SIXTY YEARS AGO. Sgt. Karlson was playing an away match under somewhat more adverse conditions than those in San Jose.

Huddled ride in open trucks to Recogne, Belgium (near Neuf Chateau). Very cold. 14 radiomen spent New Year's Eve sleeping in a room the size of the front bedroom at home. Cold!

The Germans, however, have scored their 14 points, and the rally is about to begin.

REPOSITIONING YOURSELF. Some time ago, I posted this questioning the obsession of university administrators with the external perception of their universities. One of the universities engaged in this repackaging is the former Troy State University, now known as Northern Illinois's worthy opponent Troy University. A convert headed out to join the local revelers, but not before asking this pertinent question.

Troy!?

Who in the hell is Troy?

(She also got the weather forecast right: we would have been warmer and drier playing in Huskie Stadium last night and I must stick my head outside soon, as it's another sunny morning in Paradise.)

Troy joined Alabama-Birmingham, who contributed to Hawaii's late season run, and Connecticut, who did what a Huskie ought to do to a Toledo Rocket, as first-time participants in Division I bowls. Troy appears to be embarking on an Upwardly Mobile university track.

The university is going to great lengths to elevate its profile. The hope is that the football program, which moved up from Division I-AA three years ago, enables the university to become a national fixture.

Playing in the Silicon Valley Football Classic at Spartan Stadium is another step in that direction.

One wonders, however, whether that is the best course of action.

The university has been playing football since 1909 under the name Troy State. Last April, the Board of Trustees unanimously voted to remove "State'' in an effort to reflect its status as a global institution. Troy serves more than 24,000 students at approximately 50 branches and teaching sites located in 11 countries and 14 states, most based on or near military installations.

"They felt like Troy State limited us in focus to the state of Alabama, and Troy would open up to the worldwide concept of education,'' said Larry Blakeney, Troy's football coach of 14 years. "Everything sort of fit together.''

Right. Every so often somebody wants to invert the words to create a "University of Northern Illinois." There is a UNI in Cedar Falls, Iowa, which is not close to several national laboratories, the LaSalle Street financial district, or numerous universities known nationally for things other than their sports teams, several of which have become more cooperative with us in the past ten years. The name is not what matters, the achievements are. The Trojans (and one downside of that nickname is that a nationally-known manufacturer of prophylactic devices and the producers of the latest Hellenistic epic film bought a lot of air time last night) have yet to learn this.

Now the Trojans are playing in their second nationally televised game this season.

On Sept. 9, Troy knocked off Missouri -- ranked No. 19 at the time -- 24-14 in a Thursday-night ESPN game. The university has been so aggressive in getting games televised that its stadium was wired for ESPN's specifications.

"It goes back to the reason the Board wanted to elevate the program in the first place, to increase its marketability,'' [Troy's acting athletic director Scott] Farmer said. "You do that to increase student population. It culminated this year when we played Mizzou on national television and ended up tearing down our goal post.''

Yes, but to paraphrase Best of the Web, is the students learning?

RUNNING EXTRA: Considering all the technical difficulties getting the Silicon Valley Classic started, and some additional technical troubles in Tampa on Saturday (of which more next week), is wiring a stadium to ESPN specifications such a good idea?

THE SACK OF TROY. It did not begin well. It was a dark and stormy night. The power was disrupted, both to the field lights and to the television truck. (Can't let the television truck sit idle.) When the game started, about 25 minutes late, only one camera was working, which might have made viewers tuning in wonder what bad parody of coverage of a high school game they were watching. It didn't help that ESPN-2 kept cutting back to their anchors and running long adverts for some purple pill with gold stripes (shooting the Vikings into space?)

Worse, Troy demonstrated an early ability to move the ball, converting a third-and-long, completing a pass to the one, scoring, (I think they kicked an extra point, the coverage went back to headquarters at that juncture,) forcing a three-and-out (this was the country's eighth-best defense going into the game) and then running, seemingly at will, to set up a Toledo-style screen pass for another touchdown (and again, they did kick an extra point even if the network didn't show it.)

As was true of Fall Wacht Am Rhein, the bulge was contained and the air coverage improved. Garrett Wolfe got away for a 50 yard touchdown carry. That point-after was televised nationally. On Troy's next series, Lionel Hickenbottom returned an interception to the Troy 28. Before the first quarter ended, the score was tied.

In the second quarter, the Northern Illinois defense and special teams showed their stuff.

That punt block by Dustin Utschig led to a field goal. Northern Illinois would make seven additional stops and score seventeen more points, making their season average of 34 points before Troy put together another scoring drive late in the fourth quarter. Final score 34-21, which a Chicago Tribune reader can discover but a Birmingham Post-Herald reader is still waiting for word.

By the third quarter, the network equipment was working well enough to spend more time observing the live Huskie mascot. We have a few available for home games, and they give the kids who run behind them a bit of a workout. Apparently an alumna of Northern Illinois who lives in Silicon Valley lent one for the game.

Next up for Northern Illinois: a Labor Day weekend trip to Ann Arbor. Did I tell you how much I enjoy NOT hearing the Michigan band play that one tune they know?

IT TAKES A LOT TO STOP A TRAIN. Huge wave flung train like a toy.

It looks like several bombs exploded in the area, not like the power of water. In a disaster that has crushed villages from Asia to Africa, the southwest coastline of Sri Lanka still has the power to shock. The tsunami, triggered by Sunday's 9.0 magnitude earthquake near Indonesia, traveled 1,000 miles west in two hours and unleashed itself on this 30-mile swath of coastline, killing thousands.

More than 27,000 people have died in Sri Lanka. But few places tell the story of this tragedy like the passenger train traveling from the capital, Colombo, to the southern beach town of Galle on the day after Christmas.

The train stopped on the tracks when the conductor saw water ahead. But the water rushed through, picking up the cars and throwing them like toys. Train cars split from each other, landing on their sides and upside down. The wheels came off. The tracks were ripped out of the ground. About 1,000 people are thought to have died.

This was about 400 yards from the coast, much farther away than other hard-hit areas.

Put another way, the tracks were sufficiently far inland to be protected from the normal wear and tear a large body of water such as Lake Erie, the English Channel, or the Atlantic Ocean can inflict on the New York Central, the Great Western, or the New Haven, but subject to much larger destructive forces such as this wave.

WELCOME GUESTS. A Constrained Vision and University Diaries are sending readers this way. Thanks for looking in. It will be a quiet day today after a long night that involved, for reasons that are spelled out above, hoisting multiple Sprechers.

YOU HAVE TO HAVE SOMETHING TO BEAT SOMETHING. Metaphor Country suggests that the Democratic Party's efforts to win by offering the same nostrums framed in a new way are likely to be futile.

To Lakoff it's all a matter of "framing" -- frame better, and the human sheep will follow. Because, you know, enlightenment has failed, and the best manipulator wins. Being a progressive, Lakoff is angry at the way Republicans frame. But, in despair over the need to frame -- and operating far from the emotional core -- the best he can come up with are tinny alternative phrases. Call trial lawyers "public protection attorneys." Campaign for "poison-free communities." And you've solved it.

No, you haven't. If you want to motivate people, you have to start by respecting them, and respecting what they believe. And, while you're at it, you have to know what they believe.

True enough. It helps to have good models of those belief systems, and Professor Lakoff's "nurturant parent" foundation has logical flaws.

PLAYING MORAL EQUIVALENCE. Voluntary Xchange asks readers to think about what constitutes a crime against humanity.

How many excess deaths are necessary for a government official to be internationally hounded, and ideally put on trial before some international tribunal for involuntary manslaughter?

Perhaps there is a distinction between crimes of omission and crimes of commission.

REVISE AND RESUBMIT. A Constrained Vision finds Professor Amy Wells of a noted college of deaducation to have been as careless with the research on the effectiveness of charter schools as she was with the economics.

LEGACY OF THE SIXTIES. Things calculated to make me feel old.

The 1960's are as distant from today as the Great Depression was from the 1960's, and economic historians, including Professor Margo, of Vanderbilt University, are examining the decade's long-term effects.

Virginia Postrel surveys their research, which notes the permanent damage done to Detroit and other cities that had a long hot summer.

The economists start with sociologists' findings on the riots' causes: whether a city had a riot was essentially unpredictable, assuming the city was outside the South (where few riots occurred) and had a substantial African-American population. The sociologists' research, Professor Margo says, suggests that "there was so much racial tension in the air in the 1960's that a riot could happen almost anywhere, anytime."

That unpredictability is bad news for sociologists looking for causes but good news for economists analyzing consequences. It creates a natural experiment, dividing otherwise similar places into those that had riots and those that did not.

In cities with major riots, the economists find that the median black family income dropped by about 9 percent from 1960 to 1970, compared with similar cities without severe riots. This impact on the labor market may have actually been more severe in the long run. From 1960 to 1980, male employment in cities with severe riots dropped four to seven percentage points, compared with otherwise similar cities.

The impact on property values is even more striking. In cities with severe riots, Professors Collins and Margo found, the median value of black-owned homes dropped 14 percent to 20 percent, compared with cities that experienced little or no rioting, from 1960 to 1970. The median value of all central-city homes, regardless of owner, dropped 6 percent, to 10 percent.

The following factoid ought to give pause to people who question the effectiveness of the "Great Society" reforms.

From 1940 to 1970, the value of homes owned and occupied by blacks in central cities jumped to 69 percent of the value of urban homes owned and occupied by whites, from 51 percent. (Home values were rising over this period as well.) By 1990, however, the ratio was down to a mere 53 percent, nearly as low as in 1940.

That information ought be considered in any evaluation of other incomes policies.

SPEAKING OF SHIRKING. Forward Markets weighs in on Marginal Revolution's calculation debate questions, identifying a free riding problem inherent in "from each, to each."

In a nutshell, socialist planners could have the best information available and could plan their asses off accordingly and socialism would still fail because the people responsible for actually doing the work would still suffer from the moral hazard problem.

That is, if the planners could plan, which they can't.

PAID YOUR TELEVISION TAX? Professor Althouse discovers that the price of freedom from commercials on the BBC is a slightly greater exposure to visits from the Television Police. (No, this is not a Monty Python skit.)

That's awfully oppressive. And why deter the poorest people from having TVs? What a terrible system. Why not just support the BBC from general tax funds if you love the BBC so much? You're already operating on the assumption that everyone wants to have a TV.

(I will refrain from a riff on the culture war guaranteed whenever government funds are used for the creative arts. The Superintendent's position on such matters is that government sponsored art, or government sponsored broadcasts, are censorship per se.)

The television signal is an illustration of a local pure public good. Every receiver within range of the transmitter (hence local) is able to receive the signal (hence nonexclusive use, provided the receiver is tuned to receive the signal) without impinging on any other receiver's ability to decode the signal (hence nonrivalrous consumption.) The existence of television networks and television commercials present counterexamples to the vulgar Welfare Economics Paradigm perspective (which infects the Wikipedia definition I used, although its observation of the rent-seeking-in-provision phenomenon called the military-industrial complex is notable) in which any outcome other than textbook "perfect competition" are market "failures" that "warrant" some sort of government corrective. (This summary of general equilibrium and welfare economics is more careful. Read and understand it. I may have just identified some online resources for my upcoming public policy class. The one I called "vulgar" has more fumbles than UCLA at the 1993-1994 Rose Bowl. I haven't mentioned my other team much but they will be playing on Saturday. How many other academicians have both their alma mater and their employer in different bowls?)

The article Professor Althouse links to illustrates a couple of problems with the idea that a public good requires government provision. The Television Police have a serious problem with free riders.

It is a criminal offense for anyone with a television set not to pay it, whether they watch the BBC or not. Fee-evasion cases make up 12 percent of the caseload in magistrates' courts. Although most evaders are fined, 20 people were imprisoned for nonpayment last year.

The problem the British face is that viewers now have choices.

BBC television has now been joined by hundreds of commercial stations that compete for advertising and viewers but do not receive a share of the license fee. The government has pledged to keep the current system in place when the BBC's charter is renewed in 2006.

Big mistake. Why should viewers have to pay their television tax for the support of official programming they never watch, and be exposed to the commercials that pay for the provision of other network programming? Let the Beeb have a pledge drive. The Wikipedia analysis gets it about half right.

However, since in some cases, most of the benefit of a lighthouse accrues to ships using particular ports, lighthouse maintenance fees can profitably be bundled with port fees. This has been been sufficient to fund some actual lighthouses as private goods. However, since port fees themselves are much like taxes, this argument does not go against the theory of public goods completely.

Port fees, I suppose, function like television taxes. But the trick is to bundle the provision of the public good with the use of something else in a low-transaction-cost way. There may be no cheaper way to pay for lighthouses than by docking docking ships. Commercials strike me as less intrusive than the Television Police.

$4,530,079.22. At the creation of this post, that's how much money the Amazon Honor System has collected for the American Red Cross's South Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Disaster Relief efforts. (If you click that link to see how much more money has been collected, and you haven't kicked in, consider doing so.) This article notes that the American Red Cross has received at least $18 million in donations, as well as providing an opportunity to play Alchian and Allen Jeopardy.

All the charitable agencies asked donors to give money rather than blankets, clothes or other goods.

Money provides flexibility. There will be a prize for the first reader to correctly phrase the question and provide a page reference.

Dan Drezner came off of his leave to provide other links for those who wish to get involved, and Big Arm Woman survived a snowy trip to the Polar Express to identify Charity Navigator, an auditing service that reports how much of your contribution goes to do good works, rather than to pay for additional fundraising or other administrative expenses.

Vinayak at Truck and Barter has a special request. He hails from Madras, India -- those of a certain age may recall the hippie shirts -- a coastal city that has been swamped, and he recommends AID India, a local organization that could also use your help.

Betsy's Page pinch-hits for Santa Claus, finding an Australian server's list of who has been naughty and who has been nice in providing resources.

Some people find time to engage in recriminations. (OK, there's a certain Schadenfreude in noting that as of 1034 CDT the Amazon collection from citizen contributors exceeds the official contribution from Germany.) James at Outside the Beltway compares and contrasts a New York Times editorial grousing about Official Stinginess with a Washington Post article noting Citizen Involvement. McQ at QandO has performed the nasty but necessary trek through the fever-swamps of armchair ankle-biters, as well as offering some advice to such.

And I fear that University Diaries has jumped the shark.

For I considered the frailty of the system:

That a field goal kicked by a schoolboy is worth fourteen million;
That the ill-gotten Bowl won’t send a penny to tsunami victims.
And once my queasiness at 93 million in payouts subsided,
I wracked my airy little head and decided.

Congress should not be soothed, or fooled
Into considering the big football schools
Some sort of academic endeavor.

Well, we knew that, Michigan and occasional flashes from Stanford notwithstanding. But perhaps it's the gains from trade stemming from the bowls, and other entertainment, and other commercial frivolities, that help make the charitable contributions possible. Perhaps the fault lies with Washington Post sports commentator Sally Jenkins.

Once my queasiness at this discovery subsided, I simply put two and two together, and thought, why not put that money where it can do some good, instead of into building more trophy cabinets and indoor practice facilities for America's Kappa Alphas and Sigma Chis?

You mean Title IX is a mistake? Where does the bowl subsidy money, if there is in fact a subsidy, go?

I intend to watch Northern Illinois tonight, whether the $750 thousand will do us any good or not.

RULES WRITTEN IN BLOOD. Could the people of Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Somalia have been spared the mass drownings? A geology professor at the University of Wisconsin interviewed by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel says yes.

While deaths from the earthquake itself could probably not have been reduced, many of those caused by the tsunami could have. We know that earthquakes and tsunamis are related. It's a practical matter of setting up tsunami warning systems. Seismometers record the earthquake, and wave sensors will pick up traveling wave action. Think about it. These waves are traveling tens or hundreds of miles per hour and crossing distances of thousands of miles. You do the math. With a warning system, depending upon where you are located, you'd have anywhere between a few seconds and hours to prepare. It was a preventable disaster, and it was definitely unfortunate.

Sean at The American Mind disagrees.

I will grant Thai officials didn't have much to offer the effected areas. The best they could have done was inform beachfront resorts that a strong earthquake could produce tsunamis. There's no assumption any warning would have been heeded. Locals could have just brushed it off since tsunamis rarely happen in that area.

We have a classic inference problem. Suppose the null hypothesis is that the earthquake has generated a dangerous tsunami. The government still does not know what its magnitude will be. The beachgoers have no idea how accurate the government's projection is, if one is issued. If you reject the null hypothesis, and it is true, a Type I error, do you drown, or do you see three brief increases in the local surf?

Would your answer be any different if your beach front had a history of tsunamis?

Under what circumstances would you make additional investments in tsunami warning systems?

And people say statistics is dry. I commend this primer on the various sorts of errors in inference researchers may be subject to.

SOME GOOD QUESTIONS. Tyler at Marginal Revolution poses four questions about economic calculation.

1. How does rational calculation take place within the firm? Keep in mind that some corporate giants are larger in economic terms than the smaller socialist economies.

Rational calculation? Tee hee. Dilbert is successful for a reason. Seriously, business firms are collections of transactions that can be organized more cheaply by command-and-control than by open-market transactions (imagine the drawer of wire selling the drawn wire to another contractor who straightens it and then seeks yet another contractor who cuts it.) But those open market transactions provide sufficient information for the entrepreneur to be able to guess how much brass to purchase for drawing into wire in order to convert into cards of finished pins to sell to various users thereof.

That canard about General Motors being bigger than North Korea is a favorite hobbyhorse of socialists and anti-globalization freakazoids. What distinguishes General Motors from North Korea is that General Motors has price signals to respond to that are absent to the North Korean version of Gosplan. The claim that because a corporation is a large planned economy, a planned economy ought to be practical, is a howling non sequitur. The largest corporation subsumes transactions that are a tiny subset of the transactions of a small open economy.

There is a further pedantic point: in the absence of any prices, does anybody really know what the gross product of a small socialist economy is worth?

2. If one person owned (privately) all the firms in the economy, would rational calculation be possible?

No. The image brings to my mind that apocalyptic paragraph in Capital about the dwindling numbers of the magnates of capital, who ultimately become incompatible with their capitalist integument. (Socialism, then, is simply the transfer of ownership of the means of production from their one owner to the workers, who presumably know how the enterprise works and all of a sudden have the usurped surplus value to share among themselves. That's the premise behind Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward.)

But think, instead, about Stuart Saunders, who could not combine two large railroads, or Harold Geneen, who thought that success in managing Latin American telephone utilities conferred ability to bake bread or rent cars at airports, or Jimmy Ling, who thought success in shipbuilding implied a Midas touch at making the steel for the ships. I commend Ravenscraft and Scherer's Mergers, Sell-Offs, and Economic Efficiency (details or compare prices), a case study that discovers much of the merger activity of the early 1980s was diversified companies hiving off divisions that underperformed, sometimes because they proved to be more difficult to manage than other divisions offering products closer to the diversifying firm's original core comparative advantages. Fatal conceits do not lay low only government bureaucrats. The cult of the conglomerate has given way to the cult of the CEO, but the CEO can be mugged by reality too.

(I'm getting a bit ahead of my story here, because I've just argued that a diversified firm is not equivalent to a mutual fund.)

3. If one dictator controlled all the firms in the economy, would rational calculation be possible?

No. Neither a comprehensive conglomerate firm nor a comprehensive dictatorship would have sufficient price signals to make choices, unless one goes pomo and defines rational as "whatever the dictator wants." I think that wrecked the early Soviet economy, the Chinese Great Leap Forward, and the Luftwaffe. The value of markets is in giving people information to choose among conflicting claims on goods (why else begin the first price theory class with "allocating scarce resources among competing uses," nicht wahr?) That information is absent to the CEO of Comprehensive Conglomerate as well as to the economic dictator.

4. If institutional investors or a diversified citizenry all owned the so-called "market portfolio" in equal proportions, like the Capital Asset Pricing Model suggests, would rational calculation be possible? [TC: Or is this scenario of "perfect capitalism" not much different from pure communism?]

Certainly. Those consumers differ in their desires for goods. The existence of shares suggests those consumers are willing to let entrepreneurs be agents on their behalf. Rewards and punishments for acting on those desires remain, and presumably some of those consumers are acting as entrepreneurs, managers, or workers as well as holding their shares. The question as posed hasn't ruled out sole proprietorships.

There is a somewhat more challenging problem. As firms adapt to price signals or develop new products, must these citizens continuously update their portfolios? Sounds like a worse nightmare than an eternal town meeting, the "perfect democracy" scenario from political theory.

MORE VALUABLE AS A SOURCE OF AIRCRAFT. Virginia Postrel:

If ever a company deserved to go out of business, it's US Airways.

Ms. Postrel takes a dim view of the emergence of ramp flu.

If you hate your boss or just don't want to go to work, find another job. Don't deliberately ruin other people's holiday travel.

The rot, however, begins at the top.

“I have seen lots of excuses for why people took it upon themselves to call in sick, such as low morale, poor management, anger over pay cuts and frustration with labor negotiations,” [U.S. Airways chief executive Bruce] Lakefield said. “None of those excuses passes the test. We all have our jobs to do.”

I think that includes having sufficient understanding of the system to be able to improvise schedules and crew dispatch despite computer problems.

THEY STILL VOTE ON COLLEGE COUNCIL. University Diaries does the unpleasant but socially necessary work of locating and commenting on the Modern Language Association convention. She musters a bit of empathy for the New York Times reporter who drew the short straw.

When you edit down the MLA convention, the problem isn't infantile provocativeness, as the Times writer suggests, but ideological non-deviationism. The papers are displays of party discipline.

The writer suggests the act is wearing a bit thin.

What any of it has to do with teaching literature to America's college students remains as vexing a question to some today as it was a decade ago. There is, in fact, something achingly 90's about the whole affair. The association has come to resemble a hyperactive child who, having interrupted the grownups' conversation by dancing on the coffee table, can't be made to stop. Citing [Cal] Professor [Frederick] Crews's book in The Partisan Review last year, Sanford Pinsker said: "In my better moods, I try to convince myself that 'Postmodern Pooh' marks the end of the arrant foolishness that has turned literary studies into a laughingstock; in my darker moments, however, I fear that there are other, even more outrageous would-be celebrities hoping to cash in on whatever post-postmodernism turns out to be."

Or, as Mr. [Scott] McLemee [of the *ahem* Chronicle of Higher Education] put it: "The circus is looking pretty threadbare, and the ones trying to do the freak show aspect of it are looking silly now." And yes, many believe that the press is encouraging them by continuing to pay attention.

To answer that first question: nothing. The Economics Department is apparently teaching writing now; the English Department having abdicated that function. To the extent that economists use inter alia Tom Sawyer or "The Road Not Taken" to introduce basic economic concepts, we're teaching the literature. But Modern Language Association types get to compete for tenured slots in English, Communication, various Area Studies centers, Anthropology, and for all I know Law.

SEX, DEATH, AND PROSPERITY. Voluntary Xchange opens up a can on those who would denounce the marketization of everything.

Does anyone really think that Thailand spent anywhere near that kind of money to protect the thousands of people who could've died in this tragedy - but didn't - because they had the good fortune to be in Thailand instead of Sri Lanka? Of course not.

But, what Thailand does have, and has had for over a generation, is a richer and freer society than its neighbors. And its greedy rapacious free thinking capitalists somehow invested enough in infrastructure while abusing the masses that they saved a lot of lives. There is an economic growth recipe that Thailand followed and its neighbors didn't.

So, let me be the first to say that the anti-business, anti-profit, anti-capitalist policies of many countries are nothing short of murderous. But this can often be hidden ... until a disaster hits and proves it. These aren't policy experiments ... or differences of opinion ... or local ideas for local societies ... they're crimes against humanity.

Strong, perhaps, but worth considering. The Chicago Tribune West (the Los Angeles Times, if you must, via Presto Pundit) has additional details.

Rebuilding will be more difficult in Indonesia and Sri Lanka, where resources have been depleted by long civil, ethnic or religious violence and corruption. In Indonesia, for instance, large swaths of the Aceh province, crushed by the magnitude 9 earthquake off its coast and the tsunami that followed, have been a battleground between separatists and government troops since the 1970s.

These places "have been left alone because they were too dangerous, too disobedient, too separatist. And with a high degree of corruption, it will take a very long time for those areas to recover," said Wolf Dombrowski, a professor in the disaster research unit at the University of Kiel, Germany.

Do people have to die in order for these lessons to be learned? A professor at a famous college of deaducation (via Econ Log, and thanks for the props) still doesn't get it.

