Posted 1:30 PM by Robert

... and Keynes Wittily Replied, "In The Long run, We'll All Be Heavily Discounted!"

In the 1970’s and 1980’s one heard much about the deepest secret of the then-enviable Japanese economic success: long term planning. American companies were dismissed as obsessed with what was sometimes described as their even puerile attention to short term profitability. Americans just would never understand that the secret was market share – not profitability. Infinitely wise septuagenarian and octogenarian corporate and government bureaucrats meditated from Tokyo that profitability was for the long term. First, the wise business had to plan for the long term and acquire market share. The septuagenarians and octogenarians probably never actually addressed the pathetic and awestruck American journalists before them as “grasshopper,” but it was implied.


American business? Doomed. Doomed. All doomed. The most that could be hoped for was that the Japanese industries could be pressured into locating some assembly plants among the bean fields.

It was all cultural, you see. “Asian values.” “Long term planning” seemed to follow naturally, perhaps from traditional Asian veneration of the aged. America could never compete.

And to make matters worse, there was that phrase: “long term planning.” Where had we heard that before? Yes! It was the Stalinists – the Communists – in the 1930’s! Western private capitalism is incapable of long term planning, they said! The Commies had been right, after all. They just hadn’t gotten down every nuance – but now the Japanese had figured that out, too. They figured it out in the same infernal way they managed to get all the knobs to stay on indefinitely in their cars – not like Ford or GM, where the knobs fell off right away if the car was made on a Monday or a Friday.

Despite all that, as Emperor Hirohito once said, recent developments have not necessarily been to Japan’s advantage. What happened? There is obviously no one thing that has happened, but I would like to focus on one very powerful and strangely overlooked parameter: interest rates. In particular, I would like to focus on the fact that interest rates paid by the export sector of the post-war Japanese economy were generally very low compared to what a market economy would have set. That is, the rates of interest paid by such export sector companies were rigged by the Japanese government to be low. In fact, for substantial periods – once the effects of other financing devices, such as stock warrants, are included - such interest rates were slightly negative.

So what?

Well, applying basic economic principles to irreducible “culturally determined” phenomena can sometimes produce a giddiness like what one feels seeing aqua regia applied to gold. Works of Gary Becker, which allow for such things as accounting for tastes and examination of the economic substructure of family values, can feel uncomfortably like swimming in a pool of universal solvent.

Interest rates determine what a Dollar (or Yen) today is worth compared to a Dollar (or Yen) tomorrow. Does a company pay annual interest of 5%? Then the company would just as well take $.95 now or $1.00 a year from now. So as the interest rate payable by a company gets very low, the company will be satisfied with taking more and more of its profits in the future – not today. And when real interest rates payable become negative, then the company will want to take all of its profit in the future. Management can become very wise and philosophical because it is no longer necessary to make money.

Of course, it can't last. Real interest rates in Japan were never generally as low as the export sector (and other favored sectors, such as construction) paid. Those favored sector rates were being subsidized. By whom? By long suffering Japanese families, who had very few places to put their savings, all of which paid preposterously low returns. But as the favored sectors grew inexorably, it all eventually had to end. And it is likely that a good many of those infinitely wise septuagenarian and octogenarian bureaucrats knew that it had to end.

Long term planning is much beloved by septuagenarian and octogenarian bureaucrats, because the turnover in that demographic is, shall we say, rather brisk. When the consequences of those long-ago investment decisions mature, the people who made them will no longer be around to be held to account.

And how about those Commies? Well, it’s probably not a coincidence that interest rates in the 1930’s were very low all over the world. And just the way a rising stock market makes every investor look a genius, very low interest rates make “long term planners” shine – at least for a while.

But the reason market interest rates would have been higher than the ones the government chose is that interest rates correspond to risk. If rates are too low, then there eventually will be a banking crisis, because the banks aren't charging enough for their loans for the risks involved. Further, when the cost of capital is inefficiently low, investments in capital-intensive projects such as factories seem to make a lot more sense than they should, so a lot more capital spending tends to go on than is economically efficient - which diverts capital from more efficient but less favored uses. And, sure enough, Japan went through a huge capital spending boom and now has a huge banking crisis, and fewer business philosophers. And it has been there for more than ten long years.

