing numbers on a check followed by lots of zeroes ($250,000, if we are to believe the news reports). I see a girl who didn’t know what she was getting into.

When you’re seventeen or eighteen it’s easy to believe that these editors, agents, and whatnot are “helping” you. I see a crowd of money-grubbing adults using a weak-minded teenaged girl to get them rich. Even if you don’t buy into the conspiracy theory, Kaavya Viswanathan was used.

Sure, she was used, but she also used. She used her parents’ money to buy successful Ivy League admissions coaching that also landed her a book and movie deal. It seems to me that she was fully engaged in the game until it steamrolled her.

But, yes, ages 17 - 19 aren’t exactly the peak years of one’s decision-making ability.

At the very heart of this scandal lies an issue much, much bigger than plagiarism, namely the mad scramble to get into an Ivy League-leve college. If you get in, the doors of opportunity swing wide open. If you don’t, you either have to find a way to leap-frog the thousands of students who are walking through those doors, or you likely won’t join the most elite of circles, you won’t get the kind of connections that can help elevate you from Vice President to CFO or COO and beyond.

Which brings us back to Miss Viswanathan. Had she not been caught plagiarizing she would have remained a celebrated genre-best-selling prodigy, maybe to the point where she could simply have stamped her name on her next book without having to worry at all about its “concept” or actually writing it since such mundane tasks can be done better by seasoned ghost writers. Instead she could have spent her time on the cicuit, selling her book, building her brand name, adding connections while becoming a connection herself for ambitious, young Harvard students or wannabe Harvard students.

There’s a lot more to this than a young woman who made a serious mistake than just a young woman who made a serious mistake.

That’s why I think this story wil be staying with us for a while.

Bostonist catches Beantown at its finest: A story that leaves you with sympathy for none of the involved parties (save for the black woman).

One post on Opal Mehta just isn’t enough, so here’s my second one.

Why am I attracted to this story? Because of all the proper, high-minded reasons: Integrity, honesty, creativity. Plus Harvard, a hot young chick, Ivy League admissions counselors, freaking half a million bucks (”half a rock” as Tony Soprano called it a couple of episodes ago), and a hot young chick.

What’s not to like?

There is one other thing. While my jury is on to what extent, if any, Kaavya Viswantahan’s Indian background plays into this scandal, several Indian and Desi bloggers think there is a connection (while some disagree). Because of their incredible competitiveness and academic achievements, Indians are making their presence felt in America’s cognitive elites, an elite Opal Mehta’s now disgraced author was practically destined to join.

On top of that, reactions to OM bring up interesting little tidbits about American life.

The best post on the Opal scandal I’ve seen is by desi lawyer-writer Ms. Viswanathan (whose post inspired the title of this post of mine). She brings sound wisdom to the proverbial table. In her case, it’s personal, too:

“You see, the twit has my last name… Viswanathan is actually a common South Indian name–I know at least six Viswanathans myself–but this is the first Viswanathan who has made an ass out of herself in my profession.”

I’ve never encountered a Viswanathan myself and had no idea the name is common. Lawyer-writer Viswanathan (as opposed to plagiarist-soon-to-meet-lawyers Viswanathan) offers the following suggestions and insights:

Yes, the first Viswanathan with a ridiculous fiction book advance is not a struggling lawyerwriter, but an Ivy League overachiever who got her book published through an Ivy League admissions consultant who knew the right people…

And not through hard work, either I’m not against college consulting–I do it myself–but when a respected, flashy, high profile agent like Suzanne Gluck gets involved, you know the big bucks are about clout, not manuscript. The actual agent is someone else, but the mere fact that William Morris took on a 17-year old author put this deal on another level. This was a handshake-behind closed doors deal, with everybody’s eye on the almighty, oh-so-literary, South Asian teen market. Nobody was talking about the writing.

(Anyway, folks, this is the way to get a literary agent. Connections. Stop sending slush out now and start inviting people out to drinks. I’m not kidding).

She has a lot more of interesting things to say and you should definitely read her post.

