Adam Serwer is incensed because he has “a lot of friends who spent a great deal of money, and went into a lot of debt, to learn how to be professional broadcast journalists” who are “now struggling to find work” and yet Jenna Bush Hager now has a job on Today despite having only a few years’ teaching experience.

As Glenn Greenwald writes, there’s unlikely to be any outrage on the right over Hager getting a job she’s manifestly unqualified for simply because she’s the former president’s daughter, despite right-wing affectations toward “meritocracy.” There’s something revealing here about the right’s attitude toward those who succeed despite not being privileged — the only way they can make sense of someone like Sonia Sotomayor rising to excellence from modest beginnings is through “preferential treatment,” because what does it say about their own privilege, intelligence, or ability if that’s not the case?

The Sotomayor comparison is a red herring.  While I maintained from the moment her nomination was announced that she was qualified and should be confirmed, it’s indisputable that the desire to diversify the federal bench helped her get appointed to ever-higher positions by presidents Bush 41,  Clinton, and Obama, likely over people they would have judged more outstanding were gender and ethnicity not considerations.  Whether “diversity” is a goal worth pursuing at the sacrifice of other assets we value is a worthwhile but entirely unrelated debate.

There’s no such thing as being “qualified” to go on a morning chit-chat show and yap. It takes technical competence to work behind the camera.  To be successful on air requires being attractive and glib.  So, Hager’s lack of credentials does not faze me.

Of Today lead anchors past and present,  virtually none had broadcast journalism degrees. Indeed, Matt Lauer, who technically left Ohio University a few credits shy of graduating (but was rightly awarded the remaining credits years later for his professional accomplishments) seems to be the only one who majored in that subject.  Of course, Hager isn’t a main anchor, she’s going to be an education reporter.  And, strangely, she actually has a degree in education and some teaching experience.

To be sure, she got the job because of who her daddy is, not because she’s a world-leading authority on her subject matter.  Is that “meritorious”?  Nope.  But Today isn’t a scholarly society, it’s an infotainment program in competition with Good Morning America for viewers.  I guarantee you that Hager has more “merit” in that regard than the J-school grads Serwer knows but the morning news audience does not.

“Merit” is defined in different ways for different lines of work.  For example, professional athletes make millions of dollars despite not having gone to an Ivy League institution.  Indeed, most didn’t graduate college at all!  Ditto supermodels and actors and musicians.

In a perfect world, having a famous last name would not be a huge asset in politics, the media, and the entertainment industry.  In reality, the ability to instantly separate from the herd at the outset of one’s career is a tremendous advantage.  So, of course, are connections and insider knowledge. But even those fields are largely meritocracies down the line, at least if “merit” is defined as the ability to get elected, sell records, or put butts in the seats.

Glenn Reynolds points to a story by Doug Winship about Washington State’s liquor stores running out of, um, liquor just in time for the July 4th weekend during which all good Americans celebrate their country’s independence by getting hammered. Naturally, all liquor stores in Washington State are run by the government of the state of Washington who 1) screwed up royally and 2) don’t really care because, after all, they don’t have a lot of competition.

While I’ve seldom had difficulty getting the beverages needed to restock our bar at Virginia’s ABC stores, having a state-run monopoly does have its quirks.  For example, I went in the other day to procure some Angostura bitters.  You know the brand that’s synonymous with bitters and that’s a key ingredient in many classic cocktails.  It seems that, for reasons unknown to the manager of my local ABC store, the Commonwealth has decided not to stock Angostura bitters but rather Peychaud’s.  Both are esteemed brands that have been around nearly two hundred years but Peychaud’s is much less, er, bitter than Angostura.  True connoisseurs of such things, of which I am decidedly not one, tend to keep a supply of both on hand as the properties of each go better with different cocktails.

Certainly, if this were the worst thing the Commonwealth’s government were doing, I’d be quite pleased.  But there’s no obvious reason why private individuals shouldn’t be able to open liquor stores and supply a wider variety of products.

“If you had told one of the great newspaper moguls of the past that someday it would be possible to publish a newspaper without paying anything for paper, printing and delivery, he would not have predicted that this would mean catastrophe for the industry. But that is what it has been.” – Michael Kinsley

What the moguls may have overlooked is that these developments would radically lower — indeed, essentially eliminate — barriers to entry and therefore provide a fantastic amount of competition.