And the Commies? Well, what's to be said?

I believe it was Benjamin Franklin who observed that a real interest rate of twelve percent would draw money from the moon. Ben was right. But an interest rate of .0012% has done something even more amazing. It has drawn philosophy from Japanese and Stalinist bureaucrats. You get what you pay for.

Posted 12:32 PM by Robert

No Mo' Up No'

An InstaPundit link informs us that the Canadian government has enacted a law that criminalizes hate propaganda on matters such as race, and that a leading Canadian gay rights group has called for this law to be extended to include speech about sexual orientation. If this bill passes, Maureen Dowd may for a while want to steer clear of policemen with thick rubber soles on their shoes, or wearing those broad flat brimmed hats with red coats. They may want to ask her some pointed questions about exactly what she had in mind when she wrote that “Over and over, you see alpha males, who would otherwise be plotting to crush one another, forming alliances to crush the uppity alpha woman in their midst. The corporate culture is still reeking of testosterone. … The Washington political culture is full of vintage testosterone.”

If words analogous to Ms. Dowd’s were published charging professional women “over and over” with “forming alliances to crush” heterosexual males, and asserting that social structures (say, the League of Women Voters or the Little Sisters of Charity) “reeked” of estrogen, there would be no hesitation in Ms. Dowd’s neighborhood to label such words for what they are: hate speech. As an insightful reader puts it: "It seems that Maureen Dowd believes that those of us with Y chromosomes must have our own version of 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.'" Yes, it does seem that way, and it also seems as though some Canadians now want to do something about this kind of thing.

Of course, to revert to those Canadian issues, “sexual orientation” is not just code language for “gay” – it means what it says, and heterosexual males have “sexual orientation,” too. So, Ms. Dowd, keep your eye on the Canadian Parliament – it’s a surprisingly entertaining body when in session, with none of the reserve we southerners expect of our Congress. And don’t plan any Montreal vacations until the dust settles.

Posted 3:08 PM by Robert

Exploring the Goreocosm

If the caliber of mail received here is any indication, the readership of the Man Without Qualities likely has more than a general familiarity with recent theories explaining the early history of the Universal Macrocosm.

These begin, of course, with the “Big Bang Theory,” which posits the near instantaneous swelling of the Macrocosm from a point of virtual nothingness. As many readers will no doubt have recited to their children at bedtime, Albert Einstein believed the Universe to have a uniform distribution of matter, but his own calculations proved the exact opposite. Einstein was compelled to amend his original equation. He used the term "cosmological constant", which created a spherical, four-dimensional closed universe. The Big Bang Theory is supplemented by “Inflation Theory,” which posits that following the Big Bang itself, the Macrocosm underwent a period of expansion at an inconceivable rate, a period known as the “inflationary epoch.” During this eventful epoch, the Macrocosm in less than one thousandth of a second doubled in size at least one hundred times, from an atomic nucleus to 1035 meters in width!

As with the Universal Macrocosm, so too with the early Al Goreocosm. We have already seen that Mr. Gore’s official biographies posit his near-instantaneous swelling to quasi-genius status from the virtual nothingness of a slacking Saint Alban’s and Harvard freshman “stoner.” In a previous post, the Man Without Qualities, following in the tortured path of Einstein himself, has suggested (for purposes of theoretical investigation only, of course) a kind of the “Goreomological Constant” in the form of possible “crib notes” helpfully provided by the office of Gore pere.

No doubt spurred on by Aaron Sorkin’s clarion call for a more intense analysis of Al Gore’s résumé, a helpful and astute reader has now identified the missing Goreomological “Inflationary Epoch!” It seems that Larry Summers, once Treasury Secretary in the Clinton/Gore administration and now President of Harvard, has been kicking up quite a fuss about “grade inflation” at that institution. That fuss, in turn, has resulted in the appearance of a Boston Globe report on Harvard's grade inflation. According to the Globe and the helpful reader, undergraduate honors at Harvard increased from 32 percent in 1946 to 91 percent in 2001, with the greatest growth in the 1960s and early '70s, and then again during the last 15 years. Vietnam-era draft boards panicked Harvard students and teachers, so that inflated grades became the moral equivalent of opposition to the war, helping prevent all but 19 Harvard College men from dying in Southeast Asia. It seems that 1969 was the defining moment in grade inflation: SAT scores for entering freshmen fell for the first time in years, yet the proportion of A's and B's shot up by 10 percent and the rate of honors continued climbing sharply. This coincides exactly with the time Mr. Gore started to "get serious."

