PUBLISHED, BUT DIDN'T GET INTO MADISON? J.V.C. Comments discovers high-schoolers writing peer-reviewed articles.

I can hardly criticize attempts to prepare 17-year-olds for college-level research and writing, since too many kids learn that sort of thing on the fly--or, as many of us know firsthand, they never really learn it at all.

Still, I find it a little creepy that these kids are getting their papers "published." Since 1987, The Concord Review has reprinted nearly 650 essays by ambitious high-schoolers, and the journal enjoys a convenient symbiotic relationship with The National Writing Board, an official-sounding body that will read a student's essay and send a three-page report to admissions officers at several elite colleges and universities. They'll gladly let Yale know how spiffy they think your kid is--for a $100 fee, of course.

There is dirty work, or at least a positional arms race, at work.

Look, I can't fault the Concord Review/National Writing Board folks for spotting a way to cash in, and I support their stated mission to "celebrate varsity academics." What I can't get behind is their weird romanticization of the grad-school mindset, especially when humanities programs are already bursting with the next generation of grumpy, disillusioned bloggers. I mean, come on, these kids are seventeen. At that age, the accomplishment of having understood Beowulf or the Armenian genocide should be enough. Even if it's not, we should tell them that it is.

Besides, let's be honest about "the only quarterly journal in the world to publish the academic work of secondary students." No one's reading The Concord Review for its contributors' brilliant insights on Jane Eyre or Spanish fascism. They're reading it to study examples of essays that the National Writing Board anoints, because they hope to earn the same accolade and a useful line or two on an application to an elite school. They don't respect the contributor to The Concord Review; they just want what he has.

Not only that, the industrial reserve army in the humanities stands to swell further.

If blogs are still big in around seven years, The Concord Review will help guarantee that the chorus of commiseration sounds depressingly familiar. "Grad school...the job market...the competition...seemed like what I was born to do...why didn't anyone tell me?"

Plus ca change. I still recall the laments from university: "I always got good grades in high school. What are they doing to me?" The lament generalizes, with applicable substitution, to graduate school. Many are called, few are chosen. Deal with it.

WHAT'S FOR SUPPER? That's not just a Midwestern question.

RETROSPECTIVE CARNIVAL. Ralph at Cliopatria discovers a Call for Carnival Entries, this being Early Modern Notes requesting posts dealing with developments 1450-1850. There's also a theory-laced disquisition on the origin of carnivals, should you be curious.

CALLBOY, ROUND UP TWO CREWS: Updates to some of yesterday's posts are running.

BY THEIR FRUITS SHALL YE KNOW THEM. Tyler at Marginal Revolution asks, "Can we judge thinkers by their followers?" His focus is on the followers of Karl Marx; there is an interesting challenge at the end of the post:

Can you tell me, standing on one foot, what exactly is both important and valid in the writings of Martin Heidegger? I'll assume I can use your name unless you tell me otherwise; a blogged answer is best of all.

Some people have already taken him up.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. What public policies best for the future, and what best for the governing conservative coalition? Dan Drezner points to a David Brooks essay that notes the following policy dimensions.

1. War on Islamic extremism.
2. Entitlement reform.
3. Social mobility
4. Restore integrity of institutions
5. Energy
6. National service.

Professor Drezner's reaction is mixed. He invites readers to read and understand the Brooks essay and offer their comments.

Mr Brooks's conclusion:

By using government in limited but energetic ways, conservatives could establish credibility that would enable them to reduce the size of government where it is useless or worse -- export subsidies, agricultural subsidies and the like. Then they could use that credibility to reduce the increases in entitlement spending -- the giant set of programs that crowd out everything else.

More than that, conservatives have it in their power to refashion the political landscape. American politics is now polarized, evenly divided and stagnant. It has become like World War I. Each party is down in its trench, lobbing the same old arguments, relying on the same old coalitions. Neither party is able to gain a lasting advantage. Neither party is able to accomplish much that it is proud of.

Trench warfare finally ended because somebody invented the tank. It is time for one party or another to invent the tank, some new governing philosophy that will broaden its coalition and transform the partisan divide. For Republicans, the progressive conservative governing philosophy is the tank. It is the approach to politics best suited to the emerging suburban civilization, best suited to life during a war on Islamic extremism. It is the way Republicans can build a governing majority and leave a positive mark on the nation and its destiny.

It also sounds a lot like the same old public policy debate as I have understood it for years: the Democrats offer all sorts of programs, and the Republicans offer to operate them more effectively. I fear that it will take something more jarring than a one-off terror raid with jetliners to get people thinking along those new lines.

RUNNING EXTRA: George Will has it about right:

From the New Deal through the civil rights revolution, liberalism strove to use expanding government to drive the alteration of society. Conservatism's mission was largely restoration -- rolling back big government. Neither persuasion is now plausible.

Kerry insists he is not a "redistribution Democrat." But of course he is. And Bush is a redistribution Republican. There is no "natural" distribution of social wealth. Distribution is influenced by social arrangements, from property laws to tax laws to educational arrangements, all of them political choices. Both parties have redistributionist agendas.

In disavowing "redistribution," Kerry presumably means he rejects the old liberal belief in recarving the economic pie, rather than making the pie grow, to ameliorate the condition of the poor. But he favors using government power to direct the flow of wealth to public school teachers, or to protect the flow to trial lawyers. Up-to-date liberalism defends the strong, not the poor, who are either reliable Democratic voters or nonvoters. Republicans defend their own muscular interests.

The vocabulary of the two-party argument just a generation ago now seems as anachronistic as the 1890s argument about the free coinage of silver. Liberals have next to nothing to say about poverty or, because of their servitude to the public education industry, about the calamitous inadequacy of inner-city schools, which is both a cause and a consequence of the social pathologies of poverty. Conservatives, whose party has delivered on its 2000 promise to increase federal involvement in education and health care, no longer invest even rhetorical energy in the cause of "small" or "limited" government. And now their presidential nominee wants an even bigger government role in policing speech.

This 11-D post on public attitudes toward politics merits attention.

THE MISSING OPTIONS. Live from the Third Rail investigates the thin service offered by many commuter rail operators, and discovers what regular readers of Cold Spring Shops have long known, namely that the freight railroads have hived off a great deal of capacity and are now clogged with freight trains, particularly coal trains and container loads of goods from the Pacific Rim.

If trains could run at the speeds they were designed to operate, they could pose a real challenge to low-fare airlines, especially with business-related day-trips and short-notice excursions. But since it's more profitable to run freight, passenger service gets cut. Unlike trucking companies, railroads can speed up their own traffic by Is this unfair? Not really, since the companies who own the track would be negligent in their responsibility to their shareholders if they didn't try to maximize profits.

Theoretically, if the government nationalized the tracks, they could allocate use based on a variety of factors, including traffic reduction. But that's not going to happen, since Congress would never allow it, and experience in other nations has shown separating track and train owners is a very, very bad idea.

The passenger train operators could renegotiate the contracts with the freight railroads that own the tracks, so as to make it more profitable to run the passenger trains on time. Currently, however, the railroads might hold-up the passenger train operators for payments far in excess of the benefits of the faster service, or tell the operators to go away, or some combination of both. (The latest print edition of Trains notes that Amtrak's Chicago-Los Angeles via El Paso is at risk of both having part of its route further downgraded account light traffic and part of its route jammed with freight trains. The Chicago-Los Angeles via Kansas City and Albuquerque also faces both problems.)

Live from the Third Rail notes the following policy options.

So here's what's left:

Build new tracks. This is very expensive and an eminent domain nighmare of the highest order anywhere you have enough riders to build new tracks.

Add more tracks on existing lines. They're doing this in some places already, along with upgrading signaling. It costs less money, but doesn't improve service as much.

Improve trucking. All over the country, ideas for truck-only highways, bridges and tunnels are being considered as a way to move trucks away from the gridlock. As a secondary result, you'd think rail traffic would decrease, allowing for more room for passenger service. But track owners may still want to minimize Amtrak and commuter line runs out of a desire to increase their own flexibility, which has its own economic benefits.

Do nothing. Better stock up on the books on tape, because drive time radio isn't getting any better either.

There is one further possibility: bring back the discipline of moving hot trains. The steam-era railroads understood how to do that.

SECOND SECTION: Eminent domain nightmare? Perhaps. On the other hand, perhaps it is time to consider those new truck-only tollways -- with freight railroads in the median -- as a way to provide additional freight handling capability and to free up road and rail space for passengers. And, pace Transport Blog, it does not have to be the case that without eminent domain -- compulsory purchase in the U.K. -- there would be no railroads. Many of the interurbans and a few of the more speculative railroads acquired their rights of way and easements by voluntary purchase, often sweetened with shares of stock.

CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS. It's Monday, and time for the Carnival of the Capitalists, this week at New Dog, Old Trick. (Must I phrase the announcement in the Olympian mode: the posts of the CI Carnival of the Capitalists ...?)

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE? Hundred Percenter posted a number of pictures from Sunday's pre-convention march through Manhattan. The person holding the sign has a bit too much of the Ann Coulter sorority chick look about her ...

The truth is out. The New Republic discovered, and Outside the Beltway relayed, the news that Communists for Kerry is a bit of guerilla theater turned loose within the guerilla theater. Outside the Beltway also links to Blogs for Bush coverage. Sylvain at Chicago Boyz is amused.

RUNNING EXTRA: Power Line and Captain's Quarters interview the current Miss America inside the convention. No guerilla theater there.

OLYMPICS, OBSOLETE? Perhaps for reasons additional to the organization of players by countries, according to Reason's Nick Gillespie.

But in an increasingly globalized world, one in which goods and people migrate without a second thought, such variety and such mixing is an everyday occurrence. An ever-growing number of niche cable channels deliver ever-more tailored sports content and the World Wide Web caters to every possible fetish, in sports every bit as much as porn. Compared to 30 years ago, it's a much smaller globe—and a far more interesting world. But in such a setting, the Olympics lose a good deal of what the ad men would call their "unique selling proposition."

Even more important, the great geopolitical struggles that energized the Olympics have almost completely vanished. First and foremost among these, of course, was the Cold War. Every bit as much as Korea, Vietnam, and Berlin, the Olympics were one of the great proxy battles of the Cold War, pitting the Free World vs. the Iron Curtain, Western Europe vs. Eastern Europe, the U.S.A. vs. the U.S.S.R. Bruce Jenner's 1976 triumph in the decathlon was not simply about shattering a world record; it also represented a slapdown of the 1972 champion, Nikolai Avilov, the Soviet "man machine" who struggled to bronze in Montreal. Nor was the Cold War the only political subtext to enliven the Olympics. Almost as compelling was the rise to athletic dominance of former colonies such as Kenya in track and India and Pakistan in field hockey.

Every Summer Olympics from 1968 through 1984 occasioned some sort of major protest or boycott.

(Via Champology 101.)

TODAY'S RECOMMENDED RAILROAD READING. In the course of researching "electricity keeping its own books" I found a reproduction of a 1923 National Geographic tribute to railroading.

The article is a great sketch of classic steam-era railroading. It sheds some light on why people still react to someplace busy with "What is this, Grand Central Station?"

Oh, and no doubt the Blame-America-Firsters of that era would find much about these sentences to complain about the ending to the article.

The United States has about one-sixteenth of the earth's land and an equal proportion of its population, yet it has nearly a third of the world's railway mileage. Its population is only one-fourth that of Europe, yet it has almost enough miles of line to duplicate the systems of Europe and Asia together.

Got to find the figures for today. Perhaps later.

POLITICS MAKES STRANGE SUPPER GUESTS. Hey, I like vegetarian tamales too. Soy ground beef substitute and spicy black beans. Yummy!

ELECTRICITY KEEPING ITS OWN BOOKS, FORSOOTH! Years ago, the Milwaukee Road's electrified mountain lines

employed regenerative braking, in which the train going down the mountain helped power the train going up the mountain. As one enthusiast describes it,

Perhaps the coolest aspect of the electrification system adopted by the Milwaukee was regeneration. When trains went down hill the electric motors were used as generators. This both slowed the train down (with substantial savings in the cost of replacing brake-shoes), and returned power to the system to help ascending trains, reducing the overall power needs by about twelve percent. Heavy capital costs, but significant operational savings (despite padding of costs); the net benefit was later found to amount to a return on investment of nine percent annually.

The Milwaukee's publicists were somewhat more colorful (40 Trains 46, July 1970, print edition.)

The restored current automatically sets back the power company's meters and credits the Railway with the amount. Electricity keeping its own books, forsooth!

Ah, but at what rate does the Power Company credit the consumer? Michael at Knowledge Problem has discovered an Iowa regulatory case in which "setting back the meter" isn't good enough for the Power Company, who would like to buy at wholesale and sell at retail.

Under net metering, a retail energy consumer with a small generator is only billed by the electric utility for the net power consumption over the billing period. In the Iowa case, the cooperative wanted to charge the retail consumer the retail price for power the consumer took from the system, and pay the retail consumer a lower “avoided cost” rate for any power the consumer put back into the system. The plaintiffs wanted to to be paid at the higher retail rate for power put back into the system.

The Iowa Supreme Court decided for the plaintiffs on the grounds that the underlying law, PURPA, was intended to encourage renewable resource development, and paying the (higher) retail rate would encourage renewable resources more than paying the (lower) avoided cost rate. In a dissenting opinion, a judge argued that PURPA required payment of a rate not higher than the incremental cost to the utility (i.e., the avoided cost), and the retail rate “is manifestly not the cost to the utility.”

After citing the dissenting opinion, IREC commented, “This argument is well reasoned, but not the majority opinion.”

Sounds like a somewhat more sophisticated meter than the St. Paul used. If the wind turbine owned by the plaintiff in the case simply runs the meter backwards, there is insufficient information to dispute the rate. There is a serious legal problem here, but the analogy Mr Giberson offers is strained.

Economically, the arguments in favor of net metering are all mush. If I picked apples from a tree in my backyard and took them into the supermarket, should the supermarket have to pay me the retail price for my apples? The cooperative’s proposal to charge retail for amounts consumed and pay avoided costs for amounts produced by the generator-equipped customer seems a little more reasonable, at least as a matter of logic.

I think his main point is that the Power Company is functioning as a sales agent for the windmill owner, who would otherwise be in the position of the orchard owner who would have to market his own apples in excess of his own consumption. But is it not the case that the opportunity cost of the apple I ate myself -- or the windmill-generated electricity I used to power my trains -- is the retail price? I have avoided paying that price by doing it myself.

WHAT, NO CATS? King at SCSU Scholars is contemplating posting a Friday macro-economy review. The first is informative. Hie thee there and encourage him to post more.

OVERINDULGED SECOND-STRING STREET THUGS UNDERACHIEVE. Why am I not disappointed? Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel sports commentator Michael Hunt diagnoses the problem.

So the question going forward is how the United States, now in a shocking underdog role, can play catch-up to the world in the game it invented. Having a year-round coach would help. [Pro basketball commissioner David] Stern suggested importing a few expatriates from the European leagues who understand the game and could teach it to the Americans.

That makes sense, but it all starts at the top. It was Stern who made the decision to market his league on the basis of the individual star. It has made everybody rich, including Stern, but it has done nothing to enhance the basics that the rest of the world can now do better than the Americans.

Playing as a team would be a start. So would relearning how to shoot. USA basketball. It's not fundamental.

Hear, hear. Hear this, too: it is not the case that the street game has made everybody rich. There has to be research on the effect the large rewards to a few players has had on the human-capital investments of young men, particularly young men of little intellectual ambition from poor neighborhoods. The corrosive effect of big-time sports on the integrity of the universities is well-documented.

SECOND SECTION: The U.S. women's team rallied to defeat the Australian team in the gold medal game. The women's game is still a team game. And really, would you rather look at Allen Iverson or at Lisa Leslie?

THAT SUBSIDY TO THE UPPER-MIDDLE CLASSES. "Keep UW affordable," urge the editors at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

The costs of a University of Wisconsin education have been increasingly shifting from taxpayers to students and their families - setting in motion two alarming and related trends:

(*)Fewer students from middle- to lower-income brackets are enrolling than they used to.

(*)A smaller share of the state's high school grads of color are winding up as UW freshmen.

Policy-makers must reverse these trends - and pronto - by stepping up financial aid and by keeping in check future tuition increases.

These trends betray ideals that lie at the heart of America and of Wisconsin. College opens up opportunities to young people, opportunities that in America are supposed to depend solely on talents, not on race or wealth. Wisconsin observed that principle with a long-standing policy of keeping UW affordable - a policy that steep tuition hikes are threatening.

There is more to this story. On the one hand, the Journal-Sentinel have not discussed the vanishing art of working your way through college. Have the summer-replacement factory jobs gone missing to such an extent that students are no longer able to earn their tuition with such a summer job, and a part-time job during college? At one time, within my lifetime, that was possible. On the other hand, the writers have missed the expense-preference behavior of the court intellectuals in Madison. (Hat tip: Owen at Boots and Sabers).

SCHEISTENFREUDE? Bill at Atlantic Blog and Owen at Boots and Sabers have suitably caustic comments about the ownership of the bus that did an unauthorized tank-pumpout onto a sightseeing boat in the Chicago River.

Witnesses told authorities the deluge of waste came from a long black tour bus crossing the grated bridge. At least one witness gave police an Oregon license plate number.

Surveillance cameras at neighborhood businesses helped Madigan's investigators and Chicago police detectives trace the bus to Whol, a Texas man who is identified in the complaint as one of five drivers for the Dave Matthews Band, authorities said.

Whol was driving to pick up a band member at a Michigan Avenue hotel when the bus crossed the bridge, according to the three-count civil complaint filed in Cook County Circuit Court. Later that evening, the band played the second of two shows at Alpine Valley in East Troy, Wis.

A band publicist issued a statement Tuesday night saying, "Our driver has stated that he was not involved in this incident. We reserve any judgment until we see the evidence."

Luxury coaches like the ones leased by the band are equipped with 80- to 100-gallon waste tanks that are emptied underneath the vehicle by pushing a toggle switch behind the driver's seat, according to the attorney general's complaint.

In addition to seeking fines for violations of state laws, Madigan said she is asking the court to order an evaluation of the band's waste disposal practices. State officials said most charter buses dump waste at licensed disposal facilities."

This incident may be unique, but that does not lessen the environmental or public health risks posed by the release of at least 800 pounds of liquid human waste into a busy waterway and onto a crowded tour boat," Madigan said in a statement. "This situation clearly demonstrates the environmental and public health problems that can occur when laws are ignored. This act was not only offensive, it was illegal."

Two wicked thoughts come to mind. First, is the Department of Transportation going to mandate new labels for the pumpout switches? (Drivers will please refrain from ...)

Second, as the Dave Matthews Band is shilling for Senator Kerry, can it be said that the Kerry campaign has used biological weapons on its own constituents?

