January 2008 Archives

In an article in the New York Times today, Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler, Mark Bittman compares meat to oil:

Like oil, meat is subsidized by the federal government. Like oil, meat is subject to accelerating demand as nations become wealthier, and this, in turn, sends prices higher. Finally — like oil — meat is something people are encouraged to consume less of, as the toll exacted by industrial production increases, and becomes increasingly visible.

We hear from time to time that there are drawbacks to the kind of meat production industry that has developed in the United States and elsewhere, but this article follows the relationships between those drawbacks clearly and succinctly. Bonus points to Bittman for quoting Tyler Cowen, one of the authors of the illuminating blog Marginal Revolution:

“I just don’t think we can count on market prices to reduce our meat consumption,” he [Cowen] said. “There may be a temporary spike in food prices, but it will almost certainly be reversed and then some. But if all the burden is put on eaters, that’s not a tragic state of affairs.”

I wonder if we’ll see follow-up comments from Cowen on his blog, as sometimes happens after he has been quoted in the press.

Bittman is the author of the very useful cookbook How to Cook Everything, among other things. His byline on the NYT article indicates that although he’s written a vegetarian cookbook, he’s not a vegetarian, in an apparent effort to fend off any allegations of anti-meat bias.

*Update — 1/29/08: And here is Tyler Cowen’s follow-up. He wonders whether, if one considers the environment and animal cruelty, is it better to eat cows or pigs, if one is going to eat one or the other.

Movable Type 4 supports John Gruber’s Markdown, which is a neat text-to-HTML conversion tool to make writing for the web easier. However, if you have certain out-of-date Movable Type templates, as I did, the Markdown code won’t convert to HTML for display in your feeds, resulting in ugliness. There’s a fix here at Learning Movable Type.

But I’m guessing that anyone else who has run into this problem already knows how to fix it because they post more often than I do. (It wouldn’t take much.)

Twice in the last month, the New York Times has run articles about the legal profession. The first article, The Falling-Down Professions, reports that professions like law and medicine are losing social prestige. That theme elicits little more than a shrug from me, but I did find this quote interesting:

This decline, [author Richard] Florida argued, is rooted in a broader shift in definitions of success, essentially, a realignment of the pillars. Especially among young people, professional status is now inextricably linked to ideas of flexibility and creativity, concepts alien to seemingly everyone but art students even a generation ago.

"There used to be this idea of having a separate work self and home self," he said. "Now they just want to be themselves. It's almost as if they're interviewing places to see if they fit them."

You think?

With that in mind, we turn to the more recent article, Who's Cuddly Now? Law Firms, which relates how large law firms are trying to stanch the bleeding of associate turnover by allowing associates to take reduced billable hour requirements in exchange for salary reductions, increasing parental leave, and taking other steps

I tend to agree with Enrico Schaefer when he says,

Let me say it again. As bad as hourly billing is for clients, it's worse for lawyers. To live your life as though each minute spent doing something else besides billing the client was a wasted moment is a waste of life.

As a partner I know in a respected Denver firm recently remarked, "I'd gladly give up 20% of my income not to have to deal with billable hours."

Will my generation finally get law firms to rethink the life-affecting tradeoffs they make in clinging to the billable-hour system? Maybe. I hope so. But I wonder how these seeds of change will be affected by the threat of economic instability. Gerry Riskin has been warning of doom and gloom for the legal profession and warns against thinking of law practice in terms of business as usual. Bruce McEwen sees law firms as having a less cyclical business and suggests that some features of law practice are likely to change but that the upheaval may be less dramatic than one might think.

I think it will be interesting to see how all these dynamics flow together, and I hope that economic instability does not quash efforts to make it easier to practice law and still have a well-rounded life.