Did Mr. Gore do well at Harvard after all? Or did he just bobble up into the ‘honors” category in a crapulous fog of marijuana smoke? Perhaps a statistician such as the redoubtable Iain Murray (or perhaps Charles Murtaugh) would care to undertake an analysis of whether Mr. Gore really would have received honors at Harvard if adjustment is made for the Vietnam era Goreomological “Inflationary Epoch.”

Now, the Man Without Qualities is not much of a credentialist, and would not ordinarily advocate a close analysis of any politician’s undergraduate résumé. It is only the curious syzygy of Mr. Gore’s biographical pretentiousness, Mr. Sorkin’s insouciance and Mr. Summers’ reforming zeal that has led to this juncture. But syzygys have often been associated with the birth of great figures in history – so why not Mr. Gore? Of course, with friends like Messrs. Sorkin and Summers, one might wonder if Mr. Gore might be selling apples on Canal Street by the end of the decade. But that will be revealed only in the fullness of time.

Posted 10:45 PM by Robert

The Zeta Girl

Maureen Dowd says that she is puzzled.

Specifically, Ms. Dowd attributes her puzzlement to the lack of persistence through the human life cycle of “Alpha Girl” dominance. Ms. Dowd explains that “Alpha girls ruthlessly rule junior high school, a la ‘Heathers,’ with cold shoulders, hot clothes and withering looks known as ‘deaths,’ jettisoning pathetic Wannabees from their popular Queen Bee hives.”

Ms. Dowd says “But here is what puzzles me: If schools are overrun with alpha girls, why isn't America run by alpha women?”

Yes, indeed. Why doesn’t it last?

Despite her puzzlement, Ms. Dowd has no shortage of possible explanations for the failure of the Alpha Girls to retain their dominance in adulthood. And – is this a surprise? – all of Ms. Dowd’s suggestions portray women as victims, and not one of them suggests that any of the women involved bear any responsibility whatsoever for their ultimate position in life.

Ms Dowd’s suggestions:

“Could it be that alpha men do not want to share their alpha zone with alpha women?”

“Could it be that they don't want women to challenge them, question them or, heaven forbid, outmaneuver them?”

“Could it be that they prefer the less competitive and more appreciative company of beta, gamma and va- voom girls?”

Well, Ms. Dowd, here is another suggestion. Perhaps life outside of junior high school does not favor those who attempt to ruthlessly rule with cold shoulders, hot clothes and withering looks - or whatever the adult equivalents of those may be. And it's probably not a sexually specific phenomenon. Men who attempt to ruthlessly rule with cold shoulders, hot clothes and withering looks likely also find themselves generally less influential as time goes on. And - this seems to be a place where I particularly differ with Ms. Dowd - none of this is a bad thing.

One certainly can understand Ms. Dowd’s puzzlement and evident disappointment that the rule of the Alpha Girl is less persistent than she would prefer. For there is surely no columnist in major media today whose writing is more evasive, catty and insubstantial, whose viewpoints are more juvenile, and whose approach depends more on the personal, than Ms. Dowd. By way of example only, there is no other such columnist with a mind and style so degraded that with the bodies still being pulled from the remnants of the World Trade Center only blocks from her office, it could seem clever to characterize the Administration’s efforts to fight a war on future perpetrators of such and worse horrors with “The manly men of the Bush administration have their own axis-of-evil ‘hottie board’ to rank the nuclear threat of world dictators.” That is, there is no such columnist about whom it could more truly be said that she attempts to ruthlessly rule with the literary equivalent of cold shoulders, hot clothes and withering looks.

But, Ms. Dowd, is it still working as well as it did when you were an actual Heather?

Update

While she says that I agree with more of Ms. Dowd's premises than I believe I do, Diane has some interesting things to say on this subject.

