INSTITUTIONS EVOLVE TO REDUCE TRANSACTION COSTS. Hey, distributing beer isn't cheap. Small brewers discover that wholesalers, well, want to get paid. Yes, it does limit consumer choice, but if a brewer is having trouble working with wholesalers, how many consumers are making that choice?

However, there continues to be strong demand for craft beers, Nolen and Rodman said. And specialty beers sell for higher prices - and provide fatter profit margins - for both brewers and wholesalers, said Martino.

Randy Sprecher, whose Glendale-based Sprecher Brewing Co. will celebrate its 20th anniversary next year, said he long ago accepted that distributors pay the most attention to beers with strong sales - and not necessarily strong margins. Specialty brewers have to deal with that reality, he said. Sprecher has grown his company in part by expanding his line of gourmet sodas, which are now sold in such far-flung areas as San Diego and Boston.

"We simply know what we have to do to stay alive," Sprecher said.

That sums it up, doesn't it? Margin is meaningless without volume.

MOVING UP BECAUSE OTHERS HAVE DONE WORSE. Wisconsin's football Badgers have moved up in the polls as teams that actually played lost games. There is a serious challenge coming in the form of Minnesota, reports of difficulties notwithstanding. Northern Illinois also moved up, despite letting Ball State come back from trailing 21-3. The defense had the last word, making the fourth-down stop in the first "inning" of overtime. There is a reason teams play games rather than simply rely on power ratings.

THINGS THAT MAKE YOU GO HMMM.... Jessica's Well invites readers to compare and contrast.

Take a good look at the photo on the left. In the foreground are four women. From the left, Drew Barrymore and Cameron Diaz. Two major movie stars who pull down roughly $15-20 million per movie...for 6 to 12 weeks work. Next is Christina Aguilera, a pop music diva. On the far right, of course, is Oprah Winfree. Three multi-millionaires and a multi-billionaire.

Three multi-millionaries and a multi-billionaire all made fabulously wealthy by modern media and communications sitting on the set of a talk show with world-wide syndication....saying these completely idiotic things and doing it in front of a graphic showing a woman with her mouth stitched closed.

On the right is a photo of women lining up to vote for the first time ever. Women who are not only prepared to die in the act, but have assigned enough of a probability to that outcome that they have gone through a death ritual in advance of leaving for the polls.

I can't really assign responsibility to anyone for the scene shown on the left.

I can, however, assign responsibility for the scene on the right to a very courageous and determined American President.

One that deserves very much to be re-elected.

Consider also American Digest's thinking.

It's not that I'm overjoyed with George Bush (although at least one of my friends cannot be convinced otherwise), nor that I think the Republican Party is overwhelmingly admirable. None of that. It's never easy to vote when the only viable choices are two, but that's the deal right now. And my job today as a citizen is to choose. So I will choose George W. Bush.

There are many reasons why, but here's 50.

From the Mudville Gazette:

A very necessarily empty throne in Baghdad. It's not that hard to understand, is it?

And at the New York Daily News, the editorial board (via Power Line) holds its nose.

At this critical juncture, America cannot afford such a lack of clarity — or even a hint that a President would revert to playing defense rather than staying on the offensive. Nor would it be wise to change commanders midbattle in Iraq and around the globe, replacing a tested leader with a man who would have to learn on the job under the most difficult circumstances. With so much at stake, that's a transition not to be wished for.

Returning Bush to office is the wise course, The News believes, despite our sharp disagreement with his domestic policies. Those pale in comparison with the overarching challenge of securing the nation and preserving New York's vital way of life. Of the two candidates, Bush has the clearer vision for accomplishing the goal, as well as the greater experience. He gets our endorsement.

Their disagreements with the Administration's domestic policies are for another day.

The News is dismayed by Bush's domestic record. His presidency simply has not been about serving the interests of middle-class and working-class families, whose fortunes have declined. Most tellingly, Bush weighted the centerpiece of his program — deep tax cuts — to the wealthy, providing a costly bonanza to those on top without generating an economic lift for everyone else. A sorry result was the biggest drop from budgetary surplus to deficit in U.S. history — just a few years before millions of baby boomers will retire and thus threaten the solvency of Social Security and Medicare.

Kerry's domestic agenda is preferable. He would repeal Bush's tax reductions on incomes of $200,000 and up, promises to find money for new programs without increasing the deficit and has advanced thoughtful proposals for addressing intractable problems such as the growing number of Americans without health insurance. His plan generally tracks the philosophies of Democratic predecessors Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

The preceding paragraphs are chock full of wishful thinking. First things, though, for the government, include the unconditional surrender of Osama and the like, in order that we can evaluate the Utopian Wonkery (TM) without looking over our shoulders.

SO MUCH YET TO DO. Troubling anecdote from last week's Economic Education Day luncheon at the Union League Club in Chicago. One of the speakers worked for a while at Goodwill Industries. He asked some of the new workers there why they had left their last job. All too often, they accused their employer of cheating. Why? "I was promised $6 an hour, I put in my 40 hours, my check was not for $240." There is this little thing called the tax code ... it is not necessarily in your curriculum.

LIBERTARIAN ASSESSMENTS OF THE MAJOR PARTY CANDIDATES. Megan at Asymmetrical Information has a fourteen point comparison. This observation on the economy is spot-on.

I don't think the president has much, if anything, to do with how the economy runs, unless he's one of those disastrous tinkerers, like FDR and Richard Nixon. Neither of the current candidates is such a lackwit, meaning that their impact on the economy will be minimal indeed. Neither candidate gets my vote here.

David at Hog Heaven has a different set of fourteen points (I think ...)

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge offer the short summary of tensions in North American conservatism. The long form is in their book, Right Nation (details or compare prices).

From Sept. 11 till the Iraq invasion, most conservatives expected that the war on terror would hold their movement together. The "axis of evil" would fit into the slot vacated by "the evil empire." And the conservative foot soldiers would put aside their differences--particularly over government spending--in a common war against Islamist extremism.

There are still times when that theory holds--the GOP convention was a masterly exposition of this unifying credo--but as Iraq gets ever messier, the noises off-stage grow louder. Conservatives as diverse as William F. Buckley and Pat Robertson have started to air their doubts. That clamor would become deafening if the Republicans lose the presidency on Nov. 2, with the neoconservatives the main target of the movement's wrath. But even if Mr. Bush wins, the neoconservative dream at its most fanciful is surely over. The neocons will remain; they are too clever and too prominent on Washington's rive droite to disappear. But the main question will be which representatives of other conservative foreign-policy traditions--particularly realism--will be able to re-establish influence.

The result is a paradox: A president who has devoted his energies to governing on behalf of conservative America and who is regarded by many on the right as being the most conservative person to ever reach the White House has ended up creating deep divisions on the right. Big-government conservatism has alienated influential small-government activists; you can even find prominent Washington libertarians saying that they would rather have a Massachusetts liberal with no legislative record to his name in the White House than a Texas Republican who has managed to expand both education and Medicare. Social conservatism has alienated the party's Western wing. And the Iraq War has reinforced doubts among all sorts of conservatives that Bush's Reaganism has shaded into Wilsonian liberalism--one that ignores conservative insights into both the difficulty of implanting democracy in hostile soil and the dangers of stirring up fanaticism.

The coming changes ... particularly as the G.I. and Silent Generation old heads retire ... promise to be interesting, as their thinking does not envision the Democratic Party capturing any of these elements of the Republican coalition. There are younger members of the Democratic Party who might be able to pull that off. I was listening to an interview with a Democratic candidate for an Illinois house seat who ... in some parts of the interview ... did not sound like the usual Democrat.

A COUNTEREXAMPLE CAN BE A DISPROOF. Would a truly overworked American make homemade doggy treats? On the other hand, would a truly overworked American have time to read and clip the recipes in the Sunday papers?

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

The American answer to Osama's proposal will be given on Election Day. One response is to agree that the United States of America will henceforth act like Sweden, which is on track to become majority Islamic sometime after the middle of this century. The electorate best knows which candidate will serve this end; which candidate most promises to be European-like in attitude and they can choose that path with both eyes open. The electorate can strike that bargain and Osama may keep his word. The other course is to reject Osama's terms utterly; to recognize the pleading in his outwardly belligerent manner and reply that his fugitive existence; the loss of his sanctuaries; the annihilation of his men are but the merest foretaste of what is yet to come: to say that to enemies such as he, the initials 'US' will always mean Unconditional Surrender.

That's Belmont Club, noting the latest Bin Laden tape, which Power Line compares to the kid about to be clobbered on the playground calling "time out."

Time for a qualified endorsement. Although my filling in the circle for President Bush is unlikely to affect the allocation of Illinois's electoral votes, at the margin it might affect the popular vote, for the benefit of those ignorant observers who think such aggregates (add up the total runs in the American League Championship Series, kiddies) matter.

These pages have noted the lack of progress, despite majorities in Congress and a friendly High Court, on school vouchers, private retirement accounts, retirement savings accounts, and a market-based transportation policy. These somewhat more critical observations from The Agitator are not without merit. It takes, however, something to beat something. Senator Kerry ... and the minor candidates ... fall short on this score.

President Bush has a tendency to cling to a position for perhaps too long. His core values, however, are values I am comfortable with. Senator Kerry has a tendency to be too flexible. His core values, unfortunately, are core values that trouble me.

WHY THIS JOB IS FUN, NOVICE DIVISION. The annual Economics Poster Contest for elementary and middle school students has begun.

This entry, submitted by a third grader to the Northern Illinois University regional competition, earned a place on the state calendar.

The call for entries is available online through the Northern Illinois University Office of Economic Education.

SECOND SECTION: Will somebody step up and organize a poster contest for Minnesota? There's some wishful thinking in their elementary curriculum.

THINGS THAT MAKE YOU SAY D'OH! Researchers: Stress Causes Forgetfulness.

How many people have gotten home after a blindingly stressful day and realize they've forgotten some important event or errand? Well, now at least there's a scientific explanation for the oversight. Stress makes you forgetful.

To borrow from James Taranto: What Would We Do Without Researchers?

JUST SUCK IT UP. Michael at Highered Intelligence (via Joanne Jacobs, who hails his return) is not impressed with the latest manufactured crisis the New York Times has discovered, this time the lack of therapeutic resources on university campuses.

Kids need to suck it up and deal. Their parents need to raise them to face difficulties with maturity, grace, and honor. Hey... that's a really nice trio of virtues -- gotta remember that one. Maturity, Grace, and Honor. Goes right up there with Fortitude, Wisdom, and Temperance.

Gee, you don't suppose that enrollment-retention-keep the dorms filled mentality might have anything to do with the problem. Perhaps if students were better prepared for university while in high school -- hey, why not start the preparation in first grade? -- they might have an easier time functioning when they arrive on campus.

None of which stops the Faculty Senate at Northern Illinois University from worrying about ... parking??

Senators commented that traffic from the DuSable bus turnaround has only been relocated to the Chick Evans Field House parking lot. “There is no place for people to drop students off at other than the library,” Sen. [and mathematics professor] Joseph Stephen said. “There is no place like that for the west side of campus.”

Much of the accompanying article on the Faculty Senate meeting is incoherent, so perhaps the professor is being quoted out of context. At class-changing time, the west campus looks like a middle school, only the people doing the dropping off are the same age as the people being dropped off. I'll bet the median drop-off distance is ten blocks or less.

Likewise, there has to be more to this observation from an English professor.

Students are working a lot harder now to pay for tuition, sometimes between 30 and 40 hours a week, said Sen. John Knapp.

“I used to assign eight to 10 big novels for my class,” Knapp said. “Now I am fortunate to get five or six small novels done.”

Have the high schools become less effective at teaching reading?

NO CONCERN FOR THAT HARSH AFGHAN WINTER?

Troops destined to train at Fort McCoy for overseas missions have been diverted to bases in other states after the Army decided the central Wisconsin military installation is too cold in the winter, officials announced Wednesday.

Gov. Jim Doyle blasted the decision to make Fort McCoy a seasonal, rather than year-round, training facility for troops mobilizing for duty in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait.

In a comment on the news item, Owen at Boots and Sabers notes,

Although I would not be happy about losing a base in Wisconsin, I am generally in favor of the military using its bases more efficiently and cost effectively.

True enough. Can policy makers be confident that for the foreseeable future there will be no cause to deploy troops to continental locations with temperate climates?

READ AND UNDERSTAND.

After serving in Iraq, many young veterans find it hard to make the leap from the battlefield to the classroom.

Universities have treated Vietnam-veteran status as a protected class under affirmative action policies. Vietnam era veterans are older than I. There is a war going on, with returning troops not much older than their classmates. The Chicago Tribune article (requires registration) from which the quote is the subtitle suggests that returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are not being offered help with their return to civilian life.

MORE THAN GOOD TIMING. Regular readers will recall that one of the Superintendent's betes noires is maltimed traffic lights. Perhaps abolition of the traffic lights is a superior alternative. Skip at The Sports Economist has discovered a short Regulation essay arguing that although traffic lights cause gridlock, timing them doesn't necessarily help. Other methods of traffic control, including rotaries, four-way stops, and yield signs -- or no signs at all -- might be superior.

These proposals have their pros and cons. In Peking, China, there are many streets with few or no signs ... as long as everyone is courteous and respects "nose position" the traffic, which is often heavy, is at least fluid, in the sense that molasses in January is fluid, but the kind of aggravating stop-and-go common in U.S. cities does not occur.

Britain, however, does not employ the four-way stop. Such configurations can be dangerous. Your turn? No, my turn. Oh, let's both go at once.

WORDS MEAN THINGS. What does it mean for university students to tend to be "liberal?" The Northern Star does some investigative reporting.

“Think about the terms themselves,” [sociology professor Kay] Forest said. “Liberal means a supporter of social change and innovation. Conservative means a supporter of tradition and established institutions. Young people tend to see endless possibilities and dislike restrictions, while the experiences of age can teach that some traditions have their place and too much change has its social costs.”

These days, however, the people who dislike restrictions and seek reform of Social Security and representative governments in the Islamic Quarter are referred to in popular parlance as "conservative" whilst those who seek to restrict employers' freedom to hire, or the cars people drive, or to preserve Social Security, or who question the liberation of Iraq, are the "liberals."

It is difficult to find a better exemplar of a point that arises in Right Nation (details or compare prices.) Conservatism, U.S. style, is a very different beast from that the book's European audience is used to seeing.

BATTERY PARK TO HARLEM IN 15 MINUTES. The Interborough Rapid Transit celebrates 100 years. Live from the Third Rail and Boing Boing (via Where Worlds Collide) cover.

WORKING YOUR WAY THROUGH COLLEGE IS TOUGH ENOUGH. But at some Hooters restaurants (the chicken wings aren't that great) the male help has been making life tougher for the female help.

THE RULE FOR TODAY IS RULE K.

Employes must expect the movement of trains, engines, cars or other movable equipment at any time, on any track, in either direction.

(That's from the General Code of Operating Rules in use by the Western Trunk Lines.) It's advice that others would do well to keep in mind. Yesterday I was returning from a meeting in Chicago on the 5.04 semi-fast, first stop Downers Grove Main Street. We were getting up to track speed near the Cicero Yard, but as the train was meeting an eastbound equipment train, the engineer put our train into emergency. A conductor informed us shortly that we had had an "incident" involving a pedestrian. The incident turned out to be a dead pedestrian. News accounts are sketchy, but my best guess is that somebody in a hurry waited for the eastbound train to clear, then took off, right in front of the train I was riding. One person dead, a thousand people delayed for three hours (why were the Cicero police so hesitant to release the train) and a bit of an adventure transferring all those passengers from one train to a replacement train through one door (to prevent injuries Metra used the wheelchair lifts on one car as a gangplank: everybody had to walk to that car, then transfer to the replacement train, an evolution that took 40 minutes.)

Anyone who must cross railroad tracks as part of a daily routine ought to be familiar with the advice offered by Operation Lifesaver. Walk in front of a train? It won't hurt for long.

PLAYING FOR LEASTER? Does a political party benefit more by losing or by winning? Several commentators on the Presidential election have suggested that a loss would have a salutary effect, although the effect varies by party and by observer.

On the Democratic side, the tension will be between the party's left and its center. Professor Althouse has found a New York Times forum in which Adam Nagourney contemplates the effect of a Kerry-Edwards loss. That effect might be either a return to the McGovern-Mondale-Gore 2000 themes or a return to the Kennedy-Carter 1976-Clinton themes. There are voices urging a left turn. Mitch at Shot in the Dark comments on a Mark Hertsgaard column highlighting the voices on the left. Mr Berg's take: Bring it.

Liberalism as we know it grew over the course of forty years, from the New Deal through the war. Both spawned an America, and a generation pf Americans, with deep faith in their government's ability to solve problems - and the ability to ignore the unintended consequences of the government's power. The Democrat party became the party of statist solutions - under the likes of Truman and Kennedy and Humphrey, statism coupled with the great exceptionalistic vision of America. The Republicans of the day - Eisenhower, Nixon, and a whole generation of Minnesota Republicans - on the other hand became the party of exceptionalistic vision and slightly-less statist solutions.

Mark Steyn, although he has a different thesis, makes the same observation about the folly of a left turn.

So this is no time to vote for Europhile delusions. The Continental health and welfare systems John Kerry so admires are, in fact, part of the reason those societies are dying. As for Canada, yes, under socialized health care, prescription drugs are cheaper, medical treatment's cheaper, life is cheaper. After much stonewalling, the Province of Quebec's Health Department announced this week that in the last year some 600 Quebecers had died from C. difficile, a bacterium acquired in hospital. In other words, if, say, Bill Clinton had gone for his heart bypass to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, he would have had the surgery, woken up the next day swimming in diarrhea and then died. It's a bacterium caused by inattention to hygiene -- by unionized, unsackable cleaners who don't clean properly; by harassed overstretched hospital staff who don't bother washing their hands as often as they should. So 600 people have been killed by the filthy squalor of disease-ridden government hospitals. That's the official number. Unofficially, if you're over 65, the hospitals will save face and attribute your death at their hands to "old age" or some such and then "lose" the relevant medical records. Quebec's health system is a lot less healthy than, for example, Iraq's.

One thousand Americans are killed in 18 months in Iraq, and it's a quagmire. One thousand Quebecers are killed by insufficient hand-washing in their filthy, decrepit health care system, and kindly progressive Americans can't wait to bring it south of the border. If one has to die for a cause, bringing liberty to the Middle East is a nobler venture and a better bet than government health care.

That left turn, dear Democrats, leads directly to the wilderness. Or is Mr Steyn being polemical, and is he missing the fault lines in the Republican coalition? Those exist, although Elisabeth Bumiller suggests the Republicans will simply suck it up and move on. Perhaps not. Reason's Julian Sanchez sees an opportunity for the libertarians among the Republicans in a change at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

A Kerry win might let [small-government conservatives] have their cake and eat it, too: The larger-government faction currently in the saddle would take blame for the loss, while the small-government faithful could cross the aisle to support pay-as-you-go reforms, which Kerry would be under pressure to follow through on.

That unwieldy Republican coalition has been the great unspoken hope of many observers on the Left. Thomas Frank's What's The Matter With Kansas (details or compare prices) hopes for a split between the cultural Republicans and the libertarians, as he expects that development to send the blue-collar cultural Republicans back to their natural home as Democratic voters. (Perhaps, although some Clement Zablockis and Henry Jacksons to vote for would help.) Frank's book is too polemical to be convincing. I am left with the suspicion that he is disappointed with the Republicans for not being admitted, as were some of his richer neighbors, to an Eastern college or to pledge a prominent fraternity, which he refers to as the "upper reaches of the sex cartel" (that's at page 155, you could look it up.) Another book on a related topic, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America (details or compare prices) presents a British perspective on the distinct features of U.S. style conservatism, and, although it notes the cleavages between the cultural conservatives and the libertarians, the chapter titled "The Melancholy Long Withdrawing Roar of Liberalism" ought to be read and understood by advocates of the left turn for the Democrats or the Republicans.

(As an aside, and completing the comparisons: Right Nation also offers a better treatment of the vast right wing conspiracy financed by five families than Kansas. The money from the Kochs, Bradleys, Scaife, and the like has been helpful, but without ideas and resonance among the voters the return on that investment would be small indeed.)