Johanna Edwards, another writer, passes along some interesting speculation regarding the relationship between Viswanathan and the “conceptualizers” at 17th Street:

In fact, 17th Street actually shares the copyright on Opal with Viswanathan. That’s a pretty huge deal, and it generally doesn’t happen unless the book producer has been responsible for a really large chunk of the novel. In other words, there’s a pretty decent chance that much of (or even all of) Viswanathan’s novel was ghostwritten. At the very least, it’s highly likely 17th Street had a major hand in shaping Opal. They may have written the outline or even heavily rewritten the book before it went to press.

Another interesting theory was recounted on this blog: “One person suggested to me that maybe 17th Street made up some kind of proposal or guideline sheet that included these quotes from McCafferty’s book as a style-to-shoot-for kind of thing, and someone (Kaavya or one of her collaborators) thought he/she could lift it, without realizing the original source. That seems like something that might easily happen in the too-many-cooks world of book packaging.”

Public high school teacher “Ms. Cornelius” sees the incident as an example of the “cheating culture” that many teenagers have no problem accepting. She writes on her blog about a student of her’s whom she caught cheating:

This is not a rotten kid– just an incredibly polite but disorganized one who needs some reinforcement of study skills and a big dose of accountability. Kid comes to class late, asks to go the restroom in the middle of class about three times a week, leaves the second the bell rings, and refuses to get help from me or a tutor or a study group, even during free time during the school day. Apparently, Kid has been claiming that he has been coming to me for tutoring for months now. Kid has been telling me, meanwhile, that his coach won’t let him miss practice, even when that sport is not in season, because, apparently, I am THAT gullible in this kid’s eyes. Meanwhile, Coach hyperbolically emails me that Meanie Me may cost the kid a college scholarship (carbon copied to half the building) and then provides as supporting evidence every racial stereotype you can imagine. Does this guy not realize that he is implying that the kid can’t do the work because he’s a minority? And aren’t there SOME KIND of academic requirements for athletic scholarships– unless, of course, you play for the Nebraska Cornhuskers? (Kidding!– a bit…)

Read the comments as well.

Tim Cavanaugh at Reason’s blog Hit and Run skewers the plagiarist for her egotistical spin:

Viswanathan has also pledged to add an acknowledgement to McCafferty, whose books Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings provided the source for some 40 phrases—so far—and the general outline of Viswanathan’s How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. She also has bravely outed herself as a “huge fan” of McCafferty’s work.

But she forgot to add, “I’m such a huge fan that I never mentioned her name in public, not even once, until I got caught ripping her off. And in fact last week when the Newark Star-Ledger asked me about my inspirations I replied, ‘Nothing I read gave me the inspiration.’”

This is what is so infuriating about high-profile plagiarism cases. The victim (and I realize, as Jesse Walker has noted in another context, that McCafferty will most likely benefit from this contretemps) is always somebody the plagiarist regards as too small to worry about.

Chick-lit author Ally Carter posted a note with the intriguing slug how-opal-got-way-more-publicity-than.html, which, according to Google’s blog search, opened with this:

I am insanely jealous of all the super, amazing, incredible, overwhelming publicity that surrounded How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life before word broke that the author had stolen passages from another author

.

The slug now results in a 404 page not found so I guess Carter decided to spike that post. But this is still up.

There were people willing to defend the young plagiarist from charges of plagiarism, but they’re dwindling in numbers. For example, on April 25, GoodLookiN on The Great Indian Mutiny group blog dismissed the allegations:

Come on guys, seriously, how can you even call this plagiarism?
Obivously, as she herself admited, she has read the book and absorbed the idea.
How is that wrong? As a business journalist, I do that all the time, you read up everything written about a guy before you interview him and some of it is bound to appear on your final work too.

Here is my take on the issue,
Young girls strikes it big in the publishing world at 19.
Some people turned green.
So they tooth comb every piece of similar work
Finds something similar and accuses her of plagarism.

