A STUDENT ATTITUDE SURVEY. I am once again teaching a junior level course on the economics of public policy and as was the case in the fall 2002 and fall 2003 semester I borrowed two survey questions from the National Association of Scholars. I again modified a couple of the questions from the poll. First, I offered the statement, "Here are several examples of business practices that are generally regarded as good. Which one of these business practices would probably rank as the most important?" This year, 16% (7 of 44 responses) chose "recruiting a diverse workforce in which women and minorities are advanced and promoted." Not much change from the 5 of 35 in 2003 or the 3 of 30 in 2002.

The modal choice was "providing clear and accurate business statements to stockholders and creditors," with seventeen, or 39%, compared with thirteen, or 37.1 percent, in 2003, and half the class a year ago. Enron and World Com fade. Six people chose "minimizing environmental pollution by adopting the latest anti-pollution technology and complying with government regulations," up from three in 2003 but down from the quarter of the class that selected it in 2002.

I wonder if we have an indicator of local conditions. In 2002, one respondent chose "avoiding layoffs by not exporting jobs or moving plants from one area to another." The figure rose to eleven in 2003 and fell to nine, a smaller share of the class this time. Five were not sure.

I also offered the assertion, "The only real difference between executives at Enron and those at most other big companies, is that those at Enron got caught."

Three respondents strongly agreed, 22 (half the class) agreed somewhat, nine disagreed somewhat, five strongly disagreed, and five were not sure. That's not much change from the previous surveys.

THE QUOTE OF THE DAY. Thinking you're hot stuff isn't the promised cure-all.

High self- esteem in schoolchildren does not produce better grades. (Actually, kids with high self-esteem do have slightly better grades in most studies, but that's because getting good grades leads to higher self-esteem, not the other way around.) In fact, according to a study by Donald Forsyth at Virginia Commonwealth University, college students with mediocre grades who got regular self-esteem strokes from their professors ended up doing worse on final exams than students who were told to suck it up and try harder.

Here I stand, I can do no other. (Via Milt's File.)

THEY ARE BEGINNING TO CATCH ON. The use of local funds to finance school districts has long violated principles of horizontal and vertical equity. A Constrained Vision has linked to an interesting lawsuit brought by the Alliance for School Choice (as .pdf).

The legal basis of their case is the fundamental right of parents to control the education of their children, the equal protection guarantee of the 14th Amendment, and Chief Justice Earl Warren's declaration in Brown that "[The opportunity of an education], where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms."They point out that the system of funding schools with property taxes results in fewer resources for students in poorer districts, creating a system of unequal education.

Furthermore, residence-based school assignment allows wealthier families to move into better school districts, but the assignment rules restrict other families from attending those schools. Tax subsidies for buying a new house exacerbate the problem. They add that the state's restrictions on charter schools, including funding them at a lower level than other public schools, also inhibits the freedom of parents to control their children's education.

Libertarians making common cause with egalitarians, forsooth!

NETWORK EXTERNALITIES. Villainous Company has been following a recently released study of sexual dynamics in a high school. There is still a lot of self-disclosed "going steady," a good bit of serial monogamy, and something resembling the plot of Peyton Place, all carefully diagrammed.

I'LL NEVER LACK FOR WORK. John Fund at Opinion Journal comments on a Rush Limbaugh speech on immigration policy.

I spoke with Mr. Limbaugh backstage before he discussed immigration at a private meeting of 400 leading conservatives here. He told me his comments had been prompted in part by a wire story he had read that morning quoting Mexico's Foreign Secretary Luis Ernesto Derbez as saying his country might turn to international courts to block an Arizona law, passed by voters in November and taking effect this week, that bars illegal aliens from welfare benefits and requires proof of citizenship and a photo ID to vote.

There is a reason nations retain their sovereignty. Does Mexico really want to further discredit the "international institutions" in the eyes of many U.S. citizens? But let's think carefully about where President Bush might be going.

Rush has 20 million listeners a week, so if he decides to attack President Bush's plan to regularize immigration flows through a guest-worker program, he could help kill the idea. The president told reporters last week that he plans to make a guest worker plan a "priority," so last Friday he was peppered with questions about it at a private retreat for GOP congressmen at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia. "Family values do not end at the Rio Grande river," Mr. Bush told the lawmakers, while assuring them his plan was not a backdoor amnesty program.

There is no conflict between such a plan, whether viewed as amnesty or not, the intended Arizona policy, and the legitimate national security concerns of Members of Congress.

Last month, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, the House Judiciary Committee chairman, held up passage of the bill revamping the nation's intelligence services until he got a promise that his colleagues would fast-track a bill that would make it harder for a foreigner to claim political asylum in the United States, impose strict national standards for driver licenses and strengthen border enforcement this year.

So far, no conflict. The point of work permits for hog butchers, lawn mowers, and floor scrubbers is to make their entry through legal channels easier. Stronger border enforcement does not preclude more careful inspection of those work permits, as well as more careful screening of applicants for driving licenses.

Immigration is certainly more complex than many border-control advocates would have you believe. But supporters of rational reform that would regularize the flow of immigrant labor should recognize that it must be accompanied by measures to address the legitimate concerns of Americans who worry the federal government has completely lost control of the borders. Many voters don't trust any plan coming out of Washington, whether it's by Mr. Bush or anyone else. It's that concern that is driving Rush Limbaugh and other supporters of the president to send up political warning flares.

Presumably legal channels of entry for the hog-butchers and the like would go through customs stations rather than across Arizona ranches or trackless wastes. The presumption would then be that illegal crossers making the use of smugglers or hiding in grain hoppers would be up to something other than seeking work. This problem is very close to theoretical work I am completing with a March 23 deadline in mind.