A CASE OF BUYERS' REMORSE? Professor Althouse, at her alt haus, (nicht Knoxville) notes the debut of the Wisconsin commemorative quarter with some reservations about the cow and wedge of cheese honored therein. Wisconsin residents had the chance to do a retrospective of the buffalo nickel but chose not to.

WANT TO GO RAILROADING? The job opportunities are there but be prepared to have your circadian rhythms disrupted.

But recruiting workers to fill those openings may not be easy. Though average pay for rail workers is about $62,000 plus benefits, the jobs can be trying.

"It can be a physically demanding job," [Norfolk Southern publicist Rudy] Husband said. "We move the freight 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year - through hot days, rainy days, snowy days. So people are going to be outside working in the elements, and there are times that people are going to be working at night, weekends and holidays."

Other harsh working conditions make the job unappealing for potential hires, said [spokesman Frank] Wilner of the United Transportation Union. Many crews are forced to work without days off and with infrequent rest periods, he said.

What's going on on the rails? In part, it's a substitution induced by rising wages and fuel prices confronting the trucking companies. The railroads are doing the wholesale part of the truck delivery.

A recent study found that if one quarter of what is now shipped by trucks were moved by rail, commuters would spend about 33 fewer hours sitting in traffic each year by 2025. That is a savings of 174 gallons of gas per commuter each year, said Wendell Cox, a demographic and transportation consultant and author of the study, which was funded by a grant from North America's Freight Railroads.

The second-order effects on reduced traffic congestion are noteworthy.

CARNIVAL CALL. Step right up and see The Big Picture featuring the latest Carnival of the Capitalists.

CHASED TWO HARES, CAUGHT NONE. Business guru grasps the significance of this trope.

If you spend most of your day working on multiple tasks but still feel that you don't get enough done, your problem could be an excess of multitasking.

Frequent multitasking increases the probability of errors. It results in lost time and can lead to serious mistakes that can damage your career progress.

Whenever work on other activities pulls you away from the parts of your job you enjoy the most, you also miss out on the fun parts of your career.

Well, D'Oh!! But if you have to report to the manic multitasker from hell, read and understand the column, particularly the advice at the end.

HIGH-TECH NIGHTSOIL. Check out this Retro Milwaukee site. Take a ride on the Electroliner. And discover the truth behind the quirky title of this post. (If you play golf, the greens are probably maintained with this stuff.)

ACCIDENTALANCHE! Jay at Accidental Verbosity teases Jane Galt about "instapunditing" herself in the course of referring to Asymmetrical Information from Instapundit, where she is one of three pinch-hitters for Professor Reynolds.

He was also kind enough to provide two links to these pages. If you've followed those, welcome, and stick around. It's been a bit quiet around here but there will be new content fairly regularly.

END OF THE LINE. Want an insulated vacation home? Rebuild a refrigerator car. Park a caboose nearby. Be careful you don't fall out of the upper bunks in the cupola.

SO MUCH FOR FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS. Thomas Frank's What's The Matter with Kansas (details or compare prices) marvels at the willingness of Kansans left behind by the economy nevertheless voting Republican. I recently took issue with Robert Reich over the values issues motivating many of the Republican voters.

Two U.S. News columnists have recently sounded similar themes. Managing Editor Mortimer Zuckerman sees conditions that favor old-style Democrats.

Why aren't the Democrats way ahead? After all, the vast bulk of middle- and working-class Americans are being financially squeezed between slowly rising wages and escalating costs for oil, healthcare, and education, and the war on terrorism is seen through the prism of TV news on Iraq, which focuses on horrific pictures of terrorist violence.

Advantage, Donks? Nope. Ronald Reagan's quip about the Democratic Party leaving him captured a phenomenon writ large.

The Democratic Party should be riding a wave here. It has always cast itself as the party of the little guy, fighting against the GOP, the party of the wealthy. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, the Democrats began to focus less on economics than on social conditions. At a time of declining real wages, Democrats were seen to be more concerned with liberal social programs to promote the particular interests of blacks, gays, women, and other groups. This pushed a lot of traditional Democrats into the Republican column--construction and blue-collar workers, homemakers, military veterans, cops, evangelicals, rural residents, and many ethnics. When Jimmy Carter lost control of the American economy, producing some three years of double-digit inflation, Reagan's antitax, small-government message became appealing. The Reagan Democrats emerged, consolidating the wide disaffection of white working-class workers brought about by the Vietnam War and conflicts around race in the 1960s.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party's base changed, Mr. Zuckerman argues. By their fruits shall ye know them.

Weary of the unraveling of the orderly, coherent, moral community they once relied on, Americans rejected the hedonism of Woodstock, in which individual choice and uninhibited, personal expression trumped all. Hollywood came to epitomize for them this narcissism and repudiation of conventional values. They were tired of the new counterculture of radical change, seeing in the New Left a contempt for middle America and its values, reflected in fathers abandoning their families, the delegitimization of the sanctity of marriage, raising children without clear moral guideposts--all of which, in their minds, led to increased criminality, drug abuse, people being recast as society's victims rather than accepting responsibility for their own actions. They yearned to restore the authority of public institutions and to remove some of the violence and sexuality in TV programs, records, and computer games, whose content they ascribed to the liberals who write the screenplays for TV and movies.

Mr Zuckerman has captured something that Mr Frank missed.

All of which goes a long way toward explaining the Republican use of cultural opulism to mobilize voters, exploiting explosive social issues like abortion--especially "partial-birth" abortions--gay marriage, school prayer, and guns. Recent polls by both Time and MSNBC/Knight Ridder indicate that the number of voters who are responding primarily on moral and family-value issues like gay marriage and abortion has increased to between 15 and 18 percent; in the most recent Time poll, George Bush is winning over the culturally driven voters by 70 to 18 percent, a margin that shifts the overall poll findings by as much as 7 or 8 percentage points toward Bush. This is true, as well, in the battleground states, where the GOP margin on social issues is critical. MSNBC's polling firm indicated some 12 percent in Pennsylvania and 16 percent in Missouri would pick moral and family-values issues as the most important in determining their presidential vote this year, and Bush's lead over Kerry among these voters ranges from almost 8 to 1 in Oregon to more than 10 to 1 in Ohio and more than 12 to 1 in Missouri.

That Democratic economic policies are based on canards and good intentions and not often effective also serves to rebut Mr Frank's thesis that people are voting against their best economic interests.

John Leo raises a point that Mr Frank also missed, namely the effect of Democratic tolerance of pacifist crazies on their old base.

The anti-Iraq-war demonstrations were a grab bag of contradictory constituencies, many of which had nothing to do with war and peace. But they held out the promise that the hard and soft left, by refusing to criticize each other, could form a powerful alliance. So ordinary Democrats raised almost no objection to the many hate-America themes at these marches. (Few liberals and almost no reporters mentioned that the rallies were organized by unreconstructed Communist-front groups and Maoist fans of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il.) Some of the dumber themes--Bush=Hitler and no blood for oil--moved into the mainstream left. Many stars in the Democratic firmament praised Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, which carries some of these themes, including the belief that an evil alliance between the Saudis and the Bush family explains the war in Iraq.

The Superintendent's advice to Democrats: you cannot beat something with nothing, or hold out your hopes for a fracture between the libertarian and traditionalist parts of the Republican coalition. There are some interesting developments in local Democratic races, but that's got to wait for another day, as it's getting late.

SO LITTLE DONE, SO MUCH LEFT TO DO. I might have found an example of editorializing masquerading as news analysis. I know I have found some shoddy economic reasoning.

Four times since 2001, the U.S. Congress has rejected efforts to require automakers to build more fuel-efficient vehicles. Now, with oil prices soaring above $55 a barrel and gas at $2 a gallon, the U.S. is paying the price.

Raising fuel-economy standards by just 1 mile a gallon would cut U.S. oil consumption by 143 million barrels a year - or 16 days of imports - and save motorists $9 billion, the Environmental Protection Agency estimates.

"It was not a high priority for consumers when gasoline was cheap," says Maryann Keller, president of auto-industry consulting firm Maryann Keller & Associates of Greenwich, Conn. "Congress should have understood that there are economic consequences to higher energy prices."

The failure to raise fuel-economy standards contributed to an 11% gain in U.S. gas usage, to 370 million gallons a day in August 2004 from 332 million gallons in January 2001.

What is the elasticity of demand? Might the historic cheapness of gasoline over much of that time period had anything to do with that increase? And does that saving of $9 billion net out injuries and deaths that accompany smaller cars?

President Bush opposed congressionally mandated increases in fuel economy, saying through the Office of Management and Budget in May 2003 that it would force motorists to buy smaller, less-safe vehicles and reduce automotive jobs. The Bush administration is considering issuing its own new rules for fuel economy.

"The president's proposal takes a common-sense approach and a phased approach to getting greater fuel efficiency while providing the maximum safety for drivers and the maximum options for consumers," White House spokesman Trent Duffy said.

Right. Three maxima (on what criterion function?) involving choice variables that experience has shown involve tradeoffs between the two (lower mass implies less fuel use but more risk of injury) with the imposition of a constraint (average fuel economy) necessarily reducing options. Sheesh.

Congressional inaction on fuel-economy standards is a boon to such companies as General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. because light trucks and sport-utility vehicles account for almost half of the autos sold in the U.S.

American automakers break even when they sell passenger cars and earn from $3,000 to more than $6,000 for trucks and SUVs, says David Healy, an analyst at New York-based Burnham Securities Inc. Trucks average one-third fewer miles per gallon than cars.

And as gasoline prices rise, consumers are less prone to buy those more-profitable guzzlers. Does that mean the imposition of fuel-economy standards is a form of corporate welfare?

Meanwhile, automakers and oil companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp. have spent $522 million since Jan. 1, 1999, on lobbying and political donations, according to records filed with the Federal Election Commission and the secretary of the Senate.

The transportation and energy industries are among the top five political spenders among U.S. industries, according to the Center for Responsive Politics and PoliticalMoneyLine, Washington-based groups that track campaign finance and lobbying.

Big surprise. Fuel economy standards and other regulatory policies generate rents. Money spent to influence the allocation of those rents might yield high returns.

The government's 29-year-old Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE, standards require cars to average 27.5 miles a gallon; minivans and smaller sport-utility vehicles must average 20.7 miles. The standards don't apply to vehicles weighing more than 8,500 pounds, such as General Motors' Hummer H2.

Light trucks, minivans and small SUVs accounted for 48% of the 16.6 million vehicles sold in the 2004 model year, up from 19% in 1975, Environmental Protection Agency statistics show. They averaged 21.5 miles a gallon in 2004, compared with 29.3 for passenger cars.

The surge in popularity of SUV brands such as Ford's Explorer and Toyota Motor Corp.'s Lexus RX330 explains why the average miles per gallon dropped to 20.8 in 2004 from a record 26.2 in 1987, EPA statistics show.

How many times do I have to explain that if the standards didn't exist, production of more large family sedans and station wagons in numbers sufficient to accommodate families would remain legal? I suppose that's why I get paid; if policy makers got it right the first time, anybody could teach economics.

The Senate has voted three times since 2001 on energy bill amendments dealing with higher fuel-economy standards; the House of Representatives has voted once.

An amendment by Senator Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, to raise fuel-economy standards for both cars and trucks to 40 miles a gallon was rejected on July 29, 2003. Senators also voted against increasing standards on March 13, 2002, and April 25, 2002.

The article provides no context for these votes.

The average price of a gallon of regular unleaded gas rose to $2.03 on Oct. 18 from $1.06 on Dec. 17, 2001, a 92% increase, Energy Department statistics show.

The price of a barrel of crude oil in New York doubled between Jan. 2, 2001, and Oct. 18, from $27.21 to a record $55.33. Gasoline and diesel fuel last year accounted for 57% of U.S. oil consumption.

Energy prices are affecting the economy. The Conference Board's consumer confidence index fell to 96.8 in September, from 98.7 in August. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, said monthly sales increases have averaged about 2% since June, less than half the pace of the first half of 2004, as higher gas prices kept customers home.

Again, that's why I make the big bucks. I still don't see that unleaded regular at $2.73 a gallon.

Tyler at Marginal Revolution has some good economic thinking about energy independence.

HE JUST TALKED ME OUT OF IT. Senator Kerry gave the Democratic Party's weekly radio policy statement Saturday morning (when I find a transcript I will run an extra post providing the link to it.) His focus was on pay, and he repeated the canard from the third debate about women earning 76 cents for each dollar earned by men. He also raised an argumentum ad misericordiam involving single moms earning minimum wage as part of a promise to raise the minimum wage, and made reference to "pay equity."

Great. No point in doing any work on the returns to education or to labor force participation; that work will simply be dismissed (the Senator was scornful of one of President Bush's advisors who raised that point. That's why I want the transcript.) At the beginning of the Clinton administration, P.J. O'Rourke complained that we were being governed "by a dorm-room bull session." Correct, a bull session from the late 1960s or early 1970s, and those cliches had worn thin by 1992; they have not improved with further aging. We can look forward to a panel of Social Handicappers to work out the "comparable worth" of differing jobs ... or a lot of time lost in Congress debating such foolishness. And we might see some minimum-wage moms get a pay hike, and others let go (perhaps low marginal productivity includes having some slack cut for emergencies with the kids?)

What we'll also likely see is mau-mauing of anyone crass enough to ask what any young lady is doing making babies before she's acquired any skills. That tiresome "blaming the victim" argument is annoying enough as a common room conversation topic. I have no interest in seeing that sort of thinking become public policy.

Sorry, Senator Kerry, no vote for you.

UNITED STATES, NOT A UNITED MOB. Bill Whalen reminds readers of the purpose of the Electoral College. In its absence, here is his interpretation of what would happen.

Big states, with their large media markets, would dominate the fall campaign.

That would make for a tactical and stylistic change: presidential elections based more on mass marketing in urban areas than on retail political skills in rural communities.

Ironically, that’s the polar opposite of how the two parties choose their nominees: sizing up candidates as they go door to door in small towns in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Over the past 200 years, some 700 proposals have been introduced in Congress to reform or eliminate the Electoral College.

Instead, lawmakers should recognize the realities of these times: In the past three presidential elections, no candidate achieved 50% of the [popular] vote.

Although he did lose the popular vote by 0.5% of the national total, Bush nevertheless carried 30 of the 50 states, 228 of the 435 congressional districts, and 2,480 counties to Gore’s 674.

In this regard, the Electoral College narrowly chose a winner based on his performance as the candidate with broader national appeal.

Come to think of it, it is a national election, not a regional choice.

Does it make sense to assign electoral votes by Congressional district, with two at-large delegates to be assigned based on the voting by districts?

FIREWORKS. If the offense scores the first time it snaps the ball, doesn't that mean the defense has more work to do? Never mind that, there's another win for the Northern Huskies, this time by 59-38 over Western Michigan. At halftime, the score was 42-17; reserves saw a lot of action in the second half. To the North, Wisconsin's Badgers avoided the letdown against Northwestern, prevailing 24-12.

A QUOTE FOR THE CENTURY.

Sources of individual or social decay are sometimes most dangerous, when they are associated with great achievements, and rich benefits.

That's Alfred Marshall, in Industry and Trade (which is still in print). A book review I am working on made reference to this work, and as several other related books also made reference to it, I took it with me on a quick Hiawatha ride (one can never take too many train rides) and started reading through it. It is astonishing how many things haven't changed in the 80 years since this book was written, and there will be more observations on it to follow.

The train? Ten minutes early northbound, close to time southbound despite an unexplained stop near Pleasant Prairie, and the Milwaukee airport station is going to be a fairly substantial structure set well back from the tracks in the contemporary fashion.

MARGINALIZING THE DISSENTING VOICES? The Illinois League of Women Voters will present a debate between Senatorial candidates Barack Obama and Alan Keyes, to air on WLS-TV, Chicago's channel 7 and on several other television and radio stations. Libertarian candidate Jerry Kohn, a member of the Illinois Association of School Economics Teachers, was expecting to participate earlier this week, but he has since circulated an email (I received it by virtue of my membership in the Association) noting that he has been disinvited. The fine print in the League's debate announcement (also in the current Google cached version) suggests that he, and Green Party candidate Albert Franzen, did not qualify.

Representatives of all of the campaigns met with the League and ABC 7 in September to discuss the date, format, and participation guidelines for the debate. At that time, the candidates' representatives agreed, in writing, to the League's Candidate Participation Policy. This policy included a requirement of demonstrated voter interest "as evidenced by receipt to ten percent (10%) of support in one or more statewide nonpartisan public opinion polls conducted not more than thirty days prior to the election (October 3, 2004) and at least five days prior to the debate." Mr. Keyes and Mr. Obama have met the requirements set out by the policy and will participate in the Thursday debate.

Mr Kohn is claiming that Ambassador Keyes favored his and Mr Franzen's participation. As Drudge would write, Developing ....

A GREAT AFTERNOON FOR A WALK AROUND CAMPUS. A colleague who is relatively new to the university got a good look at the west campus. I don't have one of those fancy digital cameras, but University Media Services have kindly provided the images.

We didn't walk quite this far west.

The leaves are about at this stage of turning.

Sorry, we don't offer degrees in wizardry.

PREPARING FOR YOUR ECONOMICS EXAM? Everything you need to know to understand what's going on, on one poster.

CALLING FOR MORE ECONOMIC LITERACY. Russell at Cafe Hayek is unimpressed with a recent Washington Post article purporting to explain why there are "only" two domestic manufacturers of flu vaccines. One gets the sense that the article is a complete waste of time:

We're now a little over halfway through the article and we have four reasons for why so many producers have exited the market. But all of these reasons were there five years ago when there were four producers and I'd guess that most or all of them were there 30 years ago when there were over a dozen producers. None of the reasons given have anything to do with anything that's changed recently that has made vaccine production increasingly less attractive.

And his conclusion is depressing.

The bottom line: the vaccine business is less attractive than it used to be. If we want to make it more attractive, either prices have to rise or regulations have to relax. My guess is we're going to end up with more government involvement not less.

A market-based economy is hard to sustain unless people understand how it works.

Kevin at Truck and Barter has been looking at Canadian drug production, and Canadian purchases from U.S. manufacturers at reduced prices, which U.S. patients are now attempting to exploit.

Why politicians think a country of 31 million people that has price controls on pharmaceuticals has enough excess drugs just sitting around that the US can start shopping like Paris Hilton on a bender is beyond me. I'd consider this a smart move on the part of these pharmacies. On the other hand, of course, this just means that those pharmacies that will sell to the US are going to be able to demand higher prices. If enough places adopt the no sales policy (to swing once again the other direction), the prices for those drugs that are available may rise to near-US levels, eroding the benefit. (Does anyone know if the price controls in Canada apply to international sales? I couldn't find anything in a quick search.)

It occurs to me that we might be seeing a variant of the peak load pricing phenomenon (there is a wonderful article by Oliver Williamson that appeared in the American Economic Review in 1966, and it's still worth reading and understanding. Sorry, I didn't turn up an online presentation of the argument. If one exists, please advise.) U.S. drug consumers are paying a price that reflects the costs of expanding capacity, while Canada's health ministry is able to negotiate a price that covers only the incremental cost of the drugs, by playing one producer against another. But if sufficiently many U.S. consumers start buying drugs from Canada, that has the effect of shifting the peak.

There are several posts at Truck and Barter on vaccine shortages and drug prices. Head over and have a look.

PRESERVED AS IF IN AMBER. Now that I have brought up the queries of my colleague, perhaps this is a good time to address another one. Once again, debunking a popular myth takes a lot of work, much of it simply to demonstrate the untruths that have become commonplace. Then there's the little matter of false analogies. The question, first. We are offered an example of a government program that my correspondent views as a success.

THE SALK VACCINE: The Salk vaccine was developed to deal with the growing number of cases of Polio in the 1950s. Development of the vaccine, I believe, was majorly if not entirely supported by the federal government. Dissemination of the vaccine once developed involved public institutions * e.g., the schools * in a government coordinated/government funded program. The result? The specter of Polio disappeared from the experience of America's subsequent younger generations.

Where is the equivalent program today that would wipe out childhood hunger? Or, is there evidence to the contrary that "there is no need for such a program; the private sector will produce those same results without government interference" as conservatives claim?

Let's start with a few salient facts. First, the development of the Salk vaccine involved private philanthropies, most significantly the March of Dimes. There is a reason President Franklin Roosevelt's head is on the current dime and that the current fundraising campaign against birth defects (the survival of the organization being more important than the cause) starts on January 30 of each year. And although schools participated in the immunization of kids, both with Dr Salk's shots and Dr Sabin's later sugar cubes, many kids got their shots from their family pediatricians. But that's nitpicking over facts.