But the next day it was Game Over:

It is becoming increasingly difficult to defend Kaavya Viswanathan.
In my previous post, I had argued that she be given the benefit of the doubt, you can’t exactly compare similarities to cut&paste jobs.

But, there are as many as 24 instances of such “parallels” — found their way without even cosmetic changes to make detection difficult. On the other hand, the cosmetic changes, where introduced, are perhaps even more telling.

The Mighty Middle also broke a lance for the beleaguered plagiarist:

I have no dog in this fight. I don’t read any of the authors involved. I don’t read chick novels generally. But this charge of plagiarism, at least based on the evidence cited, is bullshit.

…

The Harvard Crimson has played a nasty little game of gotcha, and perhaps hurt this young writer’s career. The accusation that a grand total of perhaps 200 words, out of 80,000, are similar to some other writers words, and that this constitutes plagiarism, is ignorant nonsense. By those standards every article that appears in the Crimson and includes phrases such as “sources say,” or “we have learned,” is plagiarized.

Leave the girl alone.

Hilariously, he kept breaking lances the following day, yesterday. The Mighty Middle is a ghostwriter who’s produced commercials for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, according to his bio page.

Most bloggers who have commented on the Opal Mehta scandal have little doubt that there was plagiarism, like ktbuffy:

I had lunch with a friend, also in publishing, and we spent a good portion of our hour talking about this, and I’ve spoken with other folks in the biz, and no one — NO ONE — thinks Viswanathan did this “unconsciously.” Where the matter seems to get a little more murky is whether 17th Street, the book’s packager, may have contributed to the case, intentionally or no, or whether their editors are just another line of readers that missed the plagiarism.

As mentioned above, some Indians/Indian-Americans claim to recognize the plagiarist’s cultural background, one that may have helped pushed her to places she should not have allowed herself to be pushed. Although not of Indian descent, Caroline M. does come from the same “cutthroat, get-into-college-or-you’re-doomed culture of suburban New Jersey” that shaped the Kaavya Viswanathan. However…

I have no sympathy for Kaavya Viswanathan. First of all, I don’t buy her “unconsciously adapted” excuse. What she did was plagiarism, plain and simple. I’ve been taking creative writing classes for years, I just finished a novella for credit, and I can tell you that I was downright paranoid about my writing even remotely resembling anyone else’s. There’s no way that Ms. Viswanathan couldn’t have noticed that her plot was parallelling that of Megan McCafferty’s Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings, let alone word-for-word “adaptations.” And not only is she going to make her publisher look bad, she’s going to make Harvard look bad (they were still brushing off the Blair Hornstine tarnish), and she’s going to make young writers look bad. Ms. Viswanathan’s plagiarism was an act of utter immaturity that, I speculate, is going to negatively influence teenage and young female writers’ image in the publishing world for quite some time. How many legitimate “chick lit” writers are going to have their books picked apart and embarrassingly scrutinized for resemblance to earlier works as a result of this?

Laura Vanderkam sees Viswanathan’s unraveling as a fall of a rare supposed child prodigy who was exploited by money-hungry elders:

I was thrilled that Viswanathan got a chance to write. But now any other 17-year-old coming to a publisher with a novel will be greeted with a cold stare. All because some packagers wanted to make a quick buck and pulled a novel out of this young woman quicker than she could actually write it herself, and because a publisher wanted to get a fresh new face out there so badly they didn’t vet the manuscript.

There’s no holding it back at ReadySteadyGo:

I am LOVING this. This is hitting every. single. one. of my schadenfreude receptors. I get to watch someone who is: younger, more academically accomplished, more writerly-ly accomplished, and insufferably self-absorbed in interviews fail miserably. In her first public statement she admitted to copying! And then she retracted it and did that whole plagiarism sidestep of “I read the book my book rips off and loved it, and must not have realized how much of it stuck with me.” As if. This whole idea that she’s fallen prey to the less-probable side of the monkeys-with-typewriters theory is just laughable.