THE FATAL CONCEIT. Krauthammer:

Upon losing a game at the 1925 Baden-Baden tournament, Aaron Nimzowitsch, the great chess theoretician and a superb player, knocked the pieces off the board, jumped on the table and screamed, "How can I lose to this idiot?"

Nimzowitsch may have lived decades ago in Denmark, but he had the soul of a modern American Democrat. After all, Democrats have been saying much the same -- with similar body language -- ever since the erudite Adlai Stevenson lost to the syntactically challenged Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. They said it again when they lost to that supposed simpleton Ronald Reagan. Twice, would you believe? With George W. Bush, they are at it again, and equally apoplectic.

Actually, this time around, even more apoplectic. The Democrats' current disdain for George Bush reminds me of another chess master, Efim Bogoljubov, who once said, "When I am White, I win because I am White" -- White moves first and therefore has a distinct advantage -- "when I am Black, I win because I am Bogoljubov." John Kerry is a man of similar vanity -- intellectual and moral -- and that spirit thoroughly permeates the Democratic Party.

Democrats feel a mixture of horror and contempt for the huddled masses -- so bovine, so benighted, so besotted with talk radio -- who made a king of an empty-headed movie star (Reagan, long before Arnold) and inexplicably want the Republicans' current nitwit leader to have a second term.

Does it come as any surprise that many in the academy fancy themselves court intellectuals for the Donks? Got news for you: Commander in Chief is a different sort of office than, say, president of the National Honor Sociey chapter, or secretary-general of the University Council.

RUNNING EXTRA: None of the above deters Howell Raines. D.J. at Poli Pundit applies the corrective. (Hat tip: Betsy's Page.)

REMEMBER LAST NIGHT'S SERMONS? Years ago, best-selling memoirs were the work of older people, such as Civil War commanders, reflecting on a lifetime's accomplishment. Today, spoiled twentysomethings write memoirs. If the one in question becomes a best-seller, do not blame me.

THERE IS A CARNIVAL OF THE CARNIVALS. Regular readers of Cold Spring Shops will know that King of Fools has been posting the Carnival of the Carnivals regularly; the most recent is here. Regular readers of Instapundit may be excused for thinking there is no such thing yet. You've got to explore the web a bit more, Glenn!

THE REAL BULL-HEADED SUVOROV.

Robert E. Lee.

Yes, that's a bit strong, and yes, there is a conversation at Brad DeLong's place about which Civil War commander was the most wasteful of life.

Might I recommend A Victor, Not a Butcher (details or compare prices) that argues General Grant was more careful with lives than any other eastern theater commander including General Lee. The summary: (p. xv.)

In fact, an average of "only" 15 percent of Grant's Federal troops were killed or wounded in his battles over the course of the war -- a total of slightly more than 94,000 men. In contrast, Grant's major Confederate counterpart, Robert E. Lee, who is often treated far more kindly by historians, had greater casualties both in percentages and in real numbers: an average of 20 percent of his troops were killed or wounded in his battles -- a total of more than 121,000 (far more than any other Civil War general). Lee had 80,000 of his men killed or wounded in his first fourteen months in command (about the same number he started with). ...

Both Grant and Lee were aggressive generals, but only Grant's aggressiveness was consistent with the strategic aims of his government. ... Lee needed a tie but went for the win, while Grant needed a win, went for it, and achieved it.

How effective was Grant after the debacle at Cold Harbor? (Author Edward Bonekemper argues was not the pointless slaughter many have portrayed it to be). (p. 265.)

As Jean Edward Smith concluded, Grant's detaching a 115,000 man army from his foe and secretly crossing the James River "was a perilous maneuver and an incredible tactical accomplishment, and it in no way diminishes Patton's accomplishment [in changing fronts during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944] to say that it pales alongside Grant's withdrawal from Cold Harbor and his crossing of the James in June 1864."

That maneuver, incidentally, made possible the penning-up of Lee's army in Petersburg, seven weeks after Grant began his campaign. Grant's total casualties (killed, wounded, captured, and missing) from Wilderness to Appomattox totaled 116,954. Preceding eastern theater commanders suffered 143,925 total casualties (p. 249) to no effect.

Mr Bonekemper cites other sources that provide some insights into the character of the man. Contemporary leaders might study these (p. 256). First, on his alcoholism. Citing James McPherson,

[Grant's] predisposition to alcoholism may have made him a better general. His struggle for self-discipline enabled him to understand and discipline others; the humiliation of prewar failures gave him a quiet humility that was conspicuously absent from so many generals with a reputation to protect; because Grant had nowhere to go but up, he could act with more boldness and decision than commanders who dared not risk failure.

Second, on his style. Citing Adam Badeau,

Not a sign about him suggested rank or reputation or power. He discussed the most ordinary themes with apparent interest, and turned from them in the same quiet tones, and without a shade of difference in his manner, to decisions that involved the fate of armies, as if great things and small were to him of equal moment.

AND YET MORE CONGESTION PRICING. Peak load pricing gains support:

The Virginia Department of Transportation said yesterday that it would build high-occupancy toll lanes on a 14-mile stretch of the Capital Beltway, working with a private partner to create the first of an extensive network of the new-style highways for the Washington region.

The plan would add two lanes on each side of the Beltway, separated from other traffic, between Springfield and the Georgetown Pike. The high-occupancy toll lanes -- or HOT lanes -- would be free for car pools of three or more people, but others would pay for the privilege of using them. To keep the lanes from clogging, tolls would increase with the amount of traffic.
"We want to build HOT lanes," said Virginia Transportation Commissioner Philip A. Shucet. "I think it could be one of the few options that we have to meaningfully improve mobility."

Virginia and Maryland leaders plan a network of congestion-priced highways that they say will unclog roadways in a region with the third-worst traffic in the nation. Virginia officials are considering additional HOT lanes on parts of Interstates 95 and 395, and Maryland officials are exploring plans to build them on the Beltway, I-270, the Baltimore Beltway and I-95 north of Baltimore.

Not everybody will pay to cut the line each day.

Officials have embraced the concept as a way to give motorists relief from chronic tie-ups. They do not expect drivers to take HOT lanes every day, but they believe that everyone would use them sometimes. Occasional users might include parents who are late to pick up children from day care, business people who are rushing to meet clients, and fed-up commuters who simply want to get out of traffic.

"I'm all for it. I would gladly pay a premium," said Harry Dennis of Arlington, a lawyer who drives the Beltway almost every day. Dennis said he would have taken the Beltway yesterday to get from Reston to Springfield if it had HOT lanes, but because traffic is so unpredictable, he took back roads.

"It's such a crapshoot the way it is right now," Dennis said.

Backers also say the lanes would allow for bus service that Beltway traffic jams now make impractical. In addition, drivers on regular lanes would benefit when cars move over to the HOT lanes, supporters say.

Not everybody likes the idea.

HOT lane opponents say the tolls amount to double taxation because public funds are used to build roads. "We pay the taxes for them; we shouldn't have to pay for them again with tolls," said Jim Wamsley, transportation chairman of the Sierra Club's Virginia chapter. Wamsley said he objected to the Beltway HOT lanes having tolls at all hours, rather than just during peak times.

This statement sounds a bit surprising. But when I visited the Sierra Club's energy issues pages, I was not able to find any discussion of carbon taxation, so Mr Wamsley's ignorance is not compounded by inconsistency. And it's rather churlish of him to not thank me for kicking in some of the money for his congested roads, which I do every time I fill my gas tank or replace -- thankfully, not that frequently -- a set of tires, assuming Congress isn't playing around again with the highway trust fund.

LIGHTHOUSE, OR RADIO SIGNAL? Lynne at Knowledge Problem and Eric at Marginal Revolution are doing some heavy intellectual lifting on whether a satellite-driven, open-signal Global Positioning System qualifies as a pure public good. Neither post considers the possibility that such satellites, whether sending signals in the clear, or sending signals that require a special decoder -- and thus the possibility of excluding free riders by selling renewable code keys -- have elements of natural monopoly (or is it a transaction cost problem in which one satellite club can steal members from two or more smaller clubs??) that might vitiate contestability.

There is a precursor to the Global Positioning System that is kind of interesting. The Illustrated Longitude (the original book is a great read, there are marvelous maps, drawings, and photos in the illustrated version -- details or compare prices) tells of a plan to anchor ships at well-defined locations in the ocean that would fire guns to give the hour in London. Give or take the speed of sound, ships within earshot of the guideships would be able to reckon their longitude by comparing their observation of local noon with the hour gun signal they heard. (But if one could anchor guideships in the ocean, one could put identifying marks on them exactly as lighthouses and bell buoys, and reckoning longitude would cease to be a problem as ships could proceed from guideship to guideship.) Satellites can be anchored -- it's called geosynchronous orbit -- and run on batteries without getting lonely, thus addressing several practical problems that scuppered the guideship idea.

DISTINGUISHED VISITORS. Vice President Cheney plans to attend Speaker Hastert's fund-raising dinner, which will be in the Northern Illinois University Convocation Center. No doubt the Washington beat and the policy wonks (go to page 20) will find occasion to carp about Northern Illinois University again benefitting from its Washington connection. Would that I knew where the $16.5 million went.

OBVIOUSLY NOT. USA Today's William Keck rides with paparazzo Mel Bouzad, in quest of an exclusive shot. Today's quarry: Britney Spears's soon-to-be-stepchild.

Bouzad reaches Spears' house just in time to see the heavily tattooed [fiancé Kevin] Federline cruising home from the grocery store. “That guy's a chump,” says Bouzad. “And you can print that.”

Bouzad routinely injects his personal feelings for the celebs he hunts, maintaining contempt for most. He insists that if he invested enough time and manpower, he could find dirt on them all and systematically destroy their lives.

Nonsense. He's well paid for the scandals he uncovers.

Whether you love the paparazzi or share George Clooney's disdain for the ground they stalk on, there's no denying these guys live an exciting life. And with demand for celebrity photos at an all-time high and with the weekly bidding war among Star, Us Weekly, People and In Touch magazines, there's a lot of money to be made.

Those celebrity photos are not airbrushed publicity shots, I can assure you. More dirt? Just more loutishness for people with no internal compass of their own to emulate. It is encouraging, however, that the hunter of celebrities has less respect for his game than the hunter of deer.

EVERYTHING I LIKE GOES AWAY. In February, I praised ATA for making effective use of its gates at Chicago Midway Airport. So naturally, ATA may or may not be leaving Chicago, and other carriers may or may not be coveting its gates at Midway. Sounds like a parody of the Baptist call to worship. Jet Blue enters into ATA's gates with Thanksgiving, and into bankruptcy courts with Praise. (Time to power down for the night, nicht wahr?)

A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION. Illinois Governor Blagojevich would like to encourage greater use of the I-Pass electronic transponders in cars and to discourage trucks from cluttering the toll roads. It's probably not yet time for freight corridors -- truck only toll roads with railroad tracks in the median strip but, as this Chicago Tribune story (yes, you must register. You too.) reveals, it might be time for discounts to encourage the use of the transponder and peak load pricing for the trucks.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. Students return to campus, where the times, they are a-changing. Outside the Beltway points to a Time column discovering -- gasp -- libertarian-conservative thinking among the students. The column rounds up the usual Old Right suspects as catalysts of the mood shifts. There is something happening here, which to Time isn't exactly clear.

Many of them think the President has betrayed them by signing bills fattening Medicare and the Department of Education. Though the students embrace small businesses built on enterprise, they criticize big ones for knowing no borders and observing no national loyalties. And while he is fringe even among those students, 40-year-old hip-hop entrepreneur Reginald Jones — who says the Iraq invasion was unconstitutional because Congress never declared war and who decries post-9/11 security measures as infringements on our freedoms — has become one of the most popular figures among the young right. His raucous seminar on the evils of abortion, taxation, the Democrats and "milquetoast" Republicans — as well as the pleasures of NASCAR — didn't end until 2:30 one morning.

That first sentence is particularly promising, as it suggests future student radicals will discover the root cause of high textbook prices. Young people are speaking their minds in a different way.

But while professors may lean left, many students are tilting right — especially toward that brand of conservatism known as libertarianism. According to a well-regarded annual survey sponsored for the past 38 years by the American Council on Education, only 17% of last year's college freshmen thought it was important to be involved in an environmental program, half the percentage of 1992. A majority of 2003 freshmen--53%--wanted affirmative action abolished, compared with only 43% of all adults. Two-thirds of frosh favored abortion rights in 1992; only 55% did so in last year's survey. Support for gun control has slipped in recent years among the young, and last year 53% of students believed that "wealthy people should pay a larger share of taxes than they do now," compared with 72% 11 years earlier.

Many students want to win one for the Gipper.

At the National Conservative Student Conference earlier this month, the students cheered nearly every time Reagan was mentioned — which is saying something, given that the name of the recently deceased President was invoked constantly. The conference's souvenir T shirt featured Reagan's image and the words THE REAGAN REVOLUTION LIVES! On the first morning, when the students were invited to the podium to introduce themselves, several said the 40th President had inspired their conservatism.

No one mentioned Bush. Which brings us back to this year's race. Although students are moving right on many issues, the President isn't necessarily benefiting. In 2000 Al Gore beat Bush among 18-to 29-year-olds by only 2 percentage points, but recent polls show Kerry with a double-digit lead among the young. (The race is a virtual tie overall.) Of course, very few conservative students will vote for Kerry, but most of the kids who attended the conference didn't seem eager to become field troops for the President either. As National Review editor Rich Lowry noted on the conservative magazine's website the day after he spoke at the conference, "What was most notable about this year was just how many smart young conservatives out there seem to think that there are no important differences between Bush and Kerry."

Some see the value of gridlock.

One student laid out a conservative case for Kerry: "When a Democrat is in office and proposes the same policies that Bush has proposed, Republicans act Republican and kill them," said Aakash Raut, 23, a senior at the University of Illinois at Springfield, in a heated debate with pro-Bush students. "And you have actually more conservative government than you do if a Republican is in the White House."

Outside the Beltway is a bit perplexed by the Reagan nostalgia.

What's odd about the piece is that it attributes this trend to Ronald Reagan, noting that these kids all grew up in the post-Reagan era and that they seem more enamored of Reagan than Bush. While Reagan was certainly a major proponent of liberty, he was hardly libertarian by most standards. And one suspects the relative affection for Reagan over Bush 43 has more to do with nostalgic reflection and the former's oratorical skills rather than substantive policy issues.

No, it might have something to do with substance. Compare and contrast. President Reagan's inaugural address asserted, "government is the problem." President Bush greeted Congress with, "Year after year in Washington, budget debates seem to come down to an old, tired argument: on one side, those who want more government, regardless of the cost; on the other, those who want less government, regardless of the need." As that essayist put it, "George W. Bush is no Ronald Reagan."

The Time essay touches on the possibility that student libertarianism and conservatism is simply the newest form of youthful rebellion, a point King at SCSU Scholars raises in commenting on a Christian Science Monitor article discovering libertarians and conservatives, before he makes an observation that is likely closer to reality: "I don't think people are sick of "do what you want" when it means freedom. Perhaps they've learned that liberty and libertine are two different things, and maybe they've learned that what their parents had in the 1960s wasn't freedom." A companion Monitor article lends some credence to that observation.

On many campuses, protesters dwell on the margins rather than in the mainstream of campus life. Some of their fellow students may admire their convictions - but others confess that they find activism more annoying than persuasive.

At Harvard University - where protests range from noisy antiwar rallies to smaller but equally zealous antiabortion demonstrations - many students say such actions are missing the mark.

"A lot of [the activists], liberals and conservatives alike, are fanatics or hopelessly idealistic," says Michael Soto, a Harvard senior studying Latin American development. "I'm not sure how much they actually accomplish, since it's just a small group. They are mainly annoying to the rest of the campus, and ineffectual."

What's that bit about an activist being someone whose mouth is more active than his mind? Best of the Web has a somewhat more transgressive hypothesis: the make-love-not-war parents of the early Eighties aborted many of the leftist students who would otherwise be here today.

There's something happening within the establishment, too. The academician is not reflexively a leftist, although he might not be that effective as a public intellectual.

For better or worse, election years lure many members of my profession out of the ivory tower and into the real world. As political events heat up, historians are summoned to illuminate the political landscape for a wide audience that suddenly craves the insights our expertise supposedly qualifies us to deliver. Generally the appeals flatter, and generally we descend and comply.

Traditionally, the most conspicuous obstacle to our effectiveness as public intellectuals has been the idea that we're all radical lefties marching in lockstep with the Democratic platform. But this stereotype is woefully inaccurate. In reality, academics -- especially middle-aged and older ones -- are just as likely to be libertarians or conservatives as they are woolly minded liberals. In point of fact, our most skewed collective bias is something more disturbing: We're pathologically close-minded.

(Via Betsy's Page.) Not only that, the old order is rapidly fading.

First, it seems we are experiencing one of those moments when history shifts its gears, and the accredited elites cannot seem to grasp what is happening, and cling desperately to the pieces of their fraying reputation. It’s a shift that the army of talented bloggers out there, part of one of the most genuinely populist movements ever to arise in modern American politics, has been announcing for a long time---perhaps a little prematurely and self-interestedly, but what they have been predicting is now clearly upon us. The baby-boomer generation’s journalistic and academic elites sought, and gained, control over the nation’s chief organs of knowledge production, accreditation, and communication, with all the enormous power and influence that has entailed. But now the Gramscian monopoly is crumbling, and they cannot see how they are themselves largely to blame for their own discrediting. The moves by Kerry’s campaign to stifle discourse---threaten booksellers, bully publishers, file lawsuits, seek regulatory restraints---are all too indicative of a reflex to control speech, and thereby deprive a democratic society of the oxygen it needs to thrive. Those of us who live and work in universities have been all too familiar with this reflex, which has been more triumphant than not in the academy, to the enduring detriment of academic discourse. But it is much harder to control and stifle journalistic and non-traditional media of expression. The credential-flashing of Mr. Oliphant (who somehow neglected to mention that his daughter is employed by the Kerry campaign, an uncomfortable fact brought out by the bloggers) looks more and more like the flash of an empty suit.

(Via Newmark's Door.) The shift, moreover, is generational.

This collective view emerged as a rather well-intentioned product of an age of wild hope, ill-informed academic speculation, and youthful optimism about the world. Nurtured in the great European and American universities, it was statist, existentialist, anti-religious, suspicious of any science that did not support its views, snobbish, pacifist, anti-technological, hedonistic in practice, puritan in theory, postmodernist in its tastes, committed to a social rather than an individual morality, hostile to the virtue tradition, sentimentally Romanticist in its attitude to Nature (which, in an unconsciously Creationist turn, did not include human beings), relativist about cultural differences, legalistic, optimistic about human nature, and deeply hostile to the marketplace. In one sense it was a nostalgia for the aristocratic European world of our collective rose-tinted memory, when the virtues of artists and intellectuals and university-educated people were recognized automatically, and merchants and financiers were "rightly" despised. In another sense it was a yearning for the dear lost days of revolutionary fervor, moral certainty, "free" sex and callow cynicism about tradition and respectability. It was escapist in its worship of Otherness -- cultural, social, political, economic, ideological, sexual, biological -- and conformist in its anxious attention to the next move of its "coolest" current leadership.