In this decade of growing free-market disillusionment, policymakers should amend state laws to better support the high-achieving charter schools and close the rest. And I hope they will also remember the hard lesson learned from this reform: that free markets in education, like free markets generally, do not serve poor children well.

Which, I suppose, is why the separatist coastal regions of Indonesia, and the Somali coast, were the best places to ride out the tsunami. (Or perhaps there is an error in inference: where there are markets, there are richer people?) The professor's previous paragraph actually suggests there are insufficient markets, not too many markets. And what's up with this "free-market disillusionment" meme? More of that "reality-based" conceit?

Carrying out market-based school reform on the cheap requires people with the experience to educate children, the business acumen to run an autonomous institution, the political connections to raise the private funds needed to keep the school afloat, and the ability to forsake their personal life to work six or seven days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day. It turns out that there are a limited number of people who can or will do charter school reform well. Thus, most charters schools hire younger, less experienced teachers and have high rates of teacher and administrator burnout and turnover.

Egad. The dot.com millionaires might have been willing to put in even longer hours each day, but they had the chance to become, well, millionaires. (Does anybody complain about entrepreneurs, or lawyers, or Congressional staffers, or tenure-track professors, putting in long hours? That is, anybody other than aggrieved spouses?)

The problem is not with the market reforms, the problem is with attempting to do them on the cheap, particularly if the unionized, tenure-protected, mediocrity-coddling conventional government schools remain as alternatives. The problem might also lie with the assignment of property rights, such that people have to engage in Queen for a Day fundraising tactics rather than raising tuition or having their bonds underwritten on LaSalle Street.

TRIFECTA. Trent at Catallarchy observes that, after a natural disaster, well-meaning people will see reason for price controls on relief supplies, see price gouging, and revisit the broken window fallacy. They're all out there.

Don at Cafe Hayek disposes of the high-prices-have-a-disparate-impact-on-the-poor argument.

But if regulation keeps price from rising, some method other than higher prices must be used to determine which of the many demanders of lumber get the relatively few supplies of lumber.

What are these other methods? They include principally queuing, black-market transactions, and use of political or commercial connections. They might include even violence.

An inevitable consequence of price caps, therefore, is to raise the value of the skills and other assets useful in carrying out these other methods of rationing – skills at queuing; skills at successfully conducting black-market exchanges; skills at manipulating personal and political connections.

Even if you’re concerned only with ‘the poor,’ therefore, the correct question is not "are the poor less able to pay higher prices than lower prices for staple goods?’ The answer to this question is all too obvious: yes.

The relevant question instead is "are the poor less able to pay higher market prices than they are able to pay to take advantage of the other methods of rationing that necessarily replace higher prices?"

I'd add something further. "To each according to his need" requires a measuring stick for neediness. Is a disaster area really the best place to set up the studio for Queen for a Day? (That was a proto-reality show of the early 1960s in which women would tell their tales of woe and the most successful of the three, as measured by audience applause, would get goods provided by manufacturers who offered a promotional consideration to the show.)

Market Power has noted the broken window argument. He has also suffered a real loss. Send your condolences.

And yes, somebody in the main press did offer the broken window argument. Exploit the Worker caught it.

THIS SUBWAY SUCKS. Live from the Third Rail unearths an online history of the Beach Pneumatic Subway under the streets of New York.

MILWAUKEE, ESTONIA?

Milwaukee's City Hall

Whitney Gould praises the construction philosophy of years past, wonders where today's monumental buildings are.

One quibble: those "tacky wooden letters" spelled out the "Welcome Milwaukee Visitors" that appeared at the beginning of each episode of Laverne and Shirley. For many years, that bell tower was the tallest building in Milwaukee.

COLLEGE FOR EVERYBODY? Garance at Tapped sounds the tocsin to defend universal college access.

It's very important if you are trying to create a society where no one expects government help that you first teach the young that they are going to have to do everything on their own and finance their own educations through debt-instruments, such as credit cards and student loans, rather than relying on any sort of collective assistance program, such as federal grants. You might think that reducing aid for young people to go to college would negatively impact the nation's economic future by reducing pathways into the middle-class and the number of skilled workers in the labor force. But it's quite essential to the ongoing Republican effort to re-educate the American public toward a more individualistic philosophy of government that the citizenry be taught early that they can expect no outside assistance and that as soon as they leave the parental nest, they are really and truly on their own.

You might think that the returns to education are sufficiently high that student loans -- or working your way through college -- perhaps with interest payment tax deductions similar to those for mortgage interests -- would suffice for people to finance their own educations.

That observation about "leaving the parental nest" is precious, too. I wonder: how many of the interns, writers, stringers, or editors at the national opinion magazines, left or right (pick Reason or The American Prospect or The Washington Monthly or National Review or The Progressive or The Weekly Standard or The Nation or New Republic) worked their way through a mid-major, perhaps while holding a day job and raising a kid. (Is there an affirmative-action case here: Ivy League graduates work in the national opinion magazines in numbers disproportionate to their representation in the national population of university graduates.) This talk about universal college access is easy for people to indulge in, if they've never had to see what it means for the pace of the class, or had to contend with twice as many bodies vying for space in their classes, or compared notes with someone who has. As King at SCSU Scholars notes, it will be St. Cloud State and Western Illinois and the community colleges absorbing these additional students: it won't be Harvard or Dartmouth or in all likelihood Michigan or Cal doing the accommodating.

STILL PLAYING THAT WEAK HAND. Robert at Liberty and Power continues to follow the travails of Southern Mississippi President Shelby "Ten of Diamonds" Thames.

RONALD COASE, CALL YOUR OFFICE. Grant at Anthropology and Economics discovers a dialectic at work within the corporation.

Creativity in the corporation has always been a kind of necessary evil. Necessary because is often the source of competitive advantage, category leadership, brand profile, growth, profit and share price. Evil because it’s just so hard to manage.

Corporations thrive on system, process, top-down control, stasis and discipline. Creativity prefers fresh thinking, rule breaking and getting outside the box of conventional practice. On balance, it seems better just to keep creativity “over there” at the advertising agency.

The corporation well might be sowing the seeds of its own destruction.

Management is about command and control, how generously we seek to re-imagine it. To this extent, the corporation may well remain a place that is essentially inimical to creativity.

Second, there is the problem of office politics. Every corporation is filled with people who compete for budgets, for CEO attention, for pride of place, and most of all for advancement. This means the corporation systematically creates people who will interfere with the realization of other people’s ideas, however good these ideas are.

Third, a lot of corporations make people miserable. The sheer press of business, the multiplicity of projects, the conflicting agenda and objectives, the grinding need to “make one’s numbers” every quarter, all these conspire to make life overwhelming, exhausting and grim. One effect: talented people turn into nay sayers. The corporation has found another way to staff itself with people who block innovation.

Institutions evolve to economize on transaction costs. That includes the selection of organizational forms other than corporations.

GET A GRIP. Andrew Sullivan has been issuing a new "Malkin Award" to commentators who, in his view, have taken too extreme a position in portraying their mainstream icons as under attack by whiny extremists. Unsurprisingly, at least one involves the de-Christianizing of Christmas. Methinks he doth protest too much. Mark Steyn (via Joanne Jacobs) puts much of the dispute into perspective.

The seasonally litigious rest their fanatical devotion to the de-Christification of Christmas on the separation of church and state. America's founders were certainly opposed to the ''establishment'' of religion, whose meaning is clear enough to any Englishman: The new republic did not want President George Washington serving simultaneously as supreme governor of the Church of America, as the queen today is simultaneously head of the Church of England, or the bishop of Virginia sitting in the U.S. Senate, as today the archbishop of York sits in the House of Lords. Two centuries on, these possibilities are so remote to Americans that the ''separation'' of church and state has dwindled down to threats of legal action over red and green party napkins.

That is not to say, however, that there are not whiny extremists. Penraker finds one.

Let me get this straight - you need to make sure you exclude Christian symbols in order to be "inclusive"? Wouldn't that properly be called being exclusive? I thought being inclusive was welcoming and having respect for all traditions. Why the suppression of one particular tradition?

He takes the opportunity to make mock, as he should, of the Dictatorship of Virtue.

No one person can ever be made to feel uncomfortable. Is that the rule? How about if I am uncomfortable going to your fake, made up diversity training? Can I be excluded because the people teaching those things treat you as such an infant that you are bound to become uncomfortable?

Must. Deal. Cards. But first, an observation. Might it be the case that a few jihadis have hijacked Sunni teachings for their own ends, despite the bad effects that has on all of Islam? Might a few Ba'athists have once hijacked all of Iraq for their own ends, despite the bad effects that had on Shia and Kurd?

And, dear reader, might it be the case that a few seculars -- whiny extremists, perhaps, but successful whiny extremists -- have hijacked the common culture for their own ends, despite the bad effects that have come in their train?

BY THEIR FRUITS SHALL YE KNOW THEM. Michael Barone argues that "reactionary progressivism" is not an oxymoron. One flash point:

For younger women, the grievances of feminism must seem antique. They were told as they were brought up that they were under obligations to leave the workplace to raise their children and to subordinate their own happiness to their duty to others. On the contrary, they may have resented the absence in their daily lives of their working mothers or the divorce of parents who decided to seek happiness their own way.

A Constrained Vision, in a link-rich post, sees that same phenomenon influencing the music.

I think that one of the more novel and interesting parts is the chapter on how contemporary music reflects the emotional damage caused by family dysfunction. That chapter is excerpted in the current issue of Policy Review.

The root of the problem, however, might be in making it more difficult for people to get into difficult situations in the first place; the problem lies not with the divorces, but with the dubious grounds for the marriages that produced these angry kids.

SERIOUS THINKING ABOUT SOCIAL SECURITY. ‘Crisis’ may be in eye of beholder.

“I don’t think there is a pressing crisis in Social Security right now,” said John Karl Scholz, another UW-Madison economics professor who has studied the system for a long time. “The long-term financing can use some shoring up.”

We can do better with the "shoring up" than the consensus fix among those denying there is a crisis.

Among the fixes suggested by those who are skeptical of private accounts are mixtures of lowering benefits and raising taxes.

Slowly increasing the retirement age and raising the cap on earnings subject to the Social Security tax are often mentioned.

According to a recent report from CCH [Inc., a business information firm in Riverwoods, Ill], if the Social Security tax were collected on wages up to $200,000 instead of the 2005 limit of $90,000, enough money would be raised to deal with the situation.

Yes, if one overlooks the opportunity costs. Max Speak, who has been following the conversation with some care, appears not to be bothered by the opportunity cost.

To be sure, conservative critics of the program believe their proposals would have beneficial effects on savings and investment. In that sense, Social Security reform is the newest vintage of supply-side economics. It presumes that program changes will lead to changes in behavior, a topic beyond the scope of this post.

Why, because the conclusions (Martin Feldstein's research on the growth-reducing effect of the Social Security tax serving as a transfer rather than as savings) would not be congenial to advocates of the status quo?

A previous post on the same topic is positively Panglossian.

Actually we require income tax revenues to finance part of benefits starting in 2018. Between 2040, before the system is "broke," and after 2042, exactly zero change in taxes is required to finance all benefits. You don't know what you're talking about.

Back to the newspaper:

• As now constituted, the Social Security system will bring in less money than it needs to pay out in benefits beginning in 2018, according to the trustees of the system, or in 2019, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

• When that happens, to keep paying promised benefits, the system will have to cash in the government bonds it has been collecting since the mid 1980s. That could be done by the government redeeming them through other tax revenue or by borrowing from the general public.

What other expenditures of public moneys shall we give up? The St. Lawrence Seaway? High speed trains in the Midwest? Wouldn't a somewhat larger economy with a larger tax base be preferable?

There's another observation in the Max Speak post that bears noting:

An IOU is a promise to pay. Should the Gov renege on its promise?

Sure. Refinance it at the Fed.

Steve Verdon has some additional thoughts on other magic fixes, including immigration and productivity.

SECOND SECTION: Nate at Four Way Stop has been thinking about the debate as well.

When one side of an issue becomes so intransigient it won't look at facts, you can't have a debate. With pretty much the entire Democratic blogosphere/brain trust/political community dead-set in believing Social Security can just be left alone, I think we've reached that point.

Check it out.

THE "LIVING WAGE" FANTASY. Mungowitz End:

If you raise pay from $6.00 / hour to $14.00 / hour or more (why not abolish gravity, while we are at it?), poor people are going to be driven out. Right now, if a job opening is announced at a university for housekeepers, there are 10 or more applicants, and that is for a very low rate of pay.

But everyone who applies is economically marginal. History of firings, periods out of the work force, little relevant experience, that sort of thing. How about if the job paid $14 / hour? Hundreds of applicants, and many of them are NOT economically marginal. Over time, all of the economically marginal people, with problems with absenteeism, punctuality, health difficulties, will be squeezed out. “Living Wage” will not be enjoyed by those now working at minimum wage, but by those whose skills can command that wage in the marketplace.

None of which deters the city fathers of Madison, Wisconsin, where a local living wage ordinance is to take effect.

At issue is a waging of political wills over the first Wisconsin increase in the minimum wage since it rose to $5.15 an hour in September 1997. The Madison mayor and Common Council have agreed to boost the rate to $5.70 an hour Jan. 1, then to $6.50 a year later, to $7.25 in January 2007. In January 2008, it would go to $7.75 an hour and adjust for inflation.

The usual suspects can be counted on to raise the usual objections.

But the business associations, calling themselves Main Street Coalition for Economic Growth Inc., are challenging the city’s authority to raise its minimum wage independent of the statewide rate. They have filed a lawsuit seeking a restraining order against the Madison wage increase.

Sometimes the way to demonstrate the folly of the law is to comply with it. Madison is close enough to reality for reality to demonstrate more job opportunities than will be observed in Madison.

TO REALLY SCREW THINGS UP REQUIRES A COMPUTER. There are no high-speed trains in much of the country, many of the interstate highways, otherwise known as corporate welfare for the truckers, were fouled by snow, and airline employees are unhappy. To add to the troubles, airplane scheduling and crew dispatching (two good jobs for economics majors, particularly with a bit of training in operations research) have become too dependent on computer programs that are incapable of making things up on their own.

Comair was unable to schedule sufficient flight crews, stranding as many as 30,000 people in 119 cities over the weekend, after its computers crashed on Christmas Day.

The carrier continued to struggle on Monday, operating just 60% of its 1,160 flights. Comair, which was already in the process of updating its computers, said it might not operate a full daily schedule until Wednesday.

Humph. What ever happened to lots of scribbling on paper, and the telephone or the crew-caller on a bicycle?

Terry Tripler, an airline industry expert in Minneapolis, said the Comair flight disruptions were inexcusable.

“This is the equivalent of Wal-Mart having every cash register closed down the day after Thanksgiving,” he said. “Is that how a business operates? Is there not a backup system somewhere?”

No. And too many people still view the computer as some sort of god.

But the dependence on computers by the industry means passengers are likely to see more flight delays caused by computer errors in the future.

“I’m afraid so,” said airline industry analyst Michael Boyd. “As long as computers continue to be made and operated by humans, we’re going to have the problem.”

Bunk. Somewhere there has to be someone with the authority to override the computer, and check the availability of planes at the airport and rest time of crews at the hotel, and get some semblance of service running.

Perhaps part of the problem has been the belief of airline management that there is a reserve army of unemployed aircrew just waiting for their chance to work for Screwup Scarelines.

Michael Boyd, an aviation industry consultant, said the sick calls were a case of "product sabotage."

US Airways has a full-scale employee mutiny on its hands," he said. "Not everyone is involved, but enough are to give the airline heartburn and they can't afford heartburn."

I think they have employees that are fed up with being made the scapegoat for what is happening at the airline," said Boyd, alluding to US Airways' bankruptcy now pending in federal bankruptcy court. "I understand where they are coming from, but this might kill the airline. This airline cannot afford a lot of bad publicity or passengers booking away."

Perhaps Allegheny U.S. Air is more valuable as a source of aircraft for other carriers than as a going concern.

TIME-CONSISTENCY PROBLEM. More shoppers are buying gift certificates, which have odd effects on the retailers' bottom line.

This year, sales lagged behind expectations in the early weeks of December, so a strong last week of the month is crucial for many retailers. Sales of gift cards were expected to rise for the holiday season, and that should bring more shoppers into stores this week and into January.

Let's see if I remember the accounting.

Store sells the gift certificate. Debit cash, credit some sort of future liabilities account.

Shopper redeems the gift certificate. Debit the liabilities account, credit inventories.

Because the good has now been sold, now the store can work out the cost of goods sold and report Christmas-season sales and profits.

The more interesting problem involves the timing of sales, which gift-certificate holders are exploiting.

Gift cards are a mixed blessing for retailers. While consumers who use them typically buy more than the face value of the cards, they also are shopping after Christmas and buying heavily discounted items.

Yes, but stores are now making pre-Christmas markdowns to clear the stuff out before Christmas, which is when it used to be purchased, and when the cost of goods sold and gross margin could be calculated. Retailers are already figuring some of this out.

“I think you’re going to see stores promoting higher-margin goods for shoppers with newfound money, and maybe less discounting,” [consultant William] Michaels said.

There is one other advantage retailers are going to recognize eventually.

“There’s a lot of stuff left,” said Catherine Spelshaus of Waukesha, who shopped at Kohl’s on Sunday.

Spelshaus was at Mayfair on Monday with her son Adam, 23, to exchange Christmas gifts at Boston Store and to look for bargains. “I’m probably going to wait yet, because I think there’ll be further markdowns,” Spelshaus said.

Those exchange desks don't run for free. Not only that, returned goods have to be credited to inventories with adjusting entries to the cost of goods sold, and the gross margin, no? (Hmm, do those reported sales figures reflect reserve accounts established for returns, or not?)

Somebody remind me once again how precise those numbers are ...

A LITTLE UNSEEMLY CROWING. Packers 34, Vikings 31, in the Roller Dome.

CLOSE THE WELLAND CANAL. Exotic predators enter the Great Lakes as stowaways in the ballast tanks of ships, as well as by swimming up the Chicago River.

"We haven't done anything," says Gary Fahnenstiel, a senior ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "It's all been rhetoric by politicians. I'll be among the first scientists to say: Let's close the Welland Canal. Let's start there. This is ridiculous."

That will limit the access of overseas hitchhikers in ballast tanks. There is still the little problem of Asian big-headed carp making their way north in the Illinois River and the Sanitary and Ship Canal.

If bighead carp make their way into the lakes, says Dennis Schornack, President Bush's handpicked person for U.S.-Canadian Great Lakes issues, "then it is just a matter of time before we end up with a carp pond."

Suppose the U.S. and Canadian governments did in fact close the Seaway and the Welland Canal. What would the economic consequences be?

Perhaps not much, according to this study conducted for the St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation. The study notes some 152,000 jobs dependent on cargo movements on what the report calls the "U.S. Great Lakes St. Lawrence Seaway System" as of 2000.

Note the conjuring trick being employed. Absent the Welland Canal, three of the five Lakes would function as a connected ecosystem as well as a contiguous transportation route, and the St. Mary's River from Lake Superior to Lake Huron allows for some movement of fish. The Sault Ste. Marie ("Soo") Locks permit the movement of boats between Lake Superior and the other three Lakes. These locks are much larger than those on the Welland Canal and the Seaway. There are lakers that have been built and remain confined on the Lakes for their entire service lives, transporting iron ore, coal, and sand and gravel aggregates, which are three of the top four cargoes transported on the Lakes. (Iron and steel products, which for the most part move within the contiguous Lakes, are in second place.) Note what is missing: grain (which in principle could be moved from elevators at Duluth-Superior, Milwaukee, and Chicago overseas), paper (Minnesota and Wisconsin ports), timber, and livestock. Those export cargoes can be sent by rail or truck to an Atlantic port.

Questions:

What is the value of the St. Lawrence Seaway?

Is the St. Lawrence Seaway corporate welfare?

Do the economic benefits it confers, if any, warrant the introduction of invasive species?

This site at the University of Michigan identifies some of the invasive species. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel provides an instructive primer on how those hitchhikers get here.

FEELING STRESSED FOR TIME? Aftermath of the earthquake: Shorter days.

By a tiny but measurable amount, the Earth is now rotating more quickly on its axis, and the 24-hour day is now one ten-thousandth second shorter.That's the result of calculations based on preliminary data made by Oak Park astronomer Dr. Leslie M. Golden. It's analogous to the increase in rotational speed that a twirling ice skater experiences when he or she draws in their arms.

I shall let you know what the people who calculate "leap seconds" have decided, once I find it. (The leap second gets added just before midnight Greenwich every so often to compensate for the slowing of the earth's rotation mandated by the laws of physics.)

POSITIONAL ARMS RACES. Deferred maintenance in the classrooms, waiting lists for required courses, departments limited to six campus visits to fill two tenure-track jobs. But there's plenty of money for building new basketball arenas, sometimes disguised as general purpose buildings, reports Skip at The Sports Economist.

They aren't cheap, but they bring in millions of new revenue as well.

The article he links suggests, not always.

"It's very challenging in this economy to build that scope of building," [Maryland athletic director Debbie] Yow said. "You can't just do this because you want to do it."

Too true, too true. Consider the white elephant known at the Convocation Center at Northern Illinois University.

THE FEAST OF STEPHEN. Yes, that's the one that Good King Wenceslaus looked out upon. In much of the British Empire, the Feast of Stephen, 26 December, is also Boxing Day. Econoclast explains that Boxing Day is not a primitive form of re-gifting for altruistic purposes. This Boxing Day page explains one version of the tradition. Snopes compiles several explanations.

And what happens in the U.K. when Christmas or the Feast of Stephen come at weekends? Extra Bank Holiday Mondays, which sometimes last until Tuesday.

In the States, when Christmas comes on a Sunday, the Packers may be compelled to play. Bah and humbug. Pro football is supposed to be done before January 1, in order for the college season to end on January 1. Oh, and preferably in a genuinely warm-weather location. The early forecast for Thursday has warmer game-time temperatures in DeKalb than in San Jose.

COST OVERRUNS? Projected cost of high-speed trains doubles.

The projected cost of a proposed Midwestern network of high-speed trains has more than doubled over the past six years, to $7.7 billion, including about $1.2 billion in Wisconsin alone, a new report shows.

But the federal government has yet to show any interest in putting up its $6.2 billion share of the nine-state Midwest Regional Rail Initiative, and supporters agree the 110-mph train plan won't get out of the station without federal money.

On the other hand, federal money is available for rebuilding the Marquette interchange in central Milwaukee, and continuing to operate the St. Lawrence Seaway. The problem, I suspect, is that this Midwestern network would not offer sufficient pork for northern-border state Senators and Representatives to get on board. First some details.

Planners originally sought four round trips daily at 79 mph, with stops in Neenah, Appleton, Oshkosh, Fond du Lac and either Allenton or West Bend. The revised plan seeks seven round trips daily at 110 mph.

Because the Milwaukee-to-Green Bay leg would be a continuation of the existing Chicago-to-Milwaukee route, service between Milwaukee and Chicago also would rise from the originally planned 14 round trips daily to 17.

The Chicago-Milwaukee frequency would still fall a bit short of the frequency once offered by the North Shore Line alone, but would exceed the frequency offered by either the Milwaukee Road, which Amtrak uses, or the Chicago and North Western during the 1930s and 1940s. There is one additional wrinkle: what happens if Wisconsin works with Chicago's Metra Rail to extend the local train service from Kenosha to Milwaukee, along the old Chicago and North Western 400 route.

Amtrak's Hiawatha line now runs seven daily round trips at 79 mph, covering the distance in about 11/2 hours, with stops in Sturtevant and Glenview, Ill. The boost to 110 mph would cut the trip by about 25 minutes, the report says.

That's a long-sought improvement over the best running time, which was 75 minutes until the late 1950s.

Of the 17 trains on the Chicago-to-Milwaukee route, 10 would continue to Madison, another destination not currently served by Amtrak. At 110 mph, the Milwaukee-to-Madison trip would take about an hour, with some trains stopping in Brookfield, Oconomowoc and Watertown.

Plans have long called for the Milwaukee-to-Madison route to be one of the first in the Midwest network, because of its potential to attract new riders. In June, Amtrak urged Congress to jump-start the route, predicting that extending the Hiawatha to Madison and adding more trips would more than double ridership, to 1.09 million by 2008.

