May’s Employment Data: An Off Month for Once, with American Job Shortage Number (AJSN) Up 350,000 to 15.6 Million

Expectations for this morning’s Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Summary, if the identical-to-April Fox News projection of 185,000 net new nonfarm positions is a good indicator, were much the same as last time.  However, the results weren’t.  We gained only 75,000, and, while the other numbers maintained strength they didn’t improve as a group.  The front-line seasonally adjusted unemployment rate stayed at 3.6%, with the unadjusted one up 0.1% to 3.4%.  We had 5.9 million unemployed persons, with those out for 27 weeks or longer up 100,000 to 1.3 million.  The count of those working part-time for economic reasons, or seeking full-time positions while keeping smaller-hours ones, fell 300,000 to 4.4 million, reversing last month’s 200,000 worsening and then some.  The two measures of how common it is for Americans to actually be working, the labor force participation rate and the employment-population ratio, stayed the same at 62.8% and 60.6%.  Private nonfarm payroll wages matched the last result, gaining 6 cents per hour, a bit more than the latest, 2.0%, annual inflation rate, to reach $27.83.

The American Job Shortage Number or AJSN, the measure showing how many additional positions could be quickly filled if getting one were as easy as getting a pizza, gained 357,000, as follows:

Compared with April, changes in those unemployed and discouraged exactly cancelled out, leaving almost the entire variation to those saying they wanted to work but did not look for it in the past year, up over 400,000 with an AJSN effect of 325,000.  The number of people claiming no interest in jobs fell almost one million – that only cut the AJSN by 50,000, but showed us once again that membership for many in that category is fluid and negotiable.  That was almost exactly offset by the 164,000 rise in those wanting to work but being temporarily unavailable.  Year-over-year, the AJSN improved 340,000, with two-thirds of that from lower official unemployment and the rest from shrinkage in five other groups.  The share of the AJSN from unemployment as the BLS defines it reached another long-term low with 31.7%.

How did this month look?  Not terrible but hardly good.  Let’s call it sluggish.  The two participation ratios, one of which worsened 0.2% in April, did not bounce back and are still, fine employment times notwithstanding, about half a recession from reaching new post-1977 lows.  We can take the poor, well-below-population-increase-requiring net jobs gain, and the other metrics here are still generally looking good, but those are due to previous months, not May 2019.  Accordingly, the turtle stayed just where he was.

Around the Horn with Five Jobs-Related Articles

Six weeks, five New York Times pieces on employment.  What did they say?

The headline of the April 21^st “Why ‘Find Your Passion’ Is Such Terrible Advice” didn’t match what Stephanie Lee wrote, which was that “we’re pretty bad at most things when we first try them.”  I don’t agree with the theory she cited that “our interests are relatively fixed and unchanging” – my life has been a roaring counterexample – or that passions will be extinguished without immediate success.  People with excessive expectations are generally those unenthusiastic anyway, and it is a perfectly valid choice to choose or accept a dull or unfulfilling work career for its value in supporting passionate activities elsewhere.

Ernie Tedeschi wrote a good summary of a positive trend in April 24^th’s “Americans Are Seeing Highest Minimum Wage in History (Without Federal Help).”  The largest problem with the likes of a national $15 level is that in many parts of the country people can do well on less, but that does not mean that those in Manhattan or Hawaii cannot decide on a higher base rate there.  Per Tedeschi, 29 states and Washington, D.C, along with a “surge” in smaller governments, now mandate more than the national $7.25, and 89% of Americans paid the lowest legal amount are getting more.  While I do not support minimum wages, as market conditions require that workers are paid what they will accept, Seattle lawmakers are far more justified in accommodating constituents in their own expensive city than imposing destructive hikes on small Texas towns.

“Behind the Numbers:  How the Jobs Report Comes Together,” by Patricia Cohen on May 3^rd, is a good reader on what goes into those usually first-Friday figures.  Not everyone sees that only one hour of weekly payroll effort makes someone “employed,” knows that in order to be “unemployed” one must look for work within the previous four weeks “regardless of any government benefits received,” recognizes that the “labor force” comprises only those working and those unemployed as here, and understands the significance of the employment-population ratio and the labor force participation rate.  Cohen mentions the two monthly data collection efforts feeding these numbers, the “Household Survey” and the “Establishment Survey” targeted to individuals and businesses respectively, and touches on seasonal adjustment which is used because times of the year differ. 