Posted 5:38 PM by Robert

More on the Vast Enron Conspiracy

The Los Angeles Times reports that Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill is heading a task force looking into the question of whether government disclosure laws need to be tightened following the collapse of Houston energy giant Enron Corp. The Times reports that in a Monday interview on CNBC, O'Neill said, "When we have people that intentionally mislead or defraud shareholders or employees, then we ought to punish them to the fullest extent of the law."

Yes, that much is clear. If, as many of Enron’s woolier critics have maintained or implied, the company and its management have obviously committed intentional fraud in the preparation of the company's financial statements, then that should be enough. No new laws are needed. The matter is settled.

So why does the Times also report that “O'Neill's task force is considering changing the standard to one of negligence, clearing the way for punishment if it can be proven the executives should have known what was going on and moved to correct it.

Well, if Mr. O'Neill, others in the Administration and their Democrat critics are beginning to understand that it is going to be difficult to tag Enron and its representatives with more than negligence – at least on the big ticket items – it would certainly make sense that Mr. O'Neill’s task force would want to say that they had applied themselves to closing that "loophole.”

But one hopes that someone on that task force is giving thought to whether shareholders would be well served by a change in the law that allowed for "punishment" of directors and officers of public corporations for mere negligence. What substantial person would accept such a position in the presence of such a law, and what would he or she demand to be paid for accepting such a risk? Is it really possible to imagine well-meaning "outside" or "independent" directors signing up - only to be punished if they are found to have been merely negligent.

Directors are already civilly liable for negligence under state corporate laws - but civil liability is not "punishment." Moreover, even the prospect of civil liability is avoided if directors comply with the so-called "reasonable business judgment rule." It is the "reasonable business judgment rule" that will likely insulate the Enron board from civil liability. Any significant weakening of "reasonable business judgment rule" protection would render it virtually impossible for a public company to attract anyone to its board who has significant assets - assets which would be exposed to shareholder lawsuits. The consequences of having only directors with no significant assets have been discussed here before.

So, unless the members of Mr. O'Neill’s task force think that shareholders of public companies would be well served by being able to hire only directors and officers who have not shown any prior ability to acquire wealth, and who would be more vulnerable to corruption and bribes than wealthier alternative hires, then the task force had better regard the possibilities of making mere negligence "punishable" or significantly weakening "reasonable business judgment rule" protection as sacred cows to be patted as the task force passes by. Or God help us all.

Posted 5:54 PM by Robert

Can Any Immigrant Ever Be Too Smart Or Too Rich?

Americans are rightfully proud of a nation that has assimilated – or, perhaps, digested – many millions of disparate immigrants. Immigration has also been highly controversial at least since the “Know Nothings” raised their particular alarms about the influx of Catholics, mostly Irish, in the first decades of the nineteenth century. But from the beginning the contentious issues concerned immigrants of less education. With respect to upscale immigration (that is, immigration of educated people) Americans generally share the sentiment once voiced by the Director of the New York Institute of Fine Arts (although I have heard a similarly phrased sentiment attributed to a director of the Institute of Advanced Studies), about an earlier generation of admirable foreigners to reach these shores: “Hitler…shakes the tree and I collect the apples.” Is such upscale immigration an unalloyed benefit to the United States? The benefits are clearly enormous, but, as Shakespeare put it in The Rape Of Lucrece: “But no perfection is so absolute, That some impurity doth not pollute.” Are there also significant costs?

Of course, there is always the question of direct displacement of American workers, such as a computer programmer who may be displaced by an H-1B visa holder. But since educated immigrants generally create jobs (many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are Asian, for example), “direct displacement” considerations have rightly not played a major role in the sometimes super hot American political debate over immigration.

Nevertheless, it appears that there may be significant costs to upscale immigration, costs that must be netted against the benefits to evaluate the phenomenon. Simply put, the possibility of upscale immigration allows users of educated labor to relax their attention on the improvement of the domestic education system, to the likely detriment to the education of American children and, more curiously, of downscale immigrant children. The Man Without Qualities believes that even allowing for the costs, the benefits from upscale immigration are clearly huge. However, not acknowledging the costs has helped to create an unrealistic and dangerous nostalgia in the minds of many public school advocates.