This Madison service would also be a significant boost in frequency compared to the 1930s and 1940s. Now comes the rub.

Of the 10 Milwaukee-to-Madison trains, six would continue to the Twin Cities. That service would replace Amtrak's once-a-day Empire Builder, which now links Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis-St. Paul and the Pacific Northwest on a route that bypasses Madison.

And thus the problem. That northerly train does a little bit of ferrying college kids to St. Cloud or Fargo or Grand Forks, as well as hauling excursionists to Glacier Park. The second function might properly be farmed out to a Nostalgie Orient Express type operation, but that might spell finis to any votes for Amtrak from Minnesota, the Dakotas, Montana, or eastern Washington.

We are, incidentally, speaking of a Neubaustrecke for this service. There is a Milwaukee Road line leaving the current Empire Builder route (which was a 100 mph railroad until 1960) at Watertown and going to Madison, but to continue three trains from Madison to the Twin Cities involves either new construction or an upgrade of a line from Madison to Portage, where it rejoins the old 100 mph railroad. But either there will be a reversal of the train's direction in Madison or a new station somewhere on the east side of the city.

The shopping list for that 12" = 1 ft hobby store runs like this:

The plan now estimates track improvements would cost $227 million between Milwaukee and Madison; $285 million from Milwaukee to the Illinois state line; $243 million from Madison to La Crosse; and $311 million from Milwaukee to Green Bay, Wade said.

New trains for the Milwaukee-to-Madison route would add another $89 million, bringing the total cost of that route to $316 million, with $253 million from the federal government and $63 million from the state, Wade said. For the rest of the Wisconsin routes, trains would cost $152 million, but Illinois and Minnesota would share part of that cost, he said.

Probably a cheaper investment than some of the highway improvement projects in other transportation bills.

Although the overall plan hasn't been approved, more than $100 million has been spent on engineering and on facilities that could improve existing service even if the full network isn't built.

Additional economies could be achieved with a little understanding of history. Those 75 minute trains of years ago were pulled by steam locomotives -- not necessarily built especially for speed -- on jointed rail past semaphore signals that were not repeated in the cab. One does not require space-age electronics and global positioning systems to run fast trains.

STANDING DOWN. Laura at 11-D, who has rather a lot on her plate right now, announces a blogging sabbatical.

GOOD NIGHT, SWEET DREAMS. Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

Santa Claus comes to East Troy, Wisconsin, December 8 1992.

I did mention a bowl game. Expect some post-Christmas commentary on that and other lighter topics.

A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE ON CELL-PHONE YAKKERS. Steve at Shot in the Dark suggests that there are design flaws that lead many users to shout, as well as some new conventions regarding their use that must emerge.

There are clearly some people who don't bother to think about what their loud conversation is revealing about themselves, let alone how they are impacting those around them. And there are others -- and I would include myself on this one -- who still aren't used to having people talking on the phone in certain situations.

All the same, I'm keeping my cards handy.

THE NUCLEAR OPTION. Not just a theoretical possibility, according to Laurence Kotlikoff (via Presto Pundit.)

The United States is going to be printing money like crazy over the next few decades to try to 'pay' its bills.

Nobody is so crass, however as to actually print money. The approved method is called "borrowing from the Fed."

MIGHT IT HAVE SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE JOB PROSPECTS? The latest thesis tacked to Newmark's Door: U.S. Slips in Attracting the World's Best Students.

Foreign applications to American graduate schools declined 28 percent this year. Actual foreign graduate student enrollments dropped 6 percent. Enrollments of all foreign students, in undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral programs, fell for the first time in three decades in an annual census released this fall. Meanwhile, university enrollments have been surging in England, Germany and other countries.

The article focusses on visa hassles and developing graduate programs elsewhere, but the niggardly salaries and burdensome teaching loads might be Neglected Actors.

DIRECTED SERVICE ORDER. Milt Rosenberg is temporarily posting his Milt's File only at the WGN Radio site.

NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN INDUSTRIAL ECONOMICS. Tyler's List of good recent papers, all available on line.

COLLEGE FOR EVERYBODY? The Agitator says no.

Employers today use a bachelor's degree to weed out applicants the same way they used a high school degree a generation ago. So in one sense, I suppose, a college education is more important than ever, in that without one, your prospects in the white-collar world are pretty dim. But if everyone else has a degree, the value of your degree drops pretty dramatically.

Particularly if the degree is a signal that is replacing the signal a high-school diploma used to communicate. Don't overlook the response to the incentives third-party payments bring in.

That's because by making it easier for anyone who wants to to go to college, the government has made buyers of colleges and sellers of prospective students, and rigged the system in favor of the buyers. When colleges get 10 applicants for every spot in a freshman class, they can pretty much charge whatever they please for tuition. There's very little consumer pressure to keep costs down (I'd submit this is also one reason why textbooks cost so much more than ordinary books -- college kids aren't spending their own money. They're spending their parents' money, the government's money, or their own future income in the form of loans). That same lack of consumer pressure also means colleges don't have to work as hard to provide as good a product, in this case a high-quality education.

(I would note in passing that ten applicants for each slot is not the norm. The ratio is something larger than one but not exceeding 1.5 at Northern Illinois.) Quality isn't the priority for many administrators, surfeit of applications or not. "Access" is, which provides lots of additional work for assorted crying-towel pushers. By their fruits ...

If we look what increased access to college has effected so far (the diminishing real value of an ever more expensive degree, grade inflation that makes it increasingly difficult for employers to evaluate graduates, the dimished quality the college education itself, and a generation of graduates burdened with debt) it's probably safe to predict that "universal" access would provide more of the same, only worse.

Not to mention that employers would carp even more about having to do the education establishment's work than they currently do. Not to mention that students would lobby for additional government grants and engage in more grade-wheedling to guilt-trip professors who would be stopping the gravy train by telling the truth on grade sheets.

Instead of Adesnik and Yglesias' ideal, my guess is that univeral access would give us a generation of young adults with college degrees who are about as smart as the population of young adults with high school diplomas a generation or two before them, only they'll be getting started on their careers (and building wealth and savings) several years later in life, and with the added handicap of looming student debt and interest.

And natural constituents for politicians who would like to turn college into a taxpayer-supported "right."

The Truck and Barter guys have been following this story as well. Ian, who points to the Agitator article, does some careful thinking about the margin, along which payoffs tend to equality.

On the margin, then, lowering these costs lets in a student for whom the returns may not be as high and for whom other activities might be of greater value. If you don't have to cover tuition, and don't mind eating the cafeteria food, school is a relatively cheap and fun way to live. This doesn't mean it's the most productive thing for that person, however. It's not that I know what would be more productive, either, but making it easier for them to attend college by spending more federal money isn't exactly doing them some great service and the little it might or might not do is done at the cost of everyone else. Additionally, it negatively impacts the people who would have attended even when the costs are high. Increasing the cohort that graduates at a certain time with similar degrees increases the labor force for a certain category of work. A couple things happen, such as people taking jobs for which they are overqualified (as mentioned in some of the posts linked to above), or wages may drop for that pool since labor is then potentially in larger supply relative to the demand (ok, so some of both of this happens, plus some people go back to school, some people leave the labor force altogether...but I'm limiting the scope here).

Consider that point along with Kevin's comparison of givens and druthers for students and employers.

Top 10 Demand (2004): accounting, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, business administration, economics/finance, computer science, computer engineering, marketing or marketing management, chemical engineering, and information sciences and systems.

Top 10 Supply (2001): Business, social science, education, psychology, health, performing arts, biology, engineering, communications, English...

Which provides a bit of job security for professors in graduate programs, as one observer observes:

I apologize to everyone actually using their college degrees in any of these fields...but everyone I know who was a communications/psychology/leisure studies major and didn't continue to graduate school is now a waitress or sells copy machines or something equally worthy of a college graduate.

But one who will show up for work. The high school diploma no longer has that signalling value.

There's a more recent Agitator post suggesting that more targeted financial aid might restrict the supply of majors in such disciplines.

SIXTY YEARS AGO. Sgt. Karlson's unit is in action.

Week before Christmas moved to Obergelbach, France, but were very near the German border. Radio station was perched in the open forward high slope for good reception, but were sitting ducks from German artillery. Frequent close calls from 88s.

Dec 25: Spent Christmas in a quiet French farmhouse in a small village of Lohr behind the lines; later in the day moved to Reims.

Christmas afternoon moved to a large beautiful wooded area about 15 miles out of Reims and spent the next 5 days freezing, sleeping in pup tents.

Providing reinforcements to contain Fall Wacht am Rhein.

In those days the press coverage was probably not like this:

Some say that General McAuliffe's response was a single word--"Nuts!"--a word that the German officer sent to negotiate had trouble translating back to his superiors. Other firsthand reports suggest, however, that the General actually issued a two-word reply, one in the imperative case suggesting that the unfortunate officer have someone engage him unwillingly in activity of a sexual nature, but one that was also more readily and universally understood.

In either case, the negotiations were ended, and with them any prospects for saving the town. As a result of the general's needlessly insulting recalcitrance, the destruction of the town is now all but certain, and the lives of its terrified residents and defenders likely forfeit.

Next action report next week.

COURAGE, MAN. Electronic mail makes post-performance grade-grubbing more convenient, and casual abuse easier. Filmmaker Guy discovers this the hard way.

Every time a student in that class (or in any class, I guess, but only the ones in that one class have done this) writes to inquire about his or her grade, I expect some angry response. So here I am sweating my student responses, which is ludicrous.

That is why you get paid. Stand by your standards. And by all means, report the miscreant to the disciplinarian, and follow up.

LONG CHANCES SHORTEN LIVES. Take risks to catch your train, wait for the next train.

Faced with the daily danger of pedestrians running across railroad tracks or under lowered crossing gates to catch their trains, Metra crews are increasingly fighting back by refusing to allow the violators to board the train.

The lawbreakers are given the option of waiting for the next train or, if the offenders insist on getting onto the train that almost hit them, going to the police station.

People respond to incentives.

It seems that in many cases, the threat of making a commuter late to work is more effective than the prospect of a fine ranging from $250 to $500 for being on the tracks or jumping crossing gates when a train is coming, railroad officials said.

Commuters generally buy into the policy.

“I have no problem fingering some idiot who can’t get to the station on time and plays Russian roulette with the train,” said Debbie Harris, 41, a commuter from Glen Ellyn. “I don’t need the stress of seeing somebody splattered.”

Denying boarding to commuters who foolishly dart in front of trains, or issuing fines, “tells these people that we care more about your life than your action just indicated,” said Chip Pew, a railroad safety specialist with the Illinois Commerce Commission.

But there are still a few people that don't get it.

Pew recalls an incident in Deerfield, on Metra’s Milwaukee District North Line, involving a commuter who became irate with a conductor because the man got grease from the train on his business suit.

“He wanted to file a damage claim against Metra and the conductor asked him, ‘How did you get the grease on your suit?’ The guy says, ‘I was climbing under the train’ (to get to the platform in order to board the train.) “The conductor denied him boarding,” Pew said.

Evans had a similar experience recently in Wheaton when a man and a woman in a hurry crawled under a Metra train momentarily stopped at the station. “They were carrying suitcases, smiling and happy that they were going to make the train until I told them they couldn’t get on,” Evans said. “They said, ‘We didn’t know you couldn’t crawl underneath the train. We’re from Texas.’”

What did they do, ride the rods north?

STAYING THE COURSE. Grant at Anthropology and Economics gets his range and bearings here. ('Tis the season to think about lode stars.) Thanks for the props. His argument:

Here, if I may, is the “intellectual” approach. I offer it as a rudimentary handbook for the liberal arts programs that have yet to install it.

1) take kids who are, many of them, not very gifted.

2) introduce them to a body of ideas that are, many of them, not very clear.

3) insist on a relativism that gives each student a certain freedom from judgment, as in “this is what I believe, so you may not judge me.”

4) engage these kids in a classroom debate in which political or personal correctness is more important than power or acuity.

5) engage these kids in a classroom debate in which certain hallowed beliefs are “taken off the table” and removed from scrutiny.

6) evaluate these kids on written work in which they are allowed to reproduce the lack of clarity (aka discursive delirium) of the authors on which they have been
raised.

7) create a classroom in which “real world” issues and outcomes are never discussed in strategic or practical terms unless they might be seen as ways “to fight the man.”

The characterization is a bit loose in places, but the conclusion appears to be accurate.

The “intellectual” approach pays dearly for it’s epistemic and pedagogical investments. Smart kids are obliged to forego some of their intelligence. Not very smart kids are confirmed in their mediocrity. The “anti-intellectual” approach creates astonishingly capable people. Native intelligence is multiplied and maximized. Smart kids get smarter. Ordinary kids get smart.

Sounds a bit like Hard America, Soft America (details or compare prices) to me.

But what qualifies the Superintendent to be lode star for the tempest-tossed Academy? Practice, perhaps. In the course of housecleaning, this memorandum, dated 21 November 1985, from me to my department chairman at Wayne State, addressing retention of students, turns up.

I have read the Carlton Maley's [c.q.] memorandum of October 29 describing research into the University's enrollment decline and efforts to stem same by retaining more students. I have three suggestions which might help.

First, we lose some students because they are simply not prepared to handle schoolwork: they lack simple reading, writing, and math skills, and any idea of good study habits. Not surprisingly, we lose many of these students in the first few weeks of class. The university can solve this problem either by raising admission standards or by being more insistent on students acquiring these skills before they enroll in classes.

Second, we lose some students because our class schedules, while more convenient than those at many universities, are not perfect. For instance, our first evening session begins at 5:30. Since the working day ends at 5:00 for many people, and their jobs are as likely to be in the northern suburbs as downtown, we are discouraging students by expecting them to battle crosstown rush hour traffic to make classes on time. The University should consider starting some evening classes at 6:00.

Third, we lose some students because our extension classes are in locations where the people have left: in Detroit and at the Downriver Center. Meanwhile, Central Michigan is offering an MBA program at Troy High School. The University should consider new extension locations, and encourage the state to impose "sales territories" on universities.

What has changed and what hasn't? Clearly, a college cartel is a bit powerless against private entry. In Illinois, there is a state board of higher education to manage the state-tolerated institutions, but it has no authority over what Chicago, Northwestern, Loyola, DePaul, not to mention Upper Iowa or Phoenix do. Evening classes at Northern Illinois begin at 6 pm, with monster traffic jams from about 5:30 to 6:15, and the extension centers are in Hoffman Estates and Naperville, not exactly poverty pockets.

But check out that first point. Sound familiar? So far, nobody has offered me any evidence that would persuade me to reject that position, while many execute ever more complicated maneuvers to deal with retention problems by other methods. Westward leading, still preceding ...

BURIDAN'S ASS, WRIT LARGE. That's the parable -- it makes a good economics question, actually -- about the donkey equidistant between two equally tasty bales of hay that starves to death because he can't make up his mind which bale to eat.

Russell at Cafe Hayek and Constrained Vision have both identified a Sebastian Mallaby column that -- stripped to its essentials -- suggests humans are two-legged versions of Buridan's ass, particularly if they are confronted with a choice of investment plans for their Social Security withholding.

The column fails, both in the small, and in the large.

Start small. Constrained Vision identifies a problem with Mr Mallaby's conclusion.

Mallaby may not want to have a choice in planning his retirement income, but many people do, including me. Why should we be denied that option? There may be legitimate economic concerns about privatization, but Mallaby's philosophical arguments are unconvincing.

Good libertarian answer, but let's get to the heart of the matter. The logical flaw arises much sooner. Mr Mallaby would not have written a very good answer to the economics question. Get this:

You see this truth in the behavior of the affluent, who actually pay to avoid choices. They hire home decorators so they don't have to stare glassily at 200 kinds of curtain rail. They hire marriage planners so they don't have to fret about cream napkins vs. white ones. There are said to be 10,000 wedding consultants practicing in the United States. If the rich are deliberately avoiding choice, why are we so sure that the majority want more of it?

Buzz. The rich are not avoiding choices. "Deliberate" IF AND ONLY IF "choice." They are choosing to delegate. We could take Mr Mallaby's argument seriously and ask, why are there any weddings for the society pages to cover? Cream or white is a relatively simple choice. Which of the 10,000 consultants are the best to hire? That might actually strengthen his argument against private accounts, in that stressed out ordinary Joes and Janes, critical faculties never sharpened by the government schools, never offered Financial Fitness for Life, would have to sort through mailbox-loads of proffers carefully crafted by the best publicists, with the most scrupulous attention paid by the best lawyers to the fine print that denieth what the big print promiseth.

The Cafe Hayek post proposes a different set of desirable consequences, also unanticipated by Mr Mallaby.

I think Mallaby's last sentence has it exactly backwards. The economic payoff from privatization will be small. The real payoff is moral—the opportunity to live as an adult, making choices and coping with the consequences, good and bad.

Ironically, what George Bush calls privatization will not be real privatization. What is called privatization is simply a mandatory government savings program where the vehicles for that saving will be highly limited to reduce that risk and stress that Mallaby and others are worried about.

Put another way, there will be a licensing bureau for financial plans and for planners. There is no wedding planners' cartel.

Powerline, also weighing in on the topic, get back to the heart of the matter.

The Social Security program is, in essence, a fraud which never could have been adopted but for the widespread belief that each person who contributes money into the system has an "account" with his money in it. It would be best if it were phased out of existence as quickly as possible. Given the political realities, anyone under the age of 50 should be agitating to bail out of the sinking ship and obtain the right to save money, rather than relying on the whims of the political process.

Precisely. And let's not hear any more talk about the supposed advantages of a defined-benefit pension plan. Yes, Social Security is a defined-benefit plan. Congress defines that benefit. Right now there are proposals to redefine the retirement age, eligibility for benefits, and how much payroll income shall be subject to tax.

The larger failing is in distracting readers with non-sequiturs about wedding planners while the existing policy is headed for a real crack-up.

KNOWLEDGE PROBLEM IS ON TO ME. Thanks for the thoughts on coping with cell-phone loudmouths in public places. There's a related post on some Chicago self-organization here. (As you might expect, the Chicagoans are a bit less, well, reserved, than the British.)

Let me take this opportunity to give a shout out for this Knowledge Problem post on reading Adam Smith, which complements this.

CHRISTMAS CALLERS FROM 11-D. Thanks for the link. Welcome. You might find this post on earnings and attachment to the labor force of interest. Yes, it does address sex differences in pay. There's plenty of stuff on the academy, browse around. This Marginal Revolution post on the nature of two-income households is also worth your time.

TOO MANY BOWLS? Coyote Blog picks up the cry.

Great - using tax money to fund random college bowl games. And where does the money go - most of the money does to the participant teams and their conferences which this year are Notre Dame and Oregon State. Why does Arizona need to subsidize the State of Oregon's athletic programs. And Notre Dame? They have one of the largest endowments in the country. Neither of these teams have any connection to Phoenix or Arizona.

OK, I am being purposefully naive. The money may go directly to the teams, but the purpose of the subsidy is to get those teams' fans to come to Arizona on the week between Christmas and New Years and buy hotel rooms.

Imagine the outcry if the subsidy is going to (gasp) the mid-majors.

TODAY'S CHRISTMAS TROLLEY. Courtesy of James Lileks, this one ran in the Twin Cities (gasp!)

SECRETLY TRAINSPOTTERS? L&N Line focuses on things Tennessee, with lots of movie reviews and ice hockey (?!?) commentary. But scroll down:

These guys deserve better than "Slimy Mollusc" status.

For non-rail readers, some history. Trains editor David P. Morgan grew up in Louisville but confessed a childhood fascination with the Milwaukee Road. As an adult, he recognized that his hometown railroad resisted follies such as a Pacific Coast extension and 100 mph steam locomotives, although it for a while operated Great Locomotive Chase engine General as a heritage exhibit.

TROUBLES AT SOUTHERN UTAH? A political science professor apparently on his way to tenure has his tenure case tabled and he is placed on administrative leave, which King at SCSU Scholars observes is an unusual step.

The manager of Voluntary Xchange is on faculty at Utah State, and weighs in with his own observations. Developing. (Hat tip: Newmark's Door.)

SECOND SECTION: King has been following the story, with a pointer to more at Cliopatria.

Now for a puzzled moment: what's unusual about merging political science and criminal justice? Often criminal justice is an area of concentration within sociology.

The case itself: yes, the immediate administrative leave signals something unusual, but there's not yet enough public information.

CARNIVAL CALL. With the Super Bowl approaching, and lots of youngsters about to learn that a decree once went out from Caesar that all the world be taxed, let us recognize Carnival of the Vanities CXVIII, with well-done seasonal theming, hosted this week at Ravenwood's Universe.

PAYOFFS ARE EQUAL AT THE MARGIN. Lifetime earnings for university graduates are higher than lifetime earnings for high school graduates. Therefore, universal college education is a Pareto improvement, generating productivity gains and greater prosperity, more evenly shared, right?

Think again. Mitch at Shot in the Dark does some careful thinking about a conversation between David at Oxblog and Matt Yglesias, starting with an observation by Alex at RAWbservations.

My degree helped get me to the front of the line. If everyone were to have that piece of paper, I have my doubts that the overall employment rates would change much and I seriously doubt that it would lead to a serious wage increase across the board. Instead, I believe the result would be a lot more college majors working at Starbucks.

The current economy doesn't have enough jobs for those of us with college degrees. There isn't a huge dearth of white collar job candidates to fill a whole bunch of vacancies. On the contrary, jobs that don't necessitate a college degree are simply requiring them to weed people out.

That's a signalling argument. A university degree simply illustrates that the holder is dependable enough to jump through hoops for four to six years beyond high school, and thus dependable enough to show up for work even though it is not required by law (which is what diminishes the signal content of a high-school diploma. Prisoners generally have perfect attendance.)

David's post gives a nod to the signalling argument, while suggesting that additional schooling indeed provides more human capital.

Right now, college graduates are almost guaranteed a decent job. But if everyone had a degree, wouldn't that just mean that educated folks wind up doing low-skill work or even unemployed?

Not being an economist, I don't have the means to answer that question in a very sophisticated manner. But I do have a hunch. Around sixty years ago, right after World War II, someone could've asked whether it was really worth making sure that all Americans got a high school education, since the value of a diploma would go down if everyone got one.

My sense is that getting America through high school represented a critical step toward creating the skilled workforce that was ready to capitalize on the use of new technologies in the 1980s and 1990s.

You might also say that once America went to high school that the value of a diploma did go down, so Americans started to one up another by going to college. Maybe someday we'll start one-upping another in the job hunt by going to grad school.

If the high school diploma is an indicator of human capital, is the one-upping investing in additional human capital, in which case people will self-select on the basis of their ability, or is it a positional arms race to acquire a stronger signal of ability? (And the one-upping with a Master's has begun, although the hypothesis that a baccalaureate is as fraudulent as the high-school diploma has become has not yet been rejected.)

Matt's post focuses on the connection between greater human capital and entry level jobs:

Now in the context of a workforce that was, on the whole, extremely well-educated and productive these jobs might just become higher paying. On the other hand, you might have a replay of the European situation where rising productivity (and a robust welfare state) made it hard to find people willing to do these jobs for the customary low wages, and instead of paying higher wages the governments chose to simply import unskilled labor.

That would be okay, too, from my perspective. It's often not realized, but allowing immigrants into the developed world to work for what are low waged by developed standards but high ones by developing world standards is one of the more effective ways to ameliorate global poverty. But if immigration to the US were to rise substantially in this way, there might be increasing pressure to do what Europe did and turn the immigrants into a helot class of "guest workers" rather than full-fledged citizens-to-be. That, in turn, could have many of the bad consequences we've seen from Europe's illiberal immigration regime.

Hmm, what ever happened to working your way through college, perhaps at one of those unskilled jobs?

On to Mitch's observations. Key question:

"So what about the kid who has a genius for working with his hands? The kid who doesn't care, for the moment, about polishing the teacher's apple, but loves tearing down engines or building things? The kid who has a talent for taking care of people, doing daycare, cooking great food - things that are noble, useful, needed skills that demand people with drive and passion, but don't require a college degree? Why should we look at at their not joining the paper chase as a "failure"?

Especially because ... payoffs are equal at the margin ... a diminished supply of master mechanics or caretakers or master chefs means the rewards to those crafts rise relative to the returns to a college degree, a rise augmented by the increased supply of college-bound but not necessarily Creative Class material.