Harmless enough as a cultural phenomenon, one might think, though perhaps unhealthily centered upon the desires and dreams of a single very large generation of people born in the years following the Second World War. The problem arises when such a fashion effectively takes over the university system, as it did in the seventies and eighties, and then rises into positions of leadership in the great institutions of journalism. The journalistic Boomers themselves, who had often been trained by scholars who believed that there might be truth about a state of affairs that could be closely approached if not fully attained, usually knew when they were bending the truth and spinning for political advantage. Their leftist principles taught them that objectivity was desirable in the abstract and might again become feasible and desirable once the inequities of society were resolved. In any case, they felt, one should not lightly fritter away the legacy of credibility built up since the Enlightenment by the great authoritative institutions of civilization -- science, historiography, the serious newspapers, the great museums, the courts, and so on. But their younger followers and employees, postmodernist in belief-system, educated by ideologically relativist and politically correct junior professors, and increasingly deprived of the basics in logic, ethics, and inductive reasoning by their specialist education, were no longer capable of making any distinction between what was true and what was conducive to their social ideals.

Not only that, the idea of a "long march" to capture the institutions might have been an error. Once one has the institutions, one has to fortify them. Fixed fortifications are more easily bypassed and left to wither than stormed directly. That the people who took possession of the forts became dizzy with success afterward cannot have helped them.

THEY'RE ALL GOING TO LAUGH AT YOU. It's the beginning of the academic conference season (Economics has its right after the New Year begins, making for a hectic spring job season) which means people who cannot find a consensus without arguing for 30 minutes about the placement of a comma attempt to speak with one voice on Pressing National Matters. Atlantic Blog uncovers two examples of silliness. First, a Guardian writer discovers the American Sociological Association speaking with one querulous voice against something resembling the Washington Consensus. Bill's reaction:

One of the more pathetic characteristics of academics is an inflated sense of self-importance. Academics are people who have, for the most part, done well in school, and are used to the praise that goes with it. It can be very hard on them to discover, when they go out into the big world, that the rest of the world does not always value highly what they do.

There's more. Go read it. Second, the American Political Science Association has rounded up the usual suspects to make the usual arguments.

What is depressing is remarkably narrow range of ideas present. If this were the annual banquet for The Nation, it would be hardly out of place. But for the APSA featured speaker line-up, it is seems as if the organizers are indulging in aggressive ideological narrowness.

Dan Drezner, who will also be presenting at the conference, notes,

APSA has about 6,000 attendees, and a crowd of 300 for these kind of talks would be impressive. These speakers influence no one, but are rather preaching to a small and committed choir.

The reasons for the poor attendance are several. First, these kind of talks are usually held during the vital hours of eating and drinking, where the real business of APSA is conducted: power-schmoozing. Well, that and reconnecting with old grad school friends. Second, after a long day of presenting, discussing, and listening to political science, the last thing most people want to do is go to a lecture about politics.

We still have the American Anthropological Association and the Modern Language Association to look forward to.

SECOND SECTION: Chris at Signifying Nothing, who will also be attending the conference, also comments.

THINKING ABOUT THE OLYMPICS. A juried performance is not the same thing as a competition. Dan Drezner has provoked lots of comments by observing,

This doesn't mean that judged competitions aren't exciting. Gymnastics, diving, ice skating can be entertaining, and they demand physical excellence -- but they're not sports.

On the other hand, the fact that an event is a competition does not make it a sport at 11D :

Is beach volleyball a real sport or is it the equivalent of the swim suit issue of Sports Illustrated. Is beach volleyball really just a way to ogle tall women in bikinis.

I put that question to a now-graduated college volleyball player who offered the following.

We all know that (women's) beach volleyball is going to be stereotyped for men's "ogling" and give them an excuse to say they're watching sports when they really just want to check out the chicks in bikinis!

But if you've ever tried to walk or run on sand on the beach (and not the hard, wet packed sand by the water), you know how hard it is to walk, let alone trying to jump and move to the ball. I'm always amazed at how much ground they can cover with just two people, especially playing at the level.

Most women's rights Nazis ... probably hate beach vball because of the focus on women and not the sport, but the reality is that men come out to watch women play in bikinis and hopefully along the way they will realize what great athletes they are, plus it helps attendance. Look at women's indoor college vball and how many males come to watch -remember the swimmers at NIU? There's also a reason the girls wear skintight uniforms and it's not because they are comfortable! It works both ways! I think both men and women benefit in some way...

Gains from trade, don't you see? The women of the fevered brow do not.

The Superintendent prefers competitions that make no distinctions as to weight or to sex. One-design planing-dinghy racing works that way. There is no reason, for example, to have separate mens' and womens' divisions for 420s or Solings.

The Olympics, though? Would it be possible to have the competitions without linking competitors to countries in national teams? Does a medal count really mean anything, when the most populous countries tend to harvest more medals (perhaps by fielding more teams?) Olympic performance as a proxy for national greatness was silly when U-boats commanded by 1936 graduates of the German Naval Academy bore the five rings on their conning towers; it was silly during the Cold War, and it is silly now.

SYMBOLISM TRUMPS SUBSTANCE. Although the University of Illinois's "Chief Illiniwek" is about as authentic as a "Captain Miles Standish" wearing a [Prussian] field-gray uniform complete with spiky helmet and dancing a [Bavarian, for you flatlanders] Schuhplattler, the evaluators from the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools finds its continued use damaging to the university's reputation, the absence of any complaints about the university's academic programs notwithstanding. When in doubt, set up a task force.

Interim Chancellor Richard Herman said he will ask faculty members to conduct a formal study of Illiniwek's effect on the campus' educational mission during the coming academic year.

Will there be a formal study of legislative micromanagement that starves Urbana -- not to mention DeKalb and Macomb -- of money while forbidding tuition increases during the coming academic year?

WHOOSH. Tornadoes on radar to the east and north of me. No news of damage yet.

RUNNING EXTRA: Some commentary on the storm, from the Northern Illinois weatherman.

Very busy day today as you can imagine. The stationary front to our south yesterday morning came back as a warm front and was right around U.S. route 30 at 6 PM...and when a thunderstorm started developing in Marshall county and moved northeast across the frontal boundary, it encountered much better wind shear, which caused the storm to rotate almost immediately, and tornado soon thereafter. I knew there was enough energy for thunderstorms, but no one thought there would be enough heating/instability for that. This was eerily reminiscent of the Utica/Joliet tornadoes this spring...same thing...warm front approaches, and there's just enough instability for the storms to become severe mainly if they interact with the front. As you can tell, we need to learn more about that. Could be an interesting grad student thesis. I think I'll pass that along to someone who might want a topic of study... In any case, first, mega kudos to the National Weather Service office in Romeoville for very timely warnings...they were on top of it once the storm started to rotate. The supercell produced 4 tornadoes, as far as I know ... one just south of DeKalb (caught on tape and shown on WREX-TV), two near Burlington, and another one also captured on home video in McHenry (as seen on WBBM-TV in Chicago).

(That last one has been running on the Weather Channel.) And it's not over yet.

Monday-end of next week...as the models have shown the last several days, Monday-Wednesday we start comfortable and slowly warm into the 80s. But by Thursday through next weekend, we could enter another stormy pattern, with highs in the 80s and periods of showers and thunderstorms as fronts try to move through the area. So, look for above average temperatures through Friday, near average through Tuesday, then above average, with lower confidence, for the latter half of next week. Rainfall will be above to much above average, with localized flooding still possible through Saturday of this week, and then more storms late next week. Watch our website and emails for further updates as our wild spring/summer weather continues. Yesterday marks the 4th time the sirens have been hit in DeKalb this year, and the 5th tornado warning for our county so far this season. Stay tuned and we'll have the latest as storms develop around the area.

AND YET ANOTHER CARNIVAL. Herewith the First Carnival of the Recipes. Eat 'em up, yum!

TONIGHT'S ECONOMICS READING.

First, a Marshallian moment: can you say "price scissors?" The Noble Pundit takes the occasion of the hurricane that disrupted his neighborhood to explain that "panic buying" is the demand-side counterpart to "price gouging" on the supply side.

Next, a Schumpeterian moment: can you say "creative destruction?" I was under the impression that seminarians learned logic; evidently Reverend Greeley did not.

First, the lament:

Greed is responsible for the endless stress and ruthless competition of the workplace and the strains and tensions of professional class marriages. Greed (in this instance another name for relentless ambition) explains much of the cheating on college campuses. Greed is responsible for outsourcing, which is incapable of comprehending that the employees who lose their jobs are also the consumers who sustain the economy. Greed generates the reckless ventures that in part caused the bubble of the late '90s. Greed causes expensive wars that shatter the budget. Greed is the reason that only the wealthy are benefitting so far from the economic upturn that is allegedly happening. Greed drives loan sharks. Greed is responsible for the success of big box stores that tax the poor with low wages to provide bargains for affluent suburban shoppers. Greed is the reason poor white Appalachians, poor African Americans and poor Native Americans must fight the wars that the wealthy start. Jessica Lynch joined the Army so she could go to college. Her Native American roommate, killed in action, joined so, single mother that she was, she could support her children. Greed is the reason why the country is being run by those whom the president has described, however inelegantly, as the "haves and the have mores."

Next, nostalgia for the past:

Greed may have been a more serious problem for Americans, say, in the era of the robber barons. But the Garys and the Morgans and the Carnegies were a small bunch of men. Now their greed has seeped down to a much larger segment of the
population.

Finally, the breakdown of logic:

Ambition is not evil within limits. The struggle for success is not bad within limits. Hard work and fair rewards are good within limits. It is not good to take from the poor and give to the rich, and that's exactly what this country is doing today.

I have trouble interpreting these paragraphs as meaning anything other than a complaint about how more-widespread prosperity is a greater social problem than the less-widespread prosperity of the era of robber barons, many of whom prospered (and were cursed) for making better products and selling them at lower prices. (And the last time I checked, the big-box retailers were not catering to the Hamptons set. I bet opposition to big-box retailers correlates positively with household income.)

Finally, a Samuelsonian moment. Alex at Marginal Revolution has some cool math stuff up.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. David Broder (via Betsy's Page) is anguished about the youngsters squabbling.

The only thing that will save the country -- and end this breach in its leadership -- is that the boomers are now in their sixties. Another generation will eventually come to power, and the country will finally be spared from constantly refighting these same battles.

True enough. But the kind of world that generation inherits will be one shaped by the social pathologies unleashed in the 1960s and thereafter. It is not enough to complain about the divisions, Mr Broder.

Will we ever recover from the 1960s?

What's happening with the bitter dispute over John Kerry's role in Vietnam confirms my fears that my generation may never see the day when the baby boomers who came of age in that troubled decade are reconciled sufficiently with each other to lead a united country.

I remember precisely when this premonition of perpetual division first struck me. On Aug. 19, 1992, the third night of the Republican National Convention in Houston, Barbara Bush and Marilyn Quayle were the featured speakers. The first lady praised her husband's fine qualities and Mrs. Quayle turned her fire on the Bill Clinton Democrats, who had just finished their convention in New York.

Through almost gritted teeth, Marilyn Quayle declared that those people in Madison Square Garden, who were claiming the mantle of leadership for a new generation, were usurpers. "Dan and I are members of the baby boom generation, too," she said. "We are all shaped by the times in which we live. I came of age in a time of turbulent social change. Some of it was good, such as civil rights; much of it was questionable."

And then she drew the line that has not been erased: "Remember, not everyone joined in the counterculture. Not everyone demonstrated, dropped out, took drugs, joined in the sexual revolution or dodged the draft. Not everyone concluded that American society was so bad that it had to be radically remade by social revolution. . . . The majority of my generation lived by the credo our parents taught us: We believed in God, in hard work and personal discipline, in our nation's essential goodness, and in the opportunity it promised those willing to work for it. . . . Though we knew some changes needed to be made, we did not believe in destroying America to save it."

It is time to recognize that, indeed, many of those changes were questionable. Perhaps it will be up to some future generation to say "enough." The counterculture got all the ink. The rest of us had to grow up in the world they left us. And, Mr Broder, your Silent Generation cohort is complicit -- by its acquiescence -- in the mess.

TODAY'S IMMIGRATION ROUNDUP. Don at Cafe Hayek understands market tests:

What distresses me about these visits – beyond the fact that I’m never able to accept their offers of employment in my Department – is that I know that the F1 student visa that each of these students have largely prevents off-campus employment. This reason is paramount, I’m sure, among those that propel these bright, skilled, and energetic young people to go begging for employment on-campus.

This policy is both immoral and economically stupid. It treats productive people as piranhas. The alleged concern is that hordes of productive, hard-working foreign students will come to America and – gasp! – work very productively and hard and, thereby, eliminate jobs for real Americans.

First of all, this policy rests on the absurd notion that the number of jobs is fixed, or that more workers in the labor force means lower average wage rates.

Secondly, and more deeply, what sort of policy is it that intentionally prevents people from producing wealth?

I’m unfailingly amused whenever I encounter people who oppose more open immigration on the grounds that too many foreigners come to America in order to suck the tit of our welfare state. If this justification for limiting immigration were truly the reason behind restrictive immigration policies, then we would not witness the many prohibitions and restraints on work by immigrants and foreign students.

There still is a factor-price-equalization argument to work through, however.

JUST SUCK IT UP AND WALK. Last year, several classroom buildings looked like middle school buildings, with all the cars waiting as students picked up their friends, and the central campus parking lots looked like the malls at Christmas, with cars idling, waiting for nearby parking spaces while more distant spaces went empty. This year, things have changed, and the editorial board of the Northern Star doesn't like it.

Campus Parking Services has said it is trying to change the campus culture by having students rely less on their cars and more on other modes of transportation.

But this is NIU, and it is well-known that a majority of NIU students rely on their cars. Perhaps once the city of DeKalb mutates into a true “college town” and students truly don’t need their cars to get around, Campus Parking Services can do its part to change the culture.

Visualize sobbing violins with lots of vibrato. There is a difference between a convenience and a necessity. Suck it up and walk.

SEEKING PRICE COMPETITION. King at SCSU Scholars has a summary of developments on the textbook pricing front. Price competition can come none too soon for Northern Illinois University's students.

From 1998 to 2003, the price publishers’ charge for textbooks has increased 34.9 percent compared to 21.6 percent for all other books, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics. College bookstores have marked up the price of their textbooks by 5.9 percent in the same period, while other books had a mark up of only 3 percent.

The University Bookstore tries to stock as many used books as they can to give students savings, said Mitch Kielb, acting director of the Holmes Student Center. He said half their sales come from used books.

The unseen part of this story is the role of third-party payments in determining the price of textbooks. It's the same problem that arises in uninformed commentary about rising health care "costs": to the extent that insurers -- in medicine -- and financial aid -- in college -- pays for the services or the books, the buyer has less incentive to shop around, and the seller has less incentive to discover the least cost technology.

RUNNING EXTRA: Joanne Jacobs asks, "Does a Latin textbook need to be updated?"

NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED. No sooner does the new athletic director arrive at Northern Illinois than does a scandal arise in -- surprise -- the women's basketball program.

In addition to losing top scorer Joi Scott, who transferred, the NIU women’s basketball team may face punishment for NCAA rules violations. Scott, who would be a junior this season, lived at the house of LaVerne Ghyant [cq], the director of NIU’s Center for Black Studies, for about a month after the spring semester, Scott said. While there, Scott accepted money for a plane ride to see her mom, accepted rides from Ghyant [cq] and did her laundry at Ghyant’s[cq] house -- all NCAA violations.

Ms Gyant is a decent person who takes an interest in the troubles some of her charges face, although what transpired might be above and beyond the call of duty.

“It’s a situation where a staff member didn’t realize they [cq] were doing something that was illegal,” said Dee Abrahamson, NIU associate athletics director.

Abrahamson said the NCAA likely won’t react until the Mid-American Conference has looked into the matter.

Scott, who hails from Ohio, said Ghyant served as a mentor and mother figure to her.

“I had [Ghyant] [cq] for a class,” Scott said. “I talked to her about all my problems and she offered me to stay at her house. I needed someone to relate to and talk to.

“If I would’ve known that I would have to pay back all the money she gave to me, I wouldn’t have taken it.”

Scott said she is being charged the rate of staying in a hotel and doing laundry for the time at Ghyant’s [cq] house. She estimated it would be about $2,000 that she has to pay back, but said an agreement may be made to give it to a charity of her choice.

“My relationship with Joi was no different than with any other student,” Ghyant [cq] said in a published report.

The coach's relationship with Ms Scott is no different from her relationship with any other player: she is denying any responsibility.

Scott said her transfer did not have to do with the NCAA violations being reported, but because her boyfriend, Rome Sanders from the NIU men’s basketball team, left DeKalb. Sanders transferred to Florida A&M after he was found guilty of a battery charge on March 19 when he got into an argument with Scott.

“First of all, Coach [Carol] Hammerle kicked me off the team after I already committed to another school,” Scott said. “I think she did that so it would seem like I left for another reason rather than the real reason. I left because of Rome. He transferred so that gave me the open door to leave.”

Scott, who first transferred to Jacksonville University before ending up at Murray State, will have to sit out the 2004-05 season as a transfer.

“I terminated her from the team because of the violations,” Hammerle said. “That was the decision I made as I thought was best for the program. I wish her the best.

“I hope for the sake of the program and the players that the NCAA doesn’t place any sanctions on us.”

So yet again, a promising recruit fails to develop either as a player or as a person, and it's not the fault of the person who recruited her. You just can't make up stuff like this.

ADAPTATION. Woodlief:

My wife copied down this quote from Eric Hoffer and left it on my bedside table:

"In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."

I suspect that most of us have areas of our lives where we are learners, and areas where we are learned. It's wisdom well-taken, isn't it, that in everything where we seem to be successful, we should have the humility and intellectual honesty to consider whether we haven't crossed over the boundary from learner to learned?

But it seems to be wisdom seldom taken. So consider for a moment the areas where you might rightly be regarded by your peers as learned. Are you open -- truly open -- to the new idea?

Read and understand.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Winston's Diary is unimpressed with the Freshman Orientation Indoctrination on offer at his college.

Also, a preview of things to come. J.V.C. and I have agreed to have a blog-to-blog discussion on what it was like to be a lower-middle-class student in the humanities. We're both of the opinion that our distaste for theory and the far-left are in part the result of our respective upbringings. For my part, I would also like to bring up what I have perceived as definite classism amongst my "colleagues." We'll probably start this in a week or so. I'm not sure who will be firing off the first salvo. I'll be working on a draft of my initial comments on the issue over the course of the next week, but will definitely have a few things to say next week about Freshman Indoctrination 101.