Photo by Flickr user mfophoto, used under Creative Commons license.

Responding to a reader suggestion that blogger’s word counts be restricted by government (a rather apples-meet-oranges response to a post suggesting CEO pay be capped) Matt Yglesias only wishes it were so.

Personally, I would love a legal cap on the number of words a blogger is allowed to produce per day. I’m privileged to have a job that I really enjoy. But at the same time, I would prefer to write somewhat less—this pace is stressful and doesn’t leave me as much time to pursue other projects and interests. But though I would prefer to write somewhat less, I have a stronger second-order preference to produce a blog that’s competitive with other major offerings on the internet. And over the years competition between bloggers has led to escalating word-counts. The resulting situation isn’t terrible, there are lots of people you should cry for before you get to me, but basically we bloggers are engaged in a red queen’s race where we all need to keep trying harder and harder just to maintain our positions. A cap would be helpful.

One presumes Matt’s merely evaluating the merits of the outcome and not seriously buying into the idea that blogger word count is a fit topic for public policymaking, so I’ll follow suit.

He’s right that word count — or, more accurately, posting frequency — is a key component to success in the blogosphere.  It’s been that way so long as I’ve been at it, which is more than six years now.   Quality matters — cranking out fifteen lousy posts a day won’t draw you many readers — but it’s very hard to get a large readership without a prodigious output. (And, I might add, even with it.)

The acceleration of the trend — of which Matt has been a beneficiary — of magazines, newspapers, and think tanks hiring established bloggers has only exacerbated this situation.  Now, instead of competing for eyeballs against other amateur pundits toiling away in their spare time, there are dozens if not hundreds of full-timers with professional PR teams behind them.

It’s also why solo blogs are giving way to group blogs and why blogging magazines like Huffington Post and Pajamas Media are springing up.

Absent government intervention — which, for the record, I oppose — I see no way out.  Since most of us read other blogs via RSS feeds, blog aggregators, or links from other blogs, the guy posting a few times a week is likely to get pushed further off the radar screen.

Photo by Flickr user Sue Richards, used under Creative Commons license.

President Obama says he’ll help GM and Chrysler but they’ll have to agree to some “pretty drastic changes.”

“We will provide them some help,” Obama said. “I know that it is not popular to provide help to auto workers — or to auto companies. But my job is to measure the costs of allowing these auto companies just to collapse versus us figuring out — can they come up with a viable plan?”  He added: “If they’re not willing to make the changes and the restructurings that are necessary, then I’m not willing to have taxpayer money chase after bad money.”

[...]

“Everybody is going to have to give a little bit — shareholders, workers, creditors, suppliers, dealers — everybody is going to have to recognize that the current model, economic model, of the U.S. auto industry is unsustainable,” Obama said.

The president said he agreed with a questioner at the town hall — a Maryland woman with family members who work for GM and Ford Motor Co. — that “there’s been a lot of mismanagement of the auto industry over the last several years.”

Obama stressed that the industry must be preserved, not only symbolically but because of the large number of jobs connected to the companies and suppliers. Obama said his job was to protect U.S. taxpayers and he wouldn’t spend federal dollars on “a model that doesn’t work.” “A lot of it’s going to depend on their willingness to make some pretty drastic changes. And some of those are still going to be painful,” he said.

[...]

The president said that even as the economy bounces back, Detroit can’t focus on “trying to build more and more SUVs and counting on gas prices being low.”  In that vein, the administration on Friday is expected to announce plans to raise fuel efficiency standards by 2 miles per gallon to 27.3 mpg for new cars and trucks in the 2011 model year, an administration official said Thursday. That would be the first increase in passenger car standards in more than two decades.

Under the changes, new passenger cars will need to meet 30.2 mpg for the 2011 model year and pickup trucks, sport utility vehicles, and minivans will need to reach 24.1 mpg, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak in advance of the announcement.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Obama will announce his strategy for the auto industry before he leaves for Europe on Tuesday. The announcement is likely to come on Monday. Gibbs said Obama still thinks U.S. automakers build cars that Americans want to buy. Both he and the president own Ford Escape hybrids. “It’s a nice car,” Gibbs said. “It really is.”

