A Boston Globe news article over the weekend about the city's mayoral race somehow wound up quoting your editor. You can check it out here:

"Walsh is interesting nationally to the Democrats for how the Democrats can win those voters, and attract the working-class white guy, or blue-collar white guy, that the Democratic Party has been losing," said Stoll.

The number of English concentrators — what most other colleges call "majors" — at Harvard declined to 144 in 2016 from 236 in 2008. The number of history concentrators declined to 146 from 231 over the same period of time. Government and comparative literature also shrank. So did African and Afro-American Studies, which declined to a mere 6 concentrators in 2016 from 21 in 2008, the Harvard Crimson reports.

What are students studying instead? "Applied STEM." "Statistics blossomed from just 17 concentrators in 2008 to 163 in 2016. Computer Science now counts 363 concentrators, up from 86 in 2008, and Applied Mathematics more than doubled in size over that time frame—from 101 to 279 students," the newspaper reports.

Paul Tudor Jones of Tudor Investment Corp. left Connecticut "for Florida, a lower tax state, in 2016, according to a residence filing in Palm Beach County," Bloomberg News reports.

We've reported here in the past on hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman's move to Florida and hedge fund manager David Tepper's move to Florida. Bruce Kovner and Bill Miller are also there. Bruce Berkowitz moved his fund to Florida from New Jersey in 2006. A Fortune article reported:

Being a mid-level editor at a small newspaper — or at any newspaper, for that matter — is one of the most thankless jobs in American journalism.

To readers, such journalists are mostly invisible. Reporters get bylines. The editors who improve and shape the stories or write the headlines that appear over them are largely anonymous.

Like baseball managers, these editors are often caught in the middle. They are blamed by their higher-profile bosses in the front office when things go wrong, but they are rarely noticed, or credited, when things go right. It's a job with more responsibility than authority. The work itself can be tedious. It often features night shifts in half-empty, fluorescent-lit newsrooms — not exactly the glamorous life of journalism as seen on television or movies.

The New York Sun, during its time as a print daily from 2002 to 2008, was blessed with more than its fair share of excellent people who did those jobs. One of the best of them, Mike Saucier, died this past week of pancreatic cancer, 30 days after being diagnosed.

The New York Times carries a column by its book critic Dwight Garner about the 1993 book "Travels With Lizbeth: Three Years On The Road And In The Streets," by Lars Eighner. Mr. Garner contends that it "contains the finest first-person writing we have about the experience of being homeless in America." Mr. Garner writes:

The author recognizes that Austin is a good place to be homeless. The weather is temperate; the city's politics are liberal. Eighner maintains a bitter running critique of the city's welfare services, however. He spies "a general contempt for the poor" in their uselessness.

California just increased gas taxes by 12 cents a gallon, joining Chris Christie's New Jersey on the list of states that have gone ahead and raised the gas tax on their own, without waiting around for the federal government to do it. Marketplace, a public radio program, has a report on the situation. Anyway, if you are tempted to be frustrated that Washington doesn't do things, remember that it's always possible for at least some state or local governments to rise to such challenges.

The New York Times reports on what President Macron of France has been up to: "major overhauls of France's labor market...more flexibility for individual firms in carving out agreements with workers." Also, a "proposal to reduce a tax on the rich known here as the 'Solidarity Tax on Wealth'— in French, the Impôt de Solidarité sur la Fortune, or I.S.F."

Reports the Times:

No president until Mr. Macron has dared go after the wealth tax since it was created, in a different form, under the first government of President François Mitterrand, a Socialist, in 1982.

The tax aims at assets — financial, property and otherwise — above $1.52 million (1.3 million euros). Everybody with holdings above that sum has had to pay up, on a progressive scale: The more you own, the more you pay.

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The Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, brownstone at 377 Union St. that political consultant Paul Manafort bought for about $3 million in 2012 turns out, according to neighbors, to have been featured in the Wall Street Journal real estate section, which reported that it sold for $300,000 in 1994. That's a ten-fold increase in value during a time period in which the S&P 500 Index was up about threefold. So I wasn't kidding in that column about the Brooklyn Boom.

A "2% excise tax on some colleges' endowment income" is being considered as one of the ways to 'pay for' lower corporate and individual tax rates as part of tax reform, Colleen Murphy, who covers taxes for Bloomberg BNA, reports on Twitter.

From the news columns of the New York Times – not the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, but the news columns of the New York Times, which aren't usually known for their strident libertarianism:

A decade after the big housing bust dealt a blow to many smaller home builders, the industry's largest firms continue to grapple with higher regulatory expenses that make building homes — especially starter homes — too costly, some housing-finance experts said. The situation confounds some people, given the pressing need for affordable housing for young families.

Laurie Goodman, a director of housing-finance policy for the Urban Institute, said the nation suffered from a "huge supply shortage" of new single-family homes.

The Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn brownstone bought by President Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort is the topic of my column this week. Please check it out at Newsmax here.

The Manafort indictment is the topic of a column that I will be posting here later. In the meantime, though, at least one point is worth paying attention to that I haven't yet seen raised elsewhere. It appears that the government is now going to take the position that consulting to a foreign political party or politician requires registering as a foreign agent, disclosing all your fees and bringing them all back into the U.S. with full taxes paid on them. Is it going to apply this standard only to Paul Manafort? Or is it going to apply the standard evenly and equally to consultants on all sides? NPR reported in 2014, for example, that the British conservative party had hired former Obama campaign aide Jim Messina, and that the British politician Ed Milliband had hired "Obama campaign mastermind" David Axelrod. American consultant Stanley Greenberg has reportedly worked for the Israeli Labor Party.

News coverage of the shortage of butter on French supermarket shelves (BBC, Bloomberg, NYT) is an economics lesson in itself.

As usual, when there's a "shortage," some sort of government intervention in the free market is nearby: the end of "milk quotas" in the European Union in 2015. I can see someone arguing that the cause of the shortage wasn't the quotas but the repeal of them, but that seems like a stretch.

There's also a good illustration here of how constantly adjusting prices helps allocate goods to where they are needed. The BBC explains the problem:

rigidities in France's system of pricing and distribution.

Kevin Williamson writes at National Review:

I have for a long time been sympathetic to the idea of capping the total annual taxes paid by an individual, say at $1 million a year. I call it the Max Tax. ... Barack Obama used to say that, at a certain point, you've made enough money. I think that, at a certain point, you've paid enough tax, at least for the year. The Left likes to talk about "fair share," even though right now, as things stand, the top 20 percent of income earners pay basically all the federal income tax — their share of taxes is wildly disproportionate to their share of income. Call me old-fashioned, but I think a million bucks a year is more than one's "fair share." I like the idea of other tax caps, too: For example, I'd cap the lifetime property taxes on a residence at the price of the house itself. If you've paid off your house once, and then paid for it again through property taxes, it should be, at long last, your house. ...