It is worth considering California as an example. It is well known that California once possessed a very good public education system, crowned by an excellent public university. Companies dependent on what was then advanced technology – largely defense contractors - played a large role in lobbying for the development and maintenance of that system. California has long since grown out of and away from defense contractors, but, if anything, the state has become even more dependent on high technology and even more needful of educated people. At the same time, California’s educational system has all but collapsed, especially at the primary and secondary level. But none of the high technology firms that fill Silicon Valley and beyond, or the biotech companies that swarm in Southern California , or the remnants of the defense companies, or any other powerful industrial group dependent on educated workers, has been loudly demanding that the system be restructured to produce people who can actually staff those industries.

Now, when industry feels a shortage of educated workers, its calls are more directed to Congress demanding easier upscale immigration rules than to the states demanding an upgrade in the public education system.

Why the change? It is simply not necessary to California industry, even its high tech industry, for California’s educational system to function. California easily imports the educated brains it needs and does not produce locally, and much of those imports come from overseas. That is a very big change from the days when California industry was a major force supporting the statewide education system – and needed to be. California is representative of the United States generally.

The United States has been successful at attracting a fair portion of the world’s best and brightest. For example, at the time of this post, there are very few American students in the Harvard University mathematics doctorate program – and that phenomenon is generally the rule at most top American universities. Too, in dollar terms (as opposed to sheer numbers of people), the dimensions of upscale immigration should not be underestimated. The Milken Institute, for example, has estimated that the disintegration of the Soviet Union alone – and the resulting relaxation of its preposterous emigration laws - released perhaps One Trillion Dollars of upscale human capital onto the international market. That the United States was the principal destination for these people is likely, since it is highly unusual for highly educated people to immigrate illegally, and in 1997 (a recent year for which reasonably reliable figures happen to be available) the United States accepted more legal immigrants than all other countries combined. And the old Soviet Union is by no means the only major supplier of educated immigrants. The large, ready supply of educated potential immigrants has changed the American need to educate its workers in a way which is similar to the way the large, ready supply of foreign-made automobiles has changed the American need to make its own cars.

In a way, the above concerns with the effects of upscale immigration on the entire education system have some elements in common with the anti-school-voucher argument that vouchers would allow parents who care about their children’s schooling to remove those children from public school, causing the public schools to lose an invaluable resource of concerned parents. Only the parents who don’t care – the argument goes – would remain, and the schools would suffer. The “costs” contemplated by the anti-voucher argument are real, although that argument fails unless one views education in a school owned by the government to have a special virtue. The anti-voucher argument fails because the overall quality of education would probably rise in a voucher system. But the incentive effect of upscale immigration appears to be general – it applies to both private and public schools. Indeed, it reduces – obviously not eliminating - the need to educate children at all. Of course, parents will still desire education for their children. And other incentives to educate the populace will remain. But that does not mean an important reduction in support for high quality, universal education has not occurred in the United States as a result of upscale immigration.

Formal immigration policies are of course only part of the story. A foreigner is less likely to immigrate voluntarily to any country to the extent the immigrant may experience discrimination or discomfort upon arrival. Referring to the manufactured goods analogy again, imports are practical substitutes for a competing domestic supply (of people or goods) only where both formal import (or immigration) laws permit entry into the country and “internal non-tariff barriers” do not block the substitutability of imports (or, in the case of immigrants, discrimination does not impose prohibitively high costs on the immigrant). American culture has been relatively open with respect to upscale immigrants. To the extent internal resistance to immigrants is prominent (as it can definitely be), such resistance in this country is normally directed against less educated immigrants.

To the extent any country has a culture not accepting of immigrants, there is less likelihood that upscale immigration will be a reliable and major source of human intellectual capital. Such countries will of necessity have to educate their own people if a modern, technologically driven society is to be maintained. It should therefore come as little surprise that the more infamously “closed” modern societies, such as Japan, famously maintain broad and intense educational systems.