Second, let's look at that loose talk about "equivalent" [government?] programs. What you are seeing, dear readers, is an example of the false analogy I call the "going to the moon" argument. The argument runs something like this. The Apollo program spent about $24 billion in 1969 dollars to land two men on the moon and safely return them to earth. So ... pick any other problem that looks like it could be fixed if the national government threw, say, $24 billion at it, and assert, "If we can put a man on the moon, we certainly can achieve these results." Compelling, huh? Here's the rub: a moon shot is a straightforward optimal control program. There is so much mass to be accelerated to a known escape velocity, steered to the proper path, decelerated to a safe landing velocity on the Moon, accelerated to a lower escape velocity (the savvy reader will note the use of expendable boosters and orbital velocity achieved first, then a translunar or transterran injection, that gets rid of a lot of mass and burns off a lot of fuel) and then decelerated to a safe splashdown velocity. The polio vaccine problem had much in common with a moon shot, as one vaccine worked reasonably well (although not without some tragedies and false starts) against polio.

On the other hand, flu vaccines, which Dr Salk also worked on, must be tweaked every year to deal with the latest mutation of the most dangerous influenza virus, and there is a bit of guesswork involved in manufacturing sufficient vaccine to treat that strain. And there is some legal fallout from the development of the polio vaccine that influences the production and distribution of the influenza vaccine. Here are some excerpts from a William Tucker article that Craig Newmark recommended.

With vaccines, there will be allergic reactions and a tiny but predictable percentage of people will suffer some kind of permanent damage or even die. Because of liability without fault and the generosity of the tort system, the result is huge damage awards.

The first instance of this came in 1955 with polio vaccinations. Cutter Laboratories, the California company that now distributes Cutter's Insect Repellent, made an early batch of vaccines, some of which had live viruses in them. Almost all the children in Idaho were administered the vaccine and several dozen contracted polio. In 1957, the parents of Anne Gottsdanker, an 8-year-old girl whose legs had become paralyzed, sued Cutter, with famed personal injury lawyer Melvin Belli representing them.

The jury found Cutter's actions were not negligent--the orders had been rushed, standards had not been clear, and safety precautions were still rudimentary at the time. But, using the new doctrine of liability without fault, the jury held Cutter accountable anyway and awarded $147,300. "That decision made Ralph Nader possible," Belli later claimed.

"It was a turning point," says Dr. Offit, whose book The Cutter Incident will be published next year. "Because of the Cutter decision, vaccines became one of the first medical products to be eliminated by lawsuits."

That this would be the outcome wasn't immediately clear. Soon after the trial, the Yale Law Journal published an article arguing that insurance against adverse reactions was the solution. The public wouldn't buy policies because it would be too complicated and expensive, but vaccine makers could. Insurance would cover the cost of bad outcomes and the manufacturers would pass these costs on to their customers. Those few who were harmed by a vaccine would be covered by those who benefited. Everything would work out. Unfortunately, this thesis failed to anticipate how high damage awards would go.

WHEN AN UNUSUAL EPIDEMIC occurred at Fort Dix, N.J., in 1976, for example, the federal government decided to vaccinate the whole country against the new "swine flu." To the astonishment of Congress, the insurance companies refused to participate. Senator Ted Kennedy charged "cupidity" and "lack of social obligation." The Congressional Budget Office predicted that with 45 million Americans inoculated, there would be 4,500 injury claims and 90 damage awards, totaling $2 million. Congress decided to provide the insurance.

As Peter Huber recounts in his book Liability, the CBO's first estimate proved uncannily accurate. A total of 4,169 damage claims were filed. However, not 90 but more than 700 suits were successful and the total bill to Congress came to over $100 million, 50 times what the CBO had predicted. The insurance companies knew their business well.

Looks like in this second case the private sector assessed the risks better than Senator Kennedy did. Did the government-sponsored swine flu shots (I passed on that one, as I have on all the other ones since then, there's a theory of public finance story to tell in another post ...) crowd out an insurance effort. Or, did the immunization program produce inefficiently many immunizations? (The efficient immunization rate is less than 100% even in the case of shots without side effects.)

I put it to you: if a government sponsored immunization program is not an easy technocratic fix, by what leap of logic can you look for an "equivalent" program to address childhood poverty, where the root cause might be a teenager who couldn't keep her pants, on or a mother widowed because her husband died in a UN peacekeeping operation somewhere, or a father was deserted by a wife who decided to explore a different sexual identity, springing the Two Income Trap, or a host of other stories? It has less to do with some ideologized free market alternative than it does with the lack of an easy technocratic fix.

EDIFICE COMPLEXES. The editorial board at the Northern Star puts the cost shifting problem into perspective.

Among every college student’s essentials are books, pens and, of course, paper. Somehow, a building dedicated to graduates just doesn’t make the list.

Information Technology Services’ inconvenient new card-swiping system, designed to regulate the amount of paper used in the computer labs, would not be needed if NIU got its priorities straight.

If this university’s budget doesn’t have room to expand the funds it spends on paper, perhaps NIU administrators should be encouraging NIU alumni, such as Dennis Barsema, to make donations for paper - an education must - rather than $2.5 million toward an alumni center that students won’t step foot in until years down the line, when they are alumni.

Students pay about $10,000 a year to attend school here. Nowhere in the tuition bill does it state that the price of attending NIU does not include paper.

Their proposals become anticlimactic, although the students do have a point. The problem, however, is that there are no naming opportunities for paper bins. Buildings and rooms are another matter.

AND ON THE LIGHTER SIDE:

(Hat tip: Shot in the Dark. The title Mitch gave to the .jpg is priceless itself.)

GOING LIKE A TRAIN AFIRE? Passengers on the 20.06 Bristol TM - Weston had to evacuate a burning train near Blackwell Common (hat tip: Transport Blog.) Passengers also had to evacuate the 19.20 Chicago - Boston and New York near Gypsum, Ohio around 2 am when the dormitory car caught on fire.

POSSIBLE SOURCE OF COMPANY MAIL? Instapundit has turned up an antitrust law professor's weblog.

HEARING THOSE JACKBOOTS. Edgy art student creates a painting that has the f-word in it. Somebody scratches out the word with crayon or charcoal, damaging the work beyond repair. Excessively earnest faculty member gets, well, excessively earnest.

NIU assistant art professor Karen Brown said the vandalism was a shameful act.

“It speaks to an incredibly regrettable immaturity on the ability of other people to tolerate ideas on which they do not agree,” Brown said. “That’s what the rise of fascism looks like, with the utter inability to tolerate the expressions of other people.”

Brown called Dudko “one of our very best students” and said her works were validly provocative.

“Her work is incredibly beautiful,” Brown said. “It’s the direct experience of her own life.”

I'll withhold judgement on the aesthetics. As long as the art faculty do not judge derivations for their elegance or their provocativeness, we have a proper division of labor. But let me remind readers that there is a non-discrimination and harassment policy at Northern Illinois University that specifically prohibits "discrimination or harassment on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, religion, age, [my emphasis] physical or mental disability, marital status, veteran status, sexual orientation, political affiliation, or any other factor unrelated to professional qualifications. Consistent with the importance of these objectives, the university maintains an accessible, diligent, and responsive complaint resolution system." Perhaps the miscreant who censored the painting was not aware of channels for official redress. But the painting appears to be actionable under the harassment provision of the policy, which reads prohibits

Harassment in the workplace that is based upon the employee's/student's protected characteristic and;

Creates or is intended to create an intimidating, hostile, offensive working environment;

Unreasonably interferes with work performance.

And edgy art is occasionally deliberately hostile or offensive.

On the other hand, perhaps the tramp of jackboots is in this harassment policy itself ...

EMPRESS MARIA THERESA HAS SPOKEN. OR NOT.

Well, you know, I don't know Laura Bush. But she seems to be calm, and she has a sparkle in her eye, which is good. But I don't know that she's ever had a real job — I mean, since she's been grown up. So her experience and her validation comes from important things, but different things. And I'm older, and my validation of what I do and what I believe and my experience is a little bit bigger — because I'm older, and I've had different experiences. And it's not a criticism of her. It's just, you know, what life is about.

But the Empress got caught out.

I had forgotten that Mrs. Bush had worked as a school teacher and librarian, and there couldn't be a more important job than teaching our children. As someone who has been both a full time mom and full time in workforce, I know we all have valuable experiences that shape who we are. I appreciate and honor Mrs. Bush's service to the country as First Lady, and am sincerely sorry I had not remembered her important work in the past.

Can you say "elitist liberal?" Next she'll say baking cookies is for the little people. (Hat tip: Charlie Sykes, who was on a roll this morning comparing the Kerry campaign with some second-guessing of embattled Packer coach and general manager Mike Sherman. Paraphrasing: "Mr Sherman should have known that Ahman Green had a tendency to fumble. It was a mistake to give him the ball on the Chicago one. I would have called a different play. And scheduling the Bears at Lambeau in September was the wrong game in the wrong place at the wrong time." A caller noted that any contender for Mr Sherman's job could vote for funding the renovation of "Lambert" field. Before he voted against it, of course.)

RENDER UNTO CAESAR. Skip at The Sports Economist finds parallels between medieval cathedral building and postmodern stadium building.

We are wealthier these days, and can afford some degree of state-sponsored extravagance when it comes to building stadiums. But I find the cathedral cost story compelling. And the principle remains the same centuries down the road -- the opportunity costs to resource mis-allocation are real, and potentially quite large.

But who is to be the Martin Luther to challenge the selling of indulgences -- or is it overpriced braaaats -- for the renovation of Lambert Lambeau Field

DEBUNKING THOSE CANARDS. Arnold at Econ Log invites readers to identify the myth about Social Security that poses "the largest barrier to a reasonable discussion of policy." That's a difficult question to answer, as I have two. The first is the paternalistic canard that individuals will mismanage or tap into their private accounts. Brad DeLong is among the recent purveyors of this canard.

There is a bigger, unmentioned reason to be against private accounts. Ten years down the road or so, there will be pressure on Congress to allow people to borrow against their private accounts, or to withdraw them to buy a house, or to use them to meet unexpected medical expenses. Congress will bow to that pressure--it's their money, after all. And in the end a lot of people will hit 70 having drained their Social Security private account dry. The rest of us will then have to decide whether to let them starve on the street, or tax ourselves a second time to give them Social Security benefits. As Dick Schmalensee says, "You have to ask yourself not just, 'Is this good policy?' but 'Will this still be good policy after Congress does its worst to it?'" The Medicare drug benefit and the corporate tax boondoggle are powerful evidence that the Bush administration holds no leashes to use to control what this Congress does to policy proposals, while lobbyists can make this Congress roll over and beg.

The problem, Professor DeLong, is that a lot of people are going to hit 70 only to discover that multiple Congresses have drained the so-called trust fund dry. (For years, the excess of Social Security tax revenues over current expenditures have masked the total operating deficit of the national government. And to invest those excess revenues in government bonds does nothing to change the story. There have to be sufficient general tax revenues coming in to redeem the bonds to provide the transfer payments to the retirees who put their trust in the house that Franklin built.) Tyler at Marginal Revolution has thought through the laws of conservation at work in changing the retirement plan.

But the canard that does more to poison debate than any other, now that I think about it, is the canard that Social Security and its later cousin Medicare have alleviated poverty among the old. A colleague sent an email around to several people asking them to comment on his defense of several of the New Deal - Great Society programs.

I've been harping on the need to be specific in political debates so we can test our assertions and learn from each other. As one might guess, I've been challenged (off-line) to put-up-or-shut-up; specifically, to specify some "liberal" government programs that have worked rather than simply react to others' perceived vagaries about the ineffectiveness of government. I will do so citing three programs: the G.I. Bill, development and dissemination of the Salk vaccine, and Medicare.

[I have cut out the material on the G.I. Bill and the polio vaccines to conserve space. These are different canards. The problem with a lot of policy analysis is the existence of things people believe to be true that after further review turn out not to be quite that true]

MEDICARE: Enacted in the 1960s, Medicare has been credited with changing the demographics of poverty in America. In the 1950s, the segment of the population most disproportionately poor were older Americans, much of their lack of resources being due to the impact of hospital and other medical expenses. Today that segment of the population is among the disproportionately richest, having been replaced in poverty by children.

Where is the equivalent program today that would ameliorate childhood poverty to a similar extent? Or, is there evidence to the contrary that "there is no need for such a program; the private sector will produce those same results without government interference" as conservatives claim?

Perhaps there is yet another answer: there is more childhood poverty today because Social Security and Medicare have reduced economic growth compared to what it would have been with a different tax regime. Martin Feldstein has worked on this topic for years. There is also a paper by Alan J. Auerbach, Jagadeesh Gokhale, and Laurence J. Kotlikoff called "Generational Accounting: A Meaningful Way to Evaluate Fiscal Policy" (requires J-STOR privileges) in the Winter 1994 Journal of Economic Perspectives that illustrates the extent to which the current crop of elders are stealing from future generations. (I am being a bit polemical but it's late and Blogger hasn't been working well, so I have to take out my wrath on something.

Here is a table of net tax rates by their reckoning, broken out by year of birth, from page 86 of the article.

1900.....21.5
1910.....24.7
1920.....26.3
1930.....28.1
1940.....29.3
1950.....30.6
1960.....32.1
1970.....33.2
1980.....33.8
1990.....33.6

Their estimates suggest future generations will face a net tax rate of 71.1 percent.

A companion article, by Robert Haveman, argues that identifying only taxes and transfers, without allocating the benefits of other government services (does that include liberating Iraq, or edgy National Endowment projects?) is incomplete accounting. True enough, but the evidence with respect to taxes and transfers alone suggests that the retirement safety net has been a massive transfer from future young people to current old people, and it has reduced economic growth compared to what it might have been.

RUNNING EXTRA. More, much more, around the Internet this morning. Start with Alex at Marginal Revolution, looking at the microeconomics of Social Security privatization. Consider this:

Social security privatization has a little-discussed benefit, done properly it is equivalent to a cut in marginal tax rates. A problem with the current system is that there is little relationship on the margin between taxes paid and benefits received.

That's what makes Social Security so popular with the current crop of elders. They've made out like bandits starting with that Vermont pensioner who received the first check. But I use the term "banditry" deliberately: they have stolen their grandchildrens' futures. There will eventually be no more future to steal. We can do better:

To see why this is important consider the difference between social security and an IRA. If a worker works an additional hour, earns $10 and puts $1 into the IRA he knows the $1 will produce a benefit 30 years down the line when he retires. The $1 contribution to the IRA is not a tax, it's consumption, a benefit of working extra hours. On the other hand if a worker earns $10 and $1 is taken and paid into social security there is no clear connection to retirement benefits. Social security payments, therefore, are taxes - and like other taxes they deter work effort and create a dead weight loss.

Privatizing social security, or in some other way creating personal accounts, would reestablish a link between marginal payments and marginal benefits and thus would be equivalent to a cut in tax rates.

Efficiency with prosperity. I like the idea. Victor at the Dead Parrot Society has an observation that is neither deceased nor defunct.

By funding the transition costs with debt today, you are working the time-consistency problem in reverse; you are acknowledging that future, implicit, debt obligations are real, today. That is a good thing that helps to work toward fiscal sanity rather than away from it. The time-consistency problem arises from fear that such an acknowledgment would *not* ever take place. Lastly, the spending record from FY1999-2002 was reasonably terrible, and it is no coincidence that budget surpluses were on the books for those years. PAYGO was born in a period of massive deficits; it was essentially eviscerated when those deficits went away (and explicitly dropped without substantial concern just when surpluses were falling into deficits). Now that large and explicit current deficits are being incurred again, there is considerable movement in the Congress to reinstate PAYGO or other similarly tight spending caps and arrangements.

To repeat, there is no more effective "lockbox" than a real trust fund account with a real name on it, not something that Congress might deal with or not. And there is time to work on the problem, particularly with generous immigration policies to expand the pool of workers, producing both more income and lowered per capita transition costs. Note this observation from Factcheck.org (via Charlie Sykes.)

There are a host of unanswered questions about Bush's intentions regarding Social Security, and the campaign so far hasn't shed much light on any of them. Bush has said he wouldn't increase payroll taxes, but maintaining benefits for current retirees while allowing some portion of current payroll taxes to go into privately owned accounts will cost at least $1 trillion and perhaps much more, depending on what estimates are used. Bush hasn't said where the money would come from.

Kerry, on the other hand, hasn't said how he would preserve the current system. Social Security's finances are unstable, and its trustees stated in the most recent annual report that by the year 2078 it will require a payroll tax increase of nearly 50% to maintain the currently scheduled rise in benefit levels. If taxes are not increased and no other changes are made, benefits would have to be cut 32% that year.

Perhaps there are other economies for the national government to consider (where is that Pig Book when you need it?) And now might be the time to contemplate that. Michael Barone has laid out the options in the upcoming election.

Bush can be justly criticized for not laying out his plans with much specificity. As on Medicare-prescription drugs, he seems content to raise the issue and let Congress -- especially House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas -- work out the details. Nor is it clear that any significant number of Democrats would support Bush on health savings accounts or Social Security. A re-elected George W. Bush may or may not be able to deliver on his promises.

But he has at least set out a vision of an "ownership society" that is a vivid contrast to what John Kerry proposes. Kerry, like most Democrats since the 1970s, aims to move this country some distance toward a Western European style welfare state. (His proposals would result in government spending an ever larger percentage of gross domestic product far into the future. Leave aside the question of whether his tax increase on the highest incomes would pay for this.)

The (larger) question is whether the United States wants to become a society with the problems of Western European welfare states -- zero job growth, stagnant economies, ever-increasing shares of GDP spent by government.

Industrial economies, with their huge firms and masses of low-skill workers, had a natural tendency toward centralization and government redistribution of income: hence the New Deal, the Great Society, the Western European welfare states. Post-industrial economies, with their burgeoning small firms and churning technological innovation, have a natural tendency toward decentralization and market distribution of resources.

The vision Kerry presented in the second and third debates, of further centralization and growing government, seems more in line with the industrial era. The vision Bush presented, more effectively than he has before, is more in line with our post-industrial times.

Perhaps so. But perhaps Daniel Henninger is correct: not everybody is ready to go there yet.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. That's how Charlie Sykes sees the upcoming election.

It is said that America's WWII generation is its "greatest generation." But my greatest fear is that it will become known as America's "last generation." Born in the bleakness of the Great Depression and hardened in the fire of WWII, they may be the last American generation that understands the meaning of duty, honor, and sacrifice. It is difficult to admit, but I know these terms are spoken with only hollow detachment by many (but not all) in my generation. Too many citizens today mistake "living in America" as "being an American." But America has always been more of an idea than a place. When you sign on, you do more than buy real estate. You accept a set of values and responsibilities. This November, my generation, which has been absent too long, must grasp that 100 years from now historians will look back at the election of 2004 and see it as the decisive election of our century. Depending on the outcome, they will describe it as the moment America joined the ranks of ordinary nations; or they will describe it as the moment the prodigal sons and daughters of the greatest generation accepted their burden as caretakers of the City on the Hill."

The weakening actually began with the next-elders to the Baby Boomers, who remembered the winning years of the Second World War and came of age at a time to capitalize on the prosperity. Now they are overrepresented in the ranks of the smug pacifists (hat tip: Atlantic Blog) as the first commenter to the post noted. And they vote in sufficient numbers to keep any administration from coming to grips with the chain-letter known as Social "Security."

On the other hand, Andrew Sullivan is in the position of contemplating which of the two major presidential contenders is the lesser evil, while King at SCSU Scholars argues it is crucial for voters to recognize which contender is more alert to the greater evil.

THE JOYS OF SHODDY SERVICE. Northern Star columnist Kimberly Marion has some suggestions for store clerks.

What I want is a little respect. Do not place the blame on me because you are at a job you dislike.

What’s even worse is when there is a line of people waiting to order and the person behind the counter holds an entire conversation about what he or she did on the weekend. I am not asking you to fan me and put peeled grapes in my mouth, and I am also not asking you to you to cut my meat and dab the corners of my mouth. All I want is the order I politely asked for.

I do recognize that there are some customers who have the tendency to be rude, but there still must be some type of polite customer service. You could think about it in a different manner and ponder where you would be without the job you have. I know where you would be: You would be broke, just like me.