After speech to the Atlantic Council last evening, EU Commissioner for Competition Neelie Kroes was asked how she would handle this very question were she in charge of the U.S. economy.  She noted that she didn’t have to put herself into any hypothetical situations, because they’re facing exactly these decisions in Europe, too.   And her answer is similar to Obama’s:  No help for industries that ran themselves into the ground with poor management decisions unless they come up with a radical restructuring plan that recasts the business to compete successfully for the long term.  And, yes, that includes being “green” for sustainability.

Obama’s absolutely right that, if the federal taxpayer is going to bail out these companies, then the government has a right to insist on major restructuring.    He’s wrong, though, and Kroes is right on how to get there.

While the government employs some really smart people with substantial knowledge of economic matters, it has no specialized expertise in how to run an automobile company.   To be sure, the people actually running GM and Chrysler haven’t exactly shown themselves as geniuses in that regard.   But, to be fair, they’ve been operating under the pressure of quarterly shareholder reports and hamstrung by a labor structure from a bygone era, which makes it difficult to make good strategic choices.

So, absolutely, Obama’s people (and/or Congress) should approve a restructuring plan before giving the auto companies another dime.  But the auto companies, not the government, should draw up the plan.

Quentin Letts informs me that Ryanair, an Irish no-frills outfit of which I’d never previously heard, is contemplating charging passengers a fee to use the toilet.

That is how it manages to charge such low basic fares for its flights. What they give you in discounted tickets, they try to claw back in the way of incidentals, from pay-per-bag luggage rates to preferential boarding deals and in-flight trinkets.

Want to pay by credit card? That’ll be extra. Want to check in at the airport with a real human being? It’ll cost ya. Insurance gets whacked on the price of your ticket at the blink of an eyelid. Booking a Ryanair ticket online is like a steeplechase, each jump being another grab for money.

The moment you step on one of Ryanair’s gaudily decorated aircraft, with their plastic yellow seat tops and their first-on-board-wins seating policy, you are bombarded with advertisements for car hire, aftershave, hot chocolate, sandwiches and so forth. It is not unlike visiting a Middle Eastern bazaar and being pestered for baksheesh by a wall-eyed leper.

And all this is before the stewardesses come trawling through the cabin with their trolleys of comestibles and gift ware. “You wanna buy, meester? Very good rates. Yessss.” It’s worse than the Djemaa el Fna in Marrakesh.

[...]

Imagine taking your wife and children on a flight where they had to pay to use the khazi. Knowing my brood, we’d be skint before we reached our destination. Human nature dictates that when you’re told you can’t go, it makes you want to go all the more, and modern air passengers seldom seem able to last a two-hour flight without answering a call of nature.

Glenn Reynolds is less good humored about the matter, observing that, “The plethora of nuisance charges being added to air travel just means that when you shop ticket price, you’re shopping a deceptive number. Airlines push that down as far as they can, then try to make the money back with other items they hope you won’t really notice.”

Quite so.  Still, one can’t really blame the airlines.  Well, not entirely anyway.

A couple years ago, my wife and I were on vacation and having cocktails in the hotel lounge with a retired airline pilot who was now doing private charter flights for the well-to-do.  I noted the serious decline in pleasantness of the airline experience even within my relatively short memory and he said that this is what the traveling customer had demanded.

When flying was a luxury affordable by only the wealthy or, as was the case when I flew as a kid, those for whom the company (in our case, the United States Army) was paying for the tickets, service was king and airlines who treated their customers well were rewarded with loyalty. Over the last quarter century or so, though, flying became affordable to the masses while being transformed into a commodity service.  Most customers shop exclusively by price and will take the ticket that’s $20 cheaper regardless of carrier.  Airlines that tried to attract customers with service were quickly abandoned in this environment, creating a race to the bottom, with amenities stripped away and more seats packed into the cabin.

That’s not the whole story, of course.  On many routes, one or at most two carriers dominate because they’ve essentially rented all the gate space at the airports.  WIthout competition, there’s no incentive for service.  But, even with competition, most people would go with the cheapest fare.

Photo by Flickr user Shamrock350 under Creative Commons license.