Winston is onto something. The humanities are no place for the down-to-earth, which is the usual state of people with a blue collar upbringing who enroll in college. (If you're stoned and blue-collar, you're probably washing cars.)

TRAINS IN THE CELLAR, BOOKS EVERYWHERE ELSE. I'm going to substitute "model trains" in place of "books" everywhere in this self-help guide from Crescat Sententia.

Are model trains a necessary part of your daily routine? Yup. Do you become grumpy and irritable if your modeling time is taken away from you? Yup. If you begin building, just a little bit, do you find it hard to stop? Frequently. Do you find yourself growing distant from friends who disapprove of your train habit? Disapprove, you ain't no friend of mine. Do you find yourself needing more and more trains to get the same "fix"? Sometimes. That New Haven freight motor is definitely not essential. When you meet a new person or enter a new room, do you instantly size up his modeling? Why else enter a train room? Does your modelling sometimes get in the way of leading a "normal" life? What's normal? Do you buy trains to make yourself feel better when sad or lonely? Been known to.

Dan Drezner found a defense of reading, at least in Greater DeKalb, that is suitable for model railroaders as well.

At least at Chicago, if not in some larger segments of the world, a person who reads books all the time is considered admirable, even if all that is gained by this reading is that the reader is entertained.

Chicago is also the place to be for O Scale in the United States, hence this defense generalizes.

ANOTHER TENNESSEE CONNECTION. Northern Illinois University president John Peters has called another name from his Tennessee Rolodex, tabbing Notre Dame's Jim Phillips (stopped also at the candy store in Champaign) as the new athletic director. One of the people the local newspaper reached for a reaction was Tennessee coaching legend Pat Summitt, who praised the hire.

That's awesome.Jim has so many qualities that will make him successful at NIU: He's a people person, and he'll inspire those around him. He has positive energy and positive attitude - if someone thinks their glass is half empty, Jim's (glass) is running over. He brings out the best in others. I'm excited for Jim and equally excited for NIU. He is a great choice. I've been to DeKalb and I know people will embrace Jim, his leadership, and his philosophy.

Yes, Pat, you were in DeKalb, in the winter of 1992, and if memory serves, your team trailed by a bucket at halftime, although they acquitted themselves well in the second half. But in those days the women's basketball team had a real coach and real players. Perhaps Mr Phillips will take his talk about the "next level" seriously and stop using the program as a plaything for the Diversity Boondoggle.

SITZPINKLER ALERT. In some circles, the red pen is no longer the grader's color of choice, because it's too scary.

"If you see a whole paper of red, it looks pretty frightening," said Sharon Carlson, a health and physical education teacher at John F. Kennedy Middle School in Northampton. "Purple stands out, but it doesn't look as scary as red."

And to think that Northampton shows up on my birth certificate. Can I disown my native town?

A mix of red and blue, the color purple embodies red's sense of authority but also blue's association with serenity, making it a less negative and more constructive color for correcting student papers, color psychologists said. Purple calls attention to itself without being too aggressive. And because the color is linked to creativity and royalty, it is also more encouraging to students.

It's also linked to Finlanders on the Iron Range and bowling-shirt Poles in Milwaukee.

Thus, today's Weenie Worldview quiz: will purple first fall out of favor because of that royal connection or because somebody will discover that editors used to correct manuscripts using blue pencils? Erm, don't the education theorists have more pressing matters to think about than the symbolism of a red correcting pen? They've been fretting about this for the past twelve years?

"The concept of purple as a replacement for red is a pretty good idea," said Leatrice Eiseman, director of the Pantone Color Institute in Carlstadt, N.J., and author of five books on color. "You soften the blow of red. Red is a bit over-the-top in its aggression."

Oh, good. I have a whole desk drawer full of over-the-top aggression. Let the slackers and the credential grubbers tremble at the thought of my aggression. Fortunately, I am not alone.

Red has other defenders. California high-school teacher Carol Jago, who has been working with students for more than 30 years, said she has no plans to stop using red. She said her students do not seem psychologically scarred by how she wields her pen. And if her students are mixing up "their," "there," and "they're," she wants to shock them into fixing the mistake.

"We need to be honest and forthright with students," Jago said. "Red is honest, direct, and to the point. I'm sending the message, 'I care about you enough to care how you present yourself to the outside world.' "

Betsy's Page, who picked up the Boston Globe story, notes,

I've been hearing this vapidity in teacher workshops for the past 12 years. What a crock! As if kids don't know that a mistake is a mistake. I'm with [Ms. Jago].

Ayup, and as if pretending that a mistake isn't a mistake somehow encourages fewer mistakes. People respond to incentives. Parents, if your kids' teachers start grading with purple, plan to be assertive in teacher conferences.

RUNNING EXTRA: You'd think these hand-wringers had said something nasty about snakes the way Dr Swygert unloads on them.

Come ON people! If your students are flunking, do you really think it matters - to them, to their parents, to their lives - what color you use on their papers? My dissertation advisor used nothing but green ink in his pens and at times my dissertation drafts looked like leprechauns had bled to death on them. Do you think I felt better about having to change every word, twice, just because I got the message in green rather than red?

Here's a hint, teachers - if your students' papers are swimming in a sea of red ink, you have many more important things to worry about than the colors of your pens. Trust me on this.

Her reaction to the "cult of self-esteem" is priceless.

This is why I don't drink while blogging - I'd spit my mead all over my keyboard laughing. It's nice to know that a deep purple pen can make it all better for a student who received a D-minus. Yes indeedy. And now the teacher can feel better about herself, too, because she's not being "over-the-top" in her "aggression", which is what touchy-feely types define as "grading objectively" these days.

Erm, isn't that D-minus just a tad "aggressive?" Or does that "minus" make it passive-aggressive?

DISCHARGED IF YOU DO, DISCHARGED IF YOU DON'T. King at SCSU Scholars links to a story about two tenure-track professors at Benedict College who have been discharged for noncompliance with a grading policy that requires course grades to reflect effort as well as achievement. His post points up the difficulty a school (the term college does not quite apply) faces in balancing "access" (read: recruiting unprepared students) with "performance" (read: producing prepared graduates) as well as the obligation such a school faces in socializing new hires to the academic environment on campus.

The curious part of the story is that at this college credit for attendance matters. I recall a for-cause hearing at Northern Illinois involving a professor's ineffective teaching, including inter alia basing grades excessively on attendance. (There were other difficulties with this professor's performance, thus the two situations are not parallel.)

CARNIVALS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE MOBILE, and this week's Carnival of the Capitalists visits the aptly-named Mobile Technology Weblog. Step right up!

A PROMISING DEVELOPMENT. Students have returned to Northern Illinois University, and the police blotter is filling up again.

About 200 Northern Illinois University students and visitors to the city discovered that if you booze, you can lose at least $200.

The fines accompanied the 215 citations issued by the DeKalb Police Department between Thursday, which was Move-In Day for NIU, and Sunday for consumption of alcohol by a minor, possession of alcohol by a minor and possession of an open container of alcohol on a public way.

Although police haven't pulled statistics from previous years, the number of tickets issued this year appears to be "a fair amount higher than in previous years," Police Chief Bill Feithen said.

Locations of the violations varied, however. Several dozen citations were issued by police on foot patrols in the northwest part of DeKalb commonly known as Greek Row.

The good news is, the police might have decided not to let MTV and ESPN define college life.

Feithen attributed some of the increase in tickets to having more officers on the streets.

"It doesn't necessarily mean there was more drinking going on," he said.

In addition to the alcohol busts, one man was arrested early Sunday morning for allegedly trying to sell some 20 bags of marijuana.

The times, they are a-changin'.

PERHAPS THEY ARE SERIOUS ABOUT THE HIAWATHA CORRIDOR. Beyond Brilliance, Beyond Stupidity is a compendium of Orchids and Onions Awards in urban planning. One development worthy of an Orchid is this report from Milwaukee's Business Journal on plans for the Amtrak Wisconsin service.

The Milwaukee-to-Chicago trip currently takes about one hour and 30 minutes. The goal is to reduce the travel time to about one hour and five minutes, [Amtrak spokesman and former WNIU newscaster Marc] Magliari said.

Regular readers of Cold Spring Shops will know that this goal represents genuine progress. The best scheduled time, long before either the Superintendent or Mr Magliari were born, was 75 minutes, nonstop. A run time of 65 minutes inclusive of stops at Mitchell Field, Sturtevant, and Glenview will require average running times between stations approaching 90 miles per hour.

WELCOME ANTHROPOLOGY AND ECONOMICS READERS. Grant was kind enough to provide a link to the "Life Imitates the Onion" post. Stick around and have a look around.

WHOOSH! Sunday's weather: temps in the 80s, winds southwest 10-to-20. Off to Shabbona Lake for a bit of Laser practice, including my first capsize in four years, to the great amusement of some urchins who were fishing (fishing???) nearby.

<~ cheesehead snark>Did you know that the largest muskie ever landed in Illinois was caught at Shabbona? (There is a fish hatchery that stocks the lake with muskies and other fish that occur naturally in Wisconsin.) Did you also know that under Wisconsin game laws it would have to have been thrown back as too small?< /cheesehead snark>

A Laser is designed to be easily righted in the event of a capsize, as I promptly demonstrated. There was still enough wind for a few more screaming reaches. Got to work on that upwind technique in heavy air some more, but the new rigging is a great help.

The Laser is also one of the Olympic class yachts, and some of them feature in the Yahoo sailing -- which includes rowing -- slideshow. Props to Brazil's Richard Scheidt, who won the men's gold in the Laser.

KEEP YOUR KIDS SAFE. Metra Rail would like parents and teachers to instill safety around the railroads in their kids and their students. This site provides some basic information and a screen saver. Cold Spring Shops wants the next generation to enjoy the trains, safely.

VESTIGES OF THE INTERURBAN ERA. Saturday was a great day to be outside and go exploring. My choice: a couple of the Chicago commuter railroads that I haven't ridden recently (I've now explored all the lines except the Metra Electric's South Chicago branch and the main line south of Kensington.) First up: the South Shore Line. (That posting on interurbans got me thinking, hey, it's been 12 years since you've ridden the South Shore.) In order to carry out this excursion in full, I had to catch the first train out of Chicago, at 8.05 am, before the ticket office opened. So the conductor issued me a cash fare receipt.

Interurban cash fare receipts

The top receipt is the one the South Shore conductor issued me. The bottom receipt is from the North Shore Line, which ceased operation in January of 1963. I wonder if the South Shore conductors are still using the same metal receipt holders the Insull management purchased years ago.

There has been more work done at the east end of the interurban, which ... imagine this ... is a passenger station at the South Bend airport, forsooth. (Thus, like the North Shore, the South Shore cars board from floor-level platforms at both namesake cities.) The platforms, shown here at May 11, 1993, are now under a train shed. The platforms, however, will only hold two cars.

South Bend station at Michiana Airport

The South Shore added six coaches at Michigan City Shops, and the train was pretty full by the time it left Hegewisch, the last station at which it receives passengers. More and more residents of Greater DeKalb are discovering that the weekend trains are an excellent way to avoid the commuting and parking hassles in downtown Chicago. The air show and a Bears exhibition game generated lots of traffic.

From the South Shore, it's on to the Milwaukee District North Line. It has been some time since I last rode the Hiawatha Service to Milwaukee, and the last time I was on the Fox Lake Branch was in the summer of 1970, sampling the weekend-only Varsity to Madison. Again, long trains, well-patronized inbound with kids headed to a performance at something called "the Metro" (ask a kid) and Bear fans headed to the preseason game (got news for you, class outfits wear green, enjoy the preseason.) The Burlington line was offering its expanded busy-weekend service, with semi-fast relief trains, first stop Downers Grove, strengthening the hourly locals.

My fifty-year-old legs are still lively enough to make a walking transfer from North Western Station to Randolph Street with enough time to buy a coffee and drink it, and to make a transfer from the late-running Milwaukee to the Union Pacific West Line Overland Route (the north exits from Union Station help out, but I did take a chance grabbing some take-out tacos at the Taco Bell on the ground floor of the North Western Station.) train full of sleepy kids and people who enjoyed the air show. Although no train was on time (Metra may have to rethink weekend dwell times, particularly in the summertime) each was close to time and I made all my connections.

GIVE ME THAT OLD-TIME CROLYISM. The weekend's reading (on-train,) is Jack Germond's Fat Man Fed Up, subtitled "How American Politics Went Bad" (details or compare prices.) There is enough stuff in each chapter to be grist for a series of essays (perhaps as the term unfolds, I do want readers coming back regularly.) For now, a couple of major themes. At the start of chapter 5, "A Confessed Liberal," Mr Germond writes,

When someone, usually a suspicious conservative, asks me if it isn't true that most reporters are liberals, I confess: Sure they are. So what?

The chapter goes on to note that such denials are counterproductive, and the material in that chapter is stuff for one of those later essays. Mr Germond provides his one rebuttal to the "so what?" in chapter 9, "Sound and Fury, Signifying a Gotcha!" He has the origins of the 1976 flap over future President James E. Carter's "ethnic purity" statement. That went from a yawn to a gaffe to a flap only after the following events transpired.

But a CBS News editor, obviously hypersensitive to violations of political correctness even before the term was invented, [c.q. -- it originated amongst over-earnest lefties in the late 1960s and entered the popular lexicon around 1990] spotted what he decided was an offending phrase, "ethnic purity." He alerted a CBS reporter, who quickly questioned Carter about it at a press conference the following day, a public enough occasion to put the "issue" into the public domain and the pack of reporters on the case.

Let me guess what else happened in the newsroom. The editor's colleagues were all just as hypersensitive: nobody -- particularly Nobody In Authority -- took occasion to say "let's research this first" or, "cool it" ("get a life" not yet being in the lexicon.) Likewise, the reporter knew only the racismsexismhomophobia template (these concepts were around in those days) and likely didn't have any colleagues that might interpret the world differently. The root cause of the "gotcha" journalism is the group-think of the journos, it's the old "How could Reagan win, I don't know anybody who voted for him?" all over again.

Mr Germond's primary gripe with politics has to do with the choice of the president. Consider his characterization of the senior President Bush: "He wanted the office and the title as a vindication of his public career but not as an opportunity to improve the lives of his fellow citizens." Granted, there are many people who see the national government as a facilitator of improvements and the president as advocate-in-chief for programs that achieve those improvements. Not everybody sees things that way. Mr Germond also doesn't like the influences of money and of interest groups -- his personal demon is Protestant fundamentalism -- on elections. The problem, as I intend to spell out in greater detail over the next few weeks, is that if the national government is to be the facilitator, that is where the interest groups are going to get involved. Perhaps a little less vision and a little less activist government will take away the incentives to buy influence.

SECOND SECTION. Check out this Instapundit alternative-campaign scenario. Nothing close in Mr Germond's book (which, not surprisingly, offers precisely no mention of Internet sources.)

SEVEN YEARS OF COLLEGE, DOWN THE DRAIN? Perhaps that is a bit too harsh a description. Read this story (registration required) about the travails of a young man who first signs to play football for Iowa, then transfers to Illinois, who has more than his share of injuries. Consider, however, the eligibility follies inherent in transferring, sitting out, then petitioning for additional eligibility ... with none of it for pay. Note also that the young man's academic progress (or lack thereof) is not newsworthy. One would think that he would be able to have finished a degree at Illinois by now, and suited up as a senior at large.

AND ON TO THE RESEARCH PROJECT. Consider a rich country that has some industries seeking to hire additional workers, but no further suitable workers can be found at current wages. (Is there an upward-sloping supply curve? Dunno yet. That's why we call it research.)

Some employers seek workers with skills that can be proxied for by credentials. (Is this going to be another riff on the failures of the U.S. education system? No. The Provost will be asking for a sabbatical report in February. Best to keep it tractable. Even the most perfect of education system probably responds to market signals with a lag.) Dominic Basulto looks at the best-case scenario.

In order to retain its technological superiority, the U.S. needs to encourage an open policy toward the immigration of professionals and students. In addition, policymakers should consider ways to boost science & math education within the U.S. and provide incentives for businesses to invest in long-term R&D initiatives. Innovation is the key to future U.S. economic greatness and immigrants arriving in the U.S. recognize this. Open labor markets help to strengthen the U.S. economy and provide the foundation for innovation in future generations. At a time when Silicon Valley is facing a labor shortage of skilled engineers and scientists, the need to embrace skilled immigrant IT professionals is all the more pressing.

Failure to understand these implications could result in a "reverse brain drain," in which the U.S. loses its best and brightest to nations in the developing world. If the rest of the world no longer views the U.S. as the home of innovation and open markets, foreign-born Americans will be free to vote with their feet and move elsewhere. A recent article in The Wall Street Journal ("Give Us Your Nerds") [no hyperlink, sorry] puts it best: "Any policy that would depress the influx or close off our borders altogether is not in America's long-term interest, especially in a world where economic growth and competitiveness will depend above all on human capital."

OK, so if an immigrant has credentials, the optimal policy involves issuance of work permits. How cheaply can these work permits be obtained?

But wait, there's more. It's not just the high-tech industries that rely on [cheap?] immigrant labor. This essay argues that the immigrants who staff some of the more humble businesses do something of value as well.

Most immigrants move to America for the golden opportunity of living in a country that is as economic free as we are. If they were looking for a welfare state Canada and Europe would be attractive options, but most immigrants want to come to America. We continue to be a beacon of the possibility that hard work is rewarded and that a strong worker will receive his or her due. Whether it is working in fields, in restaurants, in cafeterias, or in offices, immigrants often work jobs that are best characterized as semi-skilled or blue collar. These mothers and fathers are raising children with the belief that hard work is the path to success and they serve as a strong example to the next generation that responsibility garners respect. In many ways, today’s immigrants are merely the most recent wave of lower-middle class citizens who have worked hard to provide their children with unlimited opportunities and it will not surprise me to see the second generation immigrants as successful businessmen, doctors, lawyers, professors, and politicians in numbers so large that our stereotype of immigrants and blue collar labor will be outdated.

So part of the research problem is to consider cheapening the cost of legal migration. (Is there a direction for future research? Ayup. But I'm not going to give all my good ideas away until February.) The welfare migration stuff has been done to a turn already.

As an aside, Cafe Hayek uses the existence of the illegal-immigrant underground economy as a way of getting a handle on the nonexistence of monopsony power in labor markets.

What else is there to be concerned about? Herewith a skeptic's summary of the open-borders argument:

The American economy has a labor scarcity, and the Third World — specifically Mexico — has a surplus. We should liberalize labor as the next step toward the ideal of Free Trade. “If there is a demand for labor and a willing supply of labor and the government prevents the participants from exchanging their services,” Doverspa contends, “the market is less efficient and both sides lose.” Moreover, there are certain jobs — very low on the economic scale — that Americans “will not do,” jobs that are increasingly filled by immigrant labor. As things stand, this immigrant labor is half-in and half-out of our economy; a sort of labor black market, which exacts a human toll in the form of distortions and perverse arrangements. In the interest, not merely of efficiency, but of justice, we ought to embrace these workers and make them legitimately part of our markets. Doverspa captures the efficiency side of this argument nicely: “Basic economic theory states that distortions to the market always cause a dead-weight loss in overall efficiency. The wall between nation-states continues to be one of the largest impediments to full economic freedom in the world.” Others, like Tamar Jacoby, have asseverated the claims of justice.