There's probably a whole 'nother column on the antics of what radio talker Clark Howard calls the "customer no-service representative" at the credit card companies. But not tonight. I scored a minor victory over the telephone companies. I think there is a previous post to follow up on, but the archives aren't working properly at the moment.

THERE IS STILL WORK TO BE DONE. Northern Illinois University President John Peters referred extensively to something called P-20 in his recent State of the University Address.

But we have gone further – so much further, in fact, that five of our deans were called to Boston last month to tell educators from across the country how NIU has managed to create a national model for school-university partnerships. Under the umbrella of our highly-successful P-20 (or preschool through graduate school) program, five different colleges are working together to improve teacher training, raise student achievement, and smooth transitions across the public education system at every level. Can you imagine? A program so important that five deans came together to work across college boundaries on a singularly-focused initiative? Don’t look now, but I think I just saw some of the plaster heads smiling!

Here are just a few examples of what P-20 has accomplished so far. They’ve planned, opened and are helping operate an innovative new elementary school where the fine arts and technology are integrated into every subject. They developed an interactive school report card to help parents and school administrators make sense of voluminous standardized testing data. This is a product, by the way, that’s now available to 4,000 public schools in Illinois! The P-20 team obtained a five million dollar federal grant to work with struggling schools in Rockford.

The list goes on and on. In all, NIU’s P-20 program has obtained more than $7.5 million worth of federal support in less than a year-and-a-half, and they have another $15 million in the development pipeline right now.

Nor are they laboring in obscurity on these programs. NIU’s P-20 initiative is making headlines across the state and around the nation – so much so that P-20 faculty and staff are fielding calls for help from school districts around the state, each and every day! In fact, on the strength of our growing reputation for P-20 leadership, I spent Monday and Tuesday of this week in Washington – at the invitation of U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige – to discuss with a small group of university presidents how to improve math and science education in our public schools. It is no coincidence that, in looking around the country for leaders in teacher preparation and school-university partnerships, Secretary Paige would choose NIU to help advise him on national education policy.

That's interesting. The more salient statistic might be the absence of any preparation for university in the P-12.

Joanne Jacobs has the money quote.

Nearly half of high school students don't take the academic courses necessary to prepare for college.

That lack of preparation also takes its toll on our graduate assistants.

If more people are going to college than ever before....shouldn't we expect the marginal ones to be glue sniffers? But I think we know that we're not talking about a marginal one or two people here. At least that's the way it seems.

There are several links to main press coverage of the college scene at that post. Check it out.

ONE ABANDONED, ONE SUSPENDED. The Milwaukee - Muskegon catamaran ferry exceeded expectations for the summer, but will begin its winter break in November.

But even after shortening its first season from seven months to five, the Lake Express has still exceeded its 2004 ridership projections, spokesman Jeff Fleming said. He wouldn't release those projections or a precise passenger count but repeated earlier statements that the ferry has carried more than 100,000 passengers between Milwaukee and Muskegon, Mich.

Meanwhile, the Rochester-Toronto service (a public-private partnership gone wrong?) is done. Live from the Third Rail wonders if the boat will go to a route with passengers? The Superintendent has some transport gossip from the Milwaukee area to that effect...

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

We are worthy of survival only if our ideals and courage are passed to our children, if we bother have them. If all we pass on to the next generation is an estate of expectation, they will be privileged but undeserving. And civilization will perish under their deadweight.

That's Cicero at Winds of Change. Go read the whole thing.

COST SHIFTING. The administration at Northern Illinois University has discovered that students are printing off their course documents and other stuff at the computer labs, because one of their "economy" measures has been to reduce the supplies budget for the academic departments.

Because of the increase in student enrollment and rules ignored by lab attendants, an excessive amount of paper is wasted in labs. Each year, about 10 to 15 percent more paper is used than allowed and NIU has not received any additional funding for paper. Its yearly budget only allows $150,000 for paper, said ITS supervisor Elizabeth Leake.

Let's leave aside the impracticality of defining "excessive." What's the fix?

While there is no charge for printing right now, more serious measures may be taken if the problem with the increase in paper use each year is not fixed. ITS is thinking about possibly fining students who break the rules, but nothing is set in stone, Leake said. Leake said there has been no discussion of charging at all for printouts and the readers are simply in place to track who is printing what and to keep the rules unbroken so all students are able to receive their fair share of paper. She also said almost all universities have systems similar to this and they have been proven to work as they should.

So much done, so much left to do. "Excessive" and "fair share" and "no charge." Primitives.

RUNNING EXTRA. Northern Illinois University is apparently luckier than some universities. Mike Adams has some fun with the administration at North Carolina-Wilmington, where the computer labs have run out of paper and out of funds to pay the lab staff.

At first, I considered the possibility that the shortage of paper and toner may have been the result of a few selfish students printing out personal emails and otherwise hogging the resources of the collective. But, of course, that doesn’t explain the shutdown of various computer labs over the course of the last year.

Furthermore, such a view would be incompatible with the socialist mindset that pervades this university. Various programs sponsored by the Office of Campus Diversity have taught me that individuals will act in the best interest of the collective, as long as the government sufficiently taxes them and properly oversees the redistribution of public funds.

So, that really leaves me with only one conclusion: A few individuals in the administration are mismanaging student technology fees. In other words, those who control the means of production are oppressing the masses in the student population.

It goes on in a similar vein.

FULL EMPLOYMENT FOR LOAN SHARKS! I have finished The Two Income Trap (details or compare prices) and must confess to being less than impressed with its recommendations. Apparently one of the authors did some consulting for Citibank, and recommended that Citi could reduce its bankruptcy-related losses by not lending to families who are "obviously in financial trouble." This proposal did not go over well with the senior man at the meeting, who noted that the bank made most of its profits from precisely those borrowers. (That is consistent with one nugget I learned: in the credit card business, a "deadbeat" is somebody who pays off his outstanding balance in full each month, thus exploiting the grace period and paying no interest. The problem the bank has is generating sufficient interest income from its portfolio of credit cards ... where some people pay no interest because they are using credit cards as float, and others pay no interest because they are deadbeats in the old sense of the word.)

So what's the solution? Turn to page 144.

The consumer-credit monster could be beaten back if Congress would enact a simple provision into law -- a provision that wouldn't require the creation of vast new oversight committees or contentious battles in the Supreme Court. Congress could simply revive the usury laws that served the country since the American Revolution. Federal law could be amended to close the loopholes that let one state override the lending rules of another. Alternatively, Congress could impose a uniform rate to apply across the country. Such a provision would enable the states or the federal government to reimpose meaningful limits on interest rates.

I will leave it to the legal experts to determine whether or not such a federal law would be contrary to the "full faith" provision or the commerce clause of the Constitution. Let me turn to the economics, but first let me alert new readers to the Utopian Wonk style of writing excerpted above. I have been reading this sort of stuff for years, and the "if only we would do this our troubles would go away" style leaves me cool. There is more of that sort of utopian wonkery to come, but let us turn first to the usury proposal.

Authors Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi correctly note that such an interest rate cap ought to reflect the prime lending rate or the underlying rate of inflation so as to avoid a repeat of the Regulation Q follies of the late 1970s and early 1980s. But their expectation of the reaction of the banking industry is, well, utopian wonkery.

The beauty of this approach is that it would help families get out of debt without costing taxpayers a dime. How would it work? By harnessing the energy of the marketplace. Lenders themselves would transform mortgage and credit card practices just by acting in their own best interest. Since they would no longer be allowed to charge exorbitant interest rates to families with marginal credit records, it would be unprofitable for lenders to pursue [meaning to offer credit] families in financial trouble. Instead, banks would once again have a reason to screen potential buyers carefully, making loans to those who can really afford to repay.

But not repay too quickly, as the portfolio of loans might turn into an asset that paid less than a Treasury note. That policy might also bring us back to those thrilling days of the 1890s, as laid out in The Ledger, a publication of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston's economic education unit.

Could we get along without a lot of the things we buy on credit? Yes, but our lives would be very different. There would be far fewer households with multiple TV sets and full-blown entertainment centers; fewer island cruises and trips to visit a certain cartoon mouse during school vacations. But there would also be fewer washing machines, clothes dryers, home computers, air conditioning units, and a bunch of other things that we've come to regard as essential. Easier access to credit has meant that more consumers can buy more products and services, benefit from using them now, and pay for them out of future income -- buy now, pay later.

The article helpfully emphasizes the importance of the "pay later." Note also the Utopian Wonk tone of the paragraph, and be alert to the post hoc fallacy that the paragraph introduces. Its point: there are many more consumer goods in today's homes than there were in a 1960 house, let alone a 1930 house or a 1900 house ... these are modelled in the Boston Fed's education center. It is an empirical question, however, whether easy access to credit hastened the creation of thick markets that supported industrial-style production of these goods. On the other hand, Chinese manufacturers and big-box retailers strike me as likely losers from a national usury law.

And it's not as if consumers who would be denied credit by regulated banks don't have other options. Williams and Tyagi helpfully note that credit-card lenders use methods other than "Jimmy the finger-breaker" to salvage delinquent loans. That is a potential capstone paper in a money and banking class: do the crime statistics reveal any effects of credit card deregulation on convictions for loansharking. There is a rather polemical book, Walter Block's Defending the Undefendable (details or compare prices) that makes a case for the loanshark as someone willing to bear higher risks in order to provide credit to people who would not get money from The [Regulated] Establishment. The loanshark story was more compelling in the days when money lenders could discriminate along racial and class lines. But I digress.

The real folly in The Two Income Trap is this excursion into Utopian Wonkery:

Reregulation would help solve a litany of evils. The most important is worth its own headline: Limiting interest rates would halt the rapid rise in home foreclosures. With a lower ceiling on interest rates, lenders would lead the charge to reestablish an appropriate match between family income and mortgage size, which would have the effect of reducing the mass of families that are sucked into mortgages they have no hope of paying. Minority communities would no longer find themselves stripped of wealth by predatory subprime [referring here to higher-interest mortgages to more risky borrowers] lenders. And homeowners would no longer be suckered into second and third mortgages that promise to lower their monthly bills but that actually rob them of the family home.

Right. Some people might not qualify for home mortgages at all. And an interest rate ceiling does not preclude a secured line of credit ... any credit card company that offers you a home equity line of credit is offering a mortgage (in most cases a second or third, in my case it would be a new first, which is why I decline such offers) and there is no reason for policy makers to treat borrowing against home equity as illegal per se. But the real Utopian Wonkery is yet to come.

Interest rate regulation would take the ammunition out of the middle-class bidding war, helping to save families from the Two-Income Trap. Competition for the best neighborhoods would continue, but if no one could get a mortgage that ate up 40 or 50 percent of the family's entire income, then home prices would begin to settle down to Earth. To many economists, this is a scandalous notion, involving a reduction in Americans' "net worth." But that net worth isn't worth anything unless a family plans to sell its home and live in a cave, because the next house the family buys would carry a similarly outrageous price tag. Some families with weaker credit
histories or more modest incomes might find themselves limited to smaller houses, but they would also be far less likely to end up in a home that drove them into the bankruptcy courts. Moreover, as housing prices leveled off, more families would be able to afford a home without having to resort to a subprime mortgage. Reregulation of interest rates would bring relief to all families, not just those already in serious trouble.

The problem, as Warren and Tyagi noted in the promising beginning of their book, is that the competition for best neighborhoods is driven by competition for schools. A serious voucher and school choice program is more likely to pop the housing price bubble (where is that story about upscale neighborhoods objecting to vouchers account the capital losses they'd bring?) than a usury law. A usury law, on the other hand, will confine education-consuming parents of modest means to poorer schools. Warren and Tyagi find that a small price to pay for their avoidance of bankruptcy. Egad.

CARNIVAL OF THE CAPITALISTS has a homecoming (that's what October is for) at Accidental Verbosity. Say hi to Sadie.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. A number of columns suggest that there is much more at stake in the upcoming election -- at all levels -- than simply the liberation of Iraq. The latest from Thomas Friedman (requires registration) is as good a place as any.

The leading edge of the American baby boom generation is now just two presidential terms away from claiming its Social Security and Medicare benefits. "With unfunded entitlement liabilities at $74 trillion in today's dollars - an amount far exceeding the net worth of our entire national economy - and with payroll taxes needing to double to cover the projected costs of Social Security and Medicare, how can any serious person not call entitlement reform the transcendent domestic policy issue of our era?"

That's challenge number 1, and I will have more to offer on that challenge tomorrow.

The second group of boomers barreling down the highway are the young people in India, China and Eastern Europe, who in this increasingly flat world will be able to compete with your kids and mine more directly than ever for high-value-added jobs. Attention Wal-Mart shoppers: The Chinese and the Indians are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top. Young Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs are not content just to build our designs. They aspire to design the next wave of innovations and dominate those markets. Good jobs are being outsourced to them not simply because they'll work for less, but because they are better educated in the math and science skills required for 21st-century work.

When was the last time you met a 12-year-old who told you he or she wanted to grow up to be an engineer? When Bill Gates goes to China, students hang from the rafters and scalp tickets to hear him speak. In China, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America, Britney Spears is Britney Spears. We need a Bill Cosby-like president to tell all parents the truth: throw out your kid's idiotic video game, shut off the TV and get Johnny and Suzy to work, because there is a storm coming their way.

That's challenge number 2, but the education establishment is still not up to it. "Access" -- defined as keeping the unprepared or the unmotivated in the schools -- and "diversity" -- defined as tweaking the admission standards to achieve some sort of proportionality, still take up too much of the establishment's time.

The third group of boomers our next president will have to deal with is from the Arab world. The Arab region has had the highest rate of population growth in the world in the last half century. It has among the highest unemployment rates in the world today. And one-third of the Arab population is under the age of 15 and will soon be entering both a barren job market and its child-bearing years. There are eight Saudis under age 15 for every one between ages 45 and 60.

This is why I believed so strongly in trying to partner with the people of Iraq to establish some sort of decent government there that might serve as a beachhead for more progressive governance in the Arab world. I have not given up hope for this, but it may turn out that we made too many mistakes and that Iraqis are too divided for such a project to succeed. If so, the next president is going to need plan B - some combination of oil conservation that reduces our exposure to this region, a new military strategy and a renewed focus on promoting better government there through diplomatic and economic means. The Arab world is not even close to educating its baby boomers with the skills needed to succeed in the 21st century. Left untended, this trend is a prescription for humiliation and suicide terrorism.

Thus, the liberation of Iraq is a challenge -- but not the only challenge -- to policy makers.

A recent Daniel Henninger column in Opinion Journal sounds a related theme.

After three presidential debates, it is clear that George Bush is asking the American people to make a similar, abrupt break with the comforts of the political past. Proposals such as Social Security privatization or individually run health-savings accounts are not being offered as just an intriguing "policy" alternative. These ideas are an historic necessity to surviving in the world economy as it exists today.

Perhaps. With respect to Social "Security," the shortfall projections are sensitive to the projection of future immigration. To the extent that homeland security policy discourages enrollment in U.S. universities, that flow of skilled immigrants is attenuated. Likewise, the discovery by employers that skilled workers will be able to earn a comfortable living in their own countries reduces immigration by skilled workers.

Alas, this doesn't alter the reality that the economic trains of China, India and Brazil have left the station. John Kerry's comments on Social Security Wednesday evening ("I will not privatize it") and his federally led health-care proposal makes clear that he expects the electorate to put off responding to this irreversible global reality for another four years. George Bush wants the big decision made in three weeks.

The Ownership Society is the appropriate, 21st century replacement to the New Deal. It's about making it possible for the economy to turn on a dime, not once a decade. The bad news is that George Bush didn't bother to bring up the idea until a few weeks ago, in his convention speech.

Neither Mr. Bush, two anonymous Treasury secretaries nor anyone else in this administration has spent significant public time the past four years preparing American voters to make a change that I'm certain most of them know has to come. All those lunch-bucket Democrats carting DVD recorders out of Wal-Mart know those prices weren't delivered by the tooth fairy, or by a factory on the other side of town.

Bill Clinton understood these realities, as shown in his trade policies. But Bill Clinton never really changed his party; he never prepared the party to transition out of its New Deal mindset. With John Kerry, the Democratic policy stone has rolled a long way downhill.

Too bad. Amid war, terror and global economic upheaval, this election is a tough and too-sudden call for many voters. My guess is that the American electorate knows full well that the world is changing, and that come November 2, will decide the moment is now to change with it.

Perhaps, although Benjamin Wallace-Wells argues in The Washington Monthly that there is a looming crackup in the Republican coalition.

Two decades ago, Democrats granted moral authority to identity-group liberals, who, in their admirable zeal to fight discrimination, soft-peddled evidence that the country was growing more tolerant, and refused to consider that factors other than racism might explain, say, lagging minority test scores. As a result, Democrats defended unpopular quota-style affirmative-action programs and bilingual education. Today, Republicans bow to the supposed moral superiority of Christian conservatives, who, though living in the most religiously-minded and tolerant country on earth, persist in feeling persecuted. The GOP lets these groups lead them by the nose--even when, as on stem cell research, it puts them in the position of defending the unpopular and morally dubious argument that millions of Parkinson's patients should be denied a major hope for a cure in order to prevent the destruction of a few zygotes with zero chance of ever becoming humans. Two decades ago, Carter's overly cautious foreign policy helped convince millions of security-minded Democrats to abandon the party. Now, Bush's incautious foreign policy may be driving millions of Republicans the other way.

Mr Wallace-Wells suggests that some, well, triangulation, would be good for the Republicans.

A different kind of GOP isn't hard to imagine, at least in the abstract. In The New York Times Magazine last month, David Brooks sketched out a reasonable vision of what he calls "progressive conservatism." Brooks wants the GOP to embrace a slightly larger government, to value balanced budgets as highly as low taxes, to stop doing so many favors for business, and to focus on entitlement reform, national service, improving teacher quality, and promoting marriage in the ghetto. This is the vision of the Republican Party that belongs chiefly to its rump reformist wing: John McCain, Colin Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and others. It's not a bad platform, and Brooks is probably right that the Republicans would command more votes and run the country better if they hewed more closely to it.

To an extent, that argument represents some wishful thinking in Democratic circles. Thomas Frank's What's The Matter With Kansas (details or compare prices) marvels at the propensity of middle-income Kansans to vote for Republicans -- for cultural issues that he argues cannot possibly prevail -- and against their economic interests. There is much more to say about that book, and I will have more once I finish reading the related -- if less polemical The Right Nation (details or compare prices). For now, let me offer one observation from Mr Wallace-Wells's article.

The argument seemed over. Big government had won.

But of course, the argument was anything but over. An increasing number of voters were becoming aware that government was failing to make much headway against the major problems of the day. The economy remained weak, energy costs were rising, and social chaos was spreading in the cities. A few reform-minded Democrats and intellectuals were starting to rethink the premises of big government liberalism, to wonder if there might be less expensive and bureaucratic--and more effective--means to traditional liberal ends. Carter was inclined to agree with them. But such thinking was anathema to the party's liberal leaders and most powerful interest groups, and they were positioned to stop it.

The problem the Democrats face as an opposition is that they -- in an interesting inversion of thirty years ago -- give the impression of being nostalgic for a past of programs and institutions they created and managed that worked. The evidence is that those institutions did not work very well.

Mark Steyn gets it:

So, for all that Bush is accused of being ''stubborn,'' it's Kerry who refuses to change. He reckons that Americans are worn out by the wild ride of the Bush years and really do long to ''get back to where they were'' -- back to Sept. 10, to the summer of shark attacks and missing congressional interns. All that going back to Sept. 10 means is that you'll have to learn the lessons of the morning after all over again: I do believe that, if clueless, complacent Kerry won, more Americans -- and Britons and Canadians and Australians and Europeans -- will die in terrorist "nuisances."

But he won't win. Because enough Americans understand that going back to where we were means a return to polite fictions and dangerous illusions. That world is broken and you can't put that world back together.

The editorial board at the Wall Street Journal gets it.

Rather, it's because there has been a genuine and important philosophical battle growing for the past 20 years in Washington over the fate of the post-World War II welfare state. And that battle was clearly joined on Wednesday night.

The Republican challenge to the liberal big government consensus began in the 1960s with Barry Goldwater and accelerated in the 1980s with the Reagan tax cuts. Then the 1990s brought us the GOP takeover of Congress and, significantly, welfare reform. But the recapture of the Presidency in 2000 by a Republican willing to rethink such middle-class entitlements as Social Security has threatened the status quo in a way that hasn't happened in generations.