May 27^th’s “It’s 2059, and the Rich Kids Are Still Winning” is the first of a set of scenarios provided by “science fiction authors, futurists, philosophers and scientists” presented in opinion article form.  Here an eminent figure in the first category, Ted Chiang, considered the limitations of DNA enhancement, that unless we have a pure meritocracy (exceedingly unlikely in 40 years) “genetic interventions” such as improving intelligence will not, as long as social and class factors are critically important, get us equality between those of different races, income, or anything else.  That is a real point, and while such technology may push us further to the real nature of human beings, it will not level outcomes across all groups, and intelligence for scientists, as with great height for NBA centers, may continue to be necessary for success but not at all sufficient.  Expect to see more from me on this series.

David Brooks, on the same date, followed up his tempting but irritating “weavers” column with “The Welfare State Is Broken.  Here’s How to Fix It.”  An improvement from advocating that people surrender their whole lives to American social-network efforts or conjure up opportunities to “make a difference” in one of the most rejecting fields there is, this time Brooks puts the onus on social service organizations to work together and focus on the related problems of individual families.  I take issue with his characterization of poverty as longer lasting now than in the past – when I was growing up, poor meant you might not have nearly enough food for years on end – but his documented idea of “life teams,” handling everything from immediate financial and employment crises to teaching more constructive choices, is a good one, along with giving isolated people, especially older ones, the chance to join groups which are “part social club, part concierge service and part self-help cooperative.” 

Next week, I will review the latest unemployment figures.  They will show a large piece of what is happening with our economy, but, per the above, not all.

Is it Time to Break Up Facebook?

Two weeks ago The New York Times printed a guest op-ed piece from pertinent company co-founder Chris Hughes, opining that “It’s Time to Break Up Facebook.”  It was long, printing out to 27 pages, but more or less made only the point that antitrust regulators have been remiss in allowing this firm, unquestionably now along with Amazon, Google, eBay, and Microsoft one of our technology industry’s answers to football’s Monsters of the Midway, to become a monopoly.  Hughes wrote that other Facebook creator and current CEO Mark Zuckerberg, though “still the same person I watched hug his parents as they left our dorm’s common room at the beginning of our sophomore year,” has influence “far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government,” as he “sets the rules for how to distinguish violent and incendiary speech from the merely offensive, and he can choose to shut down a competitor by acquiring, blocking or copying it.”  As was also attributed to Microsoft, which garnered similar antitrust attention twenty years ago, Zuckerberg “used the word “domination” to describe our ambitions, with no hint of irony or humility,” an attitude bearing lush fruit in the form of a $500 billion de facto conglomerate including, in the form of WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram along with the marquee brand, four different billion-user-plus American-based social media platforms, with only YouTube in that size range not owned by them.  The Federal Trade Commission, perhaps swayed by the lack of user fees, allowed Facebook’s 2012 purchases of two of these firms which set up this situation, which now seems entrenched, and which Hughes maintained needs to end.  In the meantime, privacy issues, along with data restriction and manipulation facts and allegations, with Zuckerberg’s company draw more and more commentator attention.

So is a Standard Oil-style breakup what we need?  Here are some points to consider.

First, my personal bias is that Facebook has been greatly beneficial to me.  I used to fantasize about friends and acquaintances from different times and areas of my life getting together, and since I started with the site in 2009 I have had that capability, if not as much successful interchange as I had hoped, on my desktop.  My main beef with it is not its use of my data – I don’t mind getting focused advertising, which is as far as it now seems to go – but with, as Hughes said, being subject to “algorithms that select which users’ comments or experiences end up displayed in the News Feeds of friends and family,” when the posts I want to see are simply all of them.  I do not use Facebook for getting news, except for stories from a few business sites I selected.  Therefore, I want it to succeed and continue. 

Second, Facebook, counter to what Hughes wrote, is indeed a natural monopoly.  We do not want to maintain contacts through half a dozen platforms, returning to early last century when businesspeople needed multiple telephones on their desk and “I’m on the Bell” became a brand’s slogan. 

Third, monopolistic damage in this case, since it is not directly financial, requires ideology to identify, which means fundamentally more controversy and less clarity than the usual knowledge that with only one seller prices will rise.