The problem being that if you jam someone who's primarily a "doer" rather than a "thinker" or, as often as not, a "paperwork and process maven", and jam them into college, they are not going to be especially well-educated or productive - any more than if you put Matthew Yglesias, Hahvahd graduate, into chef school and told him that no other path through life was of as much value.

(Methinks Mr Berg doth presume too much. Perhaps Matt can do eggs 101 different ways. On the other hand, perhaps he is making a safe bet. There are few of my colleagues, clever though they might be, that can carry cutting oil for my Unimat.)

Repeat after me. Payoffs are equal at the margin.

And we all know college graduates in Psychology or less-vital Humanities who are working at Blockbuster, and who ten years after college are busy selling shoes; you might not know the people who went to work, or to vocational school and are making more money than the bottom 40% of lawyers, working as airline mechanics - or the ones who earn perfectly fine, sometimes excellent, livings as LPNs, daycare providers, carpenters, chefs, mechanics and a zillion other things that can't, and won't, be shipped overseas anytime soon.

Yup. (And he hasn't mentioned machinists or toolmakers.) Have I done my riff on miserable middle-aged partners at law firms who are there because that's what their teachers and their parents impressed on them as being The Thing To Do, when the reality is that What You Do is answer the phone and take on someone else's problem as your own. Most importantly,

College is a fine thing; I graduated from one. Are my friends who went through vo-ed and now work as plumbers and policemen any less important than the Harvard poli-sci grad? To say the least, no.

More kids need to know that.

Ayup.

SECOND SECTION: Ross at Andrew Sullivan observes,

I'd pose a different question, though. Suppose you tried to universalize college education -- how many people would actually go for it? At present, a little over a quarter of all Americans have college degrees, and around half try college for a while but never graduate. No doubt a lot of these people drop out, or never go, for financial reasons, and having government-subsidized college tuition would certainly raise both matriculation and graduation rates appreciably. But I'm not sure the rates would be raised to anywhere near universal levels. I think that many, many people drop out or don't go to college because they don't want to go . . . because they've spent a dozen years in school, they don't like school, and they want to get out into the world and start making money.

I saw a fair amount of this urge even among my friends and neighbors, and I come from a culture where the necessity of "going-to-college" is hammered into you starting in the cradle, if not earlier. I guess you could try to replicate the obsessed-with-admissions climate of East Coast suburbia in working class communities around the country, but I'm not sure that's either feasible or desirable. Or you could get around it by mandating college attendance, they way we mandate elementary and secondary school. But given that college-aged kids are generally considered adults, not minors (except for that pesky alcohol prohibition), I'm not sure forcing them to attend school is going to fly -- at least not in the freedom-loving U.S.A.

Finally, a faintly politically incorrect question: Isn't it possible that there's a significant segment of the American population that simply wouldn't benefit from going to college? I'm no IQ-determinist, but it seems like forcing some people into an extra four years of schooling might run, rather quickly, into a problem of diminishing returns. (Especially since I suspect that what America really needs are better elementary schools, not more emphasis on higher education.)

Indeed. Furthermore, to the extent that the university simply becomes the latest extension of compulsory education, with Freshman Experience attempting to provide the basic skills that students Used To Get in seventh grade, it simply devalues the diploma. Furthermore, because students of comparable ability realize similar returns to their degree independent of their choice of college, perhaps the problem is with the prestige-college obsession.

In the blue-collar precincts, there is a different problem. The socially prominent clique in my high school spent much of senior year evaluating whether the parties were better at LaCrosse, Oshkosh, or Whitewater. Universal access might mean an even larger infusion of party animals into the less famous universities with no concomitant surge in economic growth or any of the other spillover benefits (including Democratic registrations? Stop snarking, it's Christmas -- Ed.) the university development offices claim on their employers' behalf.

OH, AND ALL YOU ATHEISTS, HAVE A NICE DAY. In honor of the winter solstice, a Chicago Tribune article laying out a dilemma for atheists.

Winter solstice celebrations have become an increasingly popular alternative, according to American Atheists, which has about 2,500 members but contends there may be as many as 25 million atheists in the United States.

Those may be the people who are looking for an excuse to give others presents. (Who needs an excuse? Be nice to the folks you care about.) Others are more internally consistent.

For many, winter solstice celebrations are less associated with atheists than with people who practice paganism, a nature-based religion.

Ah, but now the big mystery: who is responsible for turning Christmas into "Happy Holidays?" Dynamist has an interesting factoid:

Judging from my email, which is hardly a random sample, the people most adamantly against "Happy Holidays" are not in fact Christians but secularists determined to define Christmas as an occasion that has nothing to do with
religious faith.

My reaction has to be "huh?" By definition Christmas is the special service, i.e. mass, for the birthday of the Christ child. Period. I am a bit confused. Once upon a time, retailers were very open about their Christmas sales (the decorations would be up around Thanksgiving.) Now artificial, fire-resistant evergreen trees festooned with red and green begin sprouting in the department stores before Hallowe'en, but the theme is generally "Happy Holidays" and Macy's thinks that's good for business. What's the agenda, Virginia? A prior post suggests the locution is in fact one that's good for business.

Why criticize merchants for including all their customers in wishes for a happy holiday season? The holidays do, after all, stretch from Thanksgiving to New Year's, both nonsectarian holidays. "Happy Holidays" includes Christmas, for those who celebrate it. But it also includes holidays we all share, as well as some others only a minority observe.

When you extend these greetings, are you wishing people happiness? Or affirming your Christianity? Do you want people who don't celebrate Christmas to be happy (or merry)? Or do you want to make them at least mildly uncomfortable? The answers will determine what you say.

Thanksgiving, nonsectarian? Get yee to Rhode Island.

For another perspective, note Matt Yglesias being particularly cranky about the entire retrieve-Christmas movement.

WHAT HE SAID. Harry at Crooked Timber discovers the secret of successful professoring.

My observation is this: if a course has a critical mass of good-natured, smart, and vocal students, it works well, and my evaluations are the better for it. Without that critical mass the course does not work, and my evaluations suffer. I suppose it is within my power to prevent a critical mass from emerging, but it is not within my power to ensure a critical mass. My worst ever evaluations were for a course at 8 am; I was lively and full of energy, but none of the students were; they took it because they were the group of students too off-the-ball to register in time for more reasonably scheduled courses. My best evaluations were last semester for the best course I ever taught. I co-taught with a much more experienced professor in another department, and our styles complement each other well. But what we were rewarded for was the once-in-a-decade accident of having not just a critical mass of serious, smart, and lively students, but a classroom full of them. All we did was refrain from wrecking it.

True enough. Professoring is a lot like farming: you start with your seed and fresh soil at the beginning of the semester, and sometimes the climate is favorable and all goes well, and sometimes there's a drought and bringing out the best in the students is darned difficult.

REDISCOVERING ANCIENT TRUTHS. Legend has it that a venerable professor of graduate level History of Economic Thought at the University of Chicago had a standing offer: an automatic A for the course to the student who found a passage in Wealth of Nations where Adam Smith had something kind to say about a businessman.

Don at Left2Right thinks he has discovered something new. Brad DeLong is cranky and annoyed, but not so annoyed as to say "you don't know Jack." (Hat tip: Tyler at Marginal Revolution. Don't miss Robert at Signifying Nothing's link to an annotated Wealth of Nations. Oh frabjous day, calloo, callay, Talmudic commentary to use to launch a lunch conversation.)

My favorite Smith quote deals with proposals to regulate business.

The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.

Alas, I'm getting predictable: my students tend to recognize this as coming from Adam Smith (or have they never heard of Karl Marx or Leon Trotsky?) Got the quote here: this source also sees the irony.

COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGES. Bill at Atlantic Blog discovers the logic of after-dinner drinks.

What do you when you have had a very sweet dessert and you to balance it? Coffee, right? Wrong. My wife teaches English to French and German businessmen. She had several French students out for dinner, and with a sweet dessert, she planned to have coffee. The Frenchmen corrected her, pointing out that with sweet desserts, dry red wine is best. She though they were nuts, but also knows one of life's important rules: never ignore food advice from a Frenchman. The results are to be commended.

Must. Consider. This.

IN PRAISE OF HERITAGE TROLLEYS. Live from the Third Rail reports favorably on the Little Rock faux-heritage trolley, which will take you to the old State Capitol, the riverfront pub district, and within walking distance of the Clinton Presidential Library, as well as across the river, but you still have a long walk to U.S.S. Razorback from there.

The Little Rock project follows a different design philosophy than the Kenosha and Memphis heritage trolleys. In Little Rock the three trolleys are extremely expensive (several million dollars per unit) but air-conditioned and fully compliant with current safety and disability access standards. Memphis and Kenosha use older trolleys in essentially as-built condition. A Cold Spring Shops source notes that retrofitting the older trolleys to make them compliant would likely be cost prohibitive.

NO BRITISH RESERVE ON DA L. CTA Tattler has more thoughts on the cards Cartoonist has made available for annoyed rail passengers (and airline passengers if the air guys ever catch on) to give to annoying cell-phone yakkers.

The Chicago Rapid Transit Company Transit Authority has been posting public service car cards advising riders not to be "Jack." Jack doesn't know Jack. Switchblade Susie (she's got to get a new handle; there is no more throwing the blade switch to go from third rail to catenary on the North Shore Line Skokie Swift) has some particularly wicked improvisations.

(I warned you this was Chicago. This is the tame one.)

STAND A LITTLE CLOSER TO THAT RAZOR, MISTER. Stereotypes of the professor: tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, mushroom cap, facial hair (among the Silent Generation types either a gray goatee or a Jerry Garcia; the boomers liked the fuzzy beard and small thin-gauge-wire-frame granny glasses -- not the aviator type; and some of the Thirteeners go for the dirty-face look popularized by baseball players.)

University Diaries appears to have had time to evaluate these things much more closely. J.V.C. Comments is suitably neutral to find the post amusing. Cranky Professor appears to be going cross-generational. King at SCSU Scholars has the best explanation for the hair on his chinny-chin-chin.

A colleague once quipped about your Superintendent, "Frederick the Great was less Prussian." No Jerry Garcia or granny glasses here. No mushroom caps either.

BLUSHING. President Reagan once said, "You can accomplish much if you don't care who gets the credit." All the same, I do appreciate these kind words from Always Low Prices.

The incredibly underrated and under-read Stephen Karlson...

Good of you to look in. Here is some advice a cousin sent me, I guess it's Christmas and time for the folk wisdom to go around the Internet.

When you were born, you were crying and everyone around you was smiling. Live your life so at the end, you're the one who is smiling and everyone around you is crying.

Which I intend to do. Postings will tail off over the next week (did I mention Northern Illinois is playing in a bowl game?) but thanks for your interest.

THE PERFECT ANTIDOTE. Cell-phone yakkers have long been annoying passengers on commuter and rapid transit trains for a long time. (Yes, such pests frequent the long-distance trains as well, but that's why there's a bar car, and sleeping accommodation on the overnighters.)

Now it is the airline passengers' turn, and Ideoblog (via Professor Bainbridge, check out the cross-referencing between two lawyers, it's really quite elegant) has a suggestion.

A self-help plan occurred to me a couple of weeks ago as I waited for a plane in the Indianapolis airport. Just across from me a guy filled the terminal with news of the accounting problems the university he worked for was having regarding a major gift, and how he was planning to deal with them. He was talking so loudly I could barely make out the details of the LLC operating agreement the guy down the row was drafting over the phone.

Here's my plan: do what you can to piece together the details of the conversation. Then ask the speaker some questions to fill in the blanks. If the speaker is annoyed, flustered and suddenly reticent, point out that you're curious enough to turn to Google for help with the rest. It would be nice if you could figure out your seatmate's name, from the conversation, briefcase, laptop screen, or whatever.

(I must confess to using a variant of this trick on an insurance guy on the Hiawatha recently, assuring him that his problems with an associate would stay a safe secret with me. He took his portable to the vestibule for his next call. And word has reached the Superintendent's office of a securities analyst who handed over a critique of his airborne seatmate's business plan ... although mobile phones are still not to be used, promiscuous use of laptops is common.)

London tube riders have a counter readily available. Annie at Going Underground recommends these cards. (Her example, which is posted on a secure server, is worth clicking to. I'll wait.)

Image courtesy The Cartoonist

Download your own (several styles are available) and keep them with your boarding pass and identification papers. I'm tempted to keep a set with my Metra ten-ride.

TASK FORCES TO ADDRESS THE OBVIOUS. Middling NIU grad rate provokes task force creation. The problem:

Only 53 percent of NIU undergraduate students graduate within six years, university records show.

And only one of the seven major universities in Illinois has a graduation rate above 75 percent. Graduation rates at Illinois universities span some 40-percentage points with the highest being 81 percent (University of Illinois) and the lowest being 40 percent (Southern Illinois University – Edwardsville). NIU’s rate positions the school in fourth place – 9 percentage points away from the top three.

I thought 81-53=28. Well, maybe being in fourth place, 9 points out of third, is not a problem.

The university is forming a task force across campus to look at rates and look at ways to improve them, said Vice Provost Earl Seaver.

The committee will meet during the year to develop an exit survey to interview students who leave and find out why they left.

But Seaver said NIU’s graduation rate is not cause for alarm.

“What I’m most interested in is our graduation rates as compared to the predicted,” he said.

Each year, many schools release data on their predicted graduation rates. This predicted rate is the rate students say they will have midyear. This rate is compared with the actual rate once all the data is collected. And Seaver emphasizes that both the predicted and actual rate need to be taken into account to get an accurate assessment of a school’s graduation rate.

A student body predicts the graduation rate, Seaver said, and research has shown that 20 to 25 percent of students drop out after their freshman year.

“More and more schools are realizing they have to focus on that first-year experience,” he said.

Perhaps it's simpler than that. Drop the pretense that admitting unprepared students, and hiring hand-holders and crying-towel vendors to ease their way, is "providing access."

Since 1999, NIU’S graduation rate has increased from 49 percent to 53 percent, according to NIU’s Office of Institutional Research. In 2003, there were 16,398 full-time students and 1,877 part-time students.

That coincides with an expansion of the college-age population (those overcrowded middle schools of 1995, for those of you with long memories,) tighter budgets leading to smaller entering classes in those earlier years, when the expectation was of an "era of downsizing," and the football team's successes. Do you suppose there might be less attrition from a pool of better-prepared matriculants?

University Ombudsman Tim Griffin said a variety of factors contribute to low graduation rates. These factors include uncertainties about academic and professional goals, poor academic performance, changes in life situations and the high cost of college.

All true, all true. Perhaps the university ought to be doing more to disabuse applicants of the Animal House or MTV Spring Break perception of college. Working your way through college might be a good idea as well.

[Provost J. Ivan] Legg said a trend of student isolation is another factor keeping students from finishing college. Some students feel uncomfortable when they start at NIU, so they don’t do anything to reach out and get involved in student activities. College isn’t just about going to class, said Legg. Studies show that when students are involved in school their grades are higher, Legg said. This ultimately translates to increased graduation rates. Legg worked in a kitchen during college, and he said the experience forced him out of his shell and required him to meet people.

Been there, did that, still finicky about racking the dishwasher. Unfortunately, we don't have a lake close enough to offer "Learn to Sail," nor am I aware of "Learn to Ski." Take those two classes from your Outing Center, and the third semester of calculus, and you'll be fine. But get a cold start. Provost Legg went away to Oberlin. Your Superintendent was dropped into Madison at the beginning of the turbulent 1970s. Many Huskies just can't leave their high school cliques behind, apparently.

However, Arthur Doederlein, director of undergraduate studies and associate professor for the communication department, is concerned with students who transfer to NIU from community colleges. In the last 15 years, a disproportionate number of people who drop out are from community colleges, he said. Fifty-three percent of those who drop out are transfer students.

Now comes the money graf:

While Doederlein said NIU has excellent professors and programs, he would also like to see these areas valued more than they are now – there’s not much respect, he said. If teaching and advising counted more, NIU would see an increase in graduation rates. “At NIU, teaching doesn’t count for much in terms of getting paid or promoted,” he said.

Despite this lack of recognition of good teaching, many professors take steps to ensure students receive a quality education. English Professor Sean Shesgreen said both money problems and emotional problems contribute to low graduation rates. Shesgreen said he will do everything he can to help students who are genuinely struggling.

In loco parentis, anyone? Just as long as I don't have to ground anybody, or give them a spanking ...

These are good colleagues being quoted in the article, teasing notwithstanding. Never mind the task force. Just listen to them.

Sue Doederlein, associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, said low graduation rates have been a problem at NIU and elsewhere for decades. She also said there’s a connection between a university’s graduation rate and the quality of education.

“NIU should not have the 98 percent graduation rate of Harvard, but we certainly shouldn’t be at the level of a coin toss, and that has to affect the quality of academic and intellectual life on campus,” she said.

Well, we don't have Harvard's grade inflation problems either, and we're going to a bowl. We can, however, ask our students to perform. They will.

COLD WATER ON A FATAL CONCEIT? Led by zebra mussels, a host of invasive species is wreaking ecological havoc in Lake Michigan. Some errors are easier to undo than others.

Thanks largely to the Clean Water Act of 1972, it rebounded in the last generation from decades of industrial dumping and, Milwaukee's periodic sewer overflows notwithstanding, its shores are far from the cesspool they were before the arrival of modern sewage treatment.

There are other ecological successes. Scientists used poison to control, but not eliminate, the invasion of lake-trout-killing sea lamprey in the mid-1900s. And shortly thereafter biologists managed an invasion of beach-fouling alewives by planting hundreds of millions of Pacific salmon to eat them.

But that tinkering has perhaps given the public a false confidence in humans' ability to fix the Great Lakes when something goes wrong. Beneath the lakes' shimmering surface, a mounting number of invasive species are wreaking an ecological havoc that scientists are having a hard time understanding, let alone stopping.

Today, at least 180 non-native species lurk in the lakes, and a new one arrives, on average, every eight months. Most come in the ballast water of commercial ships that shuttle between the Great Lakes and Atlantic Ocean via the St. Lawrence Seaway, a largely artificial link between the two aquatic worlds that opened for business in 1959.

Yes, I remember the fireworks show Milwaukee put on to commemorate the opening of the Seaway. International Port of Milwaukee. Big deal. The Seaway has been a net loss to the U.S. and Canada. It is not competitive with deregulated railroads and trucks. And it has been the vector for numerous exotic predators, some of which are doing tremendous damage to the zooplankton of the Great Lakes. (Freshwater lakes with plankton? Yes. One never stops learning. Read the article.)

And don't lose sight of last week's article, spelling out disturbances in the balance of nature that the salmon spawned. (Pun intentional.)

ATTACHMENT TO THE WORK FORCE PAYS OFF.The high price of family life.

Last month, the Women’s Fund of the Greater Milwaukee Foundation released a biennial report suggesting that although more Wisconsin women are in the work force than in nearly any other state, Wisconsin has one of the country’s widest overall disparities in pay based on gender.

Why?

The figures also point to a gap in pay that more economists are attributing not to gender alone but to family responsibilities.

Even as they reach parity with men in many other aspects of work, women remain the overwhelming provider of family care, and partly because of that, they continue to lag men in pay.

National research based on 15 years of survey data from 2,800 workers in the prime ages of 26 to 59 shows that women’s time away from the labor force eats into their finances for life.

(It is Christmas week, so I won't carp about proxy biases, where a dummy variable for "sex" is being used to make sense of "gender" differences.) Men are not exempt.

The shift suggests that as more men take time out for family, they too will pay the price with earnings.

Compared to what? The whole point of economic growth is to enable people to have a higher standard of living and more time for their families, or other non-work pursuits. The "experts" are beginning to recognize that there might be gains from trade between employers and employees who would like off the 24/7 treadmill. (Note the religious reference here: just slightly ahead of my time I guess.)

Barbara Gault, director of research at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, says the more workers have flexibility to fulfill work and home responsibilities, the less those workers will leave work for family. And that, she says, benefits society.

“You’re losing out on a set of talent that’s there that could otherwise be contributing more to the economy,” says Gault.

She points to trends favoring child-care assistance, pre-kindergarten classes and enhanced part-time opportunities as options more workers can seek to tend to their families without having to leave the labor force.

In November, a task force of the American Psychological Association issued a report on what it calls a “mismatch between employment norms and contemporary families.” Among its recommendations are flexible work schedules, paid family leave and school calendars that more closely align with parents’ work schedules.

Encouragingly, these suggestions do not fall exclusively into the technocratic "got a problem, make something mandatory" mindset. I will again offer a wager: look for workers in expanding industries to get a 35 or 30 hour work-week long before an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act makes it policy. Income and substitution effects at work. Casual Fridays and widespread winking at summer-Friday-afternoon workplace hooky are leading indicators.

PRIOR TO THE SNAP, the Packers clinched a spot in the playoffs.

They clinched before kickoff because Chicago, Dallas, Carolina and New York all lost in the run-of-the-mill NFC.

It got worse after that. Ahman Green fumbled inside the 10 yard line, and Brett Favre was picked twice in the end zone. Jacksonville safety Donovan Darius got tossed out of the game for a gratuitous clothesline tackle of Robert Ferguson that sent the receiver to hospital. No cold-weather magic in Lambeau today.

So it comes down to a trip to the Roller Dome.

The Packers fell into a tie with Minnesota atop the NFC North after the Vikings edged Detroit 28-27 Sunday. They travel to Minnesota for a Christmas Eve matinee that will likely decide the division.

At the moment, the football gods are favoring the Vikings. Detroit's special teams could not execute the conversion for the 28th point. Bleah.

KUDOS. Betsy's Page correctly scoops Time's Man of the Year, President Bush. Time also recognizes Power Line (for their relentless fact-checking of Dan Rather, not for their assessment of women's basketball.)

There is, as a caller to Charlie Sykes's show noted, one other individual to recognize. Had Al Gore not invented the Internet, there would be no blogosphere to fact-check CBS. A belated shout-out to Vice President Gore.

COMPASSION FASCISM IS COMPASSION FASCISM. It has nothing to do with political correctness. King at SCSU Scholars picks up a story from Southern Utah University, where a recently promoted associate professor with six years' experience and a university teaching award was neither granted nor denied tenure, which is effectively denial of tenure. (At many universities, a promotion committee will grant early promotion and deny early tenure, effectively tabling the tenure decision for another year, but generally approving it. This procedural move is unusual.) King notes,

I think it's incumbent of those of us who fight for academic freedom to defend someone like Roberds if he has been dismissed for his views (trumped up by his use of the effenheimer), but the placing of Roberds on immediate administrative leave is a red flag. That is an action taken usually when there is some reason a faculty member must not be placed before students. It's not an action taken with incompetents, nor with faculty who in the normal course of events is denied tenure.

Robert of Cliopatria, who has had some experience with tenure denials for lack of "collegiality" has much more, including another news story.

If there is a denial of tenure because the candidate does not toe the ideological line at Southern Utah (which is not playing in a bowl) it is as bad as a denial for those reasons at a more conventionally politically correct university. Developing...

CONTINUING TO PLAY THAT WEAK HAND. Embattled Southern Mississippi president Shelby "Ten of Diamonds" Thames continues to have troubles. Robert at Liberty and Power has the details. Unfortunately, the university is still hung up on assessment and strategic planning -- mercifully, not for an "era of downsizing." At least Southern Miss won its bowl game.

OPERATION WACHT AM RHEIN. Mitch at Shot in the Dark has some stories; looks like he is planning his own "Sixty Years Ago" tribute to the South Dakota National Guard's 188th and 957th Field Artillery. The wind is blowing here tonight, and the snow is piling up, but my house is much warmer than Sgt. Karlson's tent. More of his story before Christmas.

WANT THE REPUTATION? MAKE THE EFFORT. Question: is the effort worth it? Laura at 11-D has pointed to an article on the free side of the Chronicle of Higher Education seeking those missing women, particularly in laboratory science faculty at research universities.

The article identifies some features of the academic life that ought to give pause to aspirants, whether male or female.

Young women also may be opting out of research-university jobs for personal reasons. Many would-be female scholars, particularly in the sciences, seem to believe that children and a hard-charging research career don't mix. "A lot of us look like we're running around all the time," says Angelica M. Stacy, associate vice provost for faculty equity at Berkeley and a professor of chemistry there. "Young women aren't seeing the fun, the flexibility, the rewarding stuff."

(I will refrain during the Christmas season from taking too many shots at the faculty equity office, which takes a lot of the fun out of searches, which are one of the more burdensome parts of the job, particularly in economics, where the recruiting season coincides with final exams. But I digress.)