Mr. Bush isn't merely trying to shrink the supply of government by cutting this or that program. (Sadly, in our view, he rarely does.) Rather, his "ownership society" ideas about health care and pensions are a bold attempt to reduce the demand for government. This clash of visions--Mr. Bush's Republican new "progressivism" versus Mr. Kerry's conventional liberalism--is one reason so many Democrats feel so threatened by this President.

They caution,

We don't pretend to know if Americans are ready to endorse this kind of agenda, especially with a war going on. But it was certainly striking to us that the incumbent, Mr. Bush, was pitching the more aggressive reform plans, while the challenger proposed to stand athwart history yelling stop. On domestic matters as much as on foreign policy, voters this year can't say they aren't getting a choice.

Unfortunately, if the New York Times's endorsement of Senator Kerry is any indication, the Democratic establishment has learned nothing and remains nostalgic for the old days of "got a problem, get a program." Or perhaps they're nostalgic for the Yale Political Union?

Mr. Kerry has an aggressive and in some cases innovative package of ideas about energy, aimed at addressing global warming and oil dependency. He is a longtime advocate of deficit reduction. In the Senate, he worked with John McCain in restoring relations between the United States and Vietnam, and led investigations of the way the international financial system has been gamed to permit the laundering of drug and terror money. He has always understood that America's appropriate role in world affairs is as leader of a willing community of nations, not in my-way-or-the-highway domination.

We look back on the past four years with hearts nearly breaking, both for the lives unnecessarily lost and for the opportunities so casually wasted. Time and again, history invited George W. Bush to play a heroic role, and time and again he chose the wrong course. We believe that with John Kerry as president, the nation will do better.

Voting for president is a leap of faith. A candidate can explain his positions in minute detail and wind up governing with a hostile Congress that refuses to let him deliver. A disaster can upend the best-laid plans. All citizens can do is mix guesswork and hope, examining what the candidates have done in the past, their apparent priorities and their general character. It's on those three grounds that we enthusiastically endorse John Kerry for president.

Ryan Sager is on point about Senator Kerry's style.

There's a way to run for president, criticizing the present while providing a vision for the future, without sounding like the head of the Yale Political Union. But Kerry hasn't hit on it yet. He could still win, but this election season would have gone better for him had he come in understanding the difference between being right and leading people in the right direction.

More to come. As I type, I am listening to some of the mid-day campaign speeches. It will make for spectacle, if nothing else.

THE WEEKEND'S MOST PROFOUND TRIVIAL COMMENT. That recognition, which might be awarded sporadically, goes to a member of the Northern Illinois University football broadcast team, who asked all and sundry, "Ohio State lost in overtime at Northwestern. They lost at home to Wisconsin. What are they doing ranked 25th in the country." No longer. Ohio State has dropped out of the sportswriters' poll (after a shellacking at Iowa) and Northern Illinois has gathered a few votes.

The weekend's football has been a morale-builder at Cold Spring Shops. First, Northern Illinois turned a slim halftime lead into a 28-3 advantage the first three times it had the ball. Final score 42-10. Alas, some lowlives decided that Homecoming would be a good occasion to, well, behave like lowlives. (Marquette doesn't have a homecoming, but has a problem with lowlives as well.)

Later that Saturday, Wisconsin stole a win from Purdue, despite some barely-legal chop blocking by Purdue that put three of Wisconsin's front four on the bench with ankle injuries. That leaves Wisconsin undefeated among Big Ten teams, and high in the rankings, with Northwestern ... if memory serves, that's the team that delivered the reality check in 2000 ... coming into Camp Randall. But it's OK to dance with Sean and then prepare.

Then we turn to the Packers. It's all a question of which team shows up. This week, the team that came oh-so-close to the conference finals last year showed up, and turned out the lights on Detroit, at their dome. There's one more game each with Detroit and Chicago, and two with Minnesota, which provides the team with the possibility of winning the division, if the right team shows up from now until January. (January? Yup. Last regular season game is January 2 at Chicago. I miss having football done, except for the college games on New Year's Day, by just after Christmas.)

BLESS ME THIS IS PLEASANT, RIDING ON THE RAIL. The weekend's weather featured one blustery Saturday, just right for winding up a conference, and one cool sunny Sunday. Compare and contrast: making 300 km/h on a German Inter-City with riding a hayride car (a flatcar fitted with railings and bales of hay) behind two interurban coaches on a preservation railroad. But both are applications of the electric railway principle. And there were several well-restored examples of the interurban art form placed in the sunlight. Pictures later. Today is another good day for research.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Professor Ray is not happy with the circumlocutions so-called "inclusive" language imposes:

English has only "he" and "she" for reflexive personal pronouns. We once said, "Everyone has his own opinion." The reflexive pronoun case must agree with the subject. "Everyone" is singular. The predicate nominative must also be singular. Therefore, "his" was always understood to stand for both male and female nominatives. But `80's feminists wouldn't stand for it, so it became a politically correct mandate to say "Everyone has his or her opinion." That's now three words, to be politically correct, instead of one.

Human nature being lazy, the extra weight was soon dropped. The whole sentence became truncated, I should say, corrupted, into "Everyone has their own opinion." "Everyone," which is singular, is followed by "their," which is plural. This is a grammatical catastrophe, committed daily by English speaking writers, journalists, and reporters alike. These former guardians of the language have fallen slaves to the legally protected enterprise of political correctness. The people follow. It all happens because saying "his or her" all the time is awkward, and seems entirely unnecessary. Political correct talk is so pretentious and tedious that it has caused grammatical errors to become a permanent part of the English language. (Try using correct grammar on your own computer. You'll be erroneously `corrected.')"

Perhaps something like "ter" or "est" will emerge ... there were people playing with the former in the early 1970s.

EVALUATING THE DEBATE. Dynamist helpfully located a transcript of the debate I skipped to work on a railroad. Sean at The American Mind has a roundup of commentary on the debate ... or to be precise, joint interrogation by Bob Schieffer, for those of you who wish to compare, contrast, or find an argument to raise with me. Here are a few things that stand out.

President Bush: You know, there's a lot of talk about how to keep the economy growing. We talk about fiscal matters. But perhaps the best way to keep jobs here in America and to keep this economy growing is to make sure our education system works.

I went to Washington to solve problems. And I saw a problem in the public education system in America. They were just shuffling too many kids through the system, year after year, grade after grade, without learning the basics.

And so we said: Let's raise the standards. We're spending more money, but let's raise the standards and measure early and solve problems now, before it's too late.

No, education is how to help the person who's lost a job. Education is how to make sure we've got a workforce that's productive and competitive.

Got four more years, I've got more to do to continue to raise standards, to continue to reward teachers and school districts that are working, to emphasize math and science in the classrooms, to continue to expand Pell Grants to make sure that people have an opportunity to start their career with a college diploma.

True up to a point, although not much help to the individual who made a human capital investment (or not) on the basis of the incentives 20-30 years ago. That was the big problem in Detroit when I worked there. No point doing college prep when the assembly lines would pay well to use you from the neck down. And today, the problem with the college diploma is that it might be, well, not indicative of much. There is still excess capacity in some parts of the academy.

President Bush: It's your money. The way my opponent talks, he said, "We're going to spend the government's money." No, we're spending your money. And when you have more money in your pocket, you're able to better afford things you want.

I believe the role of government is to stand side by side with our citizens to help them realize their dreams, not tell citizens how to live their lives.

A mixed metaphor, Mr. President? Where is the line between "standing" and "telling?"

President Bush: There's a -- no, look, there's a systemic problem. Health care costs are on the rise because the consumers are not involved in the decision-making process. Most health care costs are covered by third parties. And therefore, the actual user of health care is not the purchaser of health care. And there's no market forces involved with health care.

It's one of the reasons I'm a strong believer in what they call health savings accounts. These are accounts that allow somebody to buy a low-premium, high-deductible catastrophic plan and couple it with tax-free savings. Businesses can contribute, employees can contribute on a contractual basis. But this is a way to make sure people are actually involved with the decision-making process on health care.

Secondly, I do believe the lawsuits -- I don't believe, I know -- that the lawsuits are causing health care costs to rise in America. That's why I'm such a strong believer in medical liability reform.

In the last debate, my opponent said those lawsuits only caused the cost to go up by 1 percent. Well, he didn't include the defensive practice of medicine that costs the federal government some $28 billion a year and costs our society between $60 billion and $100 billion a year.

Good libertarian opener, with a dig at the trial lawyers. But you've had a Republican majority in both houses since 2002 and the medical reform that emerged was a taps-open prescription drug "benefit" that has the potential to turn all drugs into flu vaccine. The sentiments are fine, but where are the savings accounts?

Senator Kerry: In the Senate we passed the right of Americans to import drugs from Canada. But the president and his friends took it out in the House, and now you don't have that right. The president blocked you from the right to have less expensive drugs from Canada.

We also wanted Medicare to be able to negotiate bulk purchasing. The VA does that. The VA provides lower-cost drugs to our veterans. We could have done that in Medicare.

Medicare is paid for by the American taxpayer. Medicare belongs to you. Medicare is for seniors, who many of them are on fixed income, to lift them out of poverty.

The Senator, on the other hand, would prefer to turn all prescription drugs into flu vaccine. And he's pandering to his Silent Generation base, who avoided poverty by stealing prosperity from future generations. (Yes, I'm being provocative. I also have documentation of this for an upcoming post. As the election approaches, I'll be more active on political economy topics.) The Senator, unfortunately, subscribes to the fiction that each can live at the expense of everyone else.

Senator Kerry: Here's what I do: We take over Medicaid children from the states so that every child in America is covered. And in exchange, if the states want to -- they're not forced to, they can choose to -- they cover individuals up to 300 percent of poverty. It's their choice.

So you change the management and you shuffle some money through Washington. Right. But wait! There's more!

Senator Kerry: In addition to that, we're going to allow people 55 to 64 to buy into Medicare early. And most importantly, we give small business a 50 percent tax credit so that after we lower the costs of health care, they also get, whether they're self-employed or a small business, a lower cost to be able to cover their employees.

You know, there is a serious intellectual argument for the government as a minimum-variance pooler of risk, and a serious empirical question about whether that monopoly can in fact value the risk more efficiently than competing insurers, each of which faces a higher variance but a stronger incentive to estimate it correctly.

On to the next act of theft by the Silent Generation, otherwise known as the Social "Security" system.

President Bush: I believe that younger workers ought to be allowed to take some of their own money and put it in a personal savings account, because I understand that they need to get better rates of return than the rates of return being given in the current Social Security trust.

And the compounding rate of interest effect will make it more likely that the Social Security system is solvent for our children and our grandchildren.

I will work with Republicans and Democrats. It'll be a vital issue in my second term. It is an issue that I am willing to take on, and so I'll bring Republicans and Democrats together.

And we're of course going to have to consider the costs. But I want to warn my fellow citizens: The cost of doing nothing, the cost of saying the current system is OK, far exceeds the costs of trying to make sure we save the system for our children.

Good answer. Did he spend too much political capital on "cost of doing nothing" after the liberation of Iraq?

Senator Kerry, on the other hand, will complain but otherwise hope the problem can be finessed.

Senator Kerry: I have a record of fighting for fiscal responsibility. In 1985, I was one of the first Democrats -- broke with my party. We balanced the budget in the '90s. We paid down the debt for two years.

And that's what we're going to do. We're going to protect Social Security. I will not privatize it. I will not cut the benefits. And we're going to be fiscally responsible. And we will take care of Social Security.

Note he did not rule out means testing, or taxing benefits differently, or raising the retirement age ...

Senator Kerry: Now, if later on after a period of time we find that Social Security is in trouble, we'll pull together the top experts of the country. We'll do exactly what we did it he 1990s. And we'll make whatever adjustment is necessary.

If he's elected, don't say I didn't warn you.

President Bush finally got to say what had to be said.

President Bush: People need to remember: Six months prior to my arrival, the stock market started to go down. And it was one of the largest declines in our history. And then we had a recession and we got attacked, which cost us 1 million jobs.

Now for something different: immigration policy.

President Bush: Many people are coming to this country for economic reasons. They're coming here to work. If you can make 50 cents in the heart of Mexico, for example, or make $5 here in America, $5.15, you're going to come here if you're worth your salt, if you want to put food on the table for your families. And that's what's happening.

And so in order to take pressure off the borders, in order to make the borders more secure, I believe there ought to be a temporary worker card that allows a willing worker and a willing employer to mate up, so long as there's not an American willing to do that job, to join up in order to be able to fulfill the employers' needs.

That has the benefit of making sure our employers aren't breaking the law as they try to fill their workforce needs. It makes sure that the people coming across the border are humanely treated, that they're not kept in the shadows of our society, that they're able to go back and forth to see their families. See, the card, it'll have a period of time attached to it.

It also means it takes pressure off the border. If somebody is coming here to work with a card, it means they're not going to have to sneak across the border. It means our border patrol will be more likely to be able to focus on doing their job.

Now, it's very important for our citizens to also know that I don't believe we ought to have amnesty. I don't think we ought to reward illegal behavior. There are plenty of people standing in line to become a citizen. And we ought not to crowd these people ahead of them in line.

Hmm, were both of them reading this?

Senator Kerry: Number one, the borders are more leaking today than they were before 9/11. The fact is, we haven't done what we need to do to toughen up our borders, and I will.

Secondly, we need a guest-worker program, but if it's all we have, it's not going to solve the problem.

The second thing we need is to crack down on illegal hiring. It's against the law in the United States to hire people illegally, and we ought to be enforcing that law properly.

And thirdly, we need an earned-legalization program for people who have been here for a long time, stayed out of trouble, got a job, paid their taxes, and their kids are American. We got to start moving them toward full citizenship, out of the shadows.

Unfortunately, the Senator still is making light of 40 years of research in labor economics.

What we need to do is raise the minimum wage. We also need to hold onto equal pay. Women work for 76 cents on the dollar for the same work that men do. That's not right in America.

And we had an initiative that we were working on to raise women's pay. They've cut it off. They've stopped it. They don't enforce these kinds of things.

And here we go again with "comparable worth." None of the Senator's court intellectuals understand compensating differentials?? The President appears to reply with a non-sequitur, but think about it. Why do homes in school districts with high test scores command higher prices?

President Bush: But let me talk about what's really important for the worker you're referring to. And that's to make sure the education system works. It's to make sure we raise standards.

On the merits, I view the President as having made the better case. But he's had majorities in both Houses of Congress. Why aren't some of these libertarian policies on the calendar?

DISCRETIONARY LOCK IN? Kevin at Truck and Barter is not happy that the Washington Post's Christopher Stern is not happy with monthly connection charges for Internet providers, health clubs, cable television, and newspaper subscriptions. More income committed to fixed charges means less income available for discretionary purchases such as food, clothing, tapes (or do you buy disks now) to watch or to hear, and books.

There is a connection between rising fixed commitments and the Two Income Trap (details or compare prices) and once the latest conference ends I will offer some more comments. For now a tease. The authors of Two Income Trap do not like the easy access to credit at high interest rates on offer today. The article quotes Jeremy Rifkin in such a way as to suggest he approves of easier access to credit. (I love a good fight, let's you and him have one!)

Rifkin points to the proliferation of tree-lined gated communities where 40 million Americans now have, in effect, their own private parks with swimming pools and bike paths. Until the mid-20th century, parks were largely viewed as public spaces. Rifkin claims that the move away from free radio and free television toward subscription models is just one example of a broader trend, with more Americans finding themselves paying premiums for traditional services such as education and health care.

The barriers are highest for consumers on the lowest economic rungs, those without credit or credit cards, according to Rifkin. "Credit cards are what open the door for those who can afford to live in this society," Rifkin said.

The number of consumers who have access to credit cards and electronic bill-paying services is large and growing. According to Synovate Inc., a research firm that follows the credit card industry, 75 percent of all households have access to a credit card. And more than half of people under 35 have paid at least one bill through online banking services.

The short form of the Two Income Trap is that more of the two incomes are going for the fixed charges and for debt service, leading to yet a different drain on the discrectionary income.

SAUCE FOR THE GOOSE? Gus at Liberty and Power discovers more crushing of dissent.

The board of trustees of Florida Gulf Coast University voted 11 to 1 to prohibit Williams from speaking at a convocation, unhappy with her statements lamenting the Bush administration's environmental policies and saying that her speech would lack "balance." All 11 of those who voted against her, including university President William Merwin, were appointed Gov. Jeb Bush. Merwin has given money to the Bush/Cheney campaign. Vice President Dick Cheney is holding a campaign rally on the university campus this Thursday. Hacks from beginning to end.

He is correct to point out that censorship is censorship, liberating or not. But this is a bit much:

I have less and less sympathy for those who find time to direct most of their intellectual fire at the left, which is out of power completely, while ignoring the Right, which is making a travesty of everything this country stood for that was worthwhile. Rather like shooing off the neighbor's dog for pooping in your lawn while your house burns down.

Florida Gulf Coast University. Not Harvard. Not Wisconsin. Not Claremont. Not Duke. Not Northern Illinois. Not Massachusetts. Where's the fire?

ECON CLASS SURE IS TOUGH. Read. Understand. Draw your own conclusion.

A LOOPHOLE BIG ENOUGH TO DRIVE A GRAVY TRAIN THROUGH. The Flemish Beerdrinker writes a few words in praise of public-private partnerships.

Investment in public services is guaranteed, while governments can keep their budgets in order.

These were popular in the construction of railroads in Europe and Latin America in the 19th Century, and governments lost a lot of money on them. (Just one nugget from the railway conference. Has to be a thesis in there somewhere.)

In the United States, the promotion generally took the form of land grants, and those didn't work terribly well either. The unsubsidized railroads such as Hill's Great Northern, and Hill's colleagues' Canadian Pacific tended to be more profitable. The one public-private partnership that turned into a serious money machine was The Pennsylvania Railroad.

A CENTURY OF PROGRESS. Critical Mass has been reading history.

In the early chapters of Left Back, Ravitch writes extensively about the debates that surrounded the rise of the progressive education movement during the early decades of the twentieth century, paying particular attention to those progressives who (quite unprogressively, it seems to me) argued that it is basically not possible to train the mind to reason well and remember much. They used this premise to justify a socially deterministic tracking curriculum that barred all but the most elite, college-bound children from a traditional academic curriculum, and that instead emphasized vocational training. Learning for its own sake was considered impractical and elitist even as the rationale for not teaching academic subjects was itself elitist: The subjects taught in the traditional academic curriculum--Latin, Greek, algebra, and so on--were felt to be well beyond the abilities of most people, who could neither reason nor remember well enough to master them. Progressive education as it was initially conceived and implemented by educationists across the country was thus in many ways profoundly conservative, even reactionary, in its conception of human potential and in its correspondingly rigid notion of school not as preparation for life as a thinking citizen but as preparation for specific manual jobs.

We have had so much progress that Latin, Greek, and algebra are now held to be beyond the abilities of university graduates. I suppose that's called access.

IS THIS THE HILL YOU WANT TO DIE ON? Bill Sjostrom manages to tie a story about the Sjostrom house cat becoming a mouser to an essay by a Labor Member of Parliament who put the row about foxhunting into perspective.

It was obvious from the start that it would end badly. The loss of proportion is staggering. Whatever progressive politics is about, or worth taking on opposing interests for, it is not about views on alternative methods of pest control. Talk of invoking the Parliament Act is like declaring a state of emergency because of a patch of fog on the M4.

I dislike the idea of blood sports. Some of the people who engage in them seem especially unlovely. Unseating the toffocracy is appealing. The trouble comes when we start converting personal prejudices into state action. Not only do we stir up all sorts of unnecessary trouble, we wander into a bog of hypocrisies, inconsistencies and contradictions.

I like the Right Honorable Gentleman's thinking, and would like to see more of it. How much of state action is a conversion of personal prejudices? Half? Three fifths? 99.44%? Makes you go hmmm...

And if Bill can link two unrelated ideas, so can I. Look at this:

The fact is that we routinely do unspeakable things to animals; hunting is scarcely up there with our ordinary cruelties. I have just watched a local council pest control officer on television explaining how he kills rats by giving them a poison that stops their blood clotting until they eventually die. I have yet to hear such practices denounced from the Commons benches. If sport is the issue, then why not ban all killing of animals, birds and fish for pleasure? Exchanging substance for symbolism is the worst form of hypocrisy.