Fourth, antitrust forces certainly have been weak, and need to consider market domination as well as direct cost to consumers when blocking mergers.

Fifth, though nominal startup costs for a new social media system would be low, successful publicity would be difficult.  Despite plenty of online advertising, millions of businesses will end operations this year for lack of sales.

Sixth, American employment would benefit, at least temporarily, if Facebook broke into multiple companies.  None of them, though, are or would be massive employers.

Seventh, our real causes for concern are about privacy.  It’s OK to get ads for Brazilian hotels when I’ve recently checked Sao Paulo airfares, but I don’t relish my health insurance companies seeing, for example, that I liked a page on Brie.  The time to stop these interconnections is now, when they are just getting started, and government action, as clumsy and behind-the-times as it usually seems, appears the least of evils. 

Should we break up Facebook?  Clearly the feds could undo those 2012 acquisitions and stop more.  Yet there is something distasteful about punishing a company that became so large because people wanted what it had to offer.  I think the way is to allow it to be a monopoly, but regulate it, including some loose but real limitations on speech and data usage, sort of like how AT&T was treated in the decades before divestiture.  When telephony became more innovative it was time for that arrangement to end, but before that the stability of phone service, even if long distance calling unfairly subsidized local connections, helped most people greatly.  And if mineable personal data pays for a valuable tool previously unobtainable at any price, that is OK, especially when so many people have little money to spare.  Through the regulatory authority, we could negotiate improvements and changes.  So let us not forget that the number of users on these platforms is in the billions for a reason – let’s not throw out the baby with the bath.

Sluggish or Catastrophic? Five Months of Autonomous Vehicle Non-Progress - II

Since March, despite the general slowdown in driverless car progress and stories about it, some noteworthy articles have been published.  Several reveal another reason why we are now off 2017 and 2018 projections – a backlash.  One piece here is “self-driving car technology can’t deliver on overblown ride-sharing promises,” by Ashley Nunes in the March 4^th USA Today.  Here we see several negative misconceptions too often written.  They include insisting on autonomous perfection when there are 30,000-plus driver-error deaths annually (“unless self-driving tech is proven faultless, ceding control of public safety to algorithms is unlikely”), confusing their current state with that to be required for proliferation (“sensors and software might trim the need for human labor but do not… purge that need entirely”), forgetting that taxi equivalents will not work in rural areas, so therefore will not wipe out personal car ownership (“Robocabs… will be cheaper… a better bargain for consumers than owning a car”), and impatience, ignoring almost unbelievable three-year progress (“a technology that never seems to quite arrive”).  There are real points to be made against autonomous vehicles, but they will be obscured with so much common erroneous thinking.

Next, on to the recent Lyft IPO and their competitor’s still-pending one, with Kate Conger’s April 18^th New York Times “Uber’s Self-Driving Cars are Valued at $7.25 Billion by Investors.”  That company division, called the Autonomous Technology Group, is receiving billions of dollars from outside investors and will have its own board, facilitating the possibility of detaching if Uber cannot improve.  That is a good thing for them, as between Uber’s being “deeply unprofitable” and losing $1.8 billion in 2018, their propensity for breaking the law, and their doubtful viability if regulated as much as other taxi companies, it is one of the last companies in which I would want to invest.  Yet their instituting a snail’s-pace timeline, as bad as that looked, may indicate a new attempt at behaving decently.  I think if the rest of Uber went out of business, this piece could be successful both in the market and on Wall Street.

As the next article and the final one show, the amount of driverless backlash varies between age groups.  Andy Meek’s April 20^th Salon “Millennials are the demographic most open to self-driving cars, but not by much” started with the revelation that Ford’s chief executive had admitted they “overestimated the arrival” of autonomous vehicles, and that, for that company at least, “their applications will be narrow.”  From there, Meek cited a HarrisX study, apparently given to people in that age group, showing that three-fourths were “very afraid” of them with 90% citing possible technical mishaps, but 70% thought progress had exceeded expectations.  The present-future confusion mentioned above again crept in, but it is noteworthy that even people young enough to be more accepting of driverless cars agree, as a group, that the current state of development is insufficient for widespread propagation. 