It therefore appears that the willingness of the United States to welcome upscale immigrants at both the level of formal immigration policy and through its culture of acceptance is working to remove incentives on technology companies (and other users of educated people) to support the broad education system in the United States. Such incentives effects are a direct link between the consequences of upscale and downscale immigration. Historically, education – especially public and parochial education – have played a huge role in the process by which new immigrant groups are assimilated into American society where such groups have lacked either general education of specific American educational component (such as English language proficiency). It therefore appears that one effect of upscale immigration is a reduced incentive to maintain the kind of educational system that has historically been used to integrate downscale immigrant groups. Looking again at California, the above analysis helps to explain why a state heavily dependent on a huge technology sector also maintains a failing public education system largely incapable of educating and integrating more recent Hispanic immigrants into mainstream American culture – all without intense outcry on the part of the commercial users of educated workers.

The purpose of this post is not to propose “solutions” to any of the issues that the above analysis may raise. That is for another time and another post or place. For now, it is enough to make the observation that our naïve acceptance of the gross benefits of upscale immigration should be tempered with an awareness that even positive developments in the life of a society carry their own costs and obligations.

Update

The discussion above does not address the issue of allegedly "subversive" immigration (such immigrants would often also be upscale immigrants, as that term is used above), which has from time to time in the past loomed large in the minds of at least some prominent American political actors. Perhaps this displays a bias on the part of The Man Without Qualities, who has difficulty taking concerns of "subversiveness" as much more than posturing and paranoia. In any event, the focus of this post is limited to one aspect of the current educational and economic situation. But one must admit that the events of September 11 and the educated nature of the terrorists involved in those acts likely intersect with aspects of what might be called "true" upscale immigration in ways not considered here.

Posted 8:52 PM by Robert

About That Résumé

Aaron Sorkin, the creative mind behind the hit television show “The West Wing” who has recently been troubled by what appears to a be serious drug problem, now says about the last Presidential election: "It was frustrating watching Gore try so hard not to appear smart in the debates. Why not just say 'Here's my f___ing résumé, what do you got?' We're a completely fictional, nonpolitical show, but one of our motors is doing our version of the old Mad magazine 'Scenes We'd Like to See.' And so to an extent we're going to rerun the last election and try a few different plays than the Gore campaign did."

Well, a more detailed examination of Mr. Gore’s résumé might be interesting, but perhaps not for the reasons Mr. Sorkin has in mind. I would like to concentrate here on the earlier portions of that résumé.

First, there was college. Bush attended Yale; Gore went to Harvard – both men were admitted as “legacy” students, since neither did all that well in high school. Harvard/Yale rivalries aside, that résumé item looks like a draw.

Mr. Bush seems to have had a rather steady, mediocre trajectory at Yale. He did, however, then enter and graduate from Harvard Business School – an institution which makes a point of forcing out the bottom ten percent of each class. So, of the major candidates in the 2000 election, Bush and Nader – but not Mr. Gore – hold graduate degrees from Harvard.

Early in college, Mr. Gore also failed to excel. Mr. Gore did better as he advanced, and received a degree as a "Government" major with honors from Harvard in 1969 – a fact that his various biographies play up a good deal. This is where the résumé examination may get interesting. In his later years at Harvard, Gore seems to have focused increasingly on courses in which the grades were based on term papers for which the work was done out of class, not exams. Mr. Gore’s courses also seem to have swung closer to “Government” topics in which Mr. Gore’s father’s office in Washington probably had a good deal of resident expertise.

For example, Harvard undergraduates write an “undergraduate thesis” – a long term-paper-like effort. Mr. Gore’s Harvard “undergraduate thesis” concerned mass communication and national politics. United States Senators normally have a lot of people hanging around the office who spend a lot of time on just that topic of mass communication and national politics. I know of no way to determine if Mr. Gore’s father’s buddies and consultants helped out on Mr. Gore’s undergraduate thesis and other papers. Perhaps others do. But, it is interesting that someone like Mr. Gore who had been an indifferent student in high school and early in college suddenly started performing better on term papers in his later college years.