Gawker provides an interesting (and funny) analysis through an Indian intern:

Whatever dubious subcontinental wunderkind Kaavya Viswanathan did write, didn’t write, had ghost-written, cribbed, subconsciously borrowed, telepathically stole, or else was brainwashed into doing by a bunch of Pakistanis hell-bent on subverting India’s credibility in the burgeoning Southeast Asian chick-lit genre, at least one thing is clear: shit like this is the reason brown kids should stick to quantitative math and organic chemistry. Ms. Viswanathan, after all, had all the hallmarks of future i-banker or doctor. Namely:

Click to find out!

Update:
The following sites have kindly linked to this post:
Boston Gal’s Open Wallet
Bostonist
Happy Scrappy
Universal Hub

I added another Opal Mehta post yesterday.

A Harvard student - a sophomore - who was fortunate enough to land a $500,000 book deal has been exposed as a plagiarist. Side by side comparisons* strongly suggests that the young author, or “typist,” as Dan Kennedy, visiting assistant professor at Northeastern University and Boston’s ranking media critic, calls her on his blog, has lifted portions of a book written by another author and peddled it as her own work. The Crimson Copy Copper has apologized for including text that is remarkably similar to her better’s, but defends herself by claiming that she didn’t really plagiarize, she had merely “internalized” the other author’s work.

That defense is seemingly pathetic, but actually brilliant, in a cool, ironic way.

When professors are caught plagiarizing, they don’t hesitate to throw their poor student-assistants under the proverbial bus, blaming them for having taken notes from other authors’ works without sufficiently labeling them as such, thus tricking Professor Brilliance into thinking that he himself had written that kick-ass 46-page chapter on the connection between the demise of eskimo whale hunting in the North Atlantic and the use of slave labor in Virginia.

While our young plagiarist probably can’t reasonably even pretend to blame her professors for the plagiarism, she can use the psycho-fraudical framework of contemporary Academia to try to wash off the mud she rolled in. Hence, no plagiarism, just “internalizing.” To poorly paraphrase an old “Wiseguy” episode: “I can see Harvard was good for you.”

There are additional twists to the story, as reported by the Boston Globe:

Born in Chennai, India, Viswanathan lived in England for about a decade before moving to the United States. Her high school college counselor, also a published author, recognized her budding literary talent and helped her get an agent. The agent steered Viswanathan toward a company that helps young writers package book ideas; editors there helped her conceptualize the novel.

”There was more shaping to this book than we usually do,” Asya Muchnick, Viswanathan’s editor, told the Globe in the February interview.

To put it in vulgar and hyperbolic terms: She plagiarized while ghost writing her own book.

* I internalized that phrase from Kennedy’s blog, but removing the dashes was my own original thinking and creative writing.

Congress may on the verge of passing of an immigration bill that would add hundreds of thousands of unskilled foreign workers to the U.S. labor market every year. The reason is that America supposedly doesn’t have enough workers to fill certain kinds of low-end jobs. Econ 101 tells you that such reasoning most charitably can be called a government intervention in the labor market (a less charitable description would be to say that it amounts to stealing from workers).

But as I have pointed out a few times over the past couple of years, Econ 101 aside, there just doesn’t seem to be much truth to the idea that there’s a lack of bodies in America. What we have is a) a lack of jobs or b) a bunch of people who don’t want to work or c) employers who don’t want to hire certain kinds of Americans.

As we’re getting close to summer and crime continues to rack up victims in Boston we’ve reached the time of the year where young urban men and their advocates complain that there aren’t many jobs around. The Boston Herald reports:

Community advocates call it a recipe for tragedy: Hub shootings are soaring as money for summer jobs to put at-risk youths to work is sorely lacking.

“The funds are just not there,” said John Drew, executive vice president of Action for Boston Community Development. “At this point, as best I can tell from where we are, we have the possibility of putting half the kids to work we had last year.”

ABCD scraped together roughly $1 million for summer jobs last year from government grants and private fund-raising. That was enough to employ 1,100 young men and women from low-income families. Three times that many had to be turned away.