But all is not well with the world.

How does making a foreign nation a party to our most sensitive policies “form a more perfect Union”? How does importing Third World gangs “establish Justice”? How does perpetuating chaos on the border “insure Domestic Tranquility”? How does opening our borders to Moslem terrorists “provide for the common defence”? How does subverting our laws, diluting our citizenship, weakening our shared culture, empowering those who despise our culture, and undermining the consensus by which we became “one people” — how do these things “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”?

Perhaps my opponents on this issue have answers for these polemical questions; but I note (with, I confess, a tinge of cynicism) that they have not yet even begun to give us their answers.

Ah, more for the research question. Suppose that some fraction of the potential migrants (who can be credentialled; perhaps Mohammed Atta fancied himself an architecture critic whilst plotting his plots) are ne'er-do-wells. Screening them out when they petition for admission is costly. Do you raise the price of admission (the Immigration Lawyers' Full Employment Act of 2005?) What effect will that have on illegal immigration (the Law of Unintended Consequences suggests the coyotes will get rich.) So suppose, instead, that you lower the price of admission? To what extent will that free up resources for catching bad guys? Or, will the bad guys mimic unskilled workers, and sneak in? Questions, questions.

And so, to work.

BUNDLING AND UNBUNDLING. Microsoft sells you an operating system that includes an internet browser, and that is "unfair competition." The government sells you protection against terrorism that includes corporate welfare for airlines whose troubles would exist absent terrorists, and that is business as usual. "Althouse independents" captures the dilemma.

I'm one of the people whose politics were changed by 9/11. Prior to 9/11, my disagreement with the social conservatives kept me from having much of any interest in Republican presidential candidates. After 9/11, I became quite bonded to George Bush. If I had to vote today, I would vote for Bush, because at this point, I cannot trust Kerry on security matters. Kerry has allowed himself to stand for so many different things, according to what is expedient at the moment. I didn't buy the strong-on-security pitch of the convention, which I know was aimed at shoring up support from centrists like me. The problem there is that I just don't believe them. (And I note that I've just written "them" and not Kerry. I was going to edit that out, but I'm going to leave it in, because it signifies my queasy feeling that Kerry is a device for returning to power a party that doesn't stand for much of any of the things that were promoted at the convention.) What would appeal to me from the Republican side, along with a convincing case that they really are competent about the security issues we assume they care more about, would be a more libertarian approach to social issues.

Unfortunately, both parties have to attend their "base," and, whenever they do, I don't like them. Because of that, I keep my distance. I don't love any of these people, and I don't have to vote today.

Unfortunately, November 2 does arrive, and then we have to choose from among the bundles offered. It is insufficient to note that the bundles are sometimes deceptively packaged, with the high spots highlighted, and the controversial stuff obfuscated, or concealed, or revealed to carefully chosen focus groups. The dilemma is not that there are parties with bases, the dilemma is in the coalition-building inherent in majority rule.

Nor does a "more libertarian approach" to social, let alone commercial issues, resolve the dilemma. A bundle of policies that reduce or eliminate the role of the state is still a bundle.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

One prominent school choice advocacy group, the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO), has adopted as mantra that school choice is widespread, unless you're poor. Middle-class and wealthy families have the means to choose neighborhoods with good public schools or send their children to private schools. Tens of millions choose where to live because of the quality of schools nearby; something people of lesser means cannot do.

Critics say rich people have a lot more of everything of value than the poor. And if they choose ritzy neighborhoods to gain access to good schools, they're paying for it, unlike the poor who demand school vouchers.

That's not exactly true. The federal income tax system operates as Robin Hood in reverse, subsidizing wealthier taxpayers at the expense of less-affluent Americans.

Among those Americans who itemize their taxes — less than one-third of those who file tax returns — the average taxpayer receives a $9,607 deduction for mortgage interest. Add an average deduction of $2,645 for real-estate taxes for a total of $12,252 — more than $4,000 in reduced taxes for higher-income earners (even after accounting for the alternative minimum tax).

That's Clint Bolick, making the case for school choice. I am pleased to see the advocates of school choice reaching out to the egalitarians. School finance through local property taxes has long been trouble. Diffusion of the meme, school choice IS bundled with home ownership, is a Good Thing. (Hat tip: Newmark's Door.)

THEY DO USE A VOLLEYBALL IN BEACH VOLLEYBALL. One would not know that from going here or here.

Australia's Nicole Sanderson faces off Australia's Summer Lochowicz.

The picture is from a slideshow Power Line located.

OUR NEIGHBORS ONLINE. Dan Drezner notes that Chicago Tribune weblogger Eric Zorn has been online for a year, and he provides a link to Mr Zorn's weblog (it's on the Tribune, natch, with its goofy registration script). Mr Zorn has his own site, with links to Illinois public affairs weblogs, and one of them is right here in DeKalb County, Illinois, operated by County Supervisor Richard Osborne.

ON MY WORKBENCH. Some time ago, I linked to this picture:

New Haven EF-3 electric locomotive

It transpires that Mike's Train House built a model of this monster, and a Green Bay hobby shop had one on offer at a very good price. Now to convert it for scale wheels and two-rail operation.

ADVANCED SPACE CAMP. Duke's Vomit Comet Crew. More air-time than the Kennywood Jack Rabbit, for sure.

UNBUNDLING. The Sports Economist has been following USA Today coverage of activity fees for kids who participate in high-school sports. One such story raises the possibility that families who want to enroll their kids in sports programs will have to pay $600 per sport, if a tax increase does not pass. Skip is simply reporting the facts, such as the school district is spinning them. I see this development as a positive development. Why shouldn't the people who take the benefits bear the burdens? For years, the common schools have devoted resources to strengthening their sports programs, football and basketball probably most prominently, while starving the academic programs for resources. Their communities put up signs hailing their regional or state champions at the city limits. But how much of that glory redounds to the communities? Is the Sherman Park area of Milwaukee any better off that Latrell Sprewell attended Milwaukee's Washington High School (just picking something that comes to mind.)

A preceding post suggests that such unbundling well might be salutary:

The tie-in of athletic competition and education is much stronger in the U.S. than the rest of the world. Recent trends suggest that the tie may be unraveling. The school choice movement, to the extent it is successful, should accelerate this development.

Why salutary? Let us end the pretense that athletes are somehow getting an "education" in return to performing for free, and let us end the fiction of "eligibility" that simply tosses unprepared kids into the labor market before their sports skills have depreciated. Read more about privatization or about ending the eligibility fiction.

THE LEFT CAN DEFECT TO NADER. Derrick Jackson is not happy that John Kerry is "chasing the SUV vote."

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, many cars, many of them SUVs, brandished American flags. Nearly three years later, many cars sport yellow ribbons in continued support of our troops. One of Bush's favorite lines of late, in a dig at what he says is Kerry's indecisiveness on Iraq, is, "There is nothing complicated about supporting our troops in combat."

The Democrats on the defensive about defense at their recent convention also tried to sound as uncomplicated as possible on supporting troops in combat. The need to appear uncomplicated has prevented politicians from asking a more complicated question: whether the best way to support our troops mean changes at home so we do not have to send them abroad in the first place to protect "our" oil.

That question, of course, is seen as too offensive, even when the current issue of Fortune magazine publishes a 6,300-word article on how the nation needs to stop its "two-decade oil pig-out, gorging like oversized vacationers at a Vegas buffet." We have pigged out to the point where imported oil has gone from 30 percent of our supplies to 60 percent in the last three decades.

One of Fortune's four major prescriptions is -- surprise! -- improved fuel economy. "The real market test will occur in coming months as the frugal efficiency of hybrid technology is married to the profligate embodiment of conspicuous consumption: the SUV," Forbes wrote. Even that is an arrogant American solution. While Europeans long ago simply went to smaller cars, here we are, performing the equivalent of open-heart surgery on an elephant, offering it the engine of a hummingbird. It might work, but it would work better if Americans were simply not so vain.

So Americans want to drive a great big SUV? There's no news there. The news will be if Kerry finds a way to say that this is not a terrific way to be an American.

Let's leave aside the snarking at ordinary Americans and think about the policy options here. First, the United States could develop its Alaskan and Floridian reserves, and explore around its shores of the Great Lakes. (I leave aside a somewhat more obvious question: why are those other countries willing to sell oil to the U.S. so cheaply?) Second, hybrid technologies are an adaptation to circumstances. The Europeans chose long ago to tax gasoline steeply and use some of the money to underwrite the operating deficits of their passenger railroads. (Some of them sold their freight railroads to North American companies, but that's another matter.) The Northeast Corridor, where Mr Jackson lives, is about as crowded as much of Europe. There is something called states rights: perhaps those states could tax gasoline heavily and use the revenues to underwrite the operating deficits of their commuter railroads -- perhaps even to buy the Acela service from Amtrak. Some of us enjoy more open space and more separated cities. Third, Senator Kerry is not off base introducing safety as a reason for people buying sport-utes. (They could buy larger cars if we didn't have those automotive fuel economy standards that effectively ban larger cars.) Mickey Kaus (scroll down -- 3.17 am) has done some groundwork.

Here's a study that--if I read it right-- tries to correct for variables like negligence, age of driver, speeding, etc. It concludes that pickup trucks, not SUVs, are the problem. SUVs do kill more third parties (e.g. other drivers, pedestrians) but they save the lives of those in the SUVs, and the second factor outweighs the first by over a thousand lives a year.

Perhaps the essential element in highway safety is -- reduced transgressiveness! Kaus, again:

For example, are "vans" the safest category, in terms of occupant deaths-per-mile, because the vehicles are safe or because vans (especially minivans) are mainly driven by cautious, milquetoasty moms? Is the Toyota 4-Runner relatively unsafe because it tends to roll over--or do 4-Runner drivers roll over so often because they tend to be aggressive young jerks?

The "jerks" hypothesis probably works for the pickup truck operators, too, especially those driving pickups that look like small Kenworths.

IT PREDICTS THE EXISTENCE OF DEAD SPOTS ON THE LAKE. Alex at Marginal Revolution notes the death of mathematician Shizuo Kakutani, whose fixed-point theorem is a foundation of much work in theoretical economics. The tribute introduces three of the classical, if counterintuitive, fixed point arguments.

Let me offer a corollary to the coffee-stirring problem: at any time, there is a spot on Earth at which the wind is not blowing. The mean and nasty application: just about any Saturday morning, when I was learning to sail my M-Scow, I found ALL such spots on the surface of Lake Geneva. (The theorem is an existence proof, it says nothing about uniqueness!) On the other hand, my local knowledge got good enough that when I started learning to sail my Laser, my efforts were good enough for two seconds and a third in the season series.

SECOND SECTION: Oh, hey, look at this!

INSTEAD OF AN AMNESTY? A reality show for illegal immigrants? The winner gets legal advice, but no guarantee of a green card? Sound Fury characterizes the show as a disgusting act of exploitation, but raises a serious point.

If ever there was an illustration of how thoroughly broken and diseased the U.S. immigration system is, this is it. Not only can't we keep out fricking terrorists, but a bunch of Mexicans jumping the border become targets for filthy reality TV shows. What an utter embarrassment.

(Hat tip: Dean's World.)

Shameless plug: got to get back to that research paper.

LIFE IMITATES THE ONION. Anthropology and Economics examines Britain's crackdown on quality-of-life crimes.

There is something threatening about public incivility. It is a modest, but distinct, form of terrorism. God fearing, good hearted citizens are made to fear for the security of person, family and home. Tolerating incivility gives power to thugs who are often marginal in their abilities, accomplishments, and social value. It is manifestly wrong that those who give so little to the common good should be allowed to extract so much from it.

Now scroll over to The Onion, and read about the dilemma a sheriff faces.

The string of unsolved crimes includes the defacement of public property, an incident of breaking-and-entering, and a string of harassing phone calls. The latest crime—the sudden disappearance of two yield signs from Hoxie Street—occurred Monday.

"We believe the yield signs were removed in order to disrupt traffic patterns, most likely to cause an accident," [Sheriff] Steinhorst said. "The party responsible for the crime could be anyone from suspected terrorist Ahmad Ibrahim Al-Mughassil, who is on the FBI's most-wanted list, to that Fairman kid and his buddies. It could be the work of one or the other. Possibly both, though I have to say I doubt that."

Anthropology and Economics, however, is interested in more serious fare: what is the balance between civility and creativity, or put another way, is there an optimal level of transgressiveness?

The perspective at Cold Spring Shops is that there is still room to err on the side of civility, and we offer some observations from Rebecca Hagelin, who is giving props to Kathleen Santorum's book, Everyday Graces.

How would children learn to avoid quarreling and whining? It is quite natural that they do so. Where would they learn to offer someone a seat if the bus is full? How would they learn that their chores are their jobs? How would they learn to speak when spoken to by adults, to say "please," "thank you" and "you're welcome"? God doesn't put us on Earth knowing these things.

Children learn them when parents take the time to teach them and to enforce the rules. Absentee parenting, part-time parenting, parenting that says, "Go to your room, watch television, get on the computer, amuse yourself becauseI have neither the time nor the inclination to make you do otherwise," produces part-time results.

We also offer for your consideration some Lileks commentary on the back-to-school adverts.

God forbid our children should ever be happy. Not when they can have ATTITUDE, which is what we all really want from our kids.

Methinks Anthropology and Economics frets too much.

How well do we control the “broken windows” dynamic. Is this, in the language of Cold War science, a controlled reaction or an uncontrolled reaction? Can we discourage small crimes against law without discouraging small crimes against social convention? I'm not saying we can't. I am saying we need to know more about the broken windows dynamic before we unleash it.

We have a lot of transgressiveness to marginalize before I will fear the tramp of brownshirts in the streets.

RUNNING EXTRA: The Moderate Voice has found more marketing of "attitude," and James Lileks has it about right:

Britney a stepmom? Let me answer that question for you: no. “How Hollywood’s blended families work” is not an issue that keeps me up at night; I expect that they stumble along thanks to money and docile Salvadoran nannies who do all the heavy lifting, and sometimes find themselves crying because they know they will be out of the child’s life eventually, and if they tried to show up for the wedding 18 years from now they’d be turned away by big men in black suits. Plus, look at that guy. These are our celebs. Not exactly a Hurrell portrait of Cary Grant, eh? He knocked up one women, produced the little girl you see here, and now he’s sauntering off to bed another doxy. Men like this make me ill.

In the comments to the Anthropology and Economics post is a link to some background information on the individuals inducing the British lifestyle policing. These individuals, in the best academic tradition, are being transgressive without realising it.

BATTLES OF THE SEXES. Professor Mike Adams at North Carolina-Wilmington (motto: Fort Fisher is Taken) offers a modest proposal to Womens' Centers at ten universities.

I would love the opportunity to visit your campus to talk about the following:

*The benefits and responsibilities of gun ownership in general.
*The desirability of concealed carry permits for women.
*The basic rules governing the use of deadly force.

Since I am traveling extensively in the coming year, I believe that I will be able to coordinate a visit to your university sometime in the coming months. Again, the lecture would be provided at no cost to the university.

Please contact me immediately, if you think that you would be interested.

The response was less than overwhelming.

Professor Adams's reaction:

I never intended to argue that women should actually carry their guns to class. But I did intend to show that the benefits of gun ownership outweigh the detriments. In others words, guns thwart crimes more often than they cause accidents.

Oh well, at least I tried. After all, most of these centers will be sponsoring the Vagina Monologues later this year. That should be enough to scare most of the men away. So maybe they don’t need guns after all. Maybe I just need to see things from a woman’s perspective.

The second battle is a post at Dean's World. Mr Esmay's complaint:

But when I became a teenager in the 1980s, to be honest, feminists were a bunch of jerks. They were. Boys could not do anything--AN-NEE-THING--right. If we were hot and horny, it was because we were "immature" and "viewed women as objects." If we were polite and respectful and called them ladies, it was because we were "demeaning" them and "putting them in their place." If we were sexually aggressive we were brutes and neanderthals. If we were respectful and decent, we were wimps.

Do you think I exaggerate? Just talk to men aged 30-45 today, and most of them--those who aren't self-flagellating wimps--will tell you that women were fucking EVIL back in the '80s. All men were potential rapists, and anything we did was taken as a sign of our "male chauvinism." If we were polite we were condescending. If we were rude we were oppressive. If we were aggressive we were domineering. If we were kind we were wimps. Honest to God, women who called themselves "feminists" twisted everyone with a Y chromosome into a pretzel, then either laughed at us or scorned us when we didn't measure up.

Worst of all, they demonized us for objecting to any of this.

Do you think I'm whining? I'm not. I'm telling you the way it was. Indeed, I don't really care what you think of me. A whole lot of us guys born between 1960 and 1980 finally got married, settled down, had kids---and didn't get happy until we decided to ignore what the kremlinists told us and started saying, "fuck you, this is me, this is who I am and what I like, and if you don't like it, you can stick it!"

The essay has illustrations, which are presented in a work-safe way. I like the term "kremlinists." Let us hope that the most militant among them are happy with their cats.

A TRIBUTE TO TWO GREATS. Word has reached Cold Spring Shops of the death of model railroader extraordinaire John Armstrong, creator of the Canandaigua Southern Rail Road. The Canandaigua Southern was open for visitors during the recent O Scale convention, and my pictures will be available for your viewing in the near future. Thanks to Mr Armstrong's sons and the Canandaigua Southern crews for opening the house although Mr Armstrong was in hospital at the time of the convention. The obituary includes this tribute.

An insatiably curious man, Mr. Armstrong also enjoyed classical music, art, science and history and the cultural resources of the Washington area.

Mr Armstrong included references to this art and history on the Canandaigua Southern, which leads to James Lileks's tribute to artist Edward Hopper. Envision Nighthawks, modeled in O Scale.

I hope to have sufficient photo-editing skills to bring you a picture of the model.

IT'S NOT THE QUALITY OF THE EVIDENCE, IT'S THE SERIOUSNESS OF THE CHARGE. Sorry, that dog doesn't always hunt. Some months ago, a faculty member at Claremont McKenna was so inspired by the consciousness-raising at a forum on racial intolerance that she vandalized HER OWN CAR in order to set off several days of rage and a one-day cancellation of classes to reflect on the evil in the Claremont community. The latter act earned Claremont Graduate president Stedman Upham a place on the deck of cards.

The good news is that the adults prevailed. Betsy's Page picks up a Los Angeles Times story bearing the good news that the faculty member has been convicted on two felony charges and one misdemeanor, and faces hard time. Sentencing set for 17 September.

