Ms. Yellen has a possibility of being renominated, according to this consensus, but it is only 22 percent; experts think that Kevin Warsh, a former Fed governor with deep Republican ties, has a slightly better chance at 23 percent.
.. The case for renominating Ms. Yellen is straightforward.
She has presided over four years of steady economic expansion and rising financial markets. She moved cautiously toward raising interest rates even though the economy seemed to be approaching full employment. By contrast, some more conservative contenders for the job have indicated they want to raise rates more quickly, which could endanger the economy as President Trump approaches midterm elections in 2018 and a potential re-election battle in 2020.
.. Moreover, as President Trump dabbles in making deals with Democrats, reappointing Ms. Yellen could serve as an expression of good faith to Democratic senators. As administration officials focus on tax legislation and other priorities on Capitol Hill, it might be helpful to them to nominate someone who might sail through confirmation, rather than demand a bruising, time-consuming battle.
.. The case against Ms. Yellen is similarly straightforward: She is a liberal economist in a government dominated by conservatives. She is a cerebral academic serving during the presidency of a bombastic businessman. And she is a staunch defender of the work the Fed and other bank regulators have done to try to limit risk in the financial system — including in a high-profile speech last month — amid an administration focused on deregulation.
Kevin Warsh: well connected, but with baggage
He has a law degree, but no advanced degree in economics.
.. Mr. Warsh has been a skeptic of the Fed’s efforts to boost the economy through quantitative easing and has advocated raising interest rates more quickly. He also has a regulatory philosophy more in line with the administration’s.
.. Mr. Warsh’s father-in-law is Ronald Lauder, of the Estée Lauder cosmetics fortune, a major Republican donor with longstanding ties to Mr. Trump.
.. If Mr. Warsh is nominated, expect significant blowback during the confirmation process from Democrats, who are likely to accuse the 47-year-old Mr. Warsh of being underqualified, of being responsible for the 2008 bank bailouts and inclined to regulate banks too lightly now, and of being too overtly political for the traditionally nonpartisan Fed chairmanship.
.. Democrats would be eager to criticize the administration for naming a recent top executive at Goldman Sachs to be the nation’s most powerful financial regulator. Some populist Republicans might join them... Foremost among them are several of the names we would probably be hearing about if a conventional Republican president were in the White House.. John B. Taylor is a respected economist at Stanford who worked in the George W. Bush administration and has been an influential voice among congressional Republicans who want to see the Fed bound by stricter rules governing its actions.Glenn Hubbard was a top economic adviser to Mr. Bush who is dean of Columbia Business School.
Larry Lindsey was another top adviser to Mr. Bush and a former Fed governor with an economics doctorate from Harvard.
.. Their doctorates and affiliations with top universities may actually be downsides in an administration that has shown disdain for academic expertise.
.. other names has emerged in various reports, including the F.D.I.C. vice chairman Thomas Hoenig and John Allison
Andrew Ng: AI Is the New Electricity
Artificial intelligence is set to revolutionize every sector, and will likely eliminate whole categories of jobs in the next few years, said Andrew Ng, a Stanford adjunct professor and former Baidu scientist, at the WSJ D.Live Asia conference.
The privilege to fail
The effects of income level on risk aversion has been well-studied in behavioral economics and psychology — individuals who earn incomes below the poverty line tend to be significantly more risk averse compared to those who are better off.
.. many low-income or first-gen students have been so focused on education and upward mobility that they have not had a chance to reflect on who they are, what they really want and the path to achieving their ambitions. This sets them apart from peers who have had leisure time and constant encouragement to develop those aspects of themselves. College, in this sense, can be a chance for first-gen students to come into their own.
But as they’re trying to understand their calling and purpose for the first time, as Rodriguez put it, being held up as “model citizens” in their communities back home can be a barrier to breaking out on their own, said Umaña.
.. Black women startup founders receive on average $36,000 in venture funding while white men receive $1.3 million.
.. Anarcho-capitalism, or the complete absence of government, is the ultimate goal of the blockchain technology movement.
.. . Halper thinks his technology can upend polling, burn down political boundaries and create a network of college campuses. Ericsson and Lawrence want to reform the internet because they believe in its potential to erase governments and and redefine the way people share, sell, connect and live
Cognitive Dissonance: Confessions of a Community College Dean
That said, it was hard to have serious discussions of equity and achievement gaps on a campus of a university with a twenty-two billion dollar endowment.
.. Gladwell makes the case that the same size donation would make a much larger social difference at a Rowan than at a Stanford. Having seen both, I have to agree. Wealthy institutions are not immune to the law of diminishing returns.
.. During a long lecture about how they don’t lecture, I started playing a variation on “Where’s Waldo?,” scanning the polaroids for faces of black people. As we passed one of the many glass-walled workspaces, an intense young woman came out to tell us “we’d prefer if you didn’t come in.” I thought her comment a bit on-the-nose, but there it was.
.. For the rest of the week, I kept hearing comments like “can you imagine what we could do with just one percent of that endowment?”
.. Borrowing a bit from Gladwell, if we assume a five percent return on a 22 billion dollar endowment, that’s a little over a billion dollars per year. That’s before adding the first dollar of tuition income, any new research support, or new donations. (The guide bragged about their generous financial aid, which sounded impressive until I did the math. Undergrad tuition, fees, room, and board is 68k per year. He mentioned that the typical aid recipient gets about 30k of “scholarship” from Stanford. By my math, that means the typical aid recipient is on the hook for another $38,000 per year.
.. A full-time student at Brookdale would spend about $5,000 per year on tuition and fees, and even at that level, about 40 percent of our students get Pell grants.)
.. we could go to “free community college” for every student at Brookdale for less than a twentieth of Stanford’s annual rentier income.
.. Alternately, its annual rentier income — remember, this is one university — would cover free community college for the entire state of New Jersey, with money left over.
.. “The fact is, higher education in the U.S. is no longer a way to improve one’s life, but a caste system that aids and abets the widening inequality gaps in every aspect of life.”
.. The point, really, is summed up in this sentence from the column: “A donation to a school that runs lean will make a much larger difference than a donation to a place like Stanford.”
.. In academe, where race and ethnicity define and represent diversity, Stanford can simply point to the African-American daughter of an attorney and investment banker and be lauded for its “diversity.”
Socioeconomic class has been enveloped and made largely irrelevant while race, gender, and identity have become the totality of what’s believed to be “diversity” on campus.