Ugh. The comments section is particularly rich.

Here’s an interesting thought from Sam Harris about the role that bad incentives play in making society toxic. He writes:

“A prison is perhaps the easiest place to see the power of bad incentives. And yet in many other places in our society, we find otherwise normal men and women caught in the same trap and busily making life for everyone much less good than it could be. Elected officials ignore long-term problems because they must pander to the short-term interests of voters. People working for insurance companies rely on technicalities to deny desperately ill patients the care they need. CEOs and investment bankers run extraordinary risks—both for their businesses and for the economy as a whole—because they reap the rewards of success without suffering the penalties of failure. Lawyers continue to prosecute people they know to be innocent (and defend those they know to be guilty) because their careers depend upon winning cases. Our government fights a war on drugs that creates the very problem of black market profits and violence that it pretends to solve….

“We need systems that are wiser than we are. We need institutions and cultural norms that make us better than we tend to be. It seems to me that the greatest challenge we now face is to build them.”

By the page. This is what now passes for normal in American law.

Drop dead.

Rutgers College.

The last year has seen attacks on the American academic model reaching a crescendo. The stratospheric costs of attendance, financed by usurious debt burdens, along with an indefensible smugness throughout the system, have all become favorite (and often valid) criticisms. N+1 launched the latest salvo. Without a doubt, law schools embody all of the major problems that plague academia, but they certainly aren’t alone. It’s true that a lot of students don’t pay the sticker prices of their schools; but it’s also true that the costs of living usually more than offset any scholarship and/or residency reductions that most students are likely to see.

The Times ran an intriguing piece by Chicago’s Luigi Zingales proposing to substitute ‘student equity’ for student loan debt. There’s something unsettling about the author’s choice of a term that typically describes an ownership stake in property to describe an investor’s relationship with an individual’s future. But Zingales persuasively takes on the current academic establishment by framing it as a privileged class whose wealthy institutions are subsidized by taxpayers, generally, and by young people who have few resources, but who arguably require the services of its institutions to progress in their own lives. In reality, the current debt industry has worse than an ownership stake in many individuals’ futures. And it seems patently unfair that universities with massive war chests can charge astronomical tuitions to teenagers and twenty-somethings, financed by government and banks– only to have the students be the ones who take on almost all the financial risk.

No surprise here. Just the latest headline from the toxic culture of law.