Hey Stedman, it's not because you have two last names that we're laughing at you.

THE JOYS OF SHODDY SERVICE. This Day By Day has it about right:

It's a preview of some dissatisfied-customer venting I'm working on, perhaps to post on the weekend.

C-CARNIVAL CALL. (How else to introduce the 100th exhibition of the Carnival of the Vanities?) This time it's at Fringe Blog, with a Brazilian flavor (Carnival being the Latin equivalent of Fasching.) The Carnival of the Capitalists is up, at Frozen North. The North is not yet frozen, but the Lileks weather forecast runs

Everyone has just accepted that September will last eight weeks this year, just as we accepted that April lasted sixteen.

There are several other Carnivals touring, and Watcher of Weasels has a Weekly Roundup of Weekly Roundups and a link to Carnival of the Carnivals, should you wish to make a tour of the Internet.

WHAT IS SEEN AND WHAT IS UNSEEN. Both Instapundit and Tongue Tied have noted Amtrak's suspension of extra-board conductor Leslie Farr, a Republican candidate for a House seat -- the First Congressional District -- in Missouri. Mr. Farr was in charge of Amtrak's eastbound Ann Rutledge. The regular conductor was in charge of a westbound extra serving as Senator Kerry's campaign train. Mr. Farr got himself in a bit of trouble with Amtrak for exploiting the delay to his train to score some political points.

In an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press, Farr said he used the train's public address system to inform passengers they would be delayed because of Kerry's train and quipped that they should vote accordingly in November.

The real problem here is not with Senator Kerry. Rather, the problem is a breakdown in supervision and dispatching on the Union Pacific Railroad, not that we haven't heard that song before.

According to Amtrak records, the eastbound Ann Rutledge train left Kansas City about 25 minutes late and was running more than an hour-and-a-half behind - due largely to freight train traffic - when it left Washington, Mo., headed toward St. Louis. The train, carrying 135 passengers, was delayed an additional 84 minutes just outside the St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood to allow Kerry's special westbound train to pass.

It's not as if railroads haven't had occasion to keep first-class trains out of the way of POTUS(*) specials -- contemporary whistle-stop tours are nostalgia for President Truman (Senator Kerry ought to study the mistakes Governor Dewey made on his own whistle-stop that year, but I digress) after all. Likewise, railroads have had, what is it, 170 years of practice in moving lesser trains such as freight trains against first-class trains, using signal indications and instructions from the Superintendent. Furthermore, if memory serves, the Washington to St. Louis section is two main tracks. Although there are restrictions requiring the stopping of opposing trains on adjacent tracks past a moving POTUS train, laying out the Annie for 84 minutes on two main tracks constitutes a serious dispatching error. Union Pacific has yet to comment.

(*)President Of The United States. Senator Kerry's train enjoys the same status, although it might operate without the pilot train.

INSTEAD OF THE RED RIVER, THE WINNIPEGGER, AND THE RUMP OF THE OLYMPIAN. Commuter rail? In the Twin Cities area? Calling at towns of 1500 souls?

A Times analysis of the potential costs of driving versus taking the train suggests commuters traveling to work between St. Cloud and the Twin Cities daily could save between $7,750 and $9,600 a year by leaving their vehicles at home.

The article does not spell out the assumptions of the analysis. Is the premise that driving commuters drive from work to home and then leave home to run errands? Doubtful. One of the advantages of driving from office to home is the opportunity to pick up the milk and bread, or the kids getting out of drama club (this is Lake Wobegon we're talking about, nicht wahr), or to go straight to the boat dock.

I don't know that weekend driving conditions are so terrible around the Cities as to make the train attractive for recreational trips. It is an option around Chicago, and likely to be much used with the air show this weekend.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. Belmont Club considers the wider ramifications of the likely storming of Najaf.

Civilization does not principally consist of bricks and mortar, but in a set of commonly accepted values and restraints. If the inhabitants of the sub-Saharan Africa and the United States could be exchanged instanteously; the one materializing in suburban homes and the other in wattle huts, the material imbalance would be reversed again within ten years, because the technology and civilization of Americans is carried in their heads and not in their possessions. There would be nothing Americans could not rebuild in Africa; and there would be nothing Africans could repair or replace in America.

So the most terrifying effect of the War so far has been in the slow destruction of taboos and imperatives which collectively allowed civilization to function. One writer observed that although Britain has possessed nuclear weapons for nearly 60 years no one worried about a UK attack on New York city. He might have added that no one in London lost any sleep over the prospect of an American nuclear strike on Picadilly Circus. The electronics, physics and rocketry check out fine; it was civilization that held them back. The concept of assymetric warfare was supposed to exploit the "fact" that transnational terrorist organizations operating in areas of chaos could strike at a civilization hamstrung by constraints. They could attack orphanages and then seek shelter in the Church of the Nativity; they could fly wide bodied aircraft into Manhattan, then seek shelter in "sovereign" Afghanistan; they could call for the death of millions from the pulpits of Qom; they could fire mortars from the Imam Ali Shrine and never expect the favor to be returned. But the logical flaw in this conception was that civilization could put aside these constraints in a moment. Hiroshima and Dresden are reminders that it could.

RUNNING EXTRA: This Cox and Forkum cartoon frames the point precisely.

They provide more commentary here.

MANAGED NOT TO CHOKE ON MY CHILI: One of the fringe benefits of travelling north of the Cheddar Curtain is the free copies of The Onion available at Real Chili.

I'll take mine without cheese, thank you.

Anyway, I was tucking into my fave, hot over beans, liberally splashed with the pepper vinegar, and then I read this. Ms. Setzer's comment is priceless. Kept my composure while eating, anyway.

SITTING IN MY CHAIR, BLUSHING. Shot in the Dark has been providing annotations for his link list (sorry, I'm just too old-school to refer to a "blogroll.") Herewith the C list, "C is for 'Crazy For These Blogs'."

Cold Spring Shops - One of my three favorite edublogs; combines laconic, genteel criticism with great railroad lore - which is really a wonderful combination.

Thanks for the props, Mitch!

SOME UNUSUAL MODEL RAILROAD READING. "Trains: the transportation for nymphomaniacs everywhere," notes Illini or Huskie?, who found these (scroll down)

WE WANT A PIECE OF THE ACTION. (Yet another discovery from my sojourn north of the Cheddar Curtain ...)

The University of Wisconsin System would request $211 million more from the state and students for its next two-year budget — about one-third of it in tuition increases — under a plan released Monday.

The proposed budget also includes a request for $227 million in additional state-funded borrowing for a slew of maintenance and building projects.

Rep. Dean Kaufert, co-chair of the Legislature’s budget committee, said the system would face a tough sell with lawmakers in asking for $227 million in additional borrowing for capital projects, especially with a budget that is expected to be tight.

“I think we’re just about tapped out as far as using the credit card and borrowing more money,” said Kaufert, R-Neenah.

Why not just request a piece of the action? What action? Oh, sorry, the supposedly objective wire services completely hide the action.

Over two decades, the income gap has steadily increased between the richest Americans, who own homes and stocks and got big tax breaks, and those at the middle and bottom of the pay scale, whose paychecks buy less.

The growing disparity is even more pronounced in this recovering economy. Wages are stagnant and the middle class is shouldering a larger tax burden. Prices for health care, housing, tuition, gas and food have soared.

(No media bias here, move along ...)

Sigh. Hasn't anybody connected the dots here? That real entry-level wages have grown only slightly suggests that what is entering the work force is still, well, in need of some seasoning. That real rewards to creativity have increased is, well, encouraging. That university officials do not say, publicly and proudly, "We are providing our graduates with talents that they will be able to cash in on in the future. We are going out of the business of providing subsidies to the future upper-middle and upper classes" is discouraging.

It might also have a salutary effect on the mind-set of the students. On this morning's radio news, a report from Florida on the cleanup after Hurricane Charley included one resident who saw less damage after the hurricane than happens during Spring Break. (Maybe the university officials do not ask for a piece of the action because it satisfies them to let ESPN and MTV set the tone.)

Not everybody is a Sitzpinkler. The editors at the Las Vegas Review-Journal get it:

So what's the problem? If we truly eliminated the opportunity for young people to find entry-level jobs, they might never find work at all. But most of those who do enter work "in the lowest quintile" work hard, save some money, and increase their skills and education as they go along, giving themselves a pretty good chance of living to be richer -- in real, constant dollars -- than their grandparents could ever have dreamed.

It's called America. No wonder people want to come here.

On the Irish Sea, Atlantic Blog has more.

These numbers suggest that students have a belief that wage growth is non-trivial, and that going into debt may be worth doing. They are not even remotely definitive, because they are not the numbers I really want. What I really want are numbers on the return to higher education. But a booming labor market is at least suggestive.

My central point remains this: why do newspapers, staffed by people who happily go into debt to buy cars and homes, write as if students are clearly worse off going into debt to pay for university education?

I suppose because it's easier to draw contrasts between this

"We're just trying to get ahead." said Debbie Reames, 49, of Raytown, Mo., whose bank job of 24 years was outsourced in February. "But it seems like we climb a few rungs and then we fall back again."

Reames has a new secretarial job, which pays $7,000 a year less than her bank job, and she works catering jobs for extra money. Her husband, Russ, can no longer work after an injury. One son is finishing college and another will start in the fall.

So the family budget tightened. That meant fewer cable channels, more meals at home, postponed doctor appointments, missed vacations, delayed credit card payments, all to "keep the wolf away from the door," she said.

and this ...

The income gap is showing up in booming sales of luxury items. Porsche Cars North America Inc. says sales are up 17 percent for the year. Strong sales at Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue overshadow lackluster sales at stores such as Wal-Mart, Sears and Payless Shoes.

Real estate agent Lance Anderson, 38, of Overland Park, Kan., expects a record sales year, as homeowners upgrade to more expensive homes and commercial clients expand. He recently took his family to Disney World for a two-week Florida vacation.

SECOND SECTION: Should have checked Dan Drezner and Joanne Jacobs before hitting the publish button. Read and understand.

THIRD SECTION. King at SCSU Scholars (is it Welcome Home?) discovers that rarest life form, a university administrator that gets it:

I think there's a shift from higher education being a public good to it being a private good, that people who use it should pay for it.

That's St. Cloud State's Diana Burlison, associate vice president for student affairs, quoted in the local paper. (Are the archives screwy, King, or is Blogger's copying of links gone goofy?)

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

But the lesson was stark and by now familiar: written history was fallible. Sloppy and erroneous assessments had been rushed into the official record, only to be presumed accurate by historians, who then published elegant reference works echoing the mistakes. Unless a person was willing, as [wreck divers John] Chatterton and [Richie] Kohler were, to ditch work and sneak off to Washington, chisel away at mountains of opaque original documents, sleep in fleabag motels, eat street-vendor hot dogs, and run outside every two hours to shovel quarters into a parking meter, he would presume the history books to be correct.

Cold Spring Shops readers who get paid to do research, whether as part of the job description, or on government grants, or for a dissertation, take heed. (That goes for recreational researchers whether working on family histories or investigating prototypes so as to build a model railroad as well.)

The quote comes from Robert Kurson's The Shadow Divers, which provides background on the identification of a mystery submarine wrecked somewhere off the New Jersey coast. The book reads a lot like Frederick Forsyth in the technical details and in the character development, but it has in common with all good sea stories that you could begin it, "No s***, this really happened." It also reinforces something my brother told me years ago, that it is easy to die on a big shipwreck. (Happens off Milwaukee all the time on Prins Willem, he has advised me.)

What U-boat was it? Read the d*** book.

TODAY'S DUMB IDEA. A school district requires that girls' handbags, just like the backpacks preferred by boys, must be left in lockers. Or rather, it did, until the students and their parents got wind of it, and exercised a little sovereignty.

SOME INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY IS BETTER LOST. "Retiring faculty strain UWGB" runs the lament. (That's the University of Wisconsin's Green Bay campus.)

The UW System reported that the retirement crunch could hit hardest in the state’s 11 four-year universities besides UW-Milwaukee and UW-Madison. Those smaller universities typically do not have the depth in faculty to withstand frequent retirements.

“In the sciences area, many of those who are retiring now are some of those who came to the university when it was originally started in the late 1960s,” [science education professor Scott] Ashmann said. “They’ve given the university its stability. To lose that living history of the university is something that is difficult in making some decisions because you don’t always know the context and what has happened in the past.

“However, having new blood and new ideas is good, as well. But I don’t know if it’s always good to have a huge amount of turnover in a short amount of time.”

On the other hand, given the suspect origins of this university, some new context might be in order.

The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay is one of six schools profiled in a new book, The Innovative Campus (Oryx Press, 1999), which takes a look back at groundbreaking higher education institutions of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Author Joy Rosenzweig Kliewer devotes the chapter "Eco U in the 1990s" to what she sees as UW-Green Bay's success in honoring its roots as an innovative, experimental institution.

"UW-Green Bay is a bold survivor of the alternative higher education movement of the 1960s and early 1970s," she writes. "Over the past three decades, the campus has kept alive its distinctive interdisciplinary structure despite budgetary cutbacks, a merger, and a changing social and political climate."

Right. You could probably fill a deck of cards (I know, I know, it's time to update that deck) just with Sitzpinklern from the peer institutions Ms Kliewer mentions.

Along with UW-Green Bay, The Innovative Campus profiles Pitzer College in Claremont, Cal.; the New College of the University of South Florida in Sarasota; Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass.; the University of California, Santa Cruz; and Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.

The six schools experimented with a range of innovations, from individualized majors and independent study, to no-letter grading, student participation in curriculum development, and academic organization by broad, interdisciplinary areas rather than by narrow, specialized departments.

Kliewer says innovation - commonplace as college enrollments doubled nationwide during the 1960s - dwindled by the late 1970s with a recessionary U.S. economy, widespread enrollment declines and a shift in student values toward careerism and away from personal self-exploration. She contends, however, that the colleges that emerged can serve as models for present-day institutions as they prepare to meet new challenges.

Kliewer said she chose to spotlight UW-Green Bay because of its history as an interdisciplinary, environmentally oriented institution. Also of interest were the widespread attention it received in higher education circles and its position as a distinctive public university in a largely mainstream, Midwestern higher education system.

There might be a simpler explanation for the sagging popularity of these Sixties-fad-inspired "alternative" models for the university.

The. Models. Didn't. Work.

The current administration at the Green Bay campus, however, is not yet ready to admit that. Back to the news story:

“We have made wonderful hires in education, the sciences, social sciences, humanities,” said Sue Hammersmith, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at UWGB. “We’ve hired an African-American Ph.D. in the education field. That’s going to be a significant plus for the university.”

For the color of his skin, or for the content of his curriculum vitae, Provost Hammersmith? I have some cards to fill in yet ...

The paragraph that precedes the provost's bragging is more telling.

Meanwhile, with the supply of new faculty instructors unable to keep up with the need created by the retirements — at UWGB and across the UW System — academic staff members have filled in the gaps and have become a larger percentage of those teaching on state campuses.

The reporter, however, has not taken a close enough look at reality.

Faculty members at UWGB and those at colleges and universities nationwide are reaching retirement age at the same time, and there aren’t enough people available to replace them, Hammersmith said.

“The one area where we were unsuccessful was in nursing, where there is a major shortage of faculty on the national market,” she said. “There are not nearly as many nursing Ph.D.s being produced as there are openings as people retire.

“The other reason is great competition for nurses — shortages in universities, technical colleges, and the medical field. Other tough areas are social work and business, although we did succeed in filing a business professorial position that had been open for three years.”

Also, the amount of federal funding available in the 1960s and 1970s used to train people for careers in higher education is no longer available because of severe budget cuts nationwide, Hammersmith said. Universities now compete with other industries for those with Ph.D.s.

It takes an average of six months to hire a professor, Hammersmith said. To address this issue, the university now advertises faculty openings in the fall and conduct interviews by January.

Academic staff members are paid less and are not eligible for tenure.

Data from the UW System show there were 5,416 full-time UW faculty members and 1,406 full-time academic staff members a decade ago. During the 2002-03 academic year, there were 6,718 full-time faculty members and 11,139 full-time academic staff.

Apparently, there is nobody available to correct the typographical errors and bring the faculty directory up to date at Green Bay's economics department, and a quick look at the English faculty and course offerings suggests that Green Bay is taking advantage of the industrial reserve army in that discipline. No doubt, however, there are plenty of dispersers of crying towels, assessors of the obvious and diversity boondogglers on campus.

Alas, the "there are plenty of retirements coming, get your Ph.D. now" bait-and-switch is getting a bit old. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, you must be a Provost ...

TODAY'S NEW WORD. Sitzpinkler.

OSHKOSH, ALL SYSTEMS ARE GO. Burt Rutan proposes to make his space program portable.

Next year’s Experimental Aircraft Association AirVenture fly-in could include a flight directly from Oshkosh’s Wittman Regional Airport into outer space.

Aviation pioneer Burt Rutan has indicated a desire to bring his pioneering SpaceShipOne aircraft to AirVenture for a possible space flight, EAA president Tom Poberezny said Monday.

The idea is a good one. The Rutan Vari-Eze has been a staple at the Oshkosh convention, and the chase planes that escorted Voyager in from its round-the-world-on-one-tank-of-gas flight were the single engine monoplanes that many homebuilders and recreational flyers started with.

HOIST ANOTHER SPRECHER. Although the Milwaukee Brewers have struggled some since the All-Star break, they are still messing up the playoff aspirations of other teams, most recently defeating the Chicago Cubs, 3-1.

THE LAZINESS PREMIUM. I took a birthday break and visited family north of the Cheddar Curtain. I had the opportunity to take an evening walk around Lambeau Field in Green Bay. Therein lies an economics lesson. The people who had houses on Lombardi Avenue, directly across from the stadium, were selling parking for $25. One block north of the stadium, along Oneida Street, the price was $15. Two blocks north, it could be had for $10. Further north, there were some optimists offering parking for $5, but there was street parking available on the side streets north of Liberty Street, about a ten minute walk from the stadium.

Admittedly, it was a preseason game, and the Bishop's Charities are no longer as sacred as once they were, and people were offering me game tickets very cheaply, but perhaps that talk about wide-bodied Cheeseheads is not completely off-base.

The game itself? Packers have some work to do.

MARKING OFF. It's still the summer session. Thanks for looking in. Back eventually.

WORKING ON THE RAILROAD. A model of the Boston and Albany Suburban Tank is currently on the workbench. Soldering on the superstructure is in progress.

Photo courtesy of Northeast Railfan Net.

If the cool weather persists, I am likely to have lots of progress to report on the railroad.

AN "UGLY TAX" IS NOT AN OPTION. Reason's Nick Gillespie is not impressed with suggestions that corrective taxation be applied to some food stuffs, all in the interest of public health. (That there might be a public interest in keeping the wide bodies hidden is out of bounds for now.)