As if the years of penury in graduate school, followed by more penury as a post-doc, which I understand is de riguer in the lab sciences, followed by five to seven years on a tenure track, with some additional years on another tenure track if the first one doesn't work out, are particularly conducive to being a good dad, that is, provided somebody is willing to put up with those risks and latch onto such a guy in the first place. It happens. There are academic dads. How many of them are in the position of a beginning economist at Wisconsin, some years ago, who once lamented about not being able to spend much time with his kids? (He did not get tenure.)

Perhaps the problem is with the job description itself, which still owes a lot to its roots with cloistered monks.

Anna L.W. Sears earned her Ph.D. in population biology from [California-] Davis [which is not going to a bowl -- Ed.] last summer and is working as research director of the Laguna de Santa Rosa Foundation, a nonprofit environmental organization in Sebastopol, Calif. After starting graduate school "with high aspirations for an academic future," she says, she "experienced a big turnaround part way through." She had come to see academe as a "competitive, narrow culture that is so tracked." And she wondered whether other women felt the same way.

So she surveyed 258 male and female graduate students at Davis in 2002 and learned that women were much more likely than men to abandon their plans for an academic career. Women cited a clash between a research career and a family, as well as "disillusionment with academia" because of its "low pay, political infighting, and harsh competition for money."

That pain comes out in a colloquy on the article, which (as several of Laura's commenters have noted) is not for the faint of heart.

One recent Ph.D. recognizes the problem comes with the job.I am currently asking myself this question.

Do I want to be part of a department where I constantly have to try to please superiors who think I should be working 24/7, while my son grows up without me? My husband is also asking himself these same questions.

Another post, by an anonymous poster, bears quoting in full.

I rarely see people in academic science who are happy and fulfilled and contribute to their communities.

The norm in academic science is to be withdrawn, obsessive, work addicted, detached, uncommunicative, and judgmental.

I overdosed on these types in graduate school and that was quite enough.That's why I would not apply for an academic science job if someone put a gun to my head

Workaholism is an illness. In academic science you have to make yourself over into a sick person to compete with all of the other sick people, and that wasn't going to work for me.

I hope all those academic men are very happy. But I know that many of them work so much, they forgot what happy meant a long time ago.

If such people lightened up, they just might be more productive. (Consider Nobel Laureate Robert Solow, skier, chess-player, offshore yacht-racer, kind enough to have commented favorably on a paper of mine that he had no obligation to read.) The Superintendent has a source in a staff position at a prominent university who characterizes many of the faculty members as "workaholics" and "political" cut-throats. The pity is that they cannot better enjoy their exalted standing in their fields, which is not attenuated in any way by the fact that their university is NOT playing in a bowl game.

But perhaps the root problem is the requirements of the job as currently constituted get in the way of people leading something resembling a normal life. For my part, I would like to find the office that provides compensation for alienation of affection, with interest.

TONIGHT'S KIT REVIEW. Electric Nose compares and contrasts kit tooling with the prototype. For the money they're spending, modellers, even in those miniature scales, deserve believable representations of the real thing, or information about traders that are doing a poor job.

A THIRD WORLD COUNTRY has corrupt public officials and enterprise-killing taxes and burdensome regulations. Chicago's water works is a candy store and the city is considering -- you guessed it -- more taxes and regulations. John McCarron:

Falling wages? No sweat. Ald. Edward Burke (14th), longtime chairman of the Chicago City Council Finance Committee, is sponsoring an ordinance that would require big-box discount stores such as Wal-Mart to pay their employees a "living wage" of $9.43 an hour . Sure beats the cheesy $5.15 an hour federal minimum wage.

Need health insurance? If the big discounters don't add medical coverage to their benefits packages, Burke's Law will tack on another $3 an hour so workers can buy their own coverage.

Say you don't work for a big retailer? No problem. All should benefit from another Burke-backed requirement: 40 percent of all merchandise sold in the big stores must be made right here in the USA.

Those are the regulations. Here come the taxes.

Daley also has been behaving like Chicago is a go-it-alone kind of town. Did he not, this very week, push through a quarter-cent increase in the city sales tax, boosting our composite rate to 9 cents on the dollar, the highest in the nation?

Meanwhile, the Daley-controlled Chicago Park District is hiking property taxes by $12 million and raising another $3 million on everything from boat slips to parking spaces. The Daley-controlled Board of Education is eyeing $40 million more in property taxes. The CTA says it needs another $80 million to avoid service cuts, which likely means a fare increase, plus a hike in the transit portion of the sales tax depending on what the legislature does this spring. At the Cook County Board, where the mayor's brother, John, chairs the Finance Committee, they're getting ready to serve up a $70 million menu of tax increases on hotel rooms, cigarettes, food, beverages and real estate.

People will, however, respond to incentives.

The big problem, of course, is getting people to shop in Chicago, or Cook County, or even Illinois, once they realize they can buy stuff for a lot less across the border. Same goes for hotel rooms, rental cars, boat slips, office buildings and just about everything else. Won't people--won't entire companies and industries--shop with their feet and take their business someplace else?

Indeed, the leakage already is upon us. Earlier this week, the Tribune's Jon Hilkevitch reported that major airlines are adjusting operations to avoid buying jet fuel at O'Hare International and Midway Airports. Local taxes now add about 20 cents to the cost of a gallon of fuel. A Boeing 747 can hold 57,285 gallons. Do the math. A cool $10,000 can be saved by topping off someplace else.The real bleeding, though, involves sofas and bedroom sets, refrigerators and DVD players, PCs and iPods. A research outfit called MetroEdge estimates Chicago residents spent $6.5 billion last year on stuff purchased outside the city. Wal-Mart alone figures Chicago residents dropped about $500 million at its 35 suburban stores.

Solution, according to Mr McCarron: make Chicago its own country, and build an Iron Curtain around it. Particularly strong sanctions for those who shop at Wal-Mart.

GOTTA MAKE SOME FAKE ID? Illini or Huskie has some thoughts on First Twin Jenna Bush becoming a high school teacher.

Jenna and Barbara never really did it for me...an English major and a humanities major? C'mon...at least pretend that you're not going to sponge off of your family for the rest of your life...we know you're not going to live the lifestyle that an English or humanities major might enjoy.

THEY DON'T STOP AT DRAINING LAKE MICHIGAN. U.S. calls water dept. a racket. Remind me again, why is the provision of water so important that it cannot be left to private business?

AN ESTABLISHMENT CLAUSE FOR EDUCATION? Constrained Vision picked up a Will Wilkinson column in which the Menu Board is much like the School Board.

There is a publicly elected “Menu Board” that determines each year’s offerings. You wanted rye this year? Sorry! The Board voted for Wonder Bread. Again! You could, in principle, opt out of the public food system and buy rye, pumpernickel, or seven grain oat-nut crunch at a fancy private store. But you’ve already paid thousands in taxes, and can’t afford to pay twice for everything you eat. The Menu Board picks it. You eat it.

Years ago, you could, in principle, opt out of the public church system. That could get you excommunicated, or killed in such a way that your soul would go to Heaven. Or you could move from Lowell to Lowell Center. Thus, the Establishment Clause.

Today you opt out of the public school system by moving from Chicago to Winnetka. (Or something ... New Trier is on the state watchlist??)

But whether you're at Chicago or New Trier, there is still this little problem. The School Board picks it. You learn it. Or not, as this nugget from Dean's World, involving anomalies in the evolution paradigm, illustrates.

No one said what they thought would happen if children in the science classroom were allowed to be told that there are unexplained problems in current evolutionary theory, or if they heard that some people — even some smart people! — believe there might be some sort of intelligent design behind much of what we see in biology.

So far the strongest answer I've heard (it's the only answer I ever seem to hear, really) is that such a statement is "not science." To which I can only reply, "a belief to the contrary is not science either. Now, is a science classroom a good place for critical inquiry, or is it not?"

Those who vigorously assert that any examination of the question of intelligent design behind life is, ipso facto, a "religion" and therefore has no place in the public schools or any science classroom have yet to convince me of their case.

Unfortunately, as long as local governments hold a monopoly on both designing the curriculum and on providing it, the tyranny of the majority (if it is organized) or of the minority (if it is sufficiently vocal) will get in the way of learning. Time to consider unbundling the design from the provision, which is Mr Wilkinson's position.

EVER HEAR OF NARCISSISTS? Don at Cafe Hayek sees different social constructions of differing self-interested behaviors:

Jogging to stay healthy is virtuous; managing your pharmaceutical firm to stay profitable is inconsiderate (and for many people downright scandalous).

Your mileage may vary.

SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT. Stephen at Left2Right notes a fall-off in graduate school applications from overseas, which, when combined with the poor academic skills of domestic students, might herald a brain drain for the United States. His concluding paragraph suggests there is plenty of blame to go around.

Surely the Bush administration must bear much of the responsibility for post-9/11 immigration policy and other ham-handed policies toward science and universities. But Democrats have also traditionally cast a blind eye at teachers' unions who have opposed measures such as merit pay and substantially greater teacher responsibility that, in my view, are necessary to improve public education. I have never been able to see why the governance structures, mediated throughout by meritocratic judgment, that are so central to having made U.S. institutions of higher education so highly successful internationally, have been so fiercely resisted in K-12 education in the U.S.

Meritocratic judgement in higher education? Sometimes. Sometimes that judgement is simply getting the people that annoy you off the island. Perhaps word has gotten back to China that, contrary to the ProfScam crowd, academicians are not underworked and overpaid.

TOO MANY BOWLS? Sure enough, Northern Illinois and four other MAC teams get bowl bids, and the sports pundits find the post-season an object of scorn. University Diaries found one columnist who got off this gem.

Remember last year when you said the Silicon Valley Classic couldn't lower itself any further than 6-6 UCLA and Fresno State? Are you ready for Northern Illinois vs. Troy? What is that, USC's JV team?

Whatever. We're playing after Christmas. Is there any other university in Illinois that can say that?

The column also gives the Akron Zips a thought. Akron failed to qualify after Hawaii became bowl-eligible by beating Michigan State, whose win over Wisconsin looked like the first day of Operation Wacht am Rhein, but the Spartans ran out of gas against Penn State (?!) and Hawaii.

MORE ON LIVING AT THE EXPENSE OF OTHERS. On the news-talk shows I listened to Thursday evening, Treasury Secretary and former railroad man John Snow repeatedly noted the $10 trillion unfunded liability that is the Social "Security" "trust fund." That is a wise move. Critics of the private account plan are pointing at the $2 trillion in securitized liability expected to be incurred as transition costs ... presumably some of the money invested will provide economic growth as well as making some dent in the $8 trillion still up in the air.

Econ Log has more references to the private-account discussion, as well as a good discussion question.

How much economic growth would a reasonable person be willing to give up in order to maintain Social Security as it is without privatization?

And Poor and Stupid has addressed Mike Kinsley's original question at length.

LIVING AT THE EXPENSE OF OTHERS. This Cox and Forkum cartoon perfectly summarizes current Social Security funding.

A few days ago, Andrew Sullivan posted a Mike Kinsley challenge to the idea that some Social Security taxes be invested directly in retirement accounts owned by taxpayers. There are more responses to the challenge than I am able to evaluate this afternoon, but herewith an abridged summary.

Arnold Kling took up the challenge the same day; certainly go there first. (He has subsequently posted an update on Econ Log.) In my view, Mr Kling did not draw sufficient distinctions between a transfer (see the above cartoon) in which a young person forgoes a consumption or investment opportunity today in order that a pensioner gets that consumption or investment opportunity instead, and an investment, in which that young person forgoes consumption today in order to enjoy greater consumption in the future (that's the technological superiority of future over current methods of production at work, otherwise known as capital formation and economic growth.) Max Speak notes the possibility of greater economic growth, but generally concurs with Mr Kinsley.

So if there is no change in economic growth, greater consumption for PRA holders comes at the expense of somebody else. But who? And how? Workers still get paid whatever they are going to be paid and spend for themselves and their children accordingly. Investment is the same. What's left is consumption of the elderly. If PRA holders' consumption is somehow augmented, some other elderly oxen get gored. If there is no less saving outside the PRAs, how would that be possible? As MK notes, returns to non-PRA savings would have to be reduced. Possible but not likely.

So MK's argument works better assuming no change in growth than in proving no change in growth. But I agree with him anyway.

(This post, from the same site, offers useful cautionary information for those who would pin their hopes on higher stock-market returns.) The assumption that changing a contingent liability (as the Social Security trust fund is drawn down, the Treasury must either cash bonds, issue new bonds, or borrow from the Fed) into a securitized liability is non-trivial. Mickey Kaus's memory for that part of the debate is pretty good.

I assume the answer to Kinsley's conundrum is that defenders of privatization think switching from a pay-as-you-go system (in which each generation pays for its elders' retirement) to a pay-for-yourself system (in which each generation sets aside money to pay for its own retirement) will boost the national savings rate and result in greater economic growth. Why might this happen? Because Social Security's current pay-as-you-go benefits--though merely transfer payments and not a return on actual savings--eliminate some of the need to save for retirement. Why set aside money for your golden years when the government will supply that money later by taxing younger workers and sending you checks? According to this argument, Social Security's faux-savings have depressed the national savings rate--an effect that will presumably be reversed if today's young workers are required to set aside cash in personal accounts to pay for their own benefits. This increased savings will mean increased investment which should translate into higher economic growth. I seem to recall studies by Martin Feldstein that purport to show such an effect.

(scroll down to 0126 entry. Econo Pundit clarifies the meaning of Professor Feldstein's abstract.)

My Stupid Dog (hat tip: Just One Minute, who has clearly devoted more than one minute to following the thread) explains why the nature of the liability matters to younger workers.

For example, Kinsley states that "Greater economic growth requires either more capital to invest, or smarter investment of the same amount of capital. Privatization will not lead to either of these." This blanket assertion nicely sidesteps the question of whether individuals should be allowed to invest their money as they see fit. (After all, if government bureaucrats can invest my money better than I can, it would hardly be in my best interest to tell them no.) But many investors are not so certain that the money we deposit into Social Security will yield any return at all. Unless something happens to thin the ranks of baby boomers in the next few years, we're going to end up paying for a lot of Wal-Mart greeters and Florida condo colonies, none of which will have any bearing on what will happen to us when we retire.

Kinsley never addresses the main issue about our current system of "collectivized" Social Security -- namely, that most Americans under thirty-five strongly suspect that the system will collapse at about the time we're eligible to draw from it. We're not talking about a zero-percent rate of return: We're talking about no return whatsoever. If Kinsley worries that a privatized Social Security will give Americans a reduced rate of return in the short term, he never addresses the question of looming disaster under our present system in the long term.

Especially if the Treasury uses the nuclear option and borrows from the Fed (remember, kiddies, that's the gentleman's way of printing money.)

To provide a sampling of what else is out there: Steve Verdon has been busy. Just keep scrolling. Follow his links. There will be a quiz on it later. Todd at Volokh Conspiracy has some thoughts on the paternalism inherent in Social Security (best question: what prevents a pensioner from squandering his benefits?) Getting to the heart of the matter,

What matters is that they both worked hard for the requisite number of years—if you work, you get it and if you don't work you don't get it. Paternalism and protecting old people from destitution have nothing to do with this. Thus, the program is in fact designed to have some redistributionist, or perhaps more accurately stated, "equalizing" component to it.

Perhaps so, but doesn't that fall back on the traditional defense of Social Security as a bad pension investment bundled with a bad insurance policy, where, rhetoric about defined benefits to the contrary, the benefits paid either to pensioners or to survivors can be subject to abridgement by Congress at any time.

There's more of the old-time religion at Mark Kleiman's.

[Semi-technical point: As Max Sawicky and others have pointed out, the assumptions behind the Bush plan are inconsistent. The stock market can't continue to yield excess returns unless the economy grows quickly. But if the economy grows quickly, there's no fiscal crisis to deal with (unless, that is we continue to pursue reckless Bushite policies of cutting taxes for some while spending money like water). So either there's no real problem, or the private accounts aren't the solution.]

Although it is true that a growing economy provides additional gains from trade to tax in order to provide benefits, the intergenerational equity question remains: what gives the current crop of retirees (today: too young for Korea but too old to be called up for Vietnam) the right to deprive today's youngsters of the greater economic growth they might enjoy with a pension plan that provided for more investment. Ultimately the source of revenue for any pension plan is economic growth: why continue to stifle it by transferring consumption?

The real old-time religion, of course, is at The Nation.

OPERATION WACHT AM RHEIN. Some veterans of the Battle of the Bulge are with us today. "Whenever the convoy slowed, we jumped off the trucks to get [retreating troops'] ammo, hand grenades and guns," Lieutenant Vincent Vicari, from the 101st Airborne, recalls. The 101st, recall, was supposed to have been winkled out of Bastogne in the second day of the German offensive. Nuts to that.

War historians offer a mixed verdict: the Battle of the Bulge delayed the Allied timetable for victory in Europe by at least six weeks, but by depleting the best of Hitler's forces, it made the final push to Berlin less costly in the long run.

Bastogne today is a tourist favorite that annually celebrates its famous survival. It has a Place McAuliffe and even a Rue Nuts.

The town of LaRoche, Belgium, nearly destroyed in the campaign, now offers a different kind of Lebensraum.

"We have space here, which others don't have, where people can just get away to breathe freely for a couple of days," says [Mayor Jean-Pierre] Dardenne, pointing out that 66 million Europeans live within 200 miles of La Roche.

And at least for now, people have reason to visit, or perhaps Belgium is discovering suburban sprawl.

Tourism is replacing farming as the economic mainstay, and the population is growing fast.

Like other towns across the Ardennes, La Roche will hold ceremonies to mark the 60th anniversary of the battle. The biggest will be in Bastogne, where King Albert II plans to greet American veterans.

Dardenne acknowledges that with the passing of time, interest in the liberation is waning. Many villages stopped commemorating the battle after the 50th anniversary.

Perhaps, although people still visit Gettysburg in large numbers.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT? Best of the Web:

[A] new youth movement isn't entirely out of the question. After all, lots of these kids will be going to college in the next decade, and those who've been raised in conservative homes and communities may be shocked to confront the authoritarian leftism that reigns on campus. Interesting times are ahead, perhaps, for left-wing academics.

Might be wise to read the entire article, however:

These young people don't make good employees, [Edina psychologist Andrea] Johnson said, because they have little respect for bosses, chafe at authority in the workplace and resent that they have to work at all. "They've been able to manipulate parents in a way that they can't manipulate outside," Johnson said.

Put another way, the authoritarian leftists are more likely to be called out for awarding low grades whether or not those low grades are for saying nice things about capitalists or Republicans. (Or there will be gains from trade between administrators with enrollment driven budgets and indulged youngsters?)

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Walter Williams gets some feedback on a previous column.

An English professor wrote, "One of the items that I assigned was a two-page essay that described a favorite vacation or holiday. One student turned in two pictures drawn with crayon depicting the beach. When I gave her a failing grade, she was indignant and said that she put a great deal of work into the pictures. When I told her that she did not do the assignment and that she was supposed to write an essay, she said, ‘But I don't know what an essay is!'"

His assessment:

Such students are academic cripples and don't belong in college in the first place.

So what's new: regular readers know my scorn for the fiction that admitting unprepared students is "access." And certainly everybody recognizes these allegations.

Several devastating consequences result when colleges admit unprepared students. First, it lets high schools off the hook by allowing them to continue to confer fraudulent diplomas. Second, it leads to a dumbing down of the academic curricula and the creation of Mickey Mouse courses for students who can't make it in more challenging courses. Academic departments or professors who don't dumb down their classes and participate in grade inflation risk declining enrollment and administrative threats to their budgets. Finally, hiring faculty to staff remedial courses inflates college costs to parents and taxpayers.

What is new is a suggestion from Professor Williams that the incentives be changed.

To a large extent, college budgets are determined by enrollment size. More students mean higher budgets and therefore incentive to admit students unprepared for college. Colleges should not admit students requiring remedial education. That's not to say youngsters shouldn't receive remedial education, but let them get it elsewhere -- maybe at the high school that awarded them a fraudulent diploma.

Years ago, in summer camp, those cabins that failed morning inspection were assigned a "Dirty Do-Over." Perhaps each high school ought to be required to make its Dirty Do-Over ratio (the proportion of diploma-holding students unable to matriculate without remediation to total college enrollment plus non-matriculants) public information.

TAKE THE TRAIN TO THE PLANES. The latest online Hiawatha timetables list stops at the new Milwaukee Mitchell Field station.

Station construction as of December 8.
(That might be a train approaching ... see it pass in a subsequent picture.)

Although this station arrangement errs on the side of passenger safety, with a platform only on the station building side of the tracks, the design will hamper speeding up the schedule and increasing the frequency of trains, as all trains calling at this station will have to run on the east track (the old southbound main line) between Lake Interlocking to the north and Sturtevant to the south. Northbound trains will have to cross over someplace, because there is current-of-traffic operation from Rondout, where the Metra Fox Lake service joins the Milwaukee line, to Chicago Union Station.

IT'S GOING ON YOUR PERMANENT RECORD. Landing a job starts on Day 1 of college. Methinks this is a bit too much.

Focusing on your career, starting to market yourself and learning how to land your first professional job has to start the first day of your college life.

At the University of Dayton, here is what that means:

And that's why, on their first day of college in August, the class of 2008 was alerted to the fact that their job search was beginning.

All incoming students were told they must develop personal Web sites with a resume and picture in their first year. The first-year students also were encouraged to make video resumes.

As if incoming students have any idea what their aptitudes are. It matters not that some of these incoming students might be adults with a work history. College-as-retraining simply indicates dissatisfaction with what those people are currently doing; it is not a magic ticket to a dream job. The story illustrates how far some universities have drifted from the idea of the first two years as an opportunity to engage Big Ideas without fear of the consequence, while discovering strengths and weaknesses that might have nothing to do with vocational talents.

There is a flip side to this public posting of credentials: employers have additional information useful in making background checks.

If you have even the slightest misdemeanor in your background, it could cost you the job you're applying for, as some job seekers have found out the hard way.

It seems very petty to be denied employment because, as one reader has complained, a search of your criminal background shows you may have been fined for not keeping your dog on a leash and you forgot to mention it in your job interview.

To job applicants, digging up trivia such as this that allows a potential employer to withdraw a job offer is devastating and unfair.

On the other hand, that universities, nay, the common schools, have abandoned character education does not mean that a good character is not still valuable.

HAPPY BEETHOVEN'S BIRTHDAY. Milt Rosenberg is more effective than I at locating music online and linking to it. In honor of the day, here are his Beethoven selections.

HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THOSE FIVE MAC TEAMS. Really, it doesn't. It's all about the University of Spoiled Children in the title game, Texas in the Rose Bowl (??) whilst the California Golden Bears must settle for Texas Tech, just before Northern Illinois plays Troy, on December 30. But there oughta be a law banning the Bowl Championship Series. (Via University Diaries, who is doing a great job following these things despite protestations of ignorance.)

I thought intercollegiate athletics were all about the contest, and the experience. Apparently nobody has told California state senator Dick Ackerman (Berkeley '64.)

"The BCS has proven in its seven-year existence that it is a failure," Ackerman said. "It has failed at the expense of California and other Pac-10 teams that have lost millions of dollars in revenue."

You mean it really is about the money?

IT'S CALLED A MARKET TEST. Bill at Atlantic Blog is properly unimpressed with an academic administrator's proposal that tenure decisions depend on teaching, scholarship, and invention, defined as the generation of useful patents. Dean Sjostrom (it's like being an admiral, Bill, the title never goes away) correctly focuses on the administrator's gripe that universities will prefer patents for their commercial value (here is my warfarin riff) rather than for their scientific originality. The administrator goes on to elaborate on his gripe.

The quickest way to change this mind-set will be to get administrations and faculties to accept successful inventing as a step toward tenure. After all, in a few decades research went from being a foreign concept in academia to being the most important factor in tenure decisions. However, unlike research, there is no established peer-review process for evaluating inventions, no way to evaluate the academic significance of a new idea beyond its potential economic value.

That must change, and the academic community, perhaps with a push from the professional societies and the financial support from the government, should take the lead in clarifying the principles for doing so. Not only could it have profound benefits for the intellectual vigor of the university, it would also help America keep its place in the global economic order.