“If you are concerned about shootings, what are you going to do when your kids are out of school all day? We have a place for them to go. We just need some help,” Drew said.

The number of people hit by gunfire on city streets skyrocketed through the first four months of the year, jumping to 110 from 65 at this time last year, according to Boston police figures.

“There aren’t that many opportunities out there right now,” said Miguel De Los Santos, 19, of Roxbury, who got his first job in a church child-care center through the ABCD program at 16. “If I didn’t have a job I would just be hanging out with my friends.”

ABCD last year was awarded roughly $600,000 of the state summer jobs money allotted to Boston and hopes to again get a cut this summer of the $4.2 million currently set aside in the proposed state budget, Drew said.

Boston runs its own summer jobs program that last year hired 3,300 teens, while a third program administered by the Boston Private Industry Council put 800 youths to work in local companies last summer.

(Emphasis mine).

There will be tens of thousands of jobs available on Cape Cod this summer, as every summer, but they will be filled mainly by foreign workers with seasonal work visas. The excuse there is that the season starts just a little bit before school’s out and ends after school’s started in the fall. Hell’s bells, what an unfortunate thing for the Cape Cod business community.

And don’t give me the “access to jobs” BS spiel. The Cape Cod workers are flown in from all around the world, for crying out loud.

(There’s of course a compelling reason to shaft Americans in favor of foreigners: Cathy Young’s from the Soviet Union!)

The skinny, as reported by the Boston Globe:

Senate leaders this week will propose legislation to offer all workers in Massachusetts up to 12 weeks’ paid time off to care for newborn and adopted children or sick family members, financed by an employee payroll premium of at least $1.50 a week.

The bill, which would pay employees their full salary, up to $750 a week, would create the most generous paid leave policy in the nation.

So while our state reps can’t bring themselves to rolling back the state income tax to 5.0% - as the people has demanded in a referendum that passed with overwhelming majority - supposedly because they need the money to prevent the state from collapsing into barbary, they manage to propose another expenditure financed by a new payroll tax. Thanks, guys, for reminding us how dumb and erroneous our position is compared to the brilliance of yours. Keeping more of our earned income vs. giving up more of our earned income so you can determine how it’s allocated? Obviously the money should pass through the hands of you state reps! And, please, while you’re at it, make sure to set up an agency that can not only administer the new payroll tax, but also harangue companies about their obligation to pay it, and to inform workers about their right to paid family leave. I don’t think a costly print, radio, and TV ad campaigns would be out of place. Also, don’t fortget to add the paid family leave to those colorful sheets employers have put on their workplace walls.

What a glorious opportunity for you guys to give cushy jobs to friends and family! While this may not reduce migration out of state (and did I mention that Massachusetts is the only state whose net migration fell over the past five years compared to the 1990’s? Well, yes I did) but it sure should make it easier for your buddies to make a good living here.

And for them to be able to make a good living, you sure as heck can roll back the state income tax, can you?

Business and labor are pondering what positions they should take on this issue, but the brainiacs in American Academia have made up their minds:

”People are already paying a high cost to take leaves,” said Randy Albelda, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. ”Individuals are paying a particularly high cost over a short period of time. What this does is spread the cost over everyone, now and over time.”

Ah, yes, what would parents do about the “particularly high cost over a short period of time” that child birth brings with it? Besides plan for it, I mean? And what’s up with this credit card mentality? Get it now, pay for it for the rest of your working life! Perhaps Mr. Albelda personally endorses those credit card solicitations that freshmen students are innundated with? “Get your iPod and other cool shit now, pay for it in 144 easy payments! It’s all about Net Present Value, yo, and what you presently value is tunes on the ‘Net, ‘aight! -Cool Cat Albelda.”

Ann Bookman, executive director of the MIT Workplace Center, predicted the plan could help stem the exodus of workers out of state. ”People see this as something for working families,” she said. ”But it will help employers. It will create a more stable and more engaged workforce. Workers won’t have to worry they’ll lose their jobs if they exercise their right to leave. This will send a message — we want Massachusetts to be a model for workers at different income levels.