If history is any guide, it’s safe to assume that a hot topic of political discussion will quickly transform into a hot topic of legislation, ranging from Twinkie taxes to mandatory high school exit exams administered by the President’s Council on Physical Fitness (which one assumes is now part of the Department of Homeland Security). Can the federal Leave No Chubby Child Behind Act be far away in a country in which 15 percent of kids are officially considered "overweight"? The corresponding figure for adults is about 65 percent, which simply pours more fat on this particular political fire.

If being overweight contributes "significantly to our health care costs," the best way to reduce our dangerous dependency on imported stretch fabrics is to make individuals internalize those costs the same way they scarf down the Big Macs and (formerly) supersized fries. That means reducing the publicly funded elements of health care. An added benefit of that would be to deny politicians -- and your taxpaying neighbors -- any right to shape your personal lifestyle.

There is a somewhat longer Jacob Sullum article, also in Reason, on the same topic, arguing

The more important question is why any of this is the government’s business. Granted that obesity is a health issue, why is it a public health issue? The answer from [Yale's Kelly] Brownell and like-minded activists is that the government must rescue consumers -- especially children -- from the environmental forces that make them fat, thereby rescuing taxpayers from the burden of obesity-related medical expenses. They propose to accomplish this mission through a combination of taxes, subsidies, censorship, and regulation. In his book Food Fight (co-authored by Katherine Battle Horgen), Brownell says "profound change is necessary." Among other things, the government must "change the basic economics of food," redesign cities so that "times, places, and incentives for people to be physically active [are] engineered into daily life," "prohibit marketing of products to children," "prohibit snack foods and soft drinks from schools," and "prohibit the operation of businesses selling food within a certain distance of schools." If legislatures fail to go along with this agenda, "litigation may be necessary."

The war on fat is the latest manifestation of a collectivist philosophy that says the government has a duty to protect "public health" by discouraging behavior that might lead to disease or injury. It also reflects an anti-capitalist perspective that views people as helpless automatons manipulated into consuming whatever big corporations choose to produce. The anti-fat crusaders want to manipulate us too, but for our own good. They seek to reshape us by reshaping the world.

There is more economics in weight gain than the simple externality argument. Mr Sullum has part of it.

As economist Tomas Philipson notes, Americans have been getting fatter for at least a century, primarily because of developments that have been tremendously positive on balance. Technological improvements in agriculture and processing have made food so cheap that even the poorest people in developed countries can afford to eat more than they need to survive. (Indeed, the poorest Americans are the fattest -- an astonishing reversal of the relationship between wealth and weight that prevailed for most of human history.) Work is much less arduous than it used to be, Philipson notes, so "the price of spending calories has gone up....Exercise has been pushed from labor to leisure." Rather than getting paid to expend calories, we now pay to do so, whether in leisure time or in money spent on health clubs, exercise equipment, and outdoor recreation. Labor-saving devices from the car and the washing machine to the remote control and the networked computer mean that we expend fewer calories away from work as well as on the job. We can choose from an amazing variety of entertainment options, many of them sedentary.

(Or, as Charlie Sykes put it, "One America does Pilates to keep fit. The other does yard work.") That is not to make light of the higher opportunity costs of exercising, or of eating right. Inas Rashad & Michael Grossman have an essay in The Public Interest (hat tip: Milt's File) titled "The Economics of Obesity" that notes,

Physical exercise has declined since 1980, and that decline is a proximate cause of the increase in body weight. Statisticians Reid Ewing, Tom Schmid, Richard Killingsworth, Amy Zlot, and Stephen Raudenbush have attributed part of the increase in obesity to the degree of urban sprawl, or how conducive a city is to exercise. Urban sprawl is defined as the process through which the spread of development across the landscape outpaces population growth. Those urban areas that offer more transportation choices, are more compact, and have a variety of stores and activity centers within reach have lower rates of obesity. Government spending on roadwork and infrastructure may thus have an influence on the obesity rate by subsidizing sprawl.

Furthermore,

According to our research, as much as two-thirds of the increase in adult obesity since 1980 can be explained by the rapid growth in the per capita number of fast-food restaurants and full-service restaurants, especially the former. It’s not hard to imagine how the explosive growth in these restaurants could fuel the obesity epidemic. Food served in these restaurants has extremely high caloric density, and almost certainly has contributed to obesity. We also found that the very modest growth in the per capita number of fast-food and full-service restaurants accounts in large part for the stability of adult weight in the period from 1960 to 1980, before the first major obesity upswing. During that period, the per capita number of full-service restaurants actually fell. Indications point to restaurant growth as the primary cause of increased obesity after 1980.

What caused this explosive restaurant growth? The principal driver seems to have been the increases in rates of labor force participation by women. As nonwork time for women became increasingly scarce and valuable over the last few decades, time devoted to at-home meal preparation decreased. Families began eating out more often. Indeed, the economists Patricia M. Anderson, Kristin F. Butcher, and Phillip B. Levine find that the rise in average hours worked by mothers can account for as much as one-third of the growth in obesity among children in certain families. In part, the rise in obesity seems to have been an unintended consequence of encouraging women to become more active in the workforce.

We have also unmasked a second and perhaps more surprising culprit in the alarming rise in obesity: the crackdown on smoking via tax increases. Higher cigarette taxes and higher cigarette prices have caused more smokers to quit — but these smokers seem to have begun eating more as a result. According to our research, each 10 percent increase in the real price of cigarettes produces a 2 percent increase in the number of obese people, other things being equal.

Clearly, those who curtail their habit or quit smoking altogether typically gain weight as the appetite-suppressing and metabolism-increasing effects of smoking come to an end. This is no small effect: The inflation-adjusted price of cigarettes has risen by approximately 164 percent since 1980. This large growth resulted in part from four federal excise tax hikes, a number of state tax hikes, and the settlement of the state lawsuits filed against cigarette manufacturers to recover Medicaid funds spent treating diseases related to smoking. The rise in the real price of cigarettes is the second-most important factor next to the growth in restaurants in the trend in the post-1980 obesity trend. We estimate that it accounts for almost 20 percent of the growth in obesity.

This summary is instructive: economists see tradeoffs where policy wonks attempt to find solutions.

Our findings underscore the idea that social action can have unintended consequences: Oftentimes, there is a tradeoff involved in achieving goals that society favors, such as increased food production, more workforce participation by women, and fewer smokers. Lower real food prices have significantly increased living standards. Expanded labor market opportunities for women have increased families’ command of real resources and increased equality of opportunity. Cigarette smoking is still the largest cause of premature death among Americans; pushing smokers to quit will have obvious health benefits. But our results and those of other economists also suggest that these efforts contribute to the rising prevalence of obesity. Whether public policies should be pursued that offset this ignored consequence of previous public policy to discourage smoking, increase market opportunities, and make cheaper food available depends on the costs and benefits of these policies.

Mr Sullum's article ends with another framing of the tradeoff.

All these developments have contributed to our expanding waistlines, but as Philipson puts it, "We are better off being fatter and richer. I would not want to go back." Given this reality, it’s rather disconcerting to see Brownell and Horgen proclaim, "Fundamental changes are necessary, because fundamental economic factors are central to the obesity epidemic."

Those who insist upon such "fundamental changes" cannot understand why others find the prospect alarming. Brownell thinks his critics are not being constructive if they fault his plan for remaking the world without offering a plan of their own. The same sort of incomprehension was apparent at the AEI conference on obesity, where University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein argued that fat people can impose costs on others only if the government forces taxpayers to pick up the tab for their health care or prevents insurers and employers from discriminating based on weight. Eliminate these distortions, he said, and weight control would be purely a private matter. In that case, a hostile audience member asked him, what are you doing to prevent obesity? Epstein’s answer: "I play basketball."

HOW OTHERS SEE US. The secret is out. Jeff at Conservative Book Club (this may be for members only) argues,

Make no mistake, the Left dominates academia as much as it does the media. But that wouldn't be possible without the herdlike submission of American parents, who more than ever seem willing to saddle themselves and their children with massive long-term debt in exchange for what is increasingly a worse than worthless miseducation.

Why do they do it? Let's be honest: it has little to do with the pursuit of wisdom. The main motive is money; or, if you prefer, "opportunity." Parents are convinced that an expensive degree from a "good" (read: prestigious) school is the price of admission to the upper middle class. It hardly matters what students actually learn -- or don't learn.

There's some validity to that view, of course: where you went to college does matter to most white-collar employers. But only at the outset: while it may be enough to get you an interview, or even a job offer, over someone else, after that the advantages cease. Which is why a long-term Princeton study of young men with equivalent SAT scores found that those who attended more selective schools out-earned those who didn't only in the first few years after college; the gap quickly narrowed and soon disappeared. (I only wish the study had included men with equivalent scores who didn't go to college at all: my guess is they'd have done just as well, long-term, as the others.) And the irony is, the ones with the initial economic advantage of a prestige degree probably spent it all, and then some, just paying off their larger student loans.

Personally, I think the days of even that initial advantage are numbered. With so many qualified students being priced out of the "better" schools, and so many unqualified students being recruited to promote "diversity," it can't be long before employers begin to notice that where -- or even whether -- one went to college is no longer a reliable indicator of intelligence, aptitude, or even minimal literacy. At which time the whole house of cards will collapse. God speed the day, I say.

Until then, what should parents do? Well, there's no one solution, but here's what I'm doing. With the first of five closely spaced children due to enter college in September, we applied only to schools we felt we could afford with little or no borrowing (state schools, mainly), plus a few that offered merit-based four-year scholarships.

CHARITY IS DUMPING. Seriously.

The argument that (new) textile and apparel manufacturers make is that their jobs must be protected for the good of the nation. But study after study has shown that the cost to consumers is an integer multiple (3 times, 4 times, maybe 10 times) the benefit to the textile worker. Still, there may be some point to this, since the reason that the second hand clothes are so cheap is the "goodwill" of industrialized nations. Huge shipments of second-hand clothing from charitable organizations have swamped the markets of third world nations, driving native clothing makers out of business.

Michael at Econ Log suggests it's time to dump the concept of dumping, although, as he notes, "foreigners are producing a better product at a lower cost and I want men with guns to stop them at the border," while more accurate, is less esthetically pleasing.

I suppose I should be grateful that a local proposal to limit the number of times a household has a garage sale (if it has more than three in a summer, it is reclassified as a "retail establishment" and subject to business tax) is not the work of resale shops engaging in rent-seeking by claiming unfair competition from "dumped" household goods.

NOTICE OF LINE RELOCATION. Eric Rasmusen has moved servers.

WHAT IS SEEN AND WHAT IS UNSEEN. A business employs 44,000 people, some of them at minimum wage, and some fraction of that workforce qualifies for public assistance of various kinds. Net result: an 86 million dollar cost to the state in the form of public assistance. Mungowitz End (via Newmark's Door) has some fun with the logic of the study.

THE EVOLUTION OF AN INFERIOR GOOD. The color purple is not just a reference to a trendy book for literature classes. It once used to be expensive to manufacture, but it has become cheap enough to reverse its class status, at least to the established residents of the Iron Range and the Upper Peninsula, who coined the term "Finlander purple" to refer to the house-painting tastes of the new strangers in the neighborhood. Marginal Revolution speculates,

If purple paint were say 25 or 50% more expensive then people would switch to substitutes but make it 500 or 1000 times as expensive and it becomes a fashion statement.

STEER A COURSE FOR FERENGI. PoliBlog hosts Carnival of the Capitalists. Logical.

MORE RAILROAD READING? Live from the Third Rail discovers a review of Central Indiana Interurban. The discovery perpetuates the automotive conspiracy myth.

The interurbans, which connected small cities and towns with metropolitan areas, were so commonplace that most large cities had were connected to one by the early 1920s. However, by the late 1930s virtually all of the interurban services were extinct. Many fell victim to GM and other auto-industrial companies, as did the street cars in Los Angeles. Others simply became redundant as the automobile proved more flexible and versatile modes of transportation across and around America's vast interior.

Umm, no, the National City Lines case does not identify a vast automotive conspiracy to destroy the interurbans. Interurbans might well have been the dot.com bubble of the early 1900s; the bubble popped well before the Great Depression. Newmark's Door has the roundup on that. A more likely villain might be President Franklin Roosevelt's Public Utility Holding Company Act, something inadvertently alluded to in the review.

The one interurban to survive, the South Shore Railroad, did so because Samuel Insull, the utility magnate whose holdings included Commonwealth Edison and the Northern Indiana Public Service Company, also owned the South Shore from 1925 until 1932, according to the Shore Line Interurban Historical Society.

In other words, he helped usher the South Shore into the era of public subsidies for passenger transport. That is considered to be the reason why the electric train, which still travels from Chicago to South Bend and back on a regular schedule, is the only interurban that successfully made the transition to a commuter railroad.

That's part of it. The Insull interests also owned the Chicago Aurora and Elgin, the Chicago North Shore and Milwaukee, and the Indiana Railroad. The first two entered Chicago on respectively the Metropolitan and Northwestern Elevated tracks, which precluded much freight train service; the third served primarily rural areas. The South Shore, on the other hand, serves the steel mill country along the South Shore (obviously) and although it runs in city streets, the street trackage provided sufficient space for freight trains. For many years, the freight revenues sufficed to cover losses attributable to the passenger service.

YOU REALLY HAVE TO UNDERSTAND THE WELFARE ECONOMICS PARADIGM. Deinonychus antirrhopus argues that Robert F. Kennedy the younger does not.

IT'S NOT EVERY UNIVERSITY. Laura at 11-D might have moved to the suburbs, but she doesn't have to like it:

The lack of sensible suburban planning has long been an interest of mine. Good discuss in the comment section here about that. I have a theory that academic snobbery about suburbia is partly to blame. Why does every university have an urban planning department and an urban policy institute, but nothing about suburbia? This omission is especially glaring since most people, and most voters, live suburbs.

Um, it's not every university. One formerly rural university now in an outer suburb of Chicago comes to mind. Some people there have done some work on suburbanization.

[Northern Illinois University's Charles] CAPPELL FOUND,WAY BACK IN 1991, that one aspect of life that many suburbanites appear fed up with is how quickly their communities are growing and developing. In fact, “growth and congestion” finished in a three-way tie for second (with taxes and transportation) when Cappell’s students asked suburbanites to name the worst aspect of living in their community.

His colleague Dick Esseks has more.

From 1970 until 1990 the Chicagoland area grew by 4 percent in population and 47 percent in land use. In the process, thousands upon thousands of acres of the best agricultural land in the world were destroyed.

Others had protested that loudly, decrying the loss of farmland, but theirvoices went unheard. Esseks shared their concern, but approached the problem from a different angle. He trained his academic sights on the large-lot (one acre or more) rural developments that he saw cropping up all around the countryside between DeKalb and Chicago. “The inefficiency of such development seemed obvious, but it appeared that nobody had quantified the fiscal impacts of it for the Chicago suburban fringe, so that is what I did,” he says.

Painstaking research and analysis led Esseks to the conclusion that such developments were a burden and not a boon.Despite promises from developers that such large homes on such big lots would generate enough taxes to more than support themselves, his research indicated otherwise. Instead, he argued, those exclusive subdivisions were actually creating a tax burden on others who had to defray the cost of building and maintaining roads to serve them, providing police and fire services to protect them, and pay to bus children from those distant homes to school.

“It’s a case of the poor – at least the notwealthy – subsidizing a higher standard of living for the rich,” Esseks says. The findings provided some of the first hard evidence that farmland preservationists could use to defend cropland. “I think because of Dick’s work, people are paying more attention to the hidden costs of how we use land,” says Ann Sorensen, director of the Center for Agriculture in the Environment, the NIU-based research arm of American Farmland Trust. “He was the first to look at the numbers.

But wait, there's more:

For [geographer Richard] Greene, one of the most interesting aspects is how edge cities contribute to the phenomenon of urban sprawl.

“Just as people are willing to commute downtown, they are willing to commute to these new job centers, so the impact of the edge cities extends far beyond their actual borders. Consequently, people are traveling farther and farther out in search of affordable housing, causing more farmland to be converted to subdivisions," Green says. "That is why, from a farmland preservation point of view, edge cities are a terrible thing. But for municipalities in those corridors that are looking to attract industry to offset residential tax bills, it's a good thing. It all depends upon your perspective."

So why did the suburbs emerge? Anybody remember what the cities looked like before the Yuppie invasion? Does the name Jacob Riis ring any bells? (hint: The Battle with the Slum and How the Other Half Lives.) At one time, some wide open spaces were desirable, and the opportunity to stock up on a week's supply of groceries -- ever hear of a grocery list? -- a convenience.

But I want to stick to the academics. The research is out there, and you don't have to look very far. Myron Orfield's American Metropolitics: The New Suburban Reality is good reading. (Amazon helpfully notes that hard-to-find and specialty titles sometimes take longer to ship; Brookings will ship it immediately.) Paul Krugman has worked with Masahisa Fujita, who is a regional economist of some stature, and with Anthony J. Venables, also accomplished, on The Spatial Economy: Cities, Regions, and International Trade, which is in my stack of stuff to read.

And in other developments, the economics department may be able to conduct a search -- note my continued skepticism about resources being matched with enrollments -- in urban and regional economics. I wonder if I should run the idea of research into the economics of suburbs by the search committee and the candidates they identify, as a screen for potential colleagues, rather than as a screen for snobs.

THE DISCIPLINE IS MISSING FROM THE PROTOTYPE TOO. Photon Courier suggests that the capacity crunch on the real railroads is going to get ugly, with the harvest and the Christmas importing season (with just-in-time deliveries, the toys get produced in October and November and the arrival of the containers at Pacific Coast ports and warehouses to the east is tightly timed) yet to come.

The railroads apparently are too busy suing Lionel to worry about keeping the lines fluid.

TODAY'S MODEL RAILROAD READING. In the Shadow of Mount Hollywood discovers the downside of operating your model railroad according to the prototype.

I came away from my discovery with a good deal of admiration and respect for Jacques, and increased frustration at my fellow hobbyists, who by and large don't share this admiration and respect -- I was, in fact, attending a meeting of fellow hobbyists, and one of the centerpiece presentations covered how a fellow was, in pedantic detail, duplicating the bureaucratic paperwork attendant to moving iron ore that was used by the real railroads in the pre-computer age on his model railroad layout. I much prefer the Lee Jacques approach. In fact, one of Jacques Barzun's most telling critiques of Western bourgeois culture is its glorification of pedantry (James Bond, after all, wanted his martinis shaken, not stirred).

The "pedantic detail" clearly refers to the modeller of an iron ore hauling railroad, who wants the switch crew working the ore dock to provide the proper mix of ores into the hold of the boat -- did you think smelting iron simply involved dumping some rocks into a furnace, applying some heat, and crossing your fingers? -- and perhaps going so far as to pull the tracks in the order the cars were emptied, so as to avoid breaking the boat's back.

But the hobby has many individuals for whom the height of excitement is shuffling hopper cars at a mine, or shuffling boxcars in Peoria. The discipline of clearing the main line for a first-class train while keeping the other trains active escapes them.