The spirit of King Canute is alive and well. Don't you just love that "That must change." How can the United States keep its place (its lead??) in the global economic order without incentives for the creative people to do so (perhaps by disregarding a "C" on a paper laying out the concept for overnight air freight, or by dropping out of Harvard to tinker with computers?) Has it ever occurred to this administrator that creative people can do quite well without the imprimatur of an M.B.A. or an Ivy League sheepskin? That dealing with patent examiners is hassle enough, without having to endure the scrutiny of a dissertation review, six years of annual reviews by colleagues, and obligatory service on a committee or two just to demonstrate adherence to the institution's values and to show your face to another jury just awaiting its chance to vote you off the island?

GET ON THE TRAIN. Robi at Winds of Change seeks your assistance for the Baghdad Hobby Club, which has turned one of Saddam's palaces into a recreation center where some of the troops are working on a HO Scale layout.

AND there is apparently an O Gauge loop of track. (No, I don't know whether it's Lionel three-rail or Atlas two-rail. If anyone posted to the club can answer this, please give a shout out.)

The Hobby Club has commercial support from HobbyTown, USA, which references this War Department memorandum requesting civilian involvement. (Some donated items will be made available to a local youth center as well.)

Robi's post provides current contact information.

Send all donations to:

Sgt Dean Flyte
Baghdad Hobby Club
ISG/MCT#4/SCP-B
Camp Slayer
APO AE 09342

I think there's some Athearn HO in the basement that needs a warmer home.

POSSIBLE SOURCE OF COMPANY MAIL. Via SCSU Scholars, the Superintendent discovers Professor Plum, who has given some thought to why university graduates can't write a memorandum.

It seems that a lot of college students and college graduates can't write. And this is getting the corporate knickers in a twist. Here, for example, are excerpts from an article on just that topic.

(Excerpts omitted, click for details.) The good professor's hypothesis, however, is a bit kind to the English department.

One slight possibility is that college students are NOT taught to write so that OTHER persons get it. Instead, they are taught to write so that their PERFESSERS in English Departments get it. And this means writing according to the canon of postmodernism--namely:

1. Write as if your scholarship covers everything from ancient history to physics--when in fact you're an ignoramus with nothing useful to say.

2. Focus entirely on yourself and two or three other similarly-demented literaquacks who get off on their squalid prose.

3. Make sure every sentence contains one of the following terms: authentic, lived, empower, critical, literacy, voice, intersection, spirit, genre, space, time, dimension, publics, discourse, perspective, narrative, politics of, exploit.

4. Disguise your privileged life and complete self-absorption behind a curtain of smarmy rhetoric that exploits the pain and degradation of real people in whose service you pretend to work, as you sip Chardonnay and discuss the praxis of discourse at the Faculty Club.

Maybe. The laments I am hearing from colleagues supervising senior capstone papers (now required of all graduating economics majors, and we are producing close to 100 seniors a year) is that many of the writers have apparently not done any writing before. Whatever exposure they have had to the English Department falls short of exposure to the Code of Theorrhea.

Perhaps it is time to time-slip the English Department. Comparative advantages notwithstanding, we certainly are not doing a worse job of teaching writing. Perhaps we ought to be paid extra for taking on that function.

SIXTY YEARS AGO Sgt. Karlson and the 87th left the mudfield.

Series of rapid jumps across France through Reims, Chateau Thierry to Metz and took forts there. Heavy artillery from Germans. Bad motor rides in rainy, cold weather; ate K rations and cold C rations most of the time. First combat at German forts.

At Metz, went into combat shelling several German forts, following Patton. Stayed in abandoned hospital for about a week, and warmed up and dried out. Dealt with frequent unfriendly fire while here.

The entry for December 14 reads,

Went into the Saar mid December into full combat. Several miserable days later pulled into Wolfling, France (Saar valley). Black nights. (A person was assigned to lead trucks into town due to poor vision conditions). Lived there for a few days (muddy fields in a filthy farm town). Shelled heavily by German 88's, and spent time on cold wet dirt.

We know that the Germans are preparing operation Wacht am Rhein, which Allied readers will know as the Battle of the Bulge. More to come.

THERE ARE LIMITS. Some behavior is socially acceptable. Some behavior is perverse. Grant the first two premises, and you must grant a third: there are limits. Alyssa Ford (via Newmark's Door) sees the problem.

In 2003, Republican Senator Rick Santorum unloaded the same sort of argument on an Associated Press reporter: "If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything." In response, David Smith, the communications director of the Human Rights Campaign, said that it was outrageous for Santorum to put being gay on the same legal and moral plane as a person who commits incest. "That is repugnant in our view and not right," he said.

There are a few important lessons to be gleaned here. First, social conservatives see the slippery slope as a poison arrow that can prevent all-out gay marriage, and they will use it again and again. Second, gay marriage advocates will say anything to distance gays and lesbians from other sexual minorities: the polygamous, the swingers, the S&M practitioners, and those rare couples that happen to be related.

Years ago, I hung out on a discussion list where a frequent visitor was into bondage. She told a story about being invited to the reviewing stand at San Francisco's Gay Pride parade, where all the Distinguished Observers turned their backs when the Man-Boy Love Association delegation walked past.

It is not a slippery slope argument. It is recognition that there are limits. The conversation, dear readers, ought to be over where the limits are.

PETRI DISHES OF FAILED LIBERAL POLICIES? Yes, that is one of Ann Coulter's more pungent lines, describing California. But there might be something broader at work. Last night I was working on the railroad and listening to Matt Drudge (yes, it is a guilty pleasure, and if the weather is correct I can pick it up on KOA (850 kHz) out of Denver as well as old reliable WLS (890 kHz) in East DeKalb) broadcasting from Las Vegas, which is apparently attracting all the hot stuff from Los Angeles (hat tip: Newmark's Door). The phenomenon is manifesting itself in Europe. Liberal Order reports a net outmigration of people from The Netherlands. Perhaps we can expect a net in-migration of French comedians, who will not necessarily be seeking lower tax bills. Owen at Boots and Sabers has discovered some new shall-not-give-offense laws regulating the content of comedy acts. Wilkommen, bienvenue, welcome.

Some people, however, are a bit slow to learn.

As a key component of the University's "New Vision for Campus Culture," the Colgate Board of Trustees and administration have demanded that all privately owned fraternity and sorority houses be sold to the school, or their chapter will no longer be recognized. Further, any student joining a non-recognized chapter may be subject to suspension or expulsion.

The Residential New Vision anticipates that University-owned Greek-letter houses will become the Broad Street Community and serve as "theme" houses. Current theme houses are designed as residences for students who want to live with others who share a common interest or background - Asian, African-American, Latino, homosexuality, creative arts, environmental activism, and peace studies.

Why doesn't drinking beer and speculating about hotties qualify as a theme that people might hold in common? It's not as if any of these other theme houses encourage intellectual development.

DINING OUT IN CHICAGO. There are good places to eat within walking distance of an L station, and we're not just talking about Loop stations. This post has a number of suggestions, including the Davis Street area of Evanston. (Now, if there were electric train service from Davis to Seven Mile Road ...)

A CANDIDATE FOR THE DECK OF CARDS. Mike Adams identifies Wythe Holt, professor of law at Alabama.

Holt is actively involved in an attempt to systematically ban ideas he finds offensive at Alabama’s flagship institution. The attempt takes the form of a new ban on “any behavior which demeans or reduces an individual based on group affiliation or personal characteristics, or which promotes hate or discrimination.”

Professor Adams correctly notes,

Wythe Holt, like so many others in academia, fails to understand that free expression is process, not a result. Public discourse cannot be rigged to guarantee certain results for certain groups contingent upon their present popularity with the powers that be.

Particularly if the method of rigging discourse sets up a machinery of repression that can be captured by others.

I really must invite Herrn. Schneider und Schwarz over for Sprechers and a sheepshead game.

DEFIES PARODY. Is it a sacrilege to be Joseph in the Christmas pageant?

A Vatican spokesman said it was unacceptable to have celebrities representing Jesus, Joseph or Mary. The Rev. Jonathan Jenkins, spokesman for the archbishop of Canterbury, who leads the world's 77 million Anglicans, said the depiction went too far.

The context for the complaint is an act of vandalism at a wax-museum display with David Beckham as Joseph, Victoria Spice as Mary, and inter alia Tony Blair playing the same part I once had (in a church.) Frankincense to offer have I ...

LAUGHTER IS THE BEST MEDICINE. The Anchoress has a younger son, who, along with some of his classmates, reduced a Diversity Weenie (TM) to incoherence.

While no one would mistake our district for a "red" (as in Bushie) zone, the kids had no tolerance for the tolerance message - they were fed up with it. As the "diversity counselor" would drone on and on with the same platitudes the students had been hearing since they were two year old Sesame Street addicts, they would throw their books, their backpacks, their headphones at the loudspeaker. They would play their trumpets or simply cry out, in various tones of rage, "you're not my mother!" And, "can we start learning, now? Please? " or (this being New York) "hey, I gotcha tolerance right here!"

In an ironic twist which the "diversity counselor" probably could never comprehend, more than a few upperclassmen began calling it the Two Minutes Hate, and eventually the idea was dropped.

Hee hee. I'm going to have to rethink using "Stalinist" to refer to Diversity Weenies (TM). Kaganovich, Molotov (ne Scriabin), and Khrushchev were made of sterner stuff.

TAKE THIS TEST. Robert at Division of Labour presents his Public Finance final examination, under the rubric of academic biases. For what it's worth, it reminds me of my undergraduate public finance final from Robert Lampman, a staff economist for the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Just for grins, here are a few Hal Varian style short answers.

1. All gains from trade accrue to people.

2. Did you study deadweight losses in price theory?

3. That's the Ramsey Rule for efficient pricing by a multiproduct natural monopoly. It would mandate full employment for economists calculating all those elasticities. (Then envision Charlie Rangel inverting those elasticities!)

4. Income means all net gains from trade, including difficult to value things such as the imputed rental value of a house on which the mortgage is paid off. (I nailed that question back in 1974; does anybody remember the implicit rent provisions in the Clinton Administration's first tax bill?)

5. Income and substitution effects.

6. Relative prices matter.

ARE PROFESSORS WEAK INSECURE PEOPLE? Consider these observations by Arnold Kling, now observing the Ivory Tower from the outside.

The ability to impress intellectually demanding colleagues is respectable. However, the intense desire to play the ego game is not so attractive. It leads you to divide the world into those who can affect your position on the ego ladder vs. those who are irrelevant. What would be considered narrow-minded snobbery elsewhere becomes a survival skill in academics.

In an environment where the esteem of peers is such a crucial variable, the pressures for conformity are likely to be strong. You are better off indicating a sophisticated wine palette than an enjoyment of fast food, just as you are better off indicating contempt for conservatives and Republicans than showing support for George Bush.

What the ego game teaches you is that it is ok to dismiss most people's opinions as irrelevant. Your personal career depends entirely on the judgment of a relatively small set of peers. Since no one else matters for your personal standing, it is easy to slip into thinking that no one outside your academic pecking order has anything valuable to say on any subject whatsoever.

Moreover, for a big winner of the ego game, it comes as a rude shock to discover people who do not automatically defer to the professor's expertise.

It's not too much a stretch for such a person to go from becoming shocked to discover that there are other sorts of people who are quite successful at what they do, despite never having heard of rational expectations or of Lacan, to seeing such people as a threat, or to devoting intellectual energy to envy of such people, or to invalidating them.

(I would further note that the ego game is all about inter-personal conflict and negotiation. Or posturing, which is why committee meetings last so damned long.)

The one upside of the ego game, from the perspective of a survivor within the ivory tower, is that there are niches for people who play it in reverse. Hence these posts.

SECOND SECTION: Jeff at J.V.C. Comments is thinking along similar lines.

If anything's going to save academia from stagnation and frivolity and the oft-deserved ivory-tower stereotype, it won't be creepy intellectual-diversity legislation, finger-wagging op-eds, or politicized bickering. Instead, change will come, at least in part, through blogging profs who embrace this sloppy medium, thus humanizing their profession without degrading it. They remind the public why scholarship matters.

WHAT IS THE SOUND OF ATLAS SHRUGGING? Commoditization of populations.

Twenty years from now, what might the world’s most precious, depleting, natural resource be? Oil? Steel? Lumber? How about working-age adults who are still contributing to a nation’s entitlement programs rather than receiving benefits from them?

Read the whole thing. Pay close attention to the concluding paragraphs.

In addition to continually expanding the number of high-paying jobs that are available in our nation, America is going to also have to quickly come to grips with its illegal alien problem. Controlling who enters the country and realizing that an appropriate mix of talent can make immigration a strong contributor to our ability to grow our workforce and enhance our international competitiveness. As a result, the U.S. must not make the same errors that Europe appears to be heading toward with regard to its Muslim population.

As working age, productive members of the society will continue to command a high premium around the world, American immigration policy should be taking advantage of the apparent biases that are surfacing elsewhere to once again make our nation the preferred vocational destination of desirable people from all parts of the globe.

The policy challenge: screening applicants for legal status while not making legal admission so burdensome that otherwise ambitious people become illegal immigrants, at the same time identifying and weeding out terrorists masquerading as job-seekers.

The Europeans appear to be cooperating by making their countries (customs union?) less attractive to high achievers.

We're taking back our earlier suggestion that the rats are leaving the sinking ship of the Netherlands. The reported emigration of Dutchmen is reminding us more and more of our own forebears' emigration from all over the world to "our sea-washed, sunset gates.

That "earlier suggestion" ends with the observation, "Incentives rule." Ayup.

SECOND SECTION: Illegal immigrants make Laura's neigborhood work.

WINNING UGLY. The Detroit Lions left the Frozen Tundra at halftime with a 13-0 lead.

There is a second half for a reason.

For the third time in five games, Ryan Longwell kicked the winning field goal on the Packers' final possession. The team was a bit inefficient this time, as with 0:02 remaining after the field goal (was it riding the winds a little faster?) the team had to kick off.

Brett Favre began another touchdown-pass streak, as well as matching Dan Marino's string of consecutive 3,000 passing yards seasons.

Elsewhere in the Black and Blue Division, Chicago softened up Jacksonville by losing, and Minnesota failed to convert its last two possessions, falling in the Roller Dome to Seattle.

I wonder if there are any Minneapolis liberals who will find solace in the outcome. After all, embattled Seahawk coach Mike Holmgren does not join the ranks of the unemployed this week.

SECOND SECTION. Probably. Captain Ed finds some literary snobs who find an F. Scott Fitzgerald monument in a St. Paul park demeaned by a nearby bronze of Snoopy. I am not making this up.

STAYING THE COURSE. Former Northern Illinois University president John LaTourette, now retired in Arizona, and former athletic director Cary Groth, now at Nevada, savor the bowl invitation.

Both La Tourette and Groth admitted there were alums, and even other administrators on campus, who questioned whether or not a coaching change wasn't warranted after Novak ended his third season with a 3-30 ledger.

"There were even some administrators who questioned what was going on, but Dr. La Tourette and I believed in Joe and his plan," Groth said. "What people have to realize is that when you have a football program in the shape it was in when he took over, it required time to rebuild. I was asked once if I ever doubted my decision and I can honestly say no. I believed in Joe and his staff, he always surrounded himself with good people. In addition, I think Dr. La Tourette, the athletic administration and the athletics staff also all believed in him. President La Tourette allowing us to extend his contract was the key."

The former president echoed much of Groth's analysis.

"Most people simply didn't realize the situation he inherited when he was appointed. He had to endure a couple of years when the people in the program had to decide to shape up and make a commitment both athletically and academically. There was quite a turnover," La Tourette recalled. "Quite frankly, there were far too many community college players, some recruits from Canada, and in general, too many recruits from out of state. People outside of the administration and the athletic department simply can't appreciate the task that Joe took on.

Let us give credit where credit is due, as Mr Novak's predecessor served at the pleasure of Mr LaTourette and Ms Groth.

Northern Illinois fans have already filled a charter plane for San Jose, as well as working on other travel arrangements.

GET INVOLVED. Betsy at Betsy's Page reaches the young.

Both my husband and I have found that when we explain to our students in college and high school how the Social Security system actually works today and how it would work with private investment accounts, they are overwhelmingly in favor of allowing individuals the right to invest some of their Social Security in the markets. This is not only the right thing to do - it's a winner politically if it can be made clear to people so that they can evaluate the demagoguery that the AARP will throw at the idea.

A linked David Brooks column spells out the stakes.

This is not 1932 any more. This is not the age of big, static state institutions. This is actually about building a bridge to the 22nd century.

Two historians at Northwestern University have not yet grasped the message.

Social Security has served the nation well for 70 years and will continue to do so unless ideologues ruin it in the name of "fixing" it. Not only does Social Security not need the radical changes proposed by the Bush administration, those "reforms" will destroy the principles upon which this admirable system of social insurance was founded.

OK, tell us how you really feel.

Social Security was established in 1935 above all to prevent the elderly from falling into dire poverty. Private schemes for supporting the retired had failed badly--corporate pension plans went bankrupt, stock market portfolios melted away. Hence, the nation already has had experience with "privatized" retirement, an experience that ended disastrously with the onset of the Great Depression.

Talk about ideas preserved as if in amber. But look carefully at that final sentence. Its logic: There was a Great Depression. Private pension plans went bust. Therefore, private pension plans ought not replace Social Security. There's just one little problem with the argument. Social Security is not depression-proof either. It uses current payroll taxes to support current retirees. A depression is a situation in which people are not working, which a fortiori means smaller payrolls to tax. Keep that in mind as you read on.

The underlying principles of Social Security are a kind of social contract that is both intergenerational and intragenerational. That is, those who are working pay the benefits of those who have retired; and those who have never done paid work (widowed homemakers and dependent children, for instance) receive benefits from those who have worked or still do. Benefits vary according to salary-based contributions, but they are nevertheless progressive: Those who have earned the lowest wages enjoy a proportionally higher benefit. These noble principles assure that everyone who pays Social Security taxes helps care for everyone else, in return for the younger generations' help when we can no longer work.

I rather like Econo Pundit's characterization of this funding scheme:

Now imagine highway #2: a perpetually deteriorating tollway which must be feverishly maintained 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, crews constantly on the job. And here's the problem: the maintenance crews are financed by current tolls. If lots of cars are crowding to get onto the tollway maintenance crews are well-financed and the highway runs smoothly. Once all those cars crowd onto the highway and few new entrants provide new tolls, well, things kind of slow down.

Furthermore, those who have earned the lowest wages will collect a proportionately higher benefit for as long as they live. Longevity is a normal good. If I wanted to be cynical, I could suggest that Social Security's survival relies on the early deaths of some of its members. The historians' argument simply rephrases the old defense of an underperforming pension plan as an underperforming survivors and disability insurance plan bundled with it. And at least one Chicago area pensioner doesn't buy the intergenerational compact.

When I was working, I paid into the Social Security system every week. I had no choice; the money was deducted before I ever saw it. This was no problem for me, because I understood that my turn would eventually come to receive my Social Security after retirement.

I, and many others like myself, played by the rules.

Now that I am retired, I find that the payment that I receive is nowhere near enough to live on, let alone be socially secure. Fortunately I saved money in an individual retirement fund and a few investments.

Today senior citizens live much longer than the Social Security Administration planned on, so the system is going broke.

No doubt my Northwestern colleagues would reject this pensioner's counterexample.

Not only does the Social Security system operate efficiently and without corruption, it is essential to the standard of living of millions of elderly Americans. According to the Century Foundation, a leading research institute, it provides more than half of the income for more than 60 percent of families headed by someone 65 or older; and some 12 million households get 90 percent or more of their total incomes from Social Security.

On to the substance. Perhaps some of those pensioners would have a bigger pension had there been a real lockbox, otherwise known as their own account, to draw on. To suggest that, however, is only slightly less evil than wishing an atheist "Merry Christmas."

Those who wish to allow workers under 55 to set up private investment accounts with at least part of their Social Security taxes argue that the system is in crisis and must be reformed. They claim the coming retirement of the Baby Boomers will bankrupt the Social Security Trust Fund, which holds the premiums we pay each month. They assert that partial privatization is the way to save the Trust Fund because the benefits eventually paid to those with private investment accounts can and will be reduced. But these claims are false on two grounds.

First, the system is not in financial crisis. Economists and actuarial accountants have studied the problem every which way from Sunday, and the most reasonable estimates conclude that the Trust Fund, which has a huge surplus at present, will be able to pay benefits at the currently enacted rates (which increase with inflation of wages) through 2042. Minor adjustments to such factors as the age of retirement, the level of benefits, extending the payroll tax to those not now included or raising the ceiling on taxable income (or some combination) would secure the Trust Fund through 2075.

Second, it is obvious that allowing millions of workers to divert all or part of their Social Security taxes from the general Trust Fund into personal accounts would cause a massive deficit in the Trust Fund and actually generate the crisis that is falsely predicted. Even the White House and its conservative allies in Congress admit that partial privatization of Social Security would cause a huge "transitional" problem--the gap between Social Security intake and outflow until the reduced benefits under the new system would take effect. President Bush has not said how he would pay for that gap, but an increasing number of members of Congress say it would have to be paid for by massive government borrowing. Experts estimate that such borrowing would amount to about $2 trillion or more, on top of the total national debt of about $7.5 trillion. Given the current shakiness of the dollar, those "transitional" costs would be dangerous to the whole economy.

Let's take those points seriously. The first point says that today's entrants to the workforce face a depleted Trust Fund upon their retirement (2042-2004=x, where x is left to the reader as an exercise) which can be fixed by effectively cutting their pensions (means-testing, benefit cuts, delayed retirement, higher payroll tax rates, or raising the maximum salary subject to tax all do that) or by confiscating the vested pensions of workers currently exempt from Social Security tax, including Illinois state university employees. Oh, and if there is a serious recession or a depression, all those long term forecasts of current revenues are worth precious little. The second point complains that a contingent liability -- benefits to be paid out of future tax revenues -- converted to a known liability -- securitized pensions -- is dangerous. Did these guys work for Arthur Andersen? There is a more thorough and link-rich send-up of the phoney transition cost problem at Constrained Vision. Go there now or go there when you finish. I'm not done smacking these guys around.

Yes, Social Security will face a shortfall eventually. This is simply the nature of insurance schemes, which in turn make adjustments.

When hurricanes overtax homeowners' insurance, rates and deductibles go up and future payments go down. When private retirement pensions are inadequately funded, government agencies force companies to increase contributions. In other words, we adjust to changing resources and needs without destroying the underlying principles. We do this all the time in national life. We don't shut down the Defense Department or move its funding to private sources when expenditures soar and national deficits rise. When the highway trust fund falls short, Congress renews appropriations for it. We make reasonable adjustments to keep essential entities going. The entire federal government continues to operate despite enormous shortfalls and, in fact, Social Security already has made many adjustments to adapt to the nation's changing demographics and economy.

More important, allowing the establishment of personal accounts with Social Security premiums would violate the intergenerational and intragenerational social contract on which Social Security was founded. This social contract stands for mutual support, while personal accounts represent a completely different idea: self-interest. The main argument for personal accounts is that smart investors could earn more for themselves than the current Social Security plan would yield. Apart from the facts that investment in the stock market is always risky and that workers can set up private investment accounts with their own money now, the personal account proposal for diverting Social Security taxes would reduce benefit payments for the great majority. Is that what Americans really want to do? In an already atomized society, do we want to further sever our bonds with each other?

Sigh. Contracts, and mortgages, and investment clubs, all provide social bonds. In your Superintendent's view, those bonds, which act on gains from trade, are preferable to political bonds, which in the case of Social Security involve the theft by the current oldsters of the current youngsters' future. At least the professors didn't invoke Halliburton, which comes to mind when somebody raises the notion of privatizing the War Department. I would also guess that these people never met Lynne Kiesling, given their ignorance of privately financed highways.

RUNNING EXTRA: Katie at A Constrained Vision links to this post with some additional observations, including a Good Question.

We are far more certain about an impending Social Security crisis than we are about an impending global warming crisis, yet folks on the left tell us to worry more about the latter than the former. If they abandoned this illogical position, our children's futures would be much brighter.

Worry. Don at Left2Right frets about visible theft by current oldsters from future youngsters. The title of his post, "Don't Tax: Spend Anyway" introduces a complaint about rising discretionary spending by the national government coexisting with tax cuts. Money quote:

The real problem is that we are plundering future generations, who have no democratic voice at all.

Wrong. The real problem is that we are depriving future generations of economic growth that they could have, if we converted a contingent liability of unknown size (the unfunded obligations of Social Security) into a securitized liability that provided genuine savings for genuine investment. That would reduce the dependence on Japanese savers that Professor Herzog fears.