Hmmm, that sounds like warfarin, useful for preventing clotting in humans as well as for killing rats. (I forget the story ... was the second use the byproduct of animal testing in the quest of the first use gone wrong? If nature gives you lemonades and all that ...) Its name pays tribute to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation at the University of Wisconsin (current motto: we don't want to schedule Northern Illinois!)

NEVER MIND VERMONT AND NEW HAMPSHIRE. Professor Althouse has recommended some Southern Wisconsin locations for leaf excursions, based on a poll of the law school faculty in Madison. Not a bad list. Let me add a bit of local knowledge. Several of the sites require the use of the State Highway 113 free ferry at Lake Wisconsin, which is a treat in itself (your tax dollars at work) and a pleasant journey break. Too bad there aren't many trains on the adjoining railroad bridge. On the other hand, the Circus World Museum nearby is open (do they serve cotton candy?) If you take the walk around Lake Geneva, you pass the Lake Geneva Yacht Club, which is home to two two-time winners of the Rolex Yachtsman and Yachtswoman of the Year Awards, and temporary home of the America's Cup (now at some other Lake Geneva.) Also in the Kettle Moraine area is the last piece of traditional interurban track in North America at the East Troy Electric Railroad, which has more train service in the fall -- most preservation railways have their busiest days in the summer, particularly if they're hosting Thomas.

(Superintendent's footnote for railroad enthusiasts: Yes, the South Shore Line still offers interurban passenger service including the center-of-the-street trackage in Michigan City, but there's this little matter of the diesels on the freight trains.)

PROCESS, NUANCE, FAILURE? Feature?

"Understanding each side from the other side -- that plus his legal training as a litigator is his intellectual framework," said Paul Nace, a friend for more than 30 years. "It's simple to have gut reactions; it's more challenging to submit your gut reactions to the rigor of intellectual debate. If the president had submitted his gut reactions to intellectual debate, the nation would have been better served."

Or bug?

"The campaign structure and strategy either fail to offer evidence of how Kerry would govern or raise warning flags," Jones said. "Such a review by no means dooms a Kerry presidency. But he's put a heavy burden on the American people to decide how he would govern."

This Washington Post report on Senator Kerry's management style (via Betsy's Page) is worth your time, and the hassle of registering to read it.

GOING TO HAVE TO READ THE TRANSCRIPT. I skipped the third debate to work on the Fox Valley O Scalers railroad. Possibly a mistake. I notice from the after-action and this summary that immigration policy and third-party payments in medicine came up.

AND BACK TO BEING ADORABLE... Just lost my pouch, but regained a friendly connection. Thanks!

I THOUGHT THIS PICTURE LOOKED FAMILIAR. During the diplomacy that preceded the liberation of Iraq, Instapundit posted this picture:

And here's (it's image 81) where I first saw that face:

"A Frenchman weeps as German soldiers march into the French capital, Paris, on June 14, 1940, after the Allied armies had been driven back across France."

Will we see a repeat as the jihadis take Paris?

WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS? Robert Reich (via Right Wing News) has read the book (details or compare prices) and come to a somewhat different understanding of it than have I. Methinks the intellectual wing of the Democratic Party downplay the cultural issues at their peril. To my mind, it does no good to let the lifestyles of the rich and famous (love children, recreational drugs, farming out the kids to nannies) trickle down to everybody (I think Bob Tyrrell made this point some years ago) and Mr Reich's invocation of the old us-against-the-power themes neglects the reaction to that to his peril. Mr Reich refers to another book, The Right Nation, that is on my to-buy list. (It includes inter alia a comparison of Speaker Hastert's district (where I live) with Minority Leader Pelosi's.) I promise some book notes (and a card deck update) once the latest conference is done.

NICHT SCHRIEBEN KANN. King at SCSU Scholars has turned up more information on sentence-parsing.

Study the above example, and parsing the following ought to be a trivial exercise. (The above example is a great way of visualising "parallel prepositional phrases.")

It seems trite to say that because we all do, but I believe you can't make an essay until you can write a paragraph, and you can't write a paragraph until you know how to write a sentence, and you can't write a sentence until you know the elements of grammar.

My title is a tease: I mentally translated the preceding into German and used a trick -- it drove some of my slower fellow students crazy -- of sticking all the verbs at the end. Less sensitive German to word order is. (Hey, was Yoda really a German Jedi Master heisst Jodl?)

QUESTION OF THE DAY: Nat Hentoff:

In that university enclave of heavily weighted intellectual bias, shouldn't the students have the right to an exchange of views on the faculty?

Doesn't their tuition cover their right to have that diversity?

(Hat tip: Lynne Kiesling.) Academic freedom, fears Mr Hentoff, has deteriorated into the freedom to hire colleagues who make the existing faculty comfortable with its prejudices.

MISPLACED PRECISION? Professor Leiter correctly notes that the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics is a creature of a Swedish bank and not an award established in Alfred Nobel's will. Methinks he doth protest too much.

It's ironic, of course, that [Amartya] Sen should be the target here, since he is one of the few economists whose important work was not based on a scientistic pretense (indeed, Sen has done a good deal to undermine that disciplinary pretense). But the general point stands, and is perhaps worth making the next time someone says (and I've heard it many times), "You know, economics is the only social science for which there is a Nobel Prize.": in fact, no social sciences are recognized with Nobel Prizes, but economics is the only social science which has felt the need to pretend that it is so recognized.

Yes, but how many winners of the Economics award have emulated the winners of the authentic Nobel Literature and Nobel Peace Prizes and made silly statements shortly thereafter? That includes those individuals who won the Prizes for silly activity.

CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES NO. 108 calls at Conservative Dialysis. There is a list of future Carnival calls in the header.

PUBLIC CHOICES? Brendan Miniter:

It turns out that the one advantage of being a big spender is that it is hard to be tagged as inattentive to people's needs.

Yes, but what happens when all the contingent liabilities (the unfunded obligations of Social "Security" and Medicare are two) come due?

IT'S OLD, BUT IT BEARS REPEATING:

I am a senior citizen. During the Clinton Administration I had an extremely good and well paying job.

I took numerous vacations and had several vacation homes.

Full lament here or here.

John at Right Wing News has a related useful post spelling out his loss function in the case of a false positive, in this case the absence of a Ba'athist unconventional weapons program.

And this Dennis Prager column (via Betsy's Page) applies a useful corrective to those who would argue that the liberation of Iraq has simply midwived jihadis.

So here's the question that apparently goes unasked of all the Democrats who are sure it is President Bush who lacks intelligence: What would Zarqawi be doing now if he were not slaughtering people in Iraq? Selling used cars in Amman? Playing cello in the Berlin Philharmonic?

Or as I phrase it, reading the Koran and tending their goats?

WATER WARS. No, not in Africa, not in Southwest Asia, not even at the Mexican border. Try the Lake District of southeastern Wisconsin:

Residents of Upper Phantom Lake, near Mukwonago, Beaver Lake, near Hartland, and Lake Beulah, near East Troy, are worried that their predominantly spring-fed bodies of water could be adversely affected by new wells on or near those lakes.

"The issue is basically that (communities) are taking on huge amounts of growth and becoming suburbs of Milwaukee, and East Troy is no different," said Rob Hudson, whose family has lived on the nearly pristine Lake Beulah since the mid-1800s.

"We're saying, 'Don't take a chance of damaging one of your picturesque resources that attracts people to the community,' " he continued. "People with homes on the lake have significant investments. If the lake turns into green sludge because of damage done by wells, we'll lose our property values and East Troy will lose taxes."

Hudson said Lake Beulah and Upper Phantom Lake residents are enlisting the help of sportsmen and conservationists who are concerned about water resources.

Mining of water is not without its perils.

The recent nasty fight between the village and town of Eagle made headlines. It was so contentious that it spilled over into a failed referendum to dissolve the village in part over a new village well site in the town.

Town officials become angry when the village attempted to annex the land. Eagle Town Chairman Don Wilton said during one of many meetings on the issue that water would surpass oil as the most valuable resource in a county thirsty for continued economic development and the clean water needed to accommodate growth.

The Eagle dispute highlighted the main problem facing water utilities. The traditional source of drinking water - deep underground aquifers about 1,000 feet beneath the surface - has become unreliable and potentially dangerous.

MONITORING THAT ECOSYSTEM. The Truth Laid Bear has made improvements in the information produced by the Blogger Ecosystem. My report makes for some interesting reading: I have been the Most Adorable Little Rodent or the Least Marauding Marsupial for the past several weeks, that despite taking extended posting breaks during the summer and losing two formerly friendly connections that once provided a good deal of traffic yet might have inferred I had quit.

RUNNING EXTRA: And as of this afternoon, I'm marauding again. Lots of kangaroos and platypuses ahead of me.

CARNIVAL CALL. The latest Carnival of the Capitalists visits Business Pundit, who has also discovered a novel Pigouvian tax. (I once had a colleague who liked to caution economists about conflating an "externality" with "something I dislike" -- something many policy wonks seem prone to do. This colleague, as a way of making the point, suggested that loose thinking about externality could transform the Holocaust into a steep Pigouvian tax. The latter post I linked to suggested he had a point.)

DOMESTIC TERRORISM? So far, nobody is officially saying so, but ...

A wrench anyone could buy at a Home Depot was used to lossen the 2-inch bolts that toppled two electrical towers. American Transmission Company, the owner of the downed towers, has put up a $10,000 reward for information about this incident.

(From Sean at The American Mind.) Local news coverage is subdued.

MORE WORK TO BE DONE. Despite all the efforts of the National Council on Economic Education and others, students still enter university ... and pass through ... without developing much in the way of economic understanding. Although I share King's reluctance to fisk student columnists, one in today's Northern Star sets such a low standard for logic that -- well, it's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it. Onward.

Why does it seem as if the cost of education is as bad as it gets? Everyone talks about the importance of education, but finding money in government seems to be at the bottom of the task list.

What’s interesting is that when politicians run for office, they often talk about improving education and providing students with the best affordable education possible. However, in the past 25 years, the financial problems with education continue to get worse nationally. Government has a problem prioritizing and allocating sufficient amounts of money for its public schools and public universities. And we the students continue to give without receiving.

Literally. The writer is about to demonstrate that he has been on campus for at least a year (I recall this columnist from last academic year) without receiving any grounding in logical thinking.

Here’s a reminder: As taxpayers, we give corporations millions of dollars each year by purchasing cars, computers, clothing and fast food. In return, these corporations make millions of dollars and even may receive tax write-offs. What do we get in return? Insufficient amounts of money for education. We also get a front-page article informing us that the CEO of our favorite investment company - or sports team - has stolen millions of dollars from us as a whole. The following proposal would alleviate some of the financial problems that educational institutions are facing around the country. “Leave No Corporation Behind” is the proposed guide to improving the facilities and environment in which young people are taught.

Where to begin? (Hey, search my archives ... I've used this formulation frequently. President Bush, do you owe me a royalty?) First, let's distinguish the act of paying TAXES to GOVERNMENTS -- state support and all that -- from the act of making PURCHASES from CORPORATIONS. Isn't the obligation of a corporation to provide decent cars, computers, clothing, and (pardon the oxymoron) fast food? Now perhaps there is a case for corporations misusing corporate welfare -- something that underpins the scandals in agribusiness, energy, and professional sports. But the author has already confessed to "not receiving" from the University, which he will continue to demonstrate in the next few paragraphs. (As an aside, one might wish to consider Milton Friedman's suggestion that businesses which make large charitable contributions be investigated for antitrust violations.)

With this proposal, companies such as Nike, Reebok and Adidas would be allowed to build sports facilities on college campuses. The proposal would provide jobs, internships and graduate assistantships. These companies already give the sports programs discounts on merchandise while making millions of dollars off the universities’ likenesses. Why not have them build a facility, maintain it, allow the state to hire faculty and spend the money to pay faculty?

Ford, Pontiac and Oldsmobile should be allowed to provide cars at no cost to universities for the purpose of traveling to conferences and other collegiate events and, in return, receive tax write-offs and future business from full-time employees and students.

Got news for you: the sportswear companies are complicit in the losses most athletic departments run up. The problem with such a proposal is that the university then has to negotiate an exclusive dealing contract with a vendor. The contract Northern Illinois University has with Pepsi is one such illustration. And do we really want to extend the coaches' car contracts to the faculty? If a conference is an overnight train ride or flying distance away, do we want to tie the faculty to their company cars?

With ever-changing technology, a deal should be implemented that would allow Microsoft and Dell to build facilities while providing upgrades and the best software programs with computers to students year-round.

Let's see, didn't IBM get hit with an antitrust suit over such promotional discounts, years ago? And didn't Microsoft's "installed base" figure in its conviction for monopolization? Are you sure you want to go there?

U.S. Cellular agreed to pay the Chicago White Sox $68 million over 20 years for naming rights. What harm would it do for the Music Building to be named “Virgin Records,” for the record company, if it means the university would be presented with a check for $30 million for 10 years? Alumni donate millions of dollars every year to programs with their names on it. Why not maximize the benefits for students?

I don't follow. Are the existing sales of "naming opportunities" (note the kinder, gentler development office language) for the benefit of somebody other than the students?

Those that believe such a proposal is politically incorrect must be satisfied with the education they - or their children - are receiving. Unfortunately, it will be a cold day in hell before President George W. Bush or Gov. Rod Blagojevich advocates it like they do when they are campaigning for improvements in the cost of education.

And I fail to see the connection here to anything that precedes it. No shortage of work to do when I get back to the classroom, I can already see that.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

I would add that the [high school college preparatory and Advanced Placement] course--at least the micro half--seems to me to be especially offensive in this regard. They've sucked nearly all the excitement out of micro and replaced it with definitions and dull formalisms.

That's Newmark's Door, seconding Arnold Kling's observations on the drabness of introductory price theory. Amen. Hey, I didn't go to that economic education conference in Little Rock just to ride a new train line (yeah, right): there is some useful stuff INCLUDING material I can steal for university level courses circulating there. Unfortunately, the increased emphasis on economics within the social studies content standards means some of the more fun stuff has been made More Earnest. So instead of "Economics Mysteries" we now have "Capstone" and the Handy Dandy Guide, of which more anon, still exists but with a less frivolous name.

LET THE STUDENTS SPEAK. The editorial board at the Northern Star have taken a stand against a relic of the mid-1980s -- no, not me; rather the University's "free speech zone."

Free speech - especially at a public university - should be unrestricted, as long as it doesn’t hinder the educational purpose for which the school was established.

And I would urge caution in applying that trailing qualifier, as the educational purpose of a state-supported university, or any other university, ought to be subject to debate.

THEY DIDN'T EVEN STAMP MY PASSPORT. Betsy's Page picks up a story about the French engaging in introspection over whether their border guards turn tourists off.

The report also attacks immigration officers for giving a bad impression of the country, singling out those at the Eurostar terminal in London. "Instead of behaving like ambassadors for France, they don't even respond to 'hello' or a smile," it says.

True enough. The inspector flipped through my passport, handed it back, didn't say a word. The British, on the other hand, require passengers to fill in a landing card if they're from other than Common Market (oops, European Union) countries and they stamp passports. I thus have two UK entry stamps but no French, German, or Austrian entry stamps.

SCHOOL TORTURES. Jacqueline Passey doesn't like related rate problems.

"Let v(t) represent the volume of water in a tank at time t. Water flows into the tank at a rate of (1 + cos (t)) liters/min and leaks out of the tank at a rate of 5 liters/min. How much water is in the tank after six minutes? When does the tank become empty? How much water leaks out in the first five minutes?"

She suggests that the tank owner buy caulk rather than work calculus. Point taken. Those sand piles and bathtubs bored me, too (although once I got the hang they were pretty easy.) My preference would be something like this. A ship is 882 feet 9 inches long at the waterline and displaces 33,000 tons. Water flows into the bow at the rate of 100 gallons per minute. The pumps remove 75 gallons per minute from the bilges. What angle from the horizontal does the bow take after 60 minutes? When does the ship sink?

SCHOOL TORTURES.

Henry is a proper noun
Parse it up or parse it down
Neuter gender, hopeless case
Object of a funny face.

"Parsing" is one way of describing the art of sentence-diagramming, which Kitty Burns Florey (via Joanne Jacobs) pens a tribute to. We learned it slightly differently (there were subjects, verbs, and complements, none of this subject-predicate stuff) and only did the basics in the seventh grade, these coppices never came up in our copybooks. Was it more busy work or something useful?

ON MY NIGHTSTAND. Warren and Tyagi's The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents are Going Broke (details or compare prices) has come out in paperback. I will have more to say about its conclusions when I finish, but let me offer the following by way of prologue.

Ultimately, however, it did not matter whether there was a meaningful gap between the schools in the center cities and those in the surrounding suburbs, or whether the streets really were safer far away from the big city. It didn't even matter whether there really was a crisis in public education, as the politicians and the local news might insist. What matters was that parents believed that there was an important difference -- and that the difference was growing. The only answer for millions of loving parents was to buy their way into a decent school district in a safe neighborhood -- whatever the cost.

That's page 28. I'm glad to see the argument that there is school choice -- it comes bundled with a house purchase -- is getting broader circulation. There's more, in the next paragraph.

And so it was that middle-class families across America have been quietly drawn into an all-out war. ... Their war is a bidding war. The opening shots in this war were fired in the most ordinary circumstances. Individual parents sought out homes they thought were good places to bring up kids, just as their parents had done before them. ... Millions of parents joined in the search for a house on a safe street with a good school nearby. Over time, demand heated up for an increasingly narrow slice of the housing stock.

Or perhaps midwived sprawl, although there has to be a gold mine of research topics dealing with the expansion of school districts perceived as "good." What is the supply elasticity of teachers? Let me return to the book.

This in itself would have been enough to trigger a bidding war for suburban homes in good school districts. But a growing number of families brought new artillery to the war: a second income. In an era when the overwhelming majority of mothers are bringing home a paycheck and covering a big part of the family's bills, it is easy to forget that just one generation ago most middle-class mothers -- including those in the workforce -- made only modest contributions to the family's regular expenses.

You just can't avoid the Say Aggregation Principle. It's only logic.

But what is really impressive is a suggestion that surfaces at page 33.

In order to free families from the trap, it is necessary to go to the heart of the problem: public education. Bad schools impose indirect -- but huge -- costs on millions of middle-class families. In their desperate rush to save their children from failing schools, families are literally spending themselves into bankruptcy. The only way to take the pressure off these families is to change the schools.

The concept of public schools is deeply American. It is perhaps the most tangible symbol of opportunity for social and economic mobility for all children, embodying the notion that merit rather than money determines a child's future. But who are we kidding? As parents increasingly believe that the differences among schools will translate into differences in lifetime chances, they are doing everything they can to buy their way into the best public schools. [Colleges, too, although the premium to attending a name college is small to nonexistent. This book will be good for several week's worth of posts.[ Schools in middle-class neighborhoods may be labeled "public," but parents have paid for tuition by purchasing a $175,000 home within a carefully selected school district.

I like it when the bundling argument gets where lots of people, possibly some with more influence than I, might read it. I also like thos (p. 34)

A well-designed voucher program would fit the bill neatly. A taxpayer-funded voucher that paid the entire cost of educating a child (not just a partial subsidy) would open a range of opportunities to all children. ... Fully funded vouchers would relieve parents from the terrible choice of leaving their kids in lousy schools or bankrupting themselves to escape those schools.

And here, in a neat form, is the choice argument packaged with an egalitarian argument. Haven't I been ringing these changes for years?

More, much more, once I finish reading the book.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. Bill at Eject! Eject! has broken with his Chicago Great Western-like tradition of an omnibus post to run his latest in two sections. From the second section (it appears as if he through-composed it and then split it so it reads in correct order if you hit his front page) there's this.

SENATOR KERRY: But we also have to be smart, Jim. And smart means not diverting your attention from the real war on terror in Afghanistan against Osama bin Laden and taking if off to Iraq where the 9/11 Commission confirms there was no connection to 9/11 itself and Saddam Hussein, and where the reason for going to war was weapons of mass destruction, not the removal of Saddam Hussein.

Somewhere, in an infinity of alternate universes, there must be a place where at this very moment, Ben Stein is wandering the wasteland of Tora Bora with clipboard in hand, stumbling over the rocks, never looking up, and saying, “Osama..? Osama..? Osama..?”