The Jacques he refers to is Francis Lee Jacques, wildlife illustrator and early kitbasher (a Depression era model railroad, improvised out of American Flyer mechanisms, in preservation in Chisholm, Minnesota) who apparently did a fine job of improvising with the materials he had.

Scratchbuilding and kit-bashing are becoming lost arts. There is so much good stuff available ready-to-run (gains from trade with China and Korea at work) that modellers have more time to think about the paperwork, and preprinted forms for the paperwork are available now from Micro Mark.

The scratch builders still have the circus to turn to: ready-built circus models are still not as easily available, but the standard of work the best craftsmen have set is pretty good.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

Some people forget (because they backed/worshipped/served-as-useful-idiots-to the other side) that we have fought an ideology before, and – we won. The Cold War was, above all else, an ideological conflict. It was the Great Civil War of Western Civilization. On the one side, you had Western Capitalism, and on the other, International Communism. Obviously, things weren't that cut and dried. The US certainly doesn't (to my constant dismay) enjoy a laissez-faire economy, and the European NATO countries even less so. And despite a totalitarian regime, even the Soviet Union tolerated a little samizdat capitalism. Nevertheless, with the exception of France, countries took sides and stayed there.

Which socio-political system was left standing after 45 years of conflict? Oh yeah, baby – despite what you hear on American campuses, the West won. We won completely. We knocked their dicks in the dirt. The bad guys gave up, in the end, without even firing a shot – like Saddam Hussein in his hidey-hole.

How did we do it? How did we endure 45 years of conflict? How did we win? In the end, it came down to one simple thing:

We proved the enemy ideology to be ineffective.

We fought Communism for almost 50 years, and we would have fought it for another 50 – had that ideology not been too incompetent to keep up the fight. Islamism isn't
Communism, however, so the means of fighting it have to be different.

That's Vodka Pundit, who goes on to distinguish the Islamofascist ideology from the Communist ideology. He misses one important point, however. He notes that Communism pretended to be an intellectual idea, holding out the promise of paradise on earth, while Islamofascism holds out the promise of paradise beyond earth. It is therefore easier to criticize Communism on the basis of facts on the ground (he invokes the $300 -- in 1983 dollars -- Commodore 64) and to crack wise about a "Mickey Mouse" system -- as President Reagan did -- than it will be to make mock of the pretensions of the Islamofascists.

Read the whole thing.

JACK OF ALL TRADES, MASTER OF NONE. In Favor of Thinking presents a job description for a literature professor. Give it a look. See also this.

MOVE ALONG, NO INDOCTRINATION GOING ON HERE. Winston's Diary discovers the downside of being ABD but not yet in a tenure-track line.

While I object strongly to the fact that I will be making about twenty cents on the dollar to an assistant professor, I object even more strongly to the fact that I am being required to teach this university's version of the infamous freshman indoctrination course, and that I have absolutely no freedom to choose what texts I will be teaching in my own class--it is all decided by committee.

The committee choice that most annoys him: Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed. (The Road to Wigan Pier it is not.) It puts him in the position where this university has assigned one arm-chair economist to teach a book by another arm-chair economist. This fact alone gives me ethical hives. Ehrenreich is an investigative reporter, and her book reveals her knowledge of economics to be both impoverish and ideologically conditioned. I took micro- and macro-economics as an undergrad, but that was at least fifteen years ago; since then, my exposure to economics has been a daily reading of The Wall Street Journal and that's about it. And even in the Journal, it's not like I'm reading it cover-to-cover. But when life deals you lemons, you make lemonade:

So I want to ask you all for help, and I'd appreciate if other bloggers would mention my plea on their own blogs, to try and attract as much advice as possible. If you've taught this book before (and you've taught it critically--lockstep leftists needn't reply), I'd like to hear about it. If you have suggestions as to how I might make myself more knowledgeable before teaching this book--including reading recommendations--please let me know. And if you just want to tell me how you think you'd handle this situation, I'd love to hear that as well.

One last thing--it had occured to me that I might use my own situation as a teaching tool. While I'm not getting paid hourly, my yearly "salary" is at the minimum wage level, and I'm obviously helping the university and the department to balance their budgets. And I have no benefits. Yet here I am teaching a book about how evil the business world is, and how underpaid its employees are, as if the ivory tower is somehow better and in a position to pass judgment. I find that a little ironic.

Hit Winston's comments section if you have any suggestions.

THE WORLD I WAS BORN INTO. Larry Smith, writing in Popular Science, attempts to live for a week with no technology developed after 1954. (Hat tip: Marginal Revolution, in an aside to the positional arms race post.)

ROUND AND ROUND ON SUMPTUARY LAWS. Arnold Kling has taken issue with recent writings by Cornell's Robert Frank on measured happiness and positional arms races. The passage that sets off Mr Kling reads,

The evidence thus suggests that if income affects happiness, it is relative, not absolute, income that matters...In most cases, the person who stays at the office two hours longer each day to be able to afford a house in a better school district has no conscious intention to make it more difficult for others to achieve the same goal...Yet the ineluctable mathematical logic of musical chairs assures that only 10 percent of all children can occupy top-decile school seats, no matter how many hours their parents work.

Mr Kling suggests, instead,

Suppose that in order to try to illustrate his thesis, Professor Frank had used as an example a person who stays at the office two hours longer each day in order to pay for a tutor for a learning-disabled child. This example leaves us favorably disposed toward the parent, whereas Frank's example does not. Because Frank talks about educational opportunity as a relative concept, and above all because he talks about trying to get into the top decile, he is able to manipulate the reader into seeing the hypothetical parent's choice as a vain and futile quest. Thus, Frank is able to insinuate that working extra hours to try to pay for a better education for your child is pathological behavior.

To put it another way, if every parent were competing to give our children the best possible education, and that resulted in better education for everyone, that would seem rational and constructive. But in Robert Frank's morality play, the main characters are compulsively competing for the highest relative status, with no actual improvement in education. In an essay (based on a book) where he claims to be speaking from scientific authority, Frank stoops to proof by loaded example.

Reality is probably somewhat more complicated (although it's OK for economists to invent worlds that can't exist so as to better be able to grasp the essential elements of the world that does exist.) Consider the latest from suburban-dwelling 11-D, missing something from the party platforms.

I wanted more discussion about the vast debt that American families have encurred to achieve a good life for their kids. Housing costs, schools of uneven quality, growing demands of the workplace, the lack of support from extended family or community are a tightening tourniquet on average Americans.

The reality is that people do have to compete for the highest relative status, and one driver of that competition is the quest for the better school districts, which often come bundled with more expensive housing, reflecting both the positional arms race (more income shifts the demand curve) and the principle of complements (the demand for the houses derives from the demand for the schools.)

Brock at Signifying Nothing weighs in with some observations about the usefulness of happiness research as a way of improving economics, a point somewhat orthogonal to that part of Professor Frank's argument being questioned by Mr Kling. Marginal Revolution offers some additional perspectives on happiness research.

Tech Central offers elaboration on the original debate, with Radley Balko proposing to Stop the World.

I propose that Congress pass the Saving Our Public Health from Innovation, Success, Trade, Riches, and Yearning bill, or the SOPHISTRY Act. On the day it's signed by the president, SOPHISTRY would license the federal government to freeze all salaries, wages, and other sources of income among the poor and lower middle class, thereby preventing any dangerous upward mobility between tax brackets. Any income earned above a citizen's current tax bracket would be taxed at 100%. All revenue from the tax would be specifically earmarked for the study of the affluence threat. The freeze would stay in effect until scientists can determine the cause of the link between prosperity and mortality.

Because wealth begets an increased chance of death, the SOPHISTRY Act will undoubtedly save thousands of lives. Perhaps millions. We owe it to America's poor to keep them poor until we can figure out why getting richer makes them die. And while critics might contend that Americans ought to be free to decide for themselves whether a bit of extra income is worth the deleterious health effects that come with affluence, it's obvious that at least so far, they simply aren't deciding correctly. Despite the obvious implications of the data above, Americans still insist on bettering their respective standards of living.

And when people make poor decisions about their own lives, it's government's job to make the correct decisions for them.

There is an open thread on the subject of happiness research and positional arms races at Econ Log.

MISSING HIS CALLING? To bolster a flagging campaign, a candidate for elective office in San Francisco (why does that not surprise?) fakes his abduction and beheading by jihadis. Classical Values has an extended roundup of coverage, with potential fallout from the story. Betsy's Page is somewhat more succinct, suggesting that the candidate had potential to work for Michael Moore. Heck, why aim so low? Had this guy submitted some "films" to juries so as to establish a track record as a "serious artist" he'd now be a lock for a MacArthur "genius grant."

TRAIN DOES NOT CARRY CHECKED BAGGAGE OR DOGS. Transport Blog has a comment thread going on the utility of space for bicycles on commuter trains.

In Greater DeKalb, you may not bring a bicycle on a Metra train; if you break it down and put it in a carrier that will fit the luggage rack, the South Shore Line will allow it as a carry-on, but the Chicago Transit Authority, with its smaller cars set up primarily for standees, will let you bring your bicycle, subject to some rules. There is some evidence that the commuter train operators do not find it cost effective to provide combination cars with baggage space for bicycles. The old common carrier railroads, including the interurbans, had such capability.

Once upon a time you could take your bicycle to South Bend.
Combination baggage and interurban coach preserved awaiting restoration at the East Troy Electric Railroad.

South Shore Line picture from this site.

WHY THERE IS NO CATBLOGGING AT COLD SPRING SHOPS. Electric Nose is not so particular.

(Hat tip: Where Worlds Collide.)

A STANDARD TO MEASURE UP TO. The Superintendent has been disrespectful of what passes for high-speed rail initiatives in the midwest, see, e.g. this. For your consideration, please review this schedule (sorry if the print is a bit small) of the Chicago-Milwaukee-Minneapolis service in the summer of 1947.

FINDING THAT MEDIAN VOTER. Consider Ward 15 in West Allis, Wisconsin, not far from where you can get real cream puffs for the balance of this week. In the 2000 presidential election, its count was Bush 444, Gore 444. There were 74 other wards in Wisconsin in which the major candidates tied. The voters confront the fundamental problem of political solutions: with two parties, and with "bipartisanship," which I view as the fleecing of the public by the political class, voters must choose a bundle of policies, rather than being able to pick and choose.

[State Representative Tony] Staskunas says it's a neighborhood that you would expect to vote Democratic when it comes to economic issues and Republican when it comes to issues such as abortion or gay marriage.

State Sen. Tom Reynolds, a Republican who lives in the ward, says a survey once showed his Senate district has the strongest level of opposition to abortion rights of any district in the state.

WHAT HAPPENS TO AN INFERIOR GOOD? The intercity bus is a canonical example of what economists call an "inferior good," meaning one that consumers make less use of as they get richer. Because on average, goods are normal (that's the Engel aggregation principle, should readers be studying for their economics prelims) resources get reallocated away from inferior goods over time. That reallocation is not without consequences, as Greyhound riders in northern Wisconsin are discovering.

On a slow summer evening, the 52-year-old driver is taking a handful of passengers over what is soon to become a ghost route.

As of Aug. 18, Greyhound will no longer visit any of the stops on tonight's itinerary: Bonduel, Shawano, Wittenberg, Birnamwood, Aniwa, Antigo, Summit Lake, Elcho, Pelican Lake, Monico, Rhinelander, Lake Tomahawk and Minocqua. Empty seats are the reason.

The more things change ... at one time these were stops on the Chicago and North Western's Flambeau 400, which did a neat job of consist-swapping in Green Bay so that the dining car, lounge, and extra coaches that came north from Chicago could return the same day, with only a few coaches going beyond Green Bay to the south shore of Lake Superior at Ashland. This bus service sounds a lot like the bus service that replaced the Flambeau during the winter, making the train a casualty of Amtrak that did not have a last run on April 30, 1971.

The story notes that Greyhound has not been a profitable company for some time. Repeat after me: losses are signals that resources are more valuable to society in their competing uses. Opportunity costs exist.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR, YOU JUST MIGHT GET IT. Campaign finance "reform," with new rules for private financing of explicitly political organizations, backfires on its inventors. Hog on Ice has a moment of schadenfreude.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

It's amazing that a man in his line of work would live to die in his bed at age
89.

That's Betsy's Page, noting the passing of oil-well fire fighter extraordinaire, Red Adair. Captain's Quarters has more.

NOW THEY'VE GONE TOO FAR. Cream puffs, made in Japan??

SO MUCH FOR THAT JOBLESS RECOVERY. A motorman on Washington D.C.'s Metro leaves her train before her relief arrives. The train sits for a while, until the motorman of the follower takes over the delayed train. Live from the Third Rail, who picks up the story, expresses some wonder at the relatively light reprimand the motorman received. It's not as if -- as once happened -- a motorman on a late-running Milwaukee streetcar gave his passengers transfers to the following car and attempted to short-turn his car in downtown Milwaukee. Big mistake. He managed to get himself completely lost and wound up on the Rapid Transit line, with an interurban car delayed behind him. He wasn't working for the Milwaukee Electric for much longer after that.

THERE'S NO WAY I CAN SAIL YOU TO THE MOUNT OF ARARAT. You can, however, view it from the Armenian side. King at SCSU Scholars, who is visiting Armenia, has pictures.

IF A BAD AFTERNOON OF SAILING beats a good afternoon of committee work, what does a good afternoon of sailing beat? (It certainly beats sitting at a computer, and it is likely to be some time until somebody figures out how to do Laser blogging.) Winds today out of the southwest at 8 to 12; sunny and warm, Shabbona Lake State Park not far away. The class rules now permit the use of PULLEYS on the running rigging (if you don't want to spend the money, learn how to tie lots of knots) and the controls are much more responsive. It is much easier to crank on some boom vang or to tweak the cunningham compared to the old cats-cradle rigging. The gut and the hamstrings are not yet ready for international competition, all the same it was nice to get out on the water in favorable winds with the fastest sailboat on the lake, if not the prettiest. (That honor would have to go to the Marshall Islands one-man proa somebody brought out to play with. Pretty boat.)

THE CASE FOR 75 MINUTE TRAINS.

As mounting delays at O'Hare slow air travelers nationwide, more passengers are finding that their 21-minute flight from Mitchell International Airport has turned into a 1 1/2-hour odyssey, often with a missed connection on the other end.

On the other hand, if one lives in the northern or northwestern suburbs of Chicago, Milwaukee's Mitchell Field appears to be a good substitute, at least to some domestic destinations.

EVERYTHING WE LIKE GOES AWAY. That's my sister's lament for the closing of yet another decent eatery in her neck of the woods. It's not just eateries. In Milwaukee, yet another bowling lane is closing (making way for a Walgreen's??) and a train bar is going to be relocated to Kansas City. The train bar sits on historic trackage: your Superintendent had his first ever diesel cab ride at the age of four in the switching yard that used to be there. And it's not just the Midwest: in the list of recently finished books is a tribute to the Automats -- with recipes! This web site has similar tributes to Lost New York.

BEND OVER, HERE IT COMES AGAIN. The Illinois Legislature and the Governor have reached agreement on a new state budget. Northern Illinois University gets the same dollar amount as it received last year, but cannot commit $4 million from that sum, which the state might request back if other tax revenues (note, it's the tax revenues that matter, not the tax rates) fail to materialize.

Conditions are also dire at UCLA (motto: On! Wisconsin!) where Professor Bainbridge notes that the University of California system must cope with a 6 percent cut in its appropriation (is that more honest than continued funding at the same level albeit with a reserve for a recision?)

The funding crunches at the state universities make the discussion at Econ Log on the marginal private and spillover benefits of a university education timely. California's budget difficulties have lead to renewed calls for "community service" as a precondition of a college degree. Joanne Jacobs is unimpressed, noting that much of the growth in enrollment is returning adults (mugged by reality?) who might find the idea of unpaid labor as a precondition of enrollment a bit burdensome.

THE GENESIS OF TIME-SHARING. On my recent swing through some eastern states I had the opportunity to visit the site of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club ( it is not too far from Horseshoe Curve on the mainline of the Pennsylvania Railroad.) Some of the private cottages and part of the large clubhouse still remain (after the flood of 1889, some cottages housed squatters; a few have been fixed up as private houses.) The curator of the clubhouse building told me that most of the facilities were used by well-to-do Pittsburghers for two weeks during the summer. Is the club the first example of the time-share condominium.

The concept has expanded some over the years: neither I nor the family I visited at the Marriott Manor in Williamsburg would be confused with Mellons or Fricks.

REVERSE INCIDENCE. Suppose a state temporarily waives an eight cent per gallon tax on gasoline. Will the price of gasoline at the pump fall by eight cents, or by more or by less than eight cents? Newmark's Door notes that gasoline stations that fail to pass along the tax break in full are subject to felony charges. But what, precisely, is "in full?"

DULL AND EARNEST. Atlantic Blog has an apt description of Bruce Springsteen's latest foray into political commentary, with a good couplet from another review.

TO CATCH A THIEF, THINK LIKE A THIEF. A recent speech by President Bush includes the lines, "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." Betsy's Page and Peoria Pundit put the quote, which has come in for some snarking, in context.

ENOUGH ALREADY. On my recent trip, I introduced the term "metrofexual" to some colleagues who have been rather busy with their own work, exploring the wilds of West Virginia, and enjoying Seinfeld reruns to have stumbled across the term. I was unable to explain the meaning of the term to them, but perhaps can summarize it in microcosm. On my return I had to replenish my supply of shampoo. My supplier used to produce only a basic balsam-and-protein product that works tolerably well on what little hair I have. No more. Their offerings at the local grocery have now proliferated to fifteen or twenty different colors, formulas, and scents. I suppose that's just plentitude at work. But mining the stacks for what I want has just become a lot more work.

The good news: others have also had enough. Via Michelle Malkin, I find a Retrosexual Manifesto that has much to commend it. More here, with interesting trackbacks.

On a related note, Budding Economist and Crowe Bar are contemplating the hotness of economics professors. Move on, nothing to see here, but no "little professor hat" either -- I think that refers to the "Irish walking hat" that makes its wearer look like a mushroom.

NOTICE OF LINE RELOCATIONS. The Budding Economist has recombined all her weblogs at Jacqueline Mackey Passey Paisley, and new homeowner Apartment 11-D has moved off of Blogspot to new digs titled 11D.

MISSING THE SAUERKRAUT AND MUSTARD. Ann Althouse has discovered the delights of the University of Wisconsin's Union Terrace, including the bratwursts. Instapundit creates a new theme: bratblogging. Kindly be advised that at Cold Spring Shops, the grilling of bratwursts is a holy ritual, sometimes involving consumption of a Sprecher or simply kicking back outside. The computer is for indoor work. Summer at these latitudes is too short to spend cookout time at the computer. Alas, sunset is coming perceptibly earlier now than it was a few weeks ago.