ANTICPATION. Two weeks ago, I wondered if shooting suspect Chai Vang was inspired by Minneapolis liberals to play the race card upon his arrest. It turns out that some such people did not require any coaching from him.

Before they are even buried, activists are trying to paint the hunters as responsible for their own deaths.

Sounds like the Right Thing to say at a semester's end party in January where there is no red or green to be seen.

THEOPHOBIA. That's today's new word, O Theophilus, which comes by way of Sissy at Sisu, and it describes the latest fear of administrators at the University of Minnesota: too much red and green at semester-end parties. (No, this has nothing to do with the Wisconsin Badgers or the North Dakota Fighting Sioux. These administrators probably don't do college hockey.) I am not making this up. From Swan Blog:

The title of the webpage is December Holiday Tips, while the article title is Reevaluating Seasonal Office Parties: How About January? Apparently, the best “tip” for a December office party is to have it in January. Never mind that both the calendar year and the Fall semester end in December. The article switches from being hypersensitive about failing to celebrate every possible December holiday to being hypersensitive about including too many holidays, thus trivializing the religious aspects. Similarly, Santa Claus is either too religious or too secular.

Lighten up, Francis! I bet parties at the Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action are a real barrel of laughs.

Ho! Ho! Ho! I wouldn't go. Let's consider the missive from Minnesota administrators.

Be aware of unintended messages. Celebrations held in December tend to make people think of Christmas, whatever the theme. Decorating public spaces with red and green or playing Christmas songs for telephone clients on hold can enhance the problem. Adding references to Hanukkah and Kwanzaa on an invitation won't change the underlying message and can be seen as insensitive to the true meaning of those events.

There are people who earn a living fretting about such things.

"There is no other month like December, when good intentions fueled by the Christmas season can negatively impact or even offend employees and customers who practice or observe other faiths and holiday traditions," says Karen Stinson, Founder and CEO of the nationally respected Minneapolis-based diversity consultancy ProGroup.

"It's what we call the 'December Dilemma'_and with the American workforce and marketplace more global and religiously diverse than ever, the problem and challenges are becoming more pronounced," notes ProGroup President Myrna Marofsky, co-author of Religion in the Workplace: A Guide to Navigating the Complex Landscape.

While about 82% of Americans are Christian, the presence of other groups is being felt, including Jews, followers of traditional Native American religions, Muslims, Buddhists, and Sikhs, among others. In fact, today there are more American Muslims than there are American Episcopalians or American Jews. At the same time, only two percent of companies "officially" recognize any religious holidays other than Christian ones, according to Marofsky.

Has it ever occurred to any of these people that if somebody wishes you a "Merry Christmas" he's simply being polite? For the 18%, let me summarize in one sentence what it is all about.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

(That 3:16 you see in the end zone is not a comment on the weakness of the Packer secondary.)

Yes, that is a statement of belief. You have the right not to believe it. You have the right to question the evidence for the Resurrection, let alone the Annunciation, or the Western Star, or the Ascension. My Puritan ancestors would concur in part and dissent in part, and no, they did not celebrate Christmas as we understand it today. But you do not have the right to be offended. And you do not have the right to tell the majority to put away their red and green. Work the room. Enjoy the egg-nog.

And you theophobes certainly ought to be more careful about what you would put in place of Christmas. I have already rounded on the solstice-fetishists. Let me go further. You might take the Teutonic edges off of Erda (don't you love Anna Russell's description of the "green-faced torso that pops out of the ground" from Rheingold) and speak of Gaia, and you might address the melting of the polar ice caps on Mars by making burnt offerings of McMansions in Maryland rather than sacrificing virgins, and by defiling Land Cruisers, but sun-worship preceded Son worship. There was even a Star Trek episode making that point.

RUNNING EXTRA: John Leo makes a point I struggled with but chose not to address.

Accommodating all traditions is a worthy goal. But a broad movement to erase the word Christmas is an extraordinary development in a culture that is more than 80 percent Christian. How much more of this is the public willing to tolerate?

There is a fine line between responsible elitism and irresponsible tyranny by a vocal minority.

SPINNING OFF THE WISCONSIN CENTRAL AGAIN. First, a little history. In the northern parts of Wisconsin there were once three railroads: the Chicago and North Western, the Milwaukee Road, and the Soo Line. Milwaukee filed for bankruptcy in 1977. Soo Line bought Milwaukee in 1985, and in 1986 set up a separate division called "Lake States Transportation," which later became its own railroad, the Wisconsin Central. Sometime after that, Canadian Pacific took formal ownership of the Soo Line, meaning the main lines of the Milwaukee Road. Wisconsin Central took formal ownership of some Chicago and North Western lines spun off as the Fox River Valley Railroad, as well as an independent property in the center of the state called Green Bay and Western. A few -- now isolated -- bits of Chicago and North Western became Union Pacific. Wisconsin Central -- meaning the old Soo Line plus some Milwaukee and Chicago and North Western branches plus the Green Bay and Western became part of Canadian National. (There is another part of this story involving the U.K., New Zealand, and Estonia, but we'll leave that for another day.)

Now it's Canadian National's turn to consider the future of some lines.

Canadian National, which became the state’s largest railroad with its $1.2 billion purchase of the Wisconsin Central Ltd. three years ago, says it is committed to northern Wisconsin.

At the same time, CN consultant and lobbyist Kevin Soucie said rail lines have a future only if they are profitable.

Though he would not say whether they were making money now, Soucie said some of the lighter-density northern Wisconsin lines, when CN acquired them, were not viable over the long term.

“The service had to be adjusted to make them work financially,” he said.

That involves a delicate balancing act: If costs aren’t cut enough, or rates aren’t high enough, the railroad loses money. At the same time, service reductions and price increases can prompt shippers to switch to trucking - with the reduced freight volumes further undercutting the line’s viability.

That spiral - ultimately leading to abandonment of lines - is what some business people fear will happen, said Jack Sroka, executive director of the Lincoln County Economic Development Corp.

Alternatively, these shippers might shop around for a short-line operator for these lines. I remember doing the Time Warp ...

CHARLES MELLEN ENVY? Vertical integration has its advantages, but Wal-Mart (a company that leases space to pop bottlers) buying a shipping line? That might not earn the brilliancy prize The Politics of CP envisions.

If Wal-Mart does follow through on this shipping deal, the world will be watching. Wall Street's jaws will drop, their competitors will wince, and no one will be able to touch them.

On the other hand, American President totes containers bound for Wal-Mart's competitors. Won't any advantages that accrue to Wal-Mart also benefit American President's other customers? (Yes, there are some advantages to running trucks part-empty. Are the economics of container ships comparable?) Not only that, aren't we seeing the same cult of the conglomerate that flowered in the late 1960s?

SCHADENFREUDE. (Heck, he's on the deck of cards, let's just call it kicking him while he's down.) Embattled Southern Mississippi president Shelby "Ten of Diamonds" Thames now gets a bad report card from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, according to Chris at Signifying Nothing.

On the other hand, Christmas is coming, and perhaps Mr Thames does not deserve this particular stick. Why does the accreditor put Southern Mississippi on probation?

According to the statement issued by Southern Miss, SACS was concerned about assessment of institutional effectiveness, assessment of distance-learning effectiveness and strategic planning in academic units.

Administrative expense-preference stuff, in other words. Institutional effectiveness? Are the students getting and holding jobs? (I can report positive results for n=2: Brett Favre and a Laser sailor to be named later.) Distance-learning effectiveness? A fad. Effectiveness means breaking the student's expectation that logging onto the internet is a substitute for working hard. Strategic planning? Sometimes that means addressing other fads. Sometimes it's just plain silly. The Economics Department did a chairman search in early 1999. The University's advert included "participating in strategic planning in an era of downsizing" as part of the job description, at a time when the local high schools were having trouble finding space for all of their students. There's more than the bowl game contributing to our record enrollments.

THE WORLD'S BIGGEST FISHING HOLE? Otherwise known as Lake Michigan.

"Forty years ago, if you waved a wand over Lake Michigan and declared the alewives gone, you would have been a hero," says Jim Lubner, education coordinator for the University of Wisconsin's Sea Grant Institute.

(Yes, I remember the stink each June.) There was no magic wand, but Atlantic salmon had an appetite for alewife fry. (Not to be confused with Friday fish fry. OK, I'll be serious.) However, the Lotke-Volterra equation (work problem 19) is still useful for modelling predator-prey cycles.

This year the salmon were biting on just about anything, and commercial fisherman Dennis Hickey says he knows why: They are starving.

The 62-year-old Baileys Harbor resident makes his living netting whitefish. Wisconsin commercial fishermen are prohibited from taking any salmon or trout; those are strictly for the recreation industry. But his side business is carving out guts and slicing fillets for customers of the charter salmon fishing operation next
door.

Salmon stomachs are normally packed with alewives - another saltwater species not native to the lake. Not this year. This year, Hickey says, the lake's biggest fish are swimming on empty.

The Lake Michigan fishery, apparently, is an attempt to create a recreational theme park in a dangerous natural environment.

But the truth is, even if scientists could figure out how to eliminate the 180 or more exotic and invasive species that have colonized the Great Lakes, even if they could figure out how to bring back Lake Michigan's six species of chubs that have disappeared, or bring back its beleaguered lake herring, sturgeon and lake trout, many of the sportsmen and tourist-dependent businesses now hooked on recreational fishing probably would not want them to.

Also, apparently, the system is a bit too complex for technocrats to manage. (No, this is not ideological spouting. Put in three or four state variables representing fish that are predators, prey, or sometimes both predator and prey, and do the math.)

Nearly four decades later, salmon have woven themselves into our cultural and ecological fabric. It's a delicate balancing act by the states of Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan and Indiana to keep enough alewives around to feed the salmon, but not so many that they once again dominate the lake. The states also annually plant non-native brown trout and steelhead trout, and each year the federal government stocks about 2 million native lake trout - a species that evolved in the lake over thousands of years but disappeared in the 1950s.

Today, biologists must cultivate the cobbled-together ecosystem like a farmer tends crops. It isn't natural, but it keeps anglers happy and alewife numbers under control.

Not only that, but, as at Jurassic Park, life will find a way.

This year, a group of fishery experts responsible for making stocking recommendations on Lake Huron considered advocating a one-year halt to salmon stocking because of a crash in alewife numbers. Adding to that is fact that an unknown number of Lake Huron's salmon are starting to reproduce on their own in some of northern Michigan's most pristine streams.

The committee backed off on those recommendations after protests from the sport fishing community.

"I could see where Lake Huron could go without stocking almost immediately, if the politics would permit. But I don't think they will," says Chuck Krueger, science director for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, which helps coordinate fish management policies for the Great Lakes states and provinces.

Wisconsin DNR biologists also worry that - just as is happening in Lake Huron - some Lake Michigan salmon are starting to reproduce on their own. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but because the extent of natural salmon reproduction is a mystery, biologists could be losing their ability to manage overall salmon numbers.

"This is the central issue for us in managing Lake Michigan," Horns says. "Lake Michigan is a perturbed, constantly changing, high-maintenance system whose future is not clear."

And here comes the problem for the technocrats.

Politicians and conservationists tout the value of salmon as a reason to protect and restore the lake. But they ignore the fact that to truly restore the lake, salmon would be among the first species that would have to go.

To find a Great Lake where a real restoration effort has been undertaken, one must look north, to Lake Superior.

The biggest Great Lake, which never completely lost its lake trout in the lamprey invasion, is an example of a damaged system that has largely recovered its natural state over the past few decades.

It's now home to a reproducing lake trout population that feasts heavily on native lake herring, a once-struggling species that has recovered in the past several decades and one that many biologists believe provides a healthier diet for lake trout.

Lake Superior today has limited salmon stocking but, unlike Lake Michigan, it does not need it as a form of life support.

Lake Superior is a more natural, self-sustaining ecosystem than Lake Michigan. But it's not nearly as popular with anglers.

That Lake Superior will kill you if you're not careful has a lot to do with this difference. But the technocrats are undeterred on Lake Michigan.

Restore the herring through a hatchery program, the theory goes, and you could restore a breeding population of lake trout. Restore the lake trout, and you could once again achieve a self-sustaining ecosystem, one that doesn't require annual salmon plantings.

But some anglers argue that if any forage species should be planted, it shouldn't be native lake herring. It should be invasive alewives. Biologists chuckle at the notion. Privately. Most are reluctant to say something publicly that will rile the sport fishing groups that, to a large extent, pay their salaries through fishing license fees.

Nearly $19 million of the Wisconsin DNR's $24.7 million 2002-'03 fisheries budget was funded by fishing licenses and salmon and trout stamps, according to the department's Dennis Schenborn.

The sportsmen aren't shy about flexing that influence.

Ah, but like any good sea story, there has to be a "no s***" moment. That comes at the very end of the article.

There is, of course, a presumption built into this squabble: that humans are still in control of the lake.

That last should be the basis of a Reflection Statement by aspiring technocrats everywhere.

JUST SLIGHTLY AHEAD OF HIS TIME? If "blogiversary" has only been a word for two or three years and The American Mind has been online for five, what sort of creative anachronism must one come up with for Sean? Oh, heck, pop over and enjoy the day.

ARCH DELUXE. Catallarchy has a little fun with Starbucks nomenclature (fortunately, around here, the kids working their way through Northern Illinois get the meaning of "medium") and with the "fair-trade" conceit (otherwise known as paying for the privilege of cocking a snook at big business.) Apparently some medium-sized businesses have similar reasons for not selling to Wal-Mart. There is something called the least-common-multiple principle: the capability of the supplier must scale to the capacity of the retailer. That can mean lower prices but reduced variety at the big-box store.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE. In case you thought ice cream cones came from frozen cows.

AN APPLIED ENGINEERING PROBLEM. I've been adding working valve gear on this model.

Clipper Class Atlantic No. 138, Comet

Is it perverse of me to want the lifting link to connect to the radius rod in such a way that the reach rod (which will be on the engineer's side) remains stationary, just as it is on the prototype? No, but it is perverse to expect any old collection of store-bought components to function without binding. Fortunately, the Internet includes some tips for master mechanics and some useful design software. Fire up the Unimat!

SLOW ORDERS. You can't run trains to time, let alone faster, without good track and good bridges and tunnels. Iain Murray notes that this problem is one that can be solved by throwing money at it, provided the money is directed properly. Unfortunately, all too often, the money is going to the wrong things.

Amtrak’s infrastructure is crumbling. As the inspector general, Kenneth Mead, says, there are “interlockings, bridges and tunnels that are well beyond their economic life.” Amtrak has been deferring capital expenditure on these assets for years. Mead goes on, “Continued deferral brings Amtrak closer to a major point of failure on the system, but no-one knows where or when such a failure will occur.”

Alas, Amtrak has 535 superintendents, all of whom must reach some sort of agreement on where the money is to go.

The inspector general did indeed suggest that one remedy to the underfunding problem would be for Congress to increase funding to Amtrak. Yet the problem of Amtrak’s failure to prioritize responsibly would remain. Again, I am unsurprised. When I was working with it, the nationalized provider of London’s famous tube service would regularly fail to make investments in certain lines, in the knowledge that political pressure would cause its funding to be increased. We cannot allow Amtrak to use the New York tunnels like a sword of Damocles, forever hanging above the nation’s head. All experience suggests that Amtrak has perverse incentives not to invest properly while it is assured of remaining in public ownership.

Instead, we should consider two other options Mead advanced as stopgap measures to prepare the railroad for privatization: “(1) a requirement to focus development on corridors where passenger rail service can make economic sense, (2) decreased funding and elimination of certain operations.” Congress can attach these provisions to any funding it grants to Amtrak. The problem is that this will require political courage from individual congressmen.

Each superintendent has to gain something from the appropriation of money, unfortunately.

For some reason, congressmen seem to think that Amtrak should continue to serve their own district even when they recognize that other routes are a financial burden on the country. Yet it is time Congress cut Amtrak down to size. It should force it to cut routes no one travels on, spend money now where it is most desperately needed, and get the infrastructure back into the condition that passenger safety demands. If that is done, a safe railroad system can then be put back into the hands of people who can provide better service to the customer than to the bureaucrat: the private sector.

I think that's why "public choice" is a field with no lack of research projects. Perhaps there has to be some equivalent of the military base-closing commission (am I reinventing the Beeching Commission?) to evaluate the Amtrak network. If called, I'll serve.

The Washington Post story Mr Murray links to illustrates another of the Superintendent's pet peeves: journalists who don't know enough about their subject. Consider this close:

[Ross] Capon [of the National Association of Railroad Passengers] said most passengers don't know about the breakdown looming in the system, but should take note when their train is delayed -- it's pointing to larger problems somewhere along the tracks.

That might be true on the Boston-New Haven and Penn Station-Washington parts of the Northeast Corridor. On occasion there is sloppy dispatching there as well. Elsewhere, the problem is likely some combination of freight traffic and careless dispatching.

IMMIGRATION ROUNDUP: Mickey Kaus wonders,

Miriam Jordan's solid 12/6 WSJ summary of the illegal immigrant/drivers' license debate notes the charge from some quarters (in this case, Sen. Lieberman's office) that the attempt to deny such licenses is "not a security provision. It's an anti-immigrant provision." Of course it is! Or, rather, it's an attempt to restrict illegal immigration by denying illegal immigrants the normalcy, and the legitimate perquisites, of legal residence. Why isn't that a perfectly proper objective? ... It would be equally true to charge that the supporters of licensing illegal immigrants aren't really concerned with making the roads safer, requiring insurance, and obtaining information on drivers--they're really, at bottom, committed to legitimizing the presence of illegals and they don't worry much about whether that encourages others to become illegals. ... Why is it only respectable to argue on the surface-argument level--about fighting terrorism and requiring auto insurance--instead of the real level (about controlling immigration)?

Perhaps because the surface arguments are easier. Consider a simple model in which there are two countries and only economic migrants. Some of the economic migrants have credentials and apply for admission. Not all are accepted. Other economic migrants lack credentials but sneak in, despite costs of getting in and a probability of getting deported. Controlling immigration is costly. The more of those costs the rich country's government shifts to legal applicants, or the tougher it is to be admitted, the more likely legal applicants will be to sneak in instead. The more difficult the rich country makes it for people to sneak in, the fewer people will sneak in, but the rich country incurs higher costs to enforce such policies, as well as reduced output compared to what it would have with illegal and legal migrants participating in its economy. On the other hand, open borders make it possible for political migrants (some of whom might be asylum-seekers; others, terrorists) to legally enter. But that's a further refinement of the model. The optimal policy, then, is probably (this is the next stage of the research) one in which there's relatively easy access for migrants with jobs or job opportunities -- although ensuring that workers admitted remain employed, there used to be something called "alien registration" each January, and I remember the ominous public service announcements: if you are an alien, you must register. My context at that tender age was "alien=from outer space" (don't ask why...) so imagine my confusion.

Instapundit promises some thoughts of his own.

OUTSOURCING ROUNDUP. Some of Illini or Huskie's former co-workers have been outsourced without much warning, and they are bearing substantial adjustment costs.

Well, nobody is going to undertake a human capital investment if they can't recoup the costs. So how now brown cow? What does a 45-50 year old transcriptionist do?

I guess they move to India.

Tough ethics problem. Does "society" (usually meaning some taxpayers) owe these people restitution, because they made career choices based on the price information available 20-30 years ago and the objective circumstances have changed. Or, does "society" have a right to request further restitution from the outsourced workers, who have lived well at the expense of others for the past 5-10 years, which is when technical changes began to make Indian call centers a meaningful substitute?

Dan Drezner reports that the migration of call center workers from currently developed countries to India has already begun. Factor price equalization is interesting, but it need not imply a race to the bottom. Photon Courier notes, however, that it is not for low-skill workers only.

PHOTOPHOBIC? J.V.C. Comments notes that the Modern Language Association's conference program is now password-protected. The Allied Social Science Associations also meet in Philadelphia; perhaps the academic beat reporters of the big papers will provide stuff for pajamahadeen to nosh on.

TOO MANY BOWLS? Remember this observation? At the time, I had the cynical thought that the Powers that Be in college sports would decide, after observing five or six MAC teams playing at Christmas time, while the top of the second division in the Pacific 12 or the Big (11) Ten stayed home, that there were too many bowl games. Now, from Skip at the Sports Economist, comes news of public subsidies to some bowl games (in addition to the extra police required for parade supervision and what have you.) Let's see, if x = public subsidy and y = 5 MAC teams, does x+y imply too many bowls?

SECOND SECTION: University Diaries discovers Operation Boycott College Sham. Although the Superintendent concurs with the idea that football -- ALL football -- is to be done on New Year's Day (the Packers won the last real National Football League title on December 31, 1967) and that a hoked-up title game in prime time on January 4 is a bit much, he also notes that the columnist who raised the idea is writing from Springfield, Illinois, where they are probably having a little trouble dealing with the idea that the best college football team in the state has an 815 area code.

MORE FUN BEING A HUSKIE THAN A HUSKY. Christmas decorations are apparently not Minnesotan enough at St. Cloud Diversity State. I am pleased to report that they are visible around Northern Illinois University (did I mention we're going to a bowl game?) although most students are too busy with finals and heading back to the 'rents to decorate. Alas, the Lionel train layout in the theater building has been crowded out by a display case.

OUT ON THE PLAINS IS A LONELY GOATHERD. Well, not so lonely any more. Recent changes in the demographics of immigration have made goat what's for dinner. Between the pasture and the pantry lies the abattoir. Or not, depending on how the town fathers of Hampshire, Illinois, rule.

A Chicago-area man's proposal to reopen a slaughterhouse in Hampshire to kill goats has created an identity crisis for the tiny Kane County community, which would rather shuck its farm-town image.

Seen one suburb, seen 'em all. There is a standing abattoir that hasn't yet been yuppified, which makes for a legal tangle involving a zoning ordinance passed after the last owners of the abattoir put down their knives.

Two years before the Dreymiller & Kray slaughterhouse closed, village officials rewrote an ordinance to say that "no building or structure shall be erected, altered or remodeled" for slaughtering animals.

Apparently, yuppification is not an automatic road to riches.

Ed Reiser, president of Dreymiller & Kray, which still operates a meat market in town, said [potential buyer Mohammed] Ahmed has come to town several times to look over the property and talk to business owners.

"He's the utmost gentleman; he's kind and cordial," Reiser said. "[The board] should be open and grateful that people want to come and spend money here. A business is a business, and they need all the business they can get to create tax dollars. Do they treat other people this way?"

Interesting object lesson in indulging your prejudices. On the one hand, the town council perceives something other than agriculture as the way forward. On the other hand, to indulge that prejudice is to preclude some gains from trade with agriculture. The article makes no mention of fears of Islam (the abattoir will observe Halal and Kosher practices) as contributing to the controversy.

DON'T KID YOURSELF. Amtrak has from time to time sold advertising rights on the flanks of its locomotives. The latest client is Toyota.

Little Rock, Arkansas, November 25, 2004, on time.

Memo to light-truck drivers: your ride might look like a small Kenworth, but it's not ready to tangle with a P-42. And despite the "Tundra" name, four-wheel drive gives you no braking advantage on icy roads. My VW Golf has more braking capability.

A LETTER OF RECOMMENDATION. Econo Pundit to Insta Pundit: Blogroll Milt Rosenberg. Hear! Hear! A little history is in order. Milt's File became a weblog with a little help from Dan Drezner and Erin O'Connor back in September of 2003. And if you're not listening to Extension 720 from 9 pm to 11 pm (Central; for some inexplicable reason this program is preempted in the summer for baseball games, and for the occasional Northwestern basketball -- is that an oxymoron? -- game from November to the beginning of March.) If you're listening and working on your railroad, give me a shout out.

THE SAY AGGREGATION PRINCIPLE AT WORK. Two new posts at 11-D about moms at work. One is the beginning of a book review. Salient observation:

On the bad side, at home mothers did (and do) provide vast unpaid services for their children and the community that can't be replicated or purchased.

A second post asks, where is the money from that second income going? Ms McKenna cites Harvard Law's Elizabeth Warren, one author of The Two-Income Trap (my extended review is in a temporarily unavailable archive -- this is the book that suggested usury laws would prevent the trap from closing) who argues,

What Ms. Warren classifies as "fixed costs" - mortgage, child care, health insurance, car and taxes - take up 75 percent of the income of today's two-income family. By contrast, the those costs represented about half of a middle-class family's income in the early 1970's.

