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What’s wrong with Alaska? 

The political anomalies of the far Northwest are on view right now in a scandal that looks likely to bring down much of the state’s Republican establishment, threatening the careers of oil executives, lobbyists and all three of Alaska’s representatives in Washington. The alleged improprieties are as crass as they get — lobbyists handing out bribes on the floor of the state Legislature, federal money directed by Alaska’s U.S. senators to those companies, and lobbyists who granted politicians personal favors. The taint has spread so far that it has become a crisis not just for those politicians who have been directly implicated, and not just for the Republican Party, but for the state itself. The Associated Press was recently moved to call the few living statesmen who had signed the state’s first constitution, in 1956, and ask them what had become of their creation. ” Greed is rampant,” one of them, Vic Fischer, told the AP. “I’m very disgusted. It’s not a matter of betrayal. It’s more a matter of sadness and concern. But most of all disgust.”

One could note the irony here. The years of tired dog eared claims from these same people about their rugged individualism, their ability to take life by the boot straps and mold themselves into self-made men and women. They don’t need no god darn gov’mint handouts. Yet here we are with a variety of top feeders and bottom feeders getting wealthy off public lands and tax payer subsidies. It would be one thing if this was the first time, or only occassionally or just a tiny handful of them, but this has become Ted Stevens (R-AK) and companies standard operating procedure. So maybe there isn’t any irony here the same old hypocrisy.

Salary, Gender and the Social Cost of Haggling 

Their study, which was coauthored by Carnegie Mellon researcher Lei Lai, found that men and women get very different responses when they initiate negotiations. Although it may well be true that women often hurt themselves by not trying to negotiate, this study found that women’s reluctance was based on an entirely reasonable and accurate view of how they were likely to be treated if they did. Both men and women were more likely to subtly penalize women who asked for more — the perception was that women who asked for more were “less nice”.

Incredibly strange, but not a completely new phenomenon, remember the scene from Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist when he has the audacity to ask, “Please, sir, I want some more.”