Within seconds of printing Dalvin Brown’s April 23^rd USA Today “Can Elon Musk’s robotaxi plan help Tesla owners make $30,000 a year?”, I wrote, next to that headline, “NO!!”  Musk must have been using something stronger than what he smoked during a September interview to say that in a year, or “a year and three months,” meaning April or July 2020, there would be “over a million robotaxis on the road,” and the idea of those with Teslas viably adding theirs to the fleet sounds more like 2025.  As optimistic as I have been, between technology delays and acceptance barriers as above I see no chance of either that quickly.  Also, especially with the slowdown, it is losing business strategy to overpromise, especially by market leaders.

Last, we have an organized effort, documented by M. R. O’Connor on April 30^th in The New Yorker in “The Fight for the Right to Drive.”  The group, the Human Driving Association, strives not only to continue allowing nonautonomous vehicles, but to require each to have a steering wheel and pedals, to mandate that all cars to be fully human-drivable, and to guarantee those things through a constitutional amendment.  Founder Alex Roy backs its ideology from environmental, freedom, technology-value disagreement, and personal-preference perspectives, with justifications ranging from the worthless (matching future laws with current expertise, as twice above) and the tradeoff-refusing (that “autonomy = freedom,” and cutting the latter would automatically be bad), to the intriguing (people may want to drive themselves for communitarian reasons such as those keeping the Amish using horses) and the naïve (to give us “meaningful work and individual agency”).  Roy’s group doesn’t have much to offer for alternatives, mentioning “investing in mass-transit” (has always happened), “build(ing) bike lanes” (only a small niche solution, and a step down in life quality for the vast majority), “adoption of electric cars” (as I recently posted, after 130 years of progress and decades of subsidies they don’t get 1% of sales), and “cell phone jamming devices in cars” (no more passengers using them either, I guess).  These losing ideas, along with assuming that driverless rides being paid for by advertising means that families should not appreciate saving maybe $1,000 per month, along with overall pushing against the tide of history, don’t give us enough to support.  Such a group, though, may help ensure that there are roads, maybe even some current cross-country expressways, that people will even at mid-century be able to drive; after all, riding horses is still legal on most public thoroughfares.

On self-driving progress, then, I’ll go for “sluggish,” along with “impeded.”  I will return to this issue with July autonomous-vehicle projections.  Expect that they will be somewhere between what Elon Musk is claiming and what some of the people quoted above expect to see.

April Jobs Data: A Fine Month, With the American Job Shortage Number (AJSN) Down Almost 900,000 to 15.2 Million, But Ordinary Behind the Front-Line Numbers

In advance of this morning’s Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Summary, Fox News predicted 185,000 more jobs.  Once again, we blew the projection away.

We added 263,000 net new nonfarm positions, and as a kicker, got a 49-year low in the adjusted employment rate, down 0.2% to 3.6%.  The adjusted version, showing that April might have the most people working year-in and year-out, was even more remarkable, reaching 3.3%.  After that, though, results were mixed.  The number of unemployed fell almost 400,000 to 5.8 million, with those out 27 weeks or longer down 100,000 to 1.2 million, but hourly private nonfarm payroll wages were only barely above inflation, up 7 cents per hour to $27.77.  The two numbers showing how common it is for Americans to be working, the labor force participation rate and the employment-population ratio, did not follow the headline results either, with the first actually down 0.2%, a substantial amount for this metric, to 62.8%, and the second unchanged at 60.6%.  Most disappointing was the count of those working part-time for economic reasons, or holding on to less than full-time positions while thus far unsuccessfully seeking longer-hour ones, which repeated March’s 200,000 worsening and is now at 4.7 million. 

The American Job Shortage Number or AJSN, the statistic showing in one figure how many additional positions could be rapidly filled if all knew that getting work were easy, improved 876,000 over March’s to at least a 10-year low, as follows:

The difference from March was completely due to lower official unemployment, which now makes up only 31.8% of latent demand.  In sum, the other numbers above essentially broke even, with the count of those wanting to work but not looking for it for a year or more showing a 133,000 improvement, but offset by rises in those describing themselves as discouraged, temporarily unavailable, and claiming no job interest at all.  Compared with a year before, the AJSN’s improvement was not as extreme, 563,000 lower and better but 87% from reduced official joblessness. 