Laws of conservation? Mom stops doing "unpaid" labor at home, goes to the office, hires (for less money?) childcare. Neighborhood schools become casualties of court-imposed reforms, two incomes bid up prices of larger houses in better neighborhoods, if a minivan-drive away from home? (Two Income Trap got this part right, that too is in a temporarily unavailable archive. Guess I'm getting the server I'm paying for. It's a hobby. It's a hobby. (Who are you trying to convince?)) Oh, yes, station wagons are now illegal except in small numbers. Drugs not available at any price 30 years ago become routine therapy today? Subsidies for housing and for health benefits shift some of those costs to others? Funny how income = wages + interest + rent + profit works.

RUNNING EXTRA. OK, the archives are available again. Here is the review of the underwhelming conclusion of The Two Income Trap, complete with a link to the promising beginning; and, as I'm such a link-slut, here are your opportunities to read the details and compare prices, both of which have the potential to bring me even more readers.

MUGGED BY REALITY. The third article in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel analysis of the obsolescence of Milwaukee's manufacturing, with particular emphasis on the fate of black migrants from the South, opens with an instructive case study.

The last time Milwaukee launched a conspicuous rescue effort in an economically stricken neighborhood, it spared few expenses and emptied the toolbox of 20th-century urban renewal strategies.

Steeltech Manufacturing Inc. opened in the early 1990s. In Metcalfe Park, one of Milwaukee's poorest neighborhoods, parks and houses were cleared to make way for a gleaming $32 million steel refinishing plant.

Civic and business leaders were hoping to replicate the old model of factory job creation for a Northern industrial city. Steeltech trained the unemployed as welders. Minority managers received majority stakes. The plant began life with a $66 million federal contract, five forms of state and federal funds, loans from six banks, its own special tax district and 42 lawyers.

It failed spectacularly.

Steeltech declared bankruptcy in 1999, eight years after its inception, leaving an empty factory inexplicably riddled with bullet holes and discrediting for many the old urban policy mix.

Steeltech's demise hastened a 180-degree ideological turn among Milwaukee's next generation of civic and business leaders. To plant the seeds of economic rebirth in Milwaukee's urban core, in an age of unprecedented global competition, Milwaukee in the past two years has moved to the forefront in accepting a new paradigm of market-driven urban change.

At least Milwaukee's policymakers used their expensive lesson to rethink some of their prejudices, which some of you might recognize as the old "progressive" nostrums.

"What we've been doing for 50 years isn't working," said Art Smith, who heads the Initiative for a Competitive Milwaukee.

Smith's organization is young, small and upbeat, like the companies it envisions amid the shuttered factories and storefront churches of the urban core. Rather than track the known deficits of the inner city - poverty, drugs and crime - the initiative aims to persuade corporate America that Milwaukee boasts more untapped competitive advantages than many might guess.

This strategy, however, is also available to less blighted quarters.

The initiative highlights an urban nexus of central locations, low transportation costs, cheap land and proximity to universities and the ideas they incubate. Initiative backers scorn zoning red tape and other regulations that handicap the industrial heart of the city in competition with sprawling business parks built on bulldozed farmland.

Interestingly, the end result will be subsidized development, simply in a different location. The Urban Archipelago types don't like the exurbs in part because they perceive them as tax sinks. Consider Stephen at Left2Right. His emphasis is on white flight from failing schools integrated by court order, but his post notes the fiction of the exurbanites living at the expense of everybody else.

The fastest growing county in Michigan, Livingston County, is exurban. It grew approximately 35% between 1990 and 2000, and has grown another 10% since then. Much of this growth has been fueled by ex-suburbanites from Metropolitan Detroit (itself the most residentially segregated area in the country). Although African-Americans represent 14.2% of citizens of Michigan (and a much higher percentage of Metropolitan Detroit), they are only 0.5% of the population of Livingston County.

So far as I can tell, there has been very little discussion of the increasing resegregation of American schools. And from this perspective, a growing exurbia (indirectly public funded by cheap gas, Interstates, and tax incentives for home ownership) seems to be very bad news.

Bad news for whom? To repeat, freedom to associate includes the freedom not to associate. What sort of public policy requires some kids to continue to attend school with other kids, simply to achieve some sort of "diversity?" Uniformity of underachievement appears to be the end result. Furthermore, although public policy research that identifies the hidden subsidies to exurbia is desirable, objectivity requires that the failures of more explicit subsidies to blighted areas also be brought out.

The new thinking about cities, however, is encouraging. Start with Harvard's Michael Porter.

Porter freely admits that crime and unskilled labor throw up big hurdles to growth. Still, he said, "We shouldn't be bashful about profit and the market economy because that's the only sustainable way of addressing most of these problems."

Porter says social safety nets are necessary for individuals but that welfare programs cannot alleviate poverty, create jobs or even stall the city's economic erosion.

Local thinking agrees.

"I just don't think social service programs were doing it," said Margaret Henningsen, co-founder of Legacy Bank, at Fond du Lac and North avenues on the north side, the nation's only fully accredited lending institution owned by African-American women.

There is still some work to be done. The article ends with some additional information about the failure at Steeltech.

Milwaukee's nascent enterprise culture hamstrung Steeltech, which was designed to cultivate minority entrepreneurialism. "What we wanted to do with Steeltech was take them out of the working-for-someone-else routine and make them part owners," said Fred G. Luber,chairman of Supersteel Products Corp., who helped conceive and fund Steeltech with his own capital.

City officials later conceded that Steeltech's inexperienced managers seldom hustled for contracts. Luber said sloppy bookkeeping caused the loss of a major government contract that could have kept it in business. Rather than accept personal financial risk, like most entrepreneurs, Steeltech's managers borrowed funds under a low-risk arrangement that simply let them forfeit shares in a default. The absentee rate for hourly workers at Steeltech ran as high as 12%.

"Our dream of doing something great for Milwaukee ended up crashing," said Luber, 79. His firm, Supersteel, had stood to gain if Steeltech had survived as a qualified minority subcontractor for the larger company's Defense Department contracts. Instead, Supersteel lost $6.5 million in the venture.

"It was a pigsty," said Paul Cadorin, chief executive of Capitol Stamping Corp., which acquired the 190,000-square-foot plant after Steeltech failed.

Shop-floor employees randomly fired guns for reasons that Cadorin cannot guess. After Cadorin purchased the plant in 2001, he hired a crew to patch roof leaks. "They gathered over 200 bullets and patched over 300 bullet holes," Cadorin said. Forklifts on the shop floor had been rammed into the walls and left holes "big enough to poke your head through," he said.

Products of Milwaukee's public schools? Wisconsin's commerce secretary Cory Nettles, fortunately, has learned by the experience.

A stalwart Democrat, Nettles disavows old welfare models as an economic remedy. "The social policy prescriptives have not really helped families break out of poverty," he said. "We should model what has worked for countless other ethnic minorities, which is entrepreneurialism."

You mean there's really more to fixing poverty than throwing money at it? There is room for optimism.

RUNNING EXTRA: Don at Left2Right is still contemplating the old nostrums. Interesting comments.

CARNIVAL CALL. Carnival of the Capitalists calls at The Entrepreneurial Mind.

NOTICE OF EMBARGO. Patrick at Transport Blog

Unless I have a complete about-turn (something that is by no means impossible) this will be my last post for Transport Blog.

Via Where Worlds Collide. Visit both sites and note differences in the legalese by which a railroad suspends service.

MONDAY MORNING RAILS: Green looks good on a locomotive, doesn't it?

URBI ET ORBI. Are the cities still incubators of creativity, or relics? Creature of the Shade has a series of posts debunking the "urban archipelago" theory of a new Democratic majority.

Repeatedly, most Americans tell pollsters that they would like to live in a small town. The result is what you call "soulless exurbs" [spelling corrected], where people have no concept of the diversity of America because their entire public life occurs in cars, or in access-controlled fake-urban centers such as shopping malls. You can start with suburban terms like "Town and Country Village" or the ubiquitous fake-Britishisms such as "Towne," which inevitably describe places that are competing with real city centers while offering sprawl-inducing free parking that helps destroy the countryside.

That is the source of Red-state energy: People who are accustomed to a world that's lying to them. On the other hand, suburbia can be healed. Much of it has been. And by building greater cities, you're creating healthier (and bluer) suburbia. Our healthies cities aren't just blue; they have the bluest suburbs.

To be sure, some of the more rapidly-growing exurbs are coming to grips with how expensive development is, but to call it a "world that's lying to them" is a bit much. Freedom to associate includes the freedom not to associate. And some of the bluer cities are not terribly healthy. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has an interesting series on the decline of industrial Milwaukee. The first article captures the incentives at work for people coming of age shortly after World War II, when the Machine Age economy of the United States won by default.

A growing school of sociologists traces direct links between the wholesale obliteration of blue collar opportunity and a chain reaction of collapsing social structures.

These sociologists are not measuring issues of race, bigotry or welfare culture, which have long been blamed for Milwaukee's social ills.

They use the clean, empirical metrics of economics.

What sets Milwaukee apart, they say, is the force and pace of economic change.

More specifically,

The Journal Sentinel's economic portrait shows that black Milwaukeeans were downsized with unprecedented force because they relied more on low-skill labor than African-Americans in any other American city, North or South. They had come north from a Southern agricultural society, and many hadn't finished high school. A large number were sharecroppers. Yet they could find an abundance of work in a smokestack-and-brewery city once known as the "toolbox to the world."

By 1970, 43% of black Milwaukeeans drew paychecks as industrial laborers - punch press operators, riveters, assembly-line workers, forklift drivers. The work was unglamorous but paid the mortgage and, on occasion, the children's college tuition, as well. Only Detroit, with 39%, came close to Milwaukee's blue collar bonanza for black workers.

Milwaukee was a phenomenal job machine. Cleveland, the 34th most populous city and Milwaukee's closest peer today in terms of economic disparities in its urban core, didn't employ as large a share of its black population in its industrial heyday.

Thousands of black Milwaukeeans, many just out of the Army, worked their way toward the middle class in the decades that followed World War II. They held jobs at blue chip stalwarts such as Allis-Chalmers, Briggs & Stratton, Schlitz Brewing, A.O. Smith and American Motors.

In the 1980s, however, the boom gave way to a scorched-earth bust. Milwaukee lost more than two out of every three factory jobsit had in 1970 - a disappearance of more than 80,000 jobs. The number of lost jobs amounts to more than one-third of the city's current black population.

What happened?

The Great Migration that carried millions from the rural South to the industrial North began early in the last century. By a quirk of history, however, African-Americans began to arrive in Milwaukee in large numbers only decades later. Their arrival mostly coincided with the 1946-1973 Golden Era of the American economy, defined by economists as the post-World War II period of unprecedented prosperity. Migrants who found work in Pittsburgh, Chicago or Detroit during the first half of the century had decades of steady work to secure homeownership and get their children educated before the nation began hemorrhaging heavy industry.

Pittsburgh? Recast itself as a headquarters city. Chicago? Go inland of the Chicago River and despair. Detroit? Need I say more.

Globalization is hastening a polarization into two distinct labor markets: A First World market of skilled and white collar positions is concentrated in downtown high-rises and suburban business parks, while a 20th-century urban work force competes for jobs with Chinese peasants willing to work for as little as 25 cents an hour. "It leads to cultural and economic isolation," said Nettles, the commerce secretary.

American jobs in the 21st century increasingly demand a college degree or other high skill set. Only 39% of black men in the U.S. without a high school diploma had a job in 2000; of those who had a college degree, 79% had a job.

Hmm, perhaps more casualties of affirmative-action admissions and College Lite? But I digress. The second article in the series, which focuses on Milwaukee as a railroad town, offers another policy dilemma.

Strange as it may seem in the 21st century, Milwaukee anchored its economic foundations on a 19th-century railroad. Yet no one argued with the city's economic model in its heyday. More than Chicago, New York or even Detroit, a bigger share of Milwaukee's African-Americans found blue collar jobs during the nation's post-World War II industrial peak than blacks did in any other American city, U.S. census figures show.

That cornucopia of low-skill opportunity proved both a blessing and a curse.

The railroad, like the laborers who powered it, was among the first to feel the winds of change. Starting in the 1970s and gathering force in the '80s, most of the companies that built Milwaukee's economy left town or went out of business, casualties of fast-paced economic Darwinism and the dawn of globalization.

'Swar immer so. If there is a large premium to skill, is the more efficient outcome one in which more people acquire the skills (which is not the same thing as encouraging more enrollment in college or working harder to "retain" floundering students) or one in which the technology is adopted to the less-able people (Ford's assembly line, McDonalds's illustrated cash registers that require no literacy?) Clearly, there are gains from trade for a clever person to exploit. The outcome ... well, I haven't left the universities yet, perhaps I'm betting on being paid more to push students harder.

There will be a third article. More to come Tuesday.

THE ABSENCE OF A BELIEF IS A BELIEF. There are some follow-ups to Professor Althouse's post on the Freedom from Religion Foundation's petulant rebuttal to the Christmas tree in Wisconsin's Capitol. Armchair Philosopher catches the logic problem in the Foundation's statement.

First, the perspective issue: in the grand scheme of things, putting up a Christmas holiday tree is about as benign as it gets. I would have different feelings about a Nativity scene, but a tree? Give me a freakin’ break! For one thing, the significance of evergreen trees, and the practice of hanging things on their branches, originates with pre-Christian paganism; there’s nothing in the Bible about holiday Christmas trees. (Although tree-trimming suggestions might spice up the otherwise unreadable books of Old Testament law.)

The second problem with this sign is that it holds no moral high ground over that which it critiques. Atheism is just as capable of hardening hearts and enslaving minds as any religion. The problem with religion is not the belief in one or more supernatural beings; the problem with religion is its self-righteousness and absolute conviction that it knows The Truth. The FFRF sign’s haughty message is just as hard-hearted and closed-minded as many conservative religious expressions.

Thank you.

One suspects, however, that such subtlety would be lost on the folks at the foundation, who made an issue once about a basketball coach keeping track of the religious preference of her recruits and scheduling games against the Fellowship of Christian Athletes' all-star team.

So, never mind the subtlety. Here is Sissy at Sisu (which is Finlander for "Coming Through!") with a proper rejoinder.

Ann Althouse's Madison, Wisconsin town fathers have been intimidated into allowing a pathetic anti-freedom-of-religion message (image above) from something called the Freedom from Religion Foundation to stand side by side with a magnificent State House Christmas tree that soars through two stories to the skylights. Fortunately, both physically and spiritually, the glorious tree towers over the scolding little FRF sign.

Andrew at The American Thinker has a little sisu of his own.

Here is the truth. We are not in the “Holiday Season.” Believing Christians are currently observing (or rather should be observing) the season of Advent, a holy period of preparation for the Feast of the Incarnation and the following Twelve Days of Christmas. Now it is acknowledged that the vast majority of people of the United States are at least nominally Christians of one denomination or another. They by definition, therefore, believe, in varying degrees of intensity to be sure, that the Creator of the universe humbled Himself to become man, splitting asunder space and time, and was born in a lowly manger in Judea two thousand years ago. The celebration of this event, the Feast of the Incarnation, has been celebrated joyously by believers ever since.

Reality, however, has to be inclusive.

Against the stupendous Incarnation and the accompanying two thousand years of tradition and devotion what do we have arrayed? One genuine and two ginned-up alternative holidays.

The original multi-cultural offering is a Jewish historical and religious commemoration of a miracle – Chanukah – which is not counted among the High Holy Days of Judaism, but which is a genuine and ancient commemoration of legitimate significance. Conveniently, Chanukah takes place around the same time as Advent, and has become invested with temporal equivalence as an opportunity for the gift-giving, greeting cards, songs, and other less spiritual accoutrements of a religious commemoration, as have also attached themselves to Christmas.

That's convenient. For Gentiles, more convenience.

However the American scene is also now featuring a neo-pagan, fake-Druid solstice Saturnalia and a modern invention of politics and hodge-podge spiritual nonsense--Kwanzaa. But I have said here the one thing you are not supposed to say.

Read the whole thing. I'll be here when you get back.

WHERE DID ECONOMISTS COME FROM? A lament from Econ Yalie:

I mean, come on, how can we call ourself economists, if we have no clue about the history of our discipline?

Yup. That went missing from introductory income theory years ago. Income-expenditure models and monetary policy make a bit more sense once one is aware of ideas such as the Labor Theory of Value and events such as the Railway Mania and the Great Depression.

FINANCIAL AID? A Constrained Vision has been following several threads addressing the high prices for college textbooks. At the heart of the problem are several incentive problems. The professors assign the books, but don't buy them. The demand for the books is inelastic. (Yes, but under competitive conditions prices will reflect opportunity costs and new editions will appear at an efficient rate.) These posts all miss the elephant in the room: in many cases the buyer of the book has an attenuated incentive to shop around, as Mom or Dad will write the check for the books, or financial aid will pick up the tab.

The textbook price revolt is in full cry at Northern Illinois, where a number of publishers' representatives have stopped sending examination copies because professors reveal a preference for used books or for sticking with older edition. The publishers' representatives, however, are classic rent-seekers. If I'm listed as teaching an introductory course they swarm as if I were The Bachelor. If I'm listed as teaching advanced theory or antitrust I might as well be quarantined.

RUNNING EXTRA: See also Steven Pearlstein.

Let's take college tuition, which this year rose at a rate of 11 percent at public and 6 percent at private four-year colleges. In their defense, college presidents (whose pay has been rising faster than everyone else's on campus) will blame students and their parents for demanding more services, programs and amenities. They'll pull out flip charts to show that while the posted tuition appears to have leapt ahead, that's really a statistical mirage because of all the extra scholarship aid (read: discounts) they are giving out. And if that's not enough, they'll send you studies showing that the value of a college degree, measured in terms of future earnings, makes a degree a Wal-Mart-like bargain.

All of this may explain why colleges want or need or deserve to raise tuition. But the reason, in the end, that they do raise prices is, like any business, because they can. And one of the big reasons they can is the ever-increasing amount of public money pumped into the system in a losing effort to keep college "affordable." In effect, these well-intentioned subsidies have the perverse effect of shielding colleges from the kind of market discipline that would have forced them to hold down prices by constantly improving their productivity and efficiency, as happens in just about every other industry.

The argument generalizes to textbooks.

Arnold at Econ Log, who found the column, asks,

How could subsidies be constructed so that they serve to help the intended beneficiaries (poor people wanting to attend college) with minimal effect on the overall cost of college?

My suggestion: merit scholarships. Years ago Milton Friedman had an interesting idea: redesign student loans without the government guarantees. The Washington Monthly, years ago, kept track of how many graduates of medical and law schools defaulted on their student loans. Under the current system, loan recipients -- who may not be the deserving poor -- are in a position to put to the taxpayers their college costs, which are padded by textbooks sold under less-than-competitive conditions and fees inflated by expense-preference behavior by administrators who get the kudos for their commitment to "inclusiveness" without being called on for running up costs and admitting the unprepared under the polite fiction of "access."

THE MEANING OF COMPETITION. Nailed to Newmark's Door are two theses by The Econoclast that summarize U.S. antitrust policy.

1. You must compete.

2. You must not win.

It's a wisecrack, but a wisecrack with a serious point. The canonical model of "perfect competition" beginning price theory students learn is a curious form of competition in which ... there are no winners and there is no competition! Rather, there is a continuum of infinitesimally small producers, each offering buyers the same product.

No wonder courts sometimes get confused. In U. S. v. U.S. Steel the Supreme Court noted that, since the Justice Department alleged no cooperation between U. S. Steel and the smaller steel companies, those companies were not accomplices in a monopolization. And as those companies remained standing, they were not victims. Conclusion: as competitors remain standing there must be competition. In Alcoa the majority opinion observes, "The successful competitor, having been urged to compete, must not be turned upon when he wins." Under textbook conditions, there is neither a successful competitor (only a successful technology) and no winner (only a continuum of participants.) Alcoa, however, succeeded by excluding others, which was unreasonable. But that's exactly what Congress wanted. "Throughout the history of these statutes it has been understood that their purpose [is, despite possible costs, sorry, the opinion isn't at this desk --Ed.] to encourage an organization of industry in small units that can compete effectively with one another."

Or, to use a formula I've appropriated for my own use: protecting competitors is equivalent to protecting competition. Just another reason I'll never lack for work.

DO YOU KNOW THE WAY TO SAN JOSE? The Northern Illinois University Huskies will play Troy (not the U.S.C. Trojans: are there any college teams called either "the Hoplites" or "Ramses?") at the Silicon Valley Bowl.

Troy has never played in a bowl since joining Division I-A in 2001. The Trojans beat Marshall and Missouri this season and lost to defending co-national champion LSU 24-20. They finished 7-4 with a second-place finish in the Sun Belt Conference.

Marshall has been a power in the Mid-American for years and is soon to migrate to Conference USA.

WELCOME PROFESSOR BECKER AND JUDGE POSNER. The Becker-Posner weblog is up and running, with both posters commenting on preemptive war. The peer review has already begun. Leiter Report suggests that web journals are not yet peer-reviewed in much the same way as scholarly journals. Kieran at Crooked Timber is skeptical about the entire enterprise, whilst Bill at Atlantic Blog suggests Kieran ought to review ex ante and ex post information.

IT'S A HOBBY. At Cold Spring Shops, there are no comments, no trackbacks, and no tipjar. Unlike the big boys, I have no illusions about being able to finance a move off a free host. All the same, contributions to make possible shopping trips here or here are welcome.

RUNNING EXTRA: The Country Pundit gets in on the gag. British Brunswick Green (not to be confused with one part green to 100 parts black in the Pennsylvania style) and Hunter Green are always useful.

TAKE THIS QUIZ. Who said,

"The notion of multiculturalism has fallen apart. Anyone coming here must respect our constitution and tolerate our Western and Christian roots."

If you say "some red-state xenophobe," give yourself a Not Close. If you say a German Christian Democrat (a party only slightly more socialist than the Democrats) you're right. It's London Times coverage picked up by Ace of Spades, who manages to catch the multiculturalists playing the same game.

I think Muslims should make much more of an effort to obey local laws. The fact that a neighborhood is predominantly Muslim does not, in fact, mean that Shari'a law has been enacted into operation. But I'm worried about this talk of forcibly homogenizing populations so that no one disagrees, as everyone is expected to think as the State permits.

To be honest, when I first heard the French were outlawing the habib in schools, my reaction was vindictive: "Good. Show them who's boss." But that's actually a dangerous reaction. I understand the issue is complicated by the possibility of coercion -- i.e., how do we know Muslim schoolgirls want to wear the habib? Maybe they're just doing so to avoid being beaten by their parents or, worse yet, raped by monsters who think they're not Islamic enough to have the right to be free of sexual violation.

But there's something inherently creepy about state action intended not to encourage tolerance, not to criminalize violent or grossly anti-social acts of intolerance, but to create a simulated "tolerance" simply by forcibly draining away all the pecularities of individual choice.

Frankly, there's some of this sort of talk in America, too. Secularists and leftists openly wonder how they can get religious Americans to give up their troublesome and regressive beliefs, and are always looking for new ways to use our institutions to compel just that.

Let people believe and worship as they will-- but hold them strictly to account as regards criminal acts, including the crime of incitement.

Sometimes, the "peculiarities of individual choice" actually serve as warning labels. The jihadi's robes, the street thug's baggy clothes, the transgressive's tattoos ... self-imposed "kick me" signs all. On the other hand, to use the power of the state to bar such things -- For Your Own Good or not -- is to create a machinery of repression that can subsequently be used -- as blue-state court intellectuals are discovering -- to repress anybody.

SORRY, NO RECIPROCAL WINE RECOMMENDATIONS. Welcome, Professor Bainbridge's readers. Thank you, sir, for the link. It's always a treat to have visitors from UCLA (motto: On! Wisconsin!) Have a look around.

DISPLAY SIGNALS AND RUN AS SECOND NO. THREE. Several of this afternoon's posts, and at least one of yesterday's, have been updated.

HEE HEE. I found this at No Oil for Pacifists.

It appears to have first surfaced at Patrick Ruffini's place.

UP ON THE LOOP THE REINDEER PAUSE. The CTA Tattler reports that the CTA Christmas Train will run after all, if in a low-budget form. (Expect my report from Mukwonago.)

TAX INCIDENCE. Kevin at the Washington Monthly suggests