”Families are in a lot of difficulty right now. A lot of workplaces aren’t set up to accommodate the dual pressures people are feeling: They have to hang on to their jobs but have to care for their families. This new initiative will resolve that,” she said.

I’m going to stick my neck out here and suggest that what would do more, way more, to stem the exodus of workers would be to roll back the state income tax to 5%, as voters demanded in a referendum a few years ago. While generous and clever compensation indeed can create a more stable and engaged workforce, there are a couple of caveats here.

Remember DEC? Did you ever hear anybody who ever worked there complain about instability or lack of compensation?

The other problem is that a perk that is available to everyone everywhere isn’t really a perk but an entitlement. An entitlement creates engagement for nothing more than the entitlement itself.

Like Governor Mitt Romney and the Democrat legislators did with their health care plan, the senate big-wigs are setting up a vote-buying scheme. It should be rejected, at least until the state income tax has been rolled back to 5%.

Update: Jay Fitzgerald doesn’t much cre for the proposal.

Today I had an otherwise pleasant conversation that reminded me of Boston College’s heart-crushing 31-26 loss to Notre Dame in 1998. The Eagles had fallen behind, but then rallied fought their way to a first down on the 2-yard line in the final minute. From there, the Eagles somehow failed to score. They did so even though their center was Damien Woody, eventual 1st round NFL draft pick and Super Bowl winner, and their tailback was Mike Cloud, eventual 2nd round NFL draft pick.

That was a tough, tough loss.

Anywhere else, apparently.

The United States Census Bureau has released migration statistics for the periods 1990-2000 and 2000-2004. Note that these numbers only cover net movement within the United States, not immigration to or emigration from the Republic.

It is no surprise that Massachusetts had a negative migration, that is, more people moved out of the state than moved to it. Perhaps somewhat more surprising is that while all other states in New England experienced improved net migration in 2000-2004 compared to 1990-2000, Massachusetts’ worsened.

The overall trend in America is that people are moving from the Northeast, from the Midwest and from California to the South (especially the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida) and the Mountain West. Migration in general seems to have abated somewhat compared to the 1990’s, which saw, among other things, a massive exodus of Anglo-whites from California, but it is still significant. The annual average number of net migrants to Nevada actually incresed in 2000-2004 compared to 1990-2000, but the state’s population is now so large that it amounted to a decrease of the migration rate. A map that compares states according to their net migration status in 1990-2000 and 2000-2004 gives a pretty good overview.

Living and loving it in Boston, I care mostly about what happens up here, so I’d like to bring to your attention a letter to the editor in daily freebie newspaper Metro Boston from April 18, 2006:

The fact that the cost of housing is pushing the young out of Boston is nothing new globally. Many see prices in Boston as high, when in fact compared to cities around the world, they are cheap. I moved from London, where I had a 75-minute commute, and now have a 14 minute commute and a bigger apartment. Cities like Hong Kong, Tokyo, London and many others with financial sectors are significantly more expensive, with salaries not so dissimilar. I manage a search firm here in Boston and we are seeing tremendous growth in the financial services, pharmaceutical and technology industries locally, attracting top talent to the area from inside and outside the United States. These people will buy houses or rent and continue to drive up prices levels similar other major cities globally.

Housing within an hour’s commute of Boston is exceptionally cheap compared to most comparable cities around the world. In the age of globalization, Boston should start comparing itself to its global peer group. It may shock some.

One of my cousins worked for a Swedish multinational company in Hong Kong for a couple of years, where he lived in an outrageously expensive apartment in a massive complex. On the other hand, he did have a live-in maid, something he could never have afforded in Sweden. A couple of other cousins of mine worked as waitresses in London for a while, where they literally time-shared a bed in a crowded but centrally located apartment. Life can be hard in those glitzy world-class cities.