God, the restraint that the President must have when that murdering bastard’s name is mentioned in derision as a sign of Bush’s incompetence. It’s practically superhuman.

First of all, you may recall that three years ago, the President -- correctly, in my estimation -- pointed out that this was not a criminal manhunt for Public Enemy Number One, but rather,

Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success. We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or no rest. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism.

“Secret even in success…” An interesting phrase, that. What does that mean?

Osama bin Laden has not been seen since the battle of Tora Bora in December of 2001. Remember now, this is not someone like Abu Nidal, a genuine terror mastermind described by the US State Department as having carried out terrorist attacks in 20 countries, killing or injuring almost 900 persons. Targets include the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Israel, moderate Palestinians, the PLO, and various Arab countries. Major attacks included the Rome and Vienna airports in December 1985, the Neve Shalom synagogue in Istanbul and the Pan Am Flight 73 hijacking in Karachi in September 1986, and the City of Poros day-excursion ship attack in Greece in July 1988

Abu Nidal was rightfully phobic about being photographed. Anonymity was camouflage to him: incredibly tight operational security, even plastic surgery. The man wanted to remain unseen. In fact he did remain unseen, retiring in his golden years to a nice apartment in Baghdad until he was assassinated by Saddam just before the war to maintain the well-established fact that Saddam had no ties to terrorism. No living ties to terrorism. Well, to that terrorist. It’s all very nuanced and sophisticated.

Contrast this behavior to that of Osama bin Laden, who did not operationally plan the 9/11 attacks (see dead underlings, above) but was rather the figurehead for an international organization of many thousands of fanatics, their numbers much thinned now.

Osama made endless videotapes. Lecturing, preaching, instructing, firing an AK-47: all the things that make young jihadis feel funny in the pants. After 9/11, he wowed ‘em in several tapes gloating and laughing over the attack and its aftermath. He was reliably heard on the radio during the final phase of Tora Bora, then…nothing.

Maybe he escaped. It’s possible.

Then came the videotape condemning the Israeli incursion into Ramallah and Jenin…only it didn’t. The US corporate scandals? Silence. Anniversary of Holy Tuesday? Cue the tumbleweeds.

The freaking invasion of a Muslim country by the Great Satan, and this new Caliph, the Leader of the Oppressed, cannot bring himself to shoot a crummy VHS in front of a white wall condemning this outrage? This glory-seeking egomaniac, the New Saladin riding the White Horse across the desert, who practically put out a 10 DVD commemorative set every time the US so much as hiccupped, is now suddenly silent, and has been for three years?

You may call that a Terror Mastermind. I call it a greasy wet spot on the wall of a cave in Afghanistan.

The man is dead. Dead, or just possibly captured. The likelihood of him having been killed at Tora Bora by US “outsourcing” was rising with his deafening silence concerning each American counterstroke and became 100% when nothing was heard from the late Osama after the US invasion of Iraq.

Does President Bush know what became of him? I would say, very likely. We know what did not become of him: he didn’t become a Martyr. He did not become the symbol of Glorious Death resisting the Great Satan. He did not become a Symbol or a Cause or an Example to Them All.

He became, if you will pardon the expression, AWOL. Bugged out. Handed in his walking papers. Fizzle…poof. Gone.

His main theme for the election:

Folks, it’s time to reach down deep and get in touch with our inner adult.

George Will suggests that there is something else at work: the continued reluctance of the Old Establishment to credit its opposition with any inner adult at all.

Conservatism's 40-year climb to dominance receives an examination worthy of its complexity in "The Right Nation," the best political book in years. Its British authors, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge of the Economist, demonstrate that conservative power derives from two sources -- its congruence with American values, especially the nation's anomalous religiosity, and the elaborate infrastructure of think tanks and other institutions that stresses that congruence.

Liberals, now tardily trying to replicate that infrastructure, thought they did not need it because they had academia and the major media. But the former marginalized itself with its silliness, and the latter have been marginalized by their insularity and by competitors born of new technologies.

Liberals complacently believed that the phrase "conservative thinker" was an oxymoron. For years -- generations, really -- the prestige of the liberal label was such that Herbert Hoover called himself a "true liberal" and Dwight Eisenhower said that cutting federal spending on education would offend "every liberal -- including me."

Liberalism's apogee came with Lyndon Johnson, who while campaigning against Goldwater proclaimed, "We're in favor of a lot of things, and we're against mighty few." Johnson's landslide win produced a ruinous opportunity -- a large liberal majority in Congress and incontinent legislating. Forty years later, only one-third of Democrats call themselves liberal, whereas two-thirds of Republicans call themselves conservative. Which explains this Micklethwait and Wooldridge observation on the Clinton presidency:

"Left-wing America was given the answer to all its prayers -- the most talented politician in a generation, a long period of peace and prosperity, and a series of Republican blunders -- and the agenda was still set by the right. Clinton's big achievements -- welfare reform, a balanced budget, a booming stock market and cutting 350,000 people from the federal payroll -- would have delighted Ronald Reagan. Whenever Clinton veered to the left -- over gays in the military, over health care -- he was slapped down."

TO PROFIT LIKE A CAPITALIST, THINK LIKE A SEWER SOCIALIST.

The old socialist Dan Hoan would have smiled to hear his grandson speak at the annual stockholders meeting of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. in April.

Thus does the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel begin a four-parter on the topic of CEO pay rising relative to that of entry-level workers.

Dan Steininger, head of Milwaukee's Catholic Knights insurance company, questioned how J.P. Morgan Chase chief executive William B. Harrison Jr. could be awarded $20 million in compensation last year, about 743 times the pay of an average worker in America.

Calling such compensation "outrageous and indecent," Steininger's speech quoted J.P. Morgan himself, who once said no chief executive should earn more than 20 times an average worker's pay.

No socialist himself, Steininger has pressured companies across America on behalf of his company's mutual fund, The Catholic Funds, while arguing that overpaid executives lower profits and hurt stockholders. But like a true grandson of Hoan, Milwaukee's mayor from 1916 to 1940, Steininger wants to reclaim an America where labor and management salaries tend to rise or fall together.

It's not just for the talking heads anymore. The Senate has taken an interest in the topic.

The climb in compensation has begun to affect the pay of executives at hospitals, universities and foundations, as salaries there rise much faster than inflation. That's attracted the attention of the U.S. Senate's Finance Committee, which has discussed legislation to crack down on excessive compensation for non-profit leaders.

All this comes at a time when average Americans are seeing their raises chewed up by rising health care costs, their retirement plans diminished or dropped, and their jobs moving to low-wage countries such as Mexico and China. A 2002 Harris Poll found that 87% of respondents felt that executives "had gotten rich at the expense of ordinary workers."

No mention in the first installment of the role, or lack thereof, of the failure of the common schools to equip kids with the skills to demonstrate an aptitude for responsibilities beyond those at the entry level.

AND THE BEAT GOES ON. Sabbatical or no, it is early October, and time for the President of the University to deliver the State of the University Address, this time in the renovated Altgeld Hall, which at many converted teachers colleges would be called the "Old Main" Hall. Comments to come this week.

CONTROVERSIAL GIANT PASSES.

Jacques Derrida, the Algerian-born, French intellectual who became one of the most celebrated and notoriously difficult philosophers of the late 20th century, died Friday at a Paris hospital, the French president's office announced. He was 74.

(From the New York Times, via Henry at Crooked Timber.)

What is it about some controversial figures that their defenders have to use the "bad acolytes, good priest" argument? Consider this, from Balkinization:

Perhaps the most important thing to say about Derrida is that he was not a Derridean. Other people made use of his work in ways that would probably have horrified him. He was what Richard Rorty once called an edifying philosopher-- not a system builder, or a great fashioner of airtight arguments, but one whose work incited and inspired others.

Yeh, I've heard the same thing about Marx and about Stalin.

Sean at The American Mind finds a Samizdata tribute on a somewhat lighter note.

Though to say that he has "died" is to, perhaps, impose a structural context defined by the ontology of Western metaphysics. In the grammatic, linguistic and rhetorical senses he has merely desedimented, dismantled and decomposed. Indeed, this is a grand narrative undoing in the egological, methodological and general sense, as opposed to a mere critique in the idiomatic or Kantian sense.

DO-IT-YOURSELF MACROECONOMETRIC FORECASTING Econopundit posts his own evaluation of the current cut in tax rates on the deficit, with links to the model should readers wish to do their own.

THE "FREE SPEECH ZONE" FOLLY CONTINUES. Protesters march for free speech. Group upset by NIU policy designating zones for expression.

And how long will this relic of emergent political correctness persist at Northern Illinois University? Yes, emergent.

In 1985, NIU and other universities across the nation chose a location on campus where students could meet and set up protests. The MLK Commons area outside the Holmes Student Center was the location designated NIU’s first “free-speech zone.” When Vice President Dick Cheney visited NIU Sept. 18, a small area was designated outside the Convocation Center for protest.

(Isn't that special? I was in Semmering the weekend of Speaker Hastert's fundraiser, but bet there was some carping in high university circles about the use of the Convocation Center for such, well, Republican, purposes. On the other hand, the Speaker has been generous to the University ...)

I am going to have to send another missive to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. 'Twould be a shame for the hottest public college in Illinois (and jousting with Northwestern ... Northwestern?? ... for football bragging rights in the state) to persist in this folly of limiting free speech to small areas, even if, at the moment, the protestors appear to be the usual crop of Sixties wannabes:

Marissa McGrath, a representative for the Women’s Alliance, said this protest shows students here can handle free speech and should be allowed to advocate it freely.

“Freedom of speech is important to everyone, especially women, due to issues of inequality,” McGrath said.

Mike Banghart, a member of the Labor Rights Alliance, said that this was the first step in this campaign to show student approval and to give hard evidence supporting this fact.

“We are prepared to escalate the campaign further if action is not made to end the free-speech zones,” Banghart said.

I mean, c'mon, there are more female students than male students on campus, and on average they get better grades and graduate more rapidly. And those non-negotiable demands? Those are so 1965. Do you really want to antagonise people who might be inclined to agree with you?

LIGHTS OUT, AIRPORT CLOSED, TRACKS BLOCKED. A "corner tower" on a high tension line in the Milwaukee area collapsed into another tower, interrupting electric power to Mitchell Field and blocking the old Milwaukee Road tracks, leading to a morning suspension of Amtrak Hiawatha service. A "corner tower" is a particularly critical part of a high tension line, as it is located where the line changes direction (it would be more accurate to call it a vertex tower at the end of two tangents, but that's the drawback of a good grounding in mathematics). As the spokeswoman for the power company noted, "It's a beautiful Saturday afternoon, and the towers tipped over. It's not an act of God." The tower collapsed shortly after Senator Edwards, the Democratic nominee, arrived at Mitchell Field. Owen at Boots and Sabers asks, "Sabotage in Milwaukee?" and Sean at The American Mind wonders, "Why'd They Fall Down?"

IT IS MINE. The bank has responded to the letter I bragged about recently.

The principal balance on the above referenced loan is lower than your required monthly principal and interest payment.

Enclosed is a payoff statement itemizing the amount necessary to pay your loan in full. Please remit this amount for your final loan payment.

Gee, you'd think they could be a bit more positive than that, don't you. Then I look at the statement, which has this bold warning:

ONLY VALID FUNDS WILL BE ACCEPTED FOR THE PAYOFF SHOWN BELOW

So I took some currency to the bank ... I didn't have enough loose pennies to make the fractional dollar part all pennies ... does that mean I paid cash for my house?

One of the entries on the statement is a "recording fee" of $18. Whether the marginal cost of sending a boilerplate statement to the county registrar of deeds is $18 is something I'd just as soon not investigate, but it's probably another of the strange one-off exactions the real estate industry specializes in. David Hapgood's The Screwing of the Average Man (details or compare prices) has a whole chapter on the weird world of real estate.

WHO ARE THE REAL FASCISTS? Tim at Where Worlds Collide wonders, "Is America Turning Fascist?" He links to a long article suggesting that assorted colorful conservative entertainers (for that is the most accurate description of Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and their buddies) might in fact be leading indicators of a very scary American fascism.

Meanwhile, the compassion fascists have been actively terrorizing ... Republicans. Sean at The American Mind has a roundup of what appear to be coordinated attacks on local Republican offices in several states. John at Powerline also has the story, and a followup in which several (Republican) Members of Congress have asked Attorney General Ashcroft to investigate these attacks (the rider asking for a concurrent investigation of Democratic voter-registration tricks may or may not be helpful.)

Confessions of A Political Junkie has an observation that casts additional doubt on the "fascist" meme:

Fear and intimidation are real in American politics. The left has become desperate for a win. Republicans are, as an institution, comfortable with being out of power because, after all, Republicans generally seek to reduce the role of government. Lefties, on the other hand, cannot handle being out of power -- especially after being in power for so long. The left understands that to advance its agenda, it must be in power. So now the left will resort to voter fraud and violence to regain the Presidency.

The puzzle for some future research" why the complicity of organized labor? I have picked up Thomas Frank's What's The Matter With Kansas? (Borders' gift certificates are useful -- details or compare prices) and will have more to say about it later, but for now want to note Frank's reflexive equating of the Democrats with organized labor and with the poor is misplaced -- George Orwell's 1930s snark at socialists as a coalition of the odd is probably more accurate about today's Democrats: all of this by way of wondering why organized labor is providing the muscle for these attacks on Republican offices?

BOWL-ELIGIBLE. The Ohio State football team has lost only six games in Columbus, Ohio, in the last three years. Three of those losses are to Wisconsin. To put things in perspective, the Superintendent has intelligence that former Ohio State coach John Cooper was replaced by Jim Tressel over Cooper's difficulty beating Wisconsin (a team that has turned three yards and a cloud of dust into a formula for winning Rose Bowls, something the late great Woody Hayes had trouble doing.) On the other hand, Wisconsin failed to win a game in Columbus, Ohio, between 1912 and 1982.

At halftime of the Northern Illinois at Central Florida game, the score was 21-0 Northern Illinois, after Ray Smith returned an interception 68 yards for a touchdown. I decided it was time to eat supper and play the "Fifth Quarter" tape (for the first time this fall: the neighbors should expect to hear it again.) Then back to the Northern Illinois game, where things were getting worse. It got so bad, in fact, that with 45 seconds to go, Central Florida scored a touchdown and conversion to take a 1 point lead. Perhaps one of the little things that separates the winless teams from the winning teams is the ability to milk the clock, in this case by going ahead with sufficient time for Northern Illinois to reach Central Florida's 22-yard line and kick the winning field goal.

And now to tie all the teams together ... let's go back to 1988, when Northern Illinois beat Wisconsin in Madison (on a late field goal) and Wisconsin beat Ohio State, also in Madison, in much worse weather, which enabled an enterprising Chicago Tribune sportswriter to play "A beat B beat C ..." to crown Northern Illinois the national champion.

SPEEDING THINGS UP. Amtrak's Texas Eagle is able to make up time and offer generally good timekeeping south of St. Louis because, compared to 1960, the trains have slower scheduled running times and more allowance for freight interference. Here is a comparison of the northbound schedules, with pm time shown in bold. (southbound schedules are much changed in 40 years.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~1960~~~~ 2004
________________MP-GM&O__Amtrak
Lv. San Antonio....................2.30......... 8.00
Lv. Austin.............................3.59.........10.31
Lv. Longview........................9.30.........7.05
Lv. Texarkana......................11.15..........9.13
Lv. Little Rock......................2.00...........12.59
Arr. St. Louis........................8.25.............8.09
Lv. St. Louis.........................8.58.............8.45
Lv. Springfield....................10.46...........10.41
Lv. Joliet..............................1.19..........1.20
Arr. Chicago.......................2.08..........2.25

The train routes are different between Austin and Longview today. On the other hand, that 30 minute connection in St. Louis was sufficient time for the switcher to pick the Chicago sleeping car off the Missouri Pacific train and tack it on the Gulf Mobile and Ohio train. Coach passengers made a transfer on foot. Today all passengers ride through, using a smaller St. Louis station (something Missouri Pacific management contemplated in the 1960s.)

THOSE CROWDED RAILS. The Noble Pundit has discovered Photon Courier's coverage of the meltdown on the freight railroads, and he offers a few comments of his own.

Basically, the gist of the articles(here and here and here and here) is that the freight railroads in the United States are facing capacity constraints caused by a lack of locomotive power and from actual phyical plant constraints caused by the elimination of double tracking in many parts of the country.

Much of this is related to the relentless drive towards efficiency that the railroads have been engaged in over the last 40 years. We can take it all the back to the MUing (or multiple unit) of diesel engines when they first came out. Prior to the ability to MU locomotives, every engine had to have its own crew. When the MU capable diesels came along, suddenly one crew could singlehandedly control the power that in years past would have required four steam locomotives and their corresponding four crews. So with this new labor efficiency, the railroads began shedding manpower at a fairly high rate.

That approach has perils of its own. The Deramus family attempted, both at Chicago Great Western and at Kansas City Southern, to exploit the low-speed capabilities of the diesel to handle all of their traffic in one huge train a day each way. The consequences include additional breakage of equipment, as couplers and brake hoses do not always stand the strain, and slow handling of goods, as the one train a day has to do all the local work that the peddler freights used to do. The ton-miles per man hour looks impressive, but shipper satisfaction falls off.

The second big efficiency that was implemented was CTC or Centralized Traffic Control. Basically this moved the control over a section of track from being the responsiblility of a local located trackside tower to a centralized control center in a major city (Union Pacific runs from, I believe, Omaha. CSX is run out of Jacksonville). This allowed the railroads to shed more manpower by concentrating their dispatchers in one location and so long as that location stays up and running, everything is good. CTC is far more labor efficient.

It also permits the railroads to make more effective use of their tracks, as faster trains are no longer restricted to following slower trains on the same track, and as the dispatcher has an easier time of overriding the timetable when services get disrupted. But it calls for a certain amount of discipline to not send slower trains ahead of faster ones in the first place, or to delay the passenger trains ... Union Pacific had no end of trouble when it took over the Chicago area commuter service.

Being able to MU locomotives and the implementation were really the low hanging fruit of the efficiency movement in the rail industry. Both actions made sense and really didn’t effect the capacity or operation of the railroad in any significant way – in fact, they often made the road more profitable and increased the capacity through better utilization.

But after the debacle of the Penn Central and as the malaise of the late 70s set in, the rail industry began to experience a condition of over capacity. The government, through the ICC was more apt to let lines get abandoned to prevent more massive bankruptcies. Passenger service went from abysmal to effectively non-existent for large swaths of the country – even after the advent of Amtrak. Railroads started looking to shed physical plant, and the government was in a mood to let it happen.

And so pressure relieving branch lines were let go to the weeds. In many places, between CTC and lower traffic, it was possible to rip up double tracking and to save on the maintenance costs. As more and more traffic transferred to the interstates (partially because of the reduced coverage of rail service) the rail industry seemed to be caught in a vicious downward spiral of falling traffic. Given the gloomy outlook, the industry can hardly be faulted for cutting the physical plant capacity.

Let's not confuse the pressure-relieving secondary lines (such as Penn Central's old Pennsylvania lines from Indianapolis to St. Louis and Crestline to Chicago, Conrail's Lackawanna Cutoff and the Erie west of the Pennsylvania-Ohio line) with the truly excess main lines (Milwaukee's Pacific Coast extension, much of the Rock Island) or the branch lines that generate a few cars per month for the through trains to cope with. The single-tracking with controlled sidings might have gone too far. Union Pacific spent a lot to restore the second main track in western Iowa, Burlington Northern Santa Fe is doubling the entire Kansas City-Belen-Southern California line, and the Michigan and St. Louis passenger corridors out of Chicago aren't going to be serious without a second main track.

Later, as the 80s came on and traffic seemed to level off some, the cuts to the physical plant slowed down (but didn’t stop), but the railroads started looking for ways to get rid of their older diesel engines, but to do so in a way that didn’t require them to go out and buy one for one replacements. So they started looking around and they realized that at certain times of the year, motive power was in higher demand in one location and at other times, in other locations. Problem was, those locations weren’t always on the same railroad. So they got together and worked out motor pooling arrangements. Basically these arrangements allowed for run-throughs of motive power on long distance, multi-line trains, and allowed for the use of say, a UP locomotive in Miami by CSX, or a CSX locomotives in Los Angeles. Kind of like a giant rent by the hour scheme in which more often than not, the roads were just trading hours, not cash.