Some reports will call this morning’s employment data spectacular and a massive improvement, but here are some reasons why it is neither.  First, though the number of new positions was once again superb, the cuts in the jobless rates seem to come mostly from fewer people pursuing them, as over 600,000 net moved into the no-interest category.  Second, the 4.7 million counted everywhere as working but unhappily doing that less than full time are now within 700,000 of those officially unemployed.  Third, the marginal attachment categories above have lacked real progress for years.  Fourth, our tepid wage improvements, along with the lower but hardly crashing AJSN, put the lie to statements that we have a worker shortage.  Yes, this April was a favorable employment month, but the turtle’s moderate if significant step forward by no means made him look like a cheetah. 

Sluggish or Catastrophic? Five Months of Autonomous Vehicle Non-Progress - I

Since early December, something has been missing.  The weekly and sometimes even daily updates on technical, legal, and organizational driverless car progress have disappeared.  The hottest information-related issue of 2018 (sorry, smartphones), it has been replaced this year by various insights into other applications of artificial intelligence and scattered updates and opinions.  What, though, has been published? 

The most comprehensive article I have seen on this change actually came out near the beginning of it.  Alexis C. Madrigal’s “7 Arguments Against the Autonomous-Vehicle Utopia” (The Atlantic, December 7^th), after calling pertinent progress “oversold,” offered a compendium of its largest real and potential obstructions, which was a genuine mixed bag. 

“Bear Case 1:  They Won’t Work Until Cars Are as Smart as Humans” may be why we are lagging behind my most recent forecast (see http://worksnewage.blogspot.com/2018/07/driverless-vehicles-and-driving-jobs.html), with “the sheer number of “edge cases,” i.e. unusual circumstances, they’d have to handle,” and, quoting “legendary roboticist” Rodney Brooks, “perceptual challenges… that are way beyond those that current developers have solved with deep learning networks, and perhaps a lot more automated reasoning than any AI systems have so far [2017] been expected to demonstrate.”  One by one the edge cases can be solved, but if there are indeed vast numbers of them, that will consume some time.  Overall, if the worst issue with driverless technology now is that it isn’t as proficient at dealing with full-contact driving by now as we had anticipated, we’re looking at delays.

Madrigal’s Bear Case 2, “They Won’t Work, Because They’ll Get Hacked,” is a known problem with fixes completed or in progress, and has shown no signs of being uncontrollable.  Bear Case 3, “They Won’t Work as a Transportation Service,” called not only for Uber and Lyft to lose money indefinitely but for them to tire of that and quit, and made the erroneous assumption that “calibrating and maintaining” onboard equipment would be done by individual owners.  The fourth, “They Won’t Work, Because You Can’t Prove They’re Safe,” depends on how people see the 30,000 annual American deaths caused by human drivers, and Bear Case 5, “They’ll Work, But Not Anytime Soon,” ignored that they are functional now, though it seems likely that roll-outs will not be, say, state by state or even city by city, but a square mile or so at a time.  Bear Case 6, “Self-Driving Cars Will Mostly Mean Computer-Assisted Drivers,” confused preliminary progress with the end product.

The most interesting part of Madrigal’s article was “Bear Case 7:  Self-Driving Cars Will Work, But Make Traffic and Emissions Worse.”  As I see it, electric cars have reached a crossroads.  Despite 130 years of technical progress after their first United States production, being beloved by environmentalists (despite over a quarter of their fuel supply coming from coal), being subsidized by the IRS and other parts of the federal government, being facilitated by sufficiently available charging stations at least regionally, and being the recipient of feverish efforts to correct their prohibitive flaw of short battery life, fully electric vehicles still comprise well below 1% of new cars sold, with hybrids sitting at only 2%.  From there, areas recently discontinuing cash grants for their purchase have seen sales drop 75% or more.  Clearly, those working on driverless technology cannot afford to tether it to all-electric platforms.  That means gasoline and diesel engine exhaust not only from people taking driverless trips, but from the vehicles reaching riders.  As for traffic, autonomous cars could end up replacing transit vehicles, and, by providing transportation for more and more people not currently alone in cars due to age or temporary or permanent infirmity, would put additional ones on the road.  All of that means that driverless technology could be seen by most environmental groups as a problem instead of a solution, which could worsen the industry’s second most severe problem, that of legal barriers. 

Three and a half months after that, we got Kara Swisher’s New York Times “Owning a Car Will Soon Be as Quaint as Owning a Horse,” in which the author predicted that she would die before her next auto purchase – meaning, apparently, that she had no plans to move to the country.  Yet the past two months’ other articles were better – see in three weeks. 