I’m not convined that Boston has much business comparing itself to London, Hong Kong, or New York, but the letter writer has a valid point in that the upscale newcomers drive up housing prices. It’s similar to a more expansive point I’ve made before: Native-born members of the middle class are squeezed from both below - by unskilled, low-income immigrants - and above - by high-salary, highly-educated immigrants. The immigrant upper-class probably has more use for the immigrant lower-class (with its maids, security guards, dry cleaners and so on) than for the natives.

Something has to give. Boston cannot continue to attract newcomers, hold on to its native borns and remain as low-dense as it currently is. Something has to give, and right now it is the native middle class. An alternative approach would be to drastically expand housing through carefully planned and pretty much subsidized housing for both middle class and lower-class people (though not mixed with each other, because then you’ll just end up with a lot of under class). A higher-density city would of course also require a dramatically expanded T service, among other things.

I don’t even know if that’s a particularly attractive option and I doubt it could win much support.

Until external factors change, expect Boston and the rest of Massachusetts to continue their demographic bleeding and social stratification.

Boston Phoenix’s media reporter Mark Jurkowitz has an interesting post on his blog regarding the commercially and sometimes journalistically shaky ethnic media in our region.

Apparently, even the bilingual Chinese-American Sampan is having financial troubles.

I’d be lying if I said I was a friend of foreign-language ethnic media. I am not and I wish it would go away.* English-language ethnic media, however, is an entirely different beast in my estimation. Such a newspaper can not only provide its ethnic community with news, commentary and a sense of community (so to speak) but also offer outsiders a glimpse into said community. That’s one reason I like Sampan so much. It not only publishes news relevant to Boston’s Chinese and Chinese-American community (mostly about Chinatown, of course), but also includes discussions on fairly sensitive topics, like the relationship between Japanese/Japanese-Americans and Chinese/Chinese-Americans. Even if you don’t find stuff like that interesting, it might be a little useful to know what the publishers of the newspaper think interest their community, some of your fellow Bostonians.

According to Jurkowitz, many ethnic media outlets are struggling financially. The point counterpoint debate on that might go like this:

- Well, most newspapers suffer from falling or stagnating ad revenue.

- Yes, but this is a growth sector, a rapidly growing demographic.

- Sure, but it’s splintered between Haitians, Chinese, Central Americans, Russians, Koreans, Congolese, Irish, Nigerians, Vietnamese…

- True, but they often prefer ethnic media.

- Okay, but here’s a bottom-line for you: Many of them are poor, some even illiterate. They’re not exactly the most premium newspaper market imaginable. Take this factoid as an example: In 2010 Hispanics are projected to sit on 9% of consumer spending. That’s great, but by then they’ll make up 16% or so of the population and they skew heavily younger than the overall population. Just because ethnic newspaper were a hit among Ellis Islanders a hundred years ago doesn’t mean they’re destined to be players today.

Controversial blog-commenter “N.” (and I’m not him, I swear) makes a good point on Jurkowitz’s blog:

I worry about the Globe and Herald; NOT little undesired papers. They should worry about how to integrate their concerns within the larger community, how to get a Somali or Chinese reporter to get into a Globe or Herald and raise awareness, if not by his/her reporting then by the higher profile and more people will ask questions and would get closer to that ethnic community.

I largely agree with that. As much as I like Sampan, it is far more important to me that Boston remains a city with two major newspapers. I also happen to think that both newspaper do a decent job at covering local immigrant communities, and also issues that affect such communities, such as education, the job market and so on.

Unlike Jurkowitz, I actually think both the Herald and the Globe do a decent job of reporting on the changing demographics of our city and region. I’m not saying they’re doing a great job, and the Globe in particular could do well to hire a Metro columnist who’d break the reigning black/white duopoly, but it is not as if rapid the growth of immigrants and non-whites has gone unnoticed by the two big ones.

*Disclosure: I run a Swedish-language web site, but most of its traffic, by a very wide margin, comes from Dominicans/Dominican-Americans, African-Americans and Red Sox-Americans who just can’t get enough Manny Ramirez.