And so with all this, especially the pooling of motive power and physical plant cutbacks led to the rail industry being able to compete with truckers again. The rail chieftians had their industry running at peak efficiency.

The point of hiving off the branch lines is to be able to run long trains with little paperwork from one shipper to one consignee. Coal trains from mine to generating plant are good, as are container trains from coastal dock to inland city (or coast-to-coast) and grain trains from a large elevator to a dock. Automobile shipments require relatively little switching under current arrangements. Motive power sharing is not something new: the Bangor and Aroostook was able to buy some additional diesels for the potato harvest season because the Pennsylvania was willing to hire them for the iron ore shipping season, which is constrained by ice conditions at the Soo Locks. Noble Pundit has neglected an important institutional change in his story, which is the effect of deregulation of railroad rates with the 1980 Staggers Act.

But that, in and of itself, has become the biggest impediment to the rail industry. They are now too efficient.

What has ended up happening is that with the increased efficiency has come increased traffic. More and more traffic coming in to our ports is coming in on containers that immediately go onto trains to be transported to within a short distance of their final destination. Other shippers of grain, of rock, of manufacturing parts are all now more willing to use rail to move their product as it is moving finally. It isn’t always necessarily true any more that a product could be driven faster than it could be shipped by rail. And the cost per lb is extremely competitive due to the reduced expenses of the railroads.

But what the railroads are facing now is the problem of a capacity constaint. They focused so hard on making sure that everything was being utilized as efficiently as possible that they wrung out all of their excess capacity – including their surge capacity. As soon as traffic started to rise above the planned levels, there was no reserve to reach into to move the freight. There are only so many locomotives. There are only so many routes between points A & B. Right now, the railroads simply can’t move anything more than they already are.

The problem that arises is a bit more challenging. Under deregulation, railroads have freedom to adjust their rates. Many have gone after traffic by offering rates that cover the avoidable cost of the service (crews and rolling stock) but do not yield sufficient return to replace, let alone add additional, capacity. Whether there is a price that balances traffic with capacity while allowing for the replacement or addition of permanent way remains to be seen. (That's stuff for another post, this one is getting long.)

DESIGN YOUR OWN OP-ED. Orin at Volokh Conspiracy has issued a call for comments from webloggers who initially supported the liberation of Iraq to reply to three questions.

First, assuming that you were in favor of the invasion of Iraq at the time of the invasion, do you believe today that the invasion of Iraq was a good idea? Why/why not?

Second, what reaction do you have to the not-very-upbeat news coming of Iraq these days, such as the stories I link to above?

Third, what specific criteria do you recommend that we should use over the coming months and years to measure whether the Iraq invasion has been a success?

The post has links to the first 35 responses, and further responses are listed in the post. He plans to read and react to what has come in. I hope he has the time, there's a LOT of stuff.

"HARD WORK" IS THE NEW CODE WORD. Grant at Anthropology and Economics thinks about it.

Most Americans don't work for a living. They risk for a living. If they run a small business, they are especially vulnerable. If they are members of Free Agent Nation, they must be very, very responsive to a changing set of circumstances. Even if they belong to a corporation, large or small, they are subject to the vicissitudes of the marketplace. As the corporation confronts new dynamism, they can be downsized, rationalized or otherwise dumped.

The Democratic camp, many of them, may work for a living, but they do not risk for a living. They hold protected positions in unions, civil services, and universities. The world may rise and fall with dynamism, but they ride not the large and small boats of enterprise, but a larger, more secure, platform of occupational privilege. (The “owning” vs. “working” class distinction is still a salient distinction. But the real measure of privilege may be how protected we are from dynamic effects of the marketplace.)

Anthropology and Economics ought to be on your daily reading list. He's also thinking about why there are inventors, and the emulation of the aristocracy.

STILL WORK TO BE DONE. Tyler at Marginal Revolution:

"I still don't understand what caused the Great Depression. Why couldn't everyone just change all the prices? What is it you teach people anyway?"

Hmm, didn't the National Recovery Administration subscribe to the notion that falling prices led to falling wages led to falling purchases led to falling employment ... so if you could just stop the prices from falling, things would get no worse.

MORE ON "SOCIAL" "SECURITY". The owner of the limousine I use for the DeKalb to O'Hare Airport legs of my trips and I had an interesting conversation about "ownership" and retirement planning. He contended that Social Security is desirable for less-prosperous workers who might have trouble putting aside money for their retirement on small paychecks and with lots of dependents. People with bigger paychecks might be able to put some money away. My challenge to him: isn't the Social Security Administration betting on sufficient economic growth that the government will have sufficient tax revenues to support those poor people in their retirement? And thus, don't both the trust fund and the private retirement accounts rely, ultimately, on continued economic growth?

James Miller makes the same point:

Imagine that under our current pay-as-you-go system the government issued a note to all young people promising to pay them each $100,000 when they are Old. This promissory note would have no real effect on the economy because even before issuing the note the government had a $100,000 future obligation to each of the Young. From an accounting viewpoint, however, these notes would vastly increase the federal debt because now the government would have an explicit obligation to each Young person.

(Hat tip: Newmark's Door. King at SCSU Scholars has some background information on Professor Miller.)

Arnold Kling's Econ Log has a summary of recent debates among the economics webloggers about privatizing social security. Go there and start scrolling. He has a related post and a column about saving, forced or otherwise.

Disclaimer: the Superintendent does not view the Social Security trust fund as a form of saving. More on that in the near future.

TODAY'S ECONOMICS PUZZLE comes from Don at Cafe Hayek.

Suppose a housewife one day accidentally discovers that a gallon of tap water combined with a dash of salt, a pinch of flour, a drop of ammonia, a splash of cooking oil, and tiny bits of several other ordinary kitchen ingredients will produce a concoction that ... is 100% safe and totally effective. The cost of producing each gallon of this stuff is $0.02.

Further, in a fit of magnanimity, this resourceful woman publishes her finding on the Net, free of charge.

Several large corporations are devastated, for no longer will families spend money buying laundry and dish detergent, window cleaner, baby wash, toothpaste, and breath fresheners. Thousands of workers who “played by the rules” lose their jobs with the firms that produced now-obsolete products such as Windex, Tide, Cascade, Fantastik, Gleem, and Listerine.……

Now change the example just a bit. This housewife makes this discovery but, in a fit of self-interestedness, she keeps the concoction secret and starts producing it herself, selling it retail at, say, $5.00 per gallon. Its popularity is immediate and immense. She makes a fortune – and in the process devastates the likes of Colgate-Palmolive, Lever Brothers, and Johnson & Johnson no less than these firms would have been devastated had she given her secret away free of charge on the Internet.

Which scenario is the better one, judged from the perspective of “social” welfare?

The purpose of the puzzle:

When I explain this fact to my students, they eventually get it (or so I fancy). But the very need to have to explain carefully that valuable goods and services offered free – or at lower and lower prices – are a benefit to society and not a problem reveals the challenge that right-thinking people confront when debating protectionist demagogues.

Read and understand.

CARNIVAL CALL. Carnival of the Capitalists makes its one-year appearance at Drakeview. Yes, it has been a year.

TRADE-OFFS. Live from the Third Rail notes that the London Transport Police have captured a rather aggressive tagger.

Although the press release calls him a disturbed sociopath, I bet he has a lot of useful information about security vulnerabilities in the tube system. Given that he spent so much time in so many off-limits ares of the system, Tox may be of use in preventing terrorists from having the access he had.

TO ENCOURAGE THE OTHERS. During the economic education conference, the topic of disciplining sensitive kids came up, in the form of a joke that applies to the Packers' problems with injured cornerback Mike McKenzie. Perhaps Mr McKenzie's agent told the general manager, "Mike is a rather sensitive man. To cut him would damage his self-esteem. Cut Terrell Buckley instead." Never mind that. Mr. McKenzie is now a New Orleans Saint. Whether the rest of the team will be encouraged remains to be seen.

RENT SEEKERS AT WORK. Liquor licensing boards are marvelous examples of cartel management as well as good places for aspiring investigative journalists to start their careers. The one in West Allis, Wisconsin, is no exception.

The Common Council is expected to decide Tuesday night whether to lift its quota on liquor licenses so a Milwaukee business can open an 8,000-square-foot liquor store at 10711 W. Oklahoma Ave.

The quota, of course, has the effect of generating monopoly rents, which, of course, are dissipated in rent-seeking.

If approved by the required two-thirds vote of the council tonight, it would be the first time in its 10-year history that the quota has been lifted for a liquor store. Only two licenses have been granted since the quota was imposed, according to City Attorney Scott Post, both for restaurants.

But opposition is mounting from competitors, nearby residents and prior applicants who were turned down for licenses because of the quota.

"They told us that if we got a license, they'd have to give one to every business that applied or they'd have lawsuits on their hands," said Linda Lutz, co-owner of the West Allis Cheese & Sausage Shoppe, which sought a license so it could sell wine and specialty beers in its gift baskets.

"Well, they will have a lawsuit," Lutz said. "If this man gets his license, we will expect to get ours, and we will go to any extent to get it."

Also objecting is Abdul Khan, who owned K-C Beverage at S. 95th St. and W. National Ave. for 13 years before losing his lease when the building was sold. Khan said he agreed to go into business with Anup Khullar at the W. Oklahoma site but opened across the street after the two spent a year squabbling about lease terms and who had the legal right to Khan's liquor license.


"Now they are awarding a new license?" Khan said. "And their attorney is the son of an alderman?"

Priceless.

ACADEMIC WORK AND SOCIAL LIFE. Laura at 11-D has been hard at work. One observation reflects the spatial isolation of many of the smaller colleges (and not a few large ones):

Even those without kids have found academia incompatible with a personal life. The high level of mobility and scarcity of jobs puts pressures on couples. Many singles must accept positions in rural areas of the country where there are little opportunities to date. Discuss.

And then there's this:

Several factors are conspiring to make academia a particularly hostile place for parents. 1) The level of competition for jobs means that universities have no need to accommodate individuals with family responsibilities. 2) Most women don’t finish their dissertations until their mid thirties and don’t secure tenure until their forties. Too late to start a family. 3) The profession is traditionally male, and women don’t feel comfortable asking for a special room to breastfeed or for paid maternity leave. 4) There are no adequate part-time options for parents. Adjuncting doesn't pay for the babysitter.

The comment sections are busy.

Ah, but is it any better in the for-profit sector?

TO GET RESULTS, FIRE THE MANAGER? The Milwaukee Brewers fired manager Phil Garner a few years ago. The Detroit Tigers, another powerhouse of the 1980s that has fallen on tough times of late, hired him and then fired him at mid-season. Mr Garner landed on his feet, however, when the Houston Astros fired their manager at mid-season and hired him (along with, if memory serves, some of his coaching staff from the Brewers.) Houston, who this year did not have to play Milwaukee at the end of the year, managed to make the playoffs as the wild-card entry. Skip at Sports Economist is pleased. The Brewers and the Tigers? Bringing up the rear ...

AND NOW THEY WANT TO USE OUR MONEY FOR FREE. Life at a state-tolerated university in the Era of Tight Budgets is not without its amusing moments. Although there is insufficient money to provide for duplication of course outlines and other class materials in the department (the geniuses that came up with this policy must not have heard of the Law of Unintended Consequences as students download the materials and print them in the university's computer labs) there is money for the circulation of all sorts of announcements and other special pleading from the central administration.

The latest must be an award winner of sorts. It's not just a leaflet, it came in an envelope as somebody decided a smaller folder on slick paper without room to print the mailing address was the smarter way to go. Its opener:

Congratulations!!!

You've been selected to join

the Faculty/Staff of Northern

Illinois University!!!

As an employee of NIU, you will experience

new opportunities and face many new

challenges, such as ...

"What's for lunch, and how can I pay for it?"

Let's leave aside the breathless style and the insulting suggestion that what is most on our minds is lunch. Let's focus on what is being offered: an opportunity to set up a Huskie Bucks account, which permits the holder to purchase copies, snacks from the vending machines, and meals at various campus food services as well as from some local restaurants. All you have to do to set up an account is make an initial deposit of $25.00, which gives you a restricted demand deposit account (limited to participating vendors with no check writing privileges) that pays no interest. Thanks a lot. I really have to get back to work on the deck of cards. The genius who came up with this leaflet really deserves one.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Andrew Sullivan:

THE PROMISE OF GRIDLOCK: One reason some people might get over their fiscal concerns about Kerry is that most observers seem to agree that the Congress is likely to stay Republican after November 2. That means that Kerry is unlikely to be able to afford his big healthcare package and may be forced, like Clinton, into getting serious about deficit reduction. One thing we do know is that unified Republican government means vast new spending increases, and the collapse of fiscal discipline. I'd be just as terrified by unified Democratic government, mind you (although we wouldn't have to deal with excrescences like the FMA). Divided government, in other words, is perhaps the only real mechanism we have - apart from a constitutional amendment to balance the budget - to restrain the politicians in D.C. from spending even more of our money. My advice: if you're voting Bush, think seriously about pulling the Dem lever for the House and Senate; vice-versa for the Kerry backers. The last thing we want is to give either of these guys the carte blanche Bush has had for four fiscally ruinous years.

IT DEPENDS ON WHAT THE MEANING OF "HISTORIC" IS. An 1899 Rock Island Lines freight house had to be demolished as part of the construction of the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock. There were several other railroad freight houses in Little Rock at one time, which also gave way to other uses.

I LOOKED AT MY WATCH AND IT WAS OH-THREE-THIRTY. The car attendant was knocking on my door. "Little Rock in thirty minutes." That's versus a timetabled departure time of 4.30 am on the southbound Texas Eagle (hey -- a slideshow.) And herewith a compare-and-contrast of sleeping car services on two sides of the Atlantic. The Texas Eagle ran fast through Illinois, where your tax dollars have gone to upgrading the line as far as Springfield, with 110 mph operation contemplated in the near future. The route serves Joliet, a few good-sized towns, Illinois State University at Bloomington and Normal, and the state capital at Springfield. Whether the investment to restore the second main track and provide a real corridor service at one or two hour headways remains as an exercise.

What came as a surprise was how fast the train ran south of St. Louis, on its ancestral Missouri Pacific rails. The less pleasant surprise was how aggressively it ran. The sleeping car was the last car on the train, and that made for a wild game of crack-the-whip all the way south ... I'd doze off, then get shaken awake to the other side of my bunk. But that did get us into Little Rock well ahead of the timetabled arrival time.

Good timekeeping on the Texas Eagle line is apparently common.

(As an aside, I don't want anybody to interpret the following picture of a late-running train as an omen!)

Some of that good timekeeping, however, is a consequence of ample recovery margins provided to cope with freight train interference (although the Little Rock-St. Louis-Joliet via Springfield part of Union Pacific is not a primary freight line.) My return trip is illustrative. The train, expected around 12.30 am at Little Rock, actually arrived about 12.52 am and departed at 1.01 am. In the two preceding hours, two Union Pacific mixed freight trains headed south, two van trains arrived from the south, as well as three Union Pacific mixed freight trains and one freight train each headed by Norfolk Southern and Burlington Northern Santa Fe power. One wonders what speeds and frequencies the San Antonio-Dallas-Longview-Little Rock-St. Louis corridor could support with some proper dispatching and discipline, as well as some profiling of the curves.

I am not familiar enough with the haulage rights allocated to other systems as a consequence of the mergers to identify those trains with the owners of the locomotives. Our trip north was not pressed as vigorously, although we were into St. Louis two minutes late, and away on time, at 8.45 am. (The dining car made its final call for breakfast at 8.30, during the St. Louis stop. That's more like a corridor train than a cruise train.) We were into Chicago on time.

The sleeping accommodation is in the Amtrak Superliner sleeping cars, which have rooms on two levels. There is one stair from the lower, boarding level, to the upper level, where the five deluxe bedrooms and ten of the economy bedrooms are provided. In the old language, the upper level is ten double roomettes without facilities and five bedrooms. The lower level is four more economy rooms plus two special bedrooms (nobody says "drawing room" any more.) This site offers some traveler tips.

Superliner sleeping car at Dallas

The Little Rock Missouri Pacific depot is quite well preserved, given Missouri Pacific's attitude toward passenger trains in the late 1960s and the absence of all passenger trains from Arkansas from early 1971 until 1974.

Many of the former railroad offices in the upper floors have been converted to other sorts of offices.

The City Night Line's Donau Kurier from Frankfurt (Main) Hauptbanhof to Wien West was an entirely different experience. I have little to report on as I slept most of the way from Mannheim (departed about midnight) to someplace beyond Linz (where I awoke at 7 am). No crack-the-whip on this train. I must do some more research before making a comparison of running times and running speeds. The rolling stock is different. The body appears to be derived from the Austro-German split-level commuter coach, but in place of upper and lower corridors with seats on each side of the aisle, there is a corridor along one side of the car with spiral staircases up to the deluxe rooms and down to the economy rooms. (There is a summary of European sleeping accommodation here and another here.)

Exterior of City Night Lines split-level sleeping car.

I slept too well to spend much time counting spaces in the car to obtain a capacity comparison with the Superliner cars.

RAILROAD MYSTERIES FROM MITTELEUROPA. A member of the Live from the Third Rail team has been riding the rails behind the old Iron Curtain, where he has some questions about the numbering of seats in Polish compartments (is this a variation on Reverse Polish Notation?) I have my own mystery, which is, what was a train off Budapest Keleti doing running to Wien Sud by way of Wiener Neustadt? That train figured in my travels, as it picked up the passengers off the Semmeringbahn service that was timetabled to run through to the Sudbahnhof but it terminated in Wiener Neustadt to flip back to Murzzuschlag. Now imagine a full train of day-hikers, many with their Alpenstocks, crowding onto a full through train, with many of the old-style second class compartment coaches (three facing three.) Fortunately, there are jump seats in the corridor, but wouldn't 2+2 open saloons make more sense?

I have a few other tales about stopping-train Europe, but they'll come later.

I'M GLAD SOMEBODY CAUGHT THIS. I was away at the National Council on Economic Education's annual conference, this year in Little Rock, Arkansas. The host hotel kindly provided a USA Today to me, and on the letters page one day I found reference to the "broken window" fallacy of economic growth in response to a previous article expecting the hurricane cleanup to stimulate the local economy.

Fortunately, Michael at Knowledge Problem has provided the necessary corrective, and a followup.

NOT SO ADORABLE LOSERS. On days that the Chicago Cubs are playing under the sun at Wrigley Field (as God and Ernie Banks intended) the Metra commuter trains that leave the suburbs in the 10 am hour offer some interesting people-watching. Case in point: last Wednesday's Train 44 on the Union Pacific West Line, off Geneva at 10.05 am. The Cubs were to play the last day game of the 2004 season that day, and the train had a large contingent of spectators. (The off-peak commuter trains are often quite full owing to the horrible congestion and high parking charges in the city, and this one was no exception.)

Among the spectators were more than a few high-schoolers, probably playing hookey, and some middle-school and elementary-age kids ACCOMPANIED BY THEIR PARENTS. It's campaign season, and the Opposition is raising the spectre of Two Americas (the old have and don't have again.) But I have to wonder how much of that Second America has lost ground on purpose ... say, by skipping school for A LOSING CUBS GAME ... with Mom or Dad complicit in the skipping. Average people cut corners, and corner-cutting can be a learned behavior.

It's a good bet that the high achievers Joanne Jacobs discovered ("They work harder." D'oh!) neither skip school for a day baseball game nor have the connivance of their parents in the skipping.

ANOTHER ECONOMIST PUBLISHES ONLINE. Doxagora has discovered Dartmouth's Andrew Samwick and his Vox Baby, which includes some thoughts on the folly of treating scholarship as somehow detracting from teaching (or is it the other way around?)

HOISTING MULTIPLE SPRECHERS. The letter excerpted below went into the mail at the end of last month.

Ladies and Gentlemen:

My records indicate that this check in the amount of $[deleted] completes the repayment of the principal outstanding on mortgage loan [deleted].

Please send confirmation of this repayment to the DeKalb County Registrar of Deeds in Sycamore, Illinois or provide me with a notification that I can deliver to them. I would also appreciate such confirmation to be provided to my insurance carrier ...

Memo to Laura, and to Lynne, and to Bill, and to any recent house buyers among the readership: it's fun to buy one and work on it. It's also fun to call it your own.