Admissions at Top Colleges: Oboes, Guatemala, and Four Questions

It was quite a news item last month that some of our country’s most selective universities had been taking bribes to admit students with more family money than credentials.  Several schools and several known celebrities were involved, with an unknown, probably massive, number yet unrevealed. 

Yet, other problems have come up over the past year.  The bigotry of affirmative action has been revealed by Harvard, which has apparently considered certain eastern Asian cultures too effective in providing learning environments, valuing education highly, and getting children to excel not only at school but in ACT and SAT performance, and have been limiting their numbers.  On the other end, black students, who since at least the 1970s have had nothing to complain about with their relative chances of top-school admission, have been in some places given bogus high school transcripts to enhance their outcomes even more.  It is clear that applicants’ chances to get into the likes of Yale or even UCLA are not determined solely by academic and test performance.

So what questions should we be asking?

First, what do we need to know about these universities?  Two things.  They are stinking rich – it’s not only Harvard’s $38 billion 2015 endowment, but Yale’s $26 billion, Stanford’s $17 billion, Princeton’s $16 billion, and so on.  They profit immensely from a correlation-causation misunderstanding where their students, most with the very highest intelligence, motivation, knowledge sets, and family support before their first day on campus, tend to excel in post-college careers, which through commensurate donations pushes endowments even higher, makes these institutions even better places to spend those four years, allows them to become even more competitive, and perpetuates the cycle.  Although universities do spend some of their money, mostly they seem to keep it and make it grow, which means they have a strong interest in filling their classes with people who rate to facilitate that.

Second, how do top schools maximize their intake of wealthy students?  Many things, while not indicating high net worth themselves, tend to go along with that, and it is remarkable how many are highly valued in prospective students.  Dartmouth and Williams will take a much higher share of oboe and bassoon players, since those instruments are rarely used outside classical music and thus studied mainly by those in the upper classes, than those excelling at accordion and folk guitar.  Highly selective colleges have millions of high school football and basketball players to choose from, but pick similar numbers from those doing fencing, lacrosse, and crew, many or most of whom are from expensive prep academies.  Admissions officers have long been high on applicants who have done the likes of altruistic, Peace-Corps-like trips to places such as Guatemala, even though such ventures cost too much for many families, and volunteer work, even though those with less money need paying part-time positions instead.  Legacy admissions, of less-qualified children of that school’s graduates, are also inclined to have more money than most, and are real and undisputed.  Overall, not a few individuals who would otherwise complain about income inequality are working, in their university jobs, to cement it into place, with the recent celebrity dishonor being only another way.

Third, how can we get high-end college admissions to be fairer?  Ross Douthat, in his March 17 New York Times column “The Scandals of Meritocracy,” suggested that those discontented with this situation from both the left and the right could be satisfied by a “centrist prescription for reform,” in which “elite schools should emphasize class-based rather than race-based affirmative action," while “phasing out preferences for jocks and legacies.”  Another even more meritocratic way would be to excise sex, race, and ethnicity information entirely, perhaps by electronically removing names and pictures from applications before evaluation.  A third choice would be to admit that the current system strives to neutralize cultural strengths and weaknesses, and admit the top few percent of each group.  Another would be to cut the cord between universities and government, denying them the likes of favorable tax treatment but freeing colleges to admit whoever they see fit. 

That brings us to the final question:  Is pure meritocracy really what we want?  American life is full of competitions, for recognition and career success as well as university admissions and their consequences, incorrectly represented as rewarding only excellence.  Douthat named “three ways that a ruling class can be legitimated – though intergenerational continuity, through representation (of minority groups) and through aptitude.”  He also asked if Harvard’s average SAT score, 1512 out of 1600 for the class of 2022, would be truly better if it went to 1570, and said the “essential premise that intelligence alone merits power is the premise that has given us many present difficulties.” 

My personal bias is toward merit.  I think demographic group membership is far less significant than individual attributes and choices, but, from talk of “reparations” for those many generations removed from slavery to votes for second members of the Clinton and Bush political dynasties, oceans of others clearly disagree.  In our many pretenses that merit is the only meaningful criterion, governing bodies will continue to do what they think they should.  And that is as far as we can go, today, on the issue of unfair university admissions.