Deans serve five year terms and often seek another 5 year term.  In this age of performance criteria, how are Deans evaluated?  Since they were originally chosen by the Provost, the Provost has a slight conflict of interest in determining whether the Dean has done a bad job during his/her 1st term.  Departments who are part of the Dean's Empire do not have the right incentives to tell the truth about the Dean's performance. If they anticipate that the Dean will be re-appointed and their remarks will become known to the Dean, then the Dean may seek revenge.   With faculty, external letters play a key role in determining evaluation but with Deans there is no role for such letters because all of the Dean's effort is unobserved by outsiders.  If the Deans are evaluated on money raised, then this raises the counter-factual of how much $ would another Dean have raised?  Are Deans at a university benchmarked relative to each other? But, how can the Dean of Social Sciences be compared to the Dean of the Medical School at the same University?

So, what is the "efficient way" to evaluate a Dean's performance? If we are unable to design such a performance metric and do not promote Deans based on this metric then what does this mean about the future of our universities?   You might say that the same issue arises with respect to managers of Fortune 500 firms but is this true? The external market for talent and poaching by other firms provides a market test of the quality of internal talent.  

With faculty members, we are one person firms and there is a clear link between our reputation and our teaching and research work which can all be quantified using various metrics. Deans engage in Team Production. If the Law School makes great strides during Dean X's reign, how much credit does the Dean receive and deserve?  Did the previous Dean make the hires and these people reached their peak production during Dean X's reign?  Did the economy boom when Dean X was in charge and the donations flowed in?  Note that this point is similar to the CEO pay for luck literature.

My big question here is how does a non-profit organization know when it does and when it doesn't have excellent leadership and what incentives are in place to encourage such efficient sorting?

For everyone who teaches undergraduate economics and seeks fresh examples for teaching the time consistency problem, the New York Times serves up a beauty.  

Read this NY Times article about California's High Speed Rail.  The following quote I reproduce below highlights a similar theme as my recent PNAS China Bullet Train paper.

I'm not sure why I keep volunteering to do this but I'm teaching undergraduate environmental economics at UCLA in the summer of 2013.  This is your chance (and may be your last chance for a long time) to take this exciting course.

If I might quote, Johnny Cash; "I went down to a Ring of Fire ..."   --- I won't sing for you but I do want to highlight this piece in the LA Times about the social interactions between the 1% and the 99% at the beach.  Here is a juicy quote from the comments section:

"HiVeloCT at 4:24 AM March 29, 2013

I've lived in Orange County since the early 60's and the privileged few who can afford oceanfront property have ALWAYS tried to run off those they consider to be "riff raff".  I have no doubt that those trying to get rid of these firepits light up their fireplaces, BBQ grills and similar sources of "particulate" pollution on a regular basis without any regard for the air quality."

So, this is a classic case of rich coastal home owners trying to privatize the beach and get rid of the middle class folks who like to hang out at the beach at night and gather around the fire pits.  For those of you who do not live close to the Ocean (I live 6 miles from the Pacific), the photo below will show you what this is about.




The nearby home owners worry about particulate matter being created and they may be right but nobody has bothered to monitor this.  The pit dwellers claim that this concern is just a "smoke screen" (pun intended) to use a politically correct means (environmental protection) to get the "unwashed" off the beach.  This general theme interests me because it speaks to the issue of certain interest groups using environmental protection as a means to achieve ulterior goals (income stratification) or at least to achieve two goals at once (clean air and class separation).  The comment I quoted above suggests that there is a backlash against this attempt and the author of the LA Times article clearly sides with the 99% on this issue.

In this age of non-stop talk about the 1% and the 99%, are the 99% "out of the loop" when they attend Ivy League Schools?  In that past, this question might have focused on not being invited to the cool parties but a group of students at Yale Law School argue that students from lower-income backgrounds are out of the professional loop at YLS and this is diminishing their chances to be big stars as practicing lawyers or future law professors.

Undergraduates whose parents went to college are more likely to know how to "play the game" in terms of non-cognitive skills such as appearance, attitude and doing the little things to raise the probability of success in applying for jobs.  This Simpsons clip will explain what I mean.  This "Young JFK" is classy.  At the modern university, whose job is it to provide such "polish"?  The faculty certainly aren't providing these skills.   Should we be?

This article  documents that people seeking a coastal summer vacation along the Atlantic Ocean are substituting away from the New Jersey Shore because so many of the NJ communities have been badly injured by Hurricane Sandy.  These communities will lose tourist $ because of the shock but the tourists' dollars do not end up in a Cyprus bank account. Instead, there are other substitute locations for the tourists to visit instead.

"In nearby Sea Isle City, whose Chamber of Commerce leased the billboard outside the Lincoln Tunnel, a spike in rentals suggests they have succeeded in poaching some vacationers from the New York City area. “We’re going to have a very good summer as a result,” said Christopher Glancey, the chamber president and a real estate broker."

Note how competition protects the households seeking a tourist summer at the beach and this competition provides strong incentives for damaged beach communities to rebuild in smarter ways so that they are more resilient against the next Hurricane.  Note that this is about making $.  This isn't about "saving the whales".  If coastal towns want to survive in this age of climate change, they have strong incentives to be smarter about their design and architecture.  This is the small ball of adaptation at work!

From age 2 to age 7, I lived here in Manhattan in apartment #4c.

Today, there are some punchy letters in the NY Times.  This lively section tends to suffer from a fundamental selection issue that some anonymous editor chooses which letters to publish and he/she tends to choose letters that selectively affirm his/her world view.  I would prefer a "crowd source" approach where "the people" vote and the most popular ones are published.

As a tenured academic and as the spouse of a tenured academic, and as the son in-law of an emeritus tenured academic, and as the son of a tenured academic at NYU, and as the father of a future tenured academic, I like this letter;

Nasty Gal has moved to Center City Los Angeles.  Why?

"Ms. Amoruso moved Nasty Gal to Los Angeles in 2011, to be closer to her merchants and models. She shunned office space in Santa Monica, where ShoeDazzle and BeachMint are based, for less glamorous space downtown, where 20-something Nasty Gal employees in mesh crop tops, leggings and platform shoes stand out from the paralegals. (Shortly after the move, one employee was berated by a lawyer in the building who saw “Nasty Gal Creative Studio” and assumed it was a pornography studio.)"

This blog post is 1/2 a joke and it is 1/2 a statement about the future of Center City real estate demand. Who needs to be downtown?  Who can visit infrequently by bullet train?