Mr. Gore would not be the first student to "get serious" as he worked his way through college. However, one normally (although, not always) expects people who get serious to have developed a sense of academic and personal direction and purpose, and to maintain it after graduation. This appears not to have been the case with Mr. Gore. After graduation, he volunteered for enlistment in the U.S. Army and served in Vietnam - a decision apparently not based so much on any commitment to patriotism as a desire to preserve his future political viability. Returning to civilian life, Mr. Gore became an investigative reporter with The Tennesseean in Nashville. He attended Vanderbilt University Divinity School and Vanderbilt Law School. But he apparently reverted to his bad old scholastic habits, because his transcripts did not shine. An official capsule biography says he also “operated a small homebuilding business.”

He is also said to have used a great deal of marijuana during and after his days at Harvard, drug use perhaps approaching the levels that Mr. Sorkin seems to enjoy. For example, John C. Warnecke, a Tennessee friend of Mr. Gore, said in an interview: “I have first hand knowledge that he has not told the truth about his drug use. Al Gore and I smoked regularly, as buddies. Marijuana, hash. I was his regular supplier. I didn't deal dope, I just gave it to him. We smoked more than once, more than a few times, we smoked a lot. We smoked in his car, in his house, we smoked in his parents' house, in my house… we smoked on weekends. We smoked a lot. Al Gore and I were smoking marijuana together right up to the time that he ran for Congress in 1976. Right up through the week he declared for that race, in fact.”

It is not my point here either to criticize or to excuse Mr. Gore’s drug use, poor post-graduate scholastic performance or an apparent lack of direction after Harvard. However, none of these traits is generally found in people who get serious during college the way Mr. Gore claims to have done. Although Mr. Bush frankly admits he too lacked direction and continued to abuse alcohol until roughly his 40th year, there is no inconsistency in Mr. Bush’s record like that in Mr. Gore's. Since Mr. Bush experienced his conversion to a serious life, he has been, well, serious. That is generally what one expects in such cases, and it is odd that Mr. Gore's conversion to serious life seems to have included some substantial relapses, if his version of events is to be believed.

In the light of Mr. Gore’s now-notorious penchant for imaginative reconstructions of his past, the inconsistencies sketched above make it is worth asking: Just how did Mr. Gore manage that academic upswing in his later years at Harvard? Did he have “help” from Washington? Would that explain how he was an uncommitted student lacking direction and a desire to apply himself before and after Harvard and in his early time as a Harvard student, but seemed to "shine" for his later period in college? It would also help to explain how this "shining" might have occurred notwithstanding what appears to have been rather heavy use of marijuana, behavior more associated with the losing of one's way rather than the finding of it.

One hopes that Mr. Gore did not stoop to hiring someone to do his academic work as did his fellow Senator, Democratic Presidential aspirant and Harvard graduate, Ted Kennedy. But, in his defense, Mr. Kennedy has never masqueraded as an intellectual.

Mr. Gore does have such pretensions. Since Mr. Gore has now re-entered what he calls the "national debate," going so far as to sport a beret and an odd little French-intellectual beard - it would seem worth looking into the very question that Aaron Sorkin is urging the nation to ask. As Mr. Sorkin so directly puts it, just what about that “f___ing résumé?”

Update

An astute reader writes with a fine point:

"I'm not so impressed with Aaron Sorkin's resume. A BA from Syracuse? In Theater Arts? Even for TV, that's not very impressive. Half the writing staff on The Simpsons are from Harvard. Even Conan O'Brian went to Harvard."

I wonder if Mr. Sorkin would be willing to turn over his proceeds from The West Wing to someone on his staff with a more impressive résumé than his? One can imagine the negotiations between Mr. Sorkin and his Harvard educated writer beginning with the writer's sally: "Here's my f___ing résumé, what do you got?"

But where to imagine the talks going from there? Perhaps Mr. Sorkin is working on that aspect right now, in the Presidential context, of course.

One might have thought that someone like Mr. Sorkin, who has undeniably accomplished much notwithstanding his unimpressive résumé, would understand how pretentious, silly, undemocratic and, ultimately, disgraceful, such thinking is. And it is not just Mr. Sorkin. The entire "I should be President (or Senator) because I had better grades than you did" argument that the Clinton/Gore camp has been extruding for years, with the help of their friends in the media, should be stopped. And those involved should be called to account in the media and at the polls.