MORE COACHING CLICHES. Fatigue catches up to women’s hoops in 2nd overtime.

"I’m not blaming anything on the officiating, but it’s tough when one team shoots 27 [free throws] and one shoots eight," NIU coach Carol Hammerle said. "That’s just part of playing on the road."

Um, it's not as if the team consists of jaded freshmen contending with the hassles of a required course. Didn't the coach recruit players and teach them how to implement the defense without committing fouls?

CARNIVAL CALL. This week's Carnival of the Capitalists calls at Ashish's Niti. Looks like lots of linkable stuff there.

KARLSON GETS RESULTS. Gable [c.q.] Hall pool to reopen after lengthy closure.

Repairs cost school less than $5,000 after pool sprung a leak.

Kudos to the physical plant people, and I revise this snarkiness accordingly.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. Anti-war generation watches its children go to war. The concluding paragraph clarifies.

Pat Phillips, 48, says he trusts his daughter and respects her right to make choices as an adult.

"My only concern is that she is making the choice for the right reason, because she wants to go, not because I went and her brothers."

Pat Phillips, who returned from Afghanistan last year at this time, says it has been fascinating to see soldiers his children's ages and compare them with the men and women he served with at the beginning of his military career in 1974.

"We went in for something to do," he said. "These kids today, they are on a mission. I think they're more like their grandparents than their parents. They remind me of soldiers who went in right after Pearl Harbor. They are very directed, very clear in their focus and what their obligation is to their country. We had peace and love and all of that. These kids have Sept. 11. It did something to them."

HERE'S A FINGER IN YOUR EYE. Day By Day:

Let's start the post roundup with The Mesopotamian.

I bow in respect and awe to the men and women of our people who, armed only with faith and hope are going to the polls under the very real threats of being blown to pieces. These are the real braves; not the miserable creatures of hate who are attacking one of the noblest things that has ever happened to us. Have you ever seen anything like this? Iraq will be O.K. with so many brave people, it will certainly O.K.; I can say no more just now; I am just filled with pride and moved beyond words. People are turning up not only under the present threat to polling stations but also under future threats to themselves and their families; yet they are coming, and keep coming. Behold the Iraqi people; now you know their true metal. We shall never forget the meanness of these bas…s. After this is over there will be no let up, they must be wiped out. It is our duty and the duty of every decent human to make sure this vermin is no more and that no more innocent decent people are victimized.

My condolences to the Great American people for the tragic recent losses of soldiers. The blood of Iraqis and Americans is being shed on the soil of Mesopotamia; a baptism with blood. A baptism of a lasting friendship and alliance, for many years to come, through thick and thin, we shall never forget the brave soldiers fallen while defending our freedom and future.

Hammorabi has observations

One woman was crying because she can not reach the requested polling station to vote!

In many parts the police helped citizens to take them with their cars to the polling stations!

As we expected the enemies of God and freedom send their mentally retarded cockroaches in some suicidal attacks.

On the top of our privileged today are those who were killed in their way for voting. Their names should be perpetuated for ever! Their names should be written in Gold in Al-Fordos Square in Baghdad!

as well as a comment on totalitarian "elections"

No more 99.99 % in Iraq!

This is the figure of the Arabs' dictators except Saddam!

He used to get 100%!

Surprisingly those who voted for the master of the mass graves are abstaining now!

There's an encouraging anecdote at Iraq The Model (hat tip: Winds of Change).

The first thing we saw this morning on our way to the voting center was a convoy of the Iraqi army vehicles patrolling the street, the soldiers were cheering the people marching towards their voting centers then one of the soldiers chanted "vote for Allawi" less than a hundred meters, the convoy stopped and the captain in charge yelled at the soldier who did that and said:

"You're a member of the military institution and you have absolutely no right to support any political entity or interfere with the people's choice. This is Iraq's army, not Allawi's".

This was a good sign indeed and the young officer's statement was met by applause from the people on the street.

The streets were completely empty except for the Iraqi and the coalition forces ' patrols, and of course kids seizing the chance to play soccer! We had all kinds of feelings in our minds while we were on our way to the ballot box except one feeling that never came to us, that was fear.

We could smell pride in the atmosphere this morning; everyone we saw was holding up his blue tipped finger with broad smiles on the faces while walking out of the center.

There are too many roundups for me to catalog all of them. Andrew Sullivan, Instapundit, and PoliBlog, natch. Dan Drezner has a relatively recently opened thread. No Oil for Pacifists has been busy. A Constrained Vision suggests several sources.

Villainous Company presents an organization chart for the three branches of the new Iraqi government. Keep in mind, this election is to set up a constitutional convention, to further refine that organization chart. The coalition and the interim government are attempting to collapse into two or three years a number of structural changes that took the thirteen colonies six years to work out after Independence, and another 75 years to further refine.

There are, of course, naysayers. Mitch at Shot in the Dark has identified some of them, as well as offering a proper response to the worst among those.

News flash, Ollie; this is the right thing. The Iraqis are getting a fairer election, it seems, than the people of Milwaukee, and value the opportunity, turning out in amazing numbers, more than most Americans

Tapped have apparently gone skiing in Vermont for the weekend.

IF YOU CAN'T SAY ANYTHING NICE? The priest-in-residence at the Chicago Sun-Times, Rev. Andrew Greeley, offers a backhanded compliment to the election in Iraq.

Those of us who bitterly oppose the war in Iraq must hope and pray that the Iraq election is a success and that a strong and credible government will emerge from it. Even if we believe that the president's goal of establishing democracy in Iraq is madcap fantasy, we must still hope and pray that it can be done. Only if there is a semblance of an effective government will American troops begin to withdraw. The president must be able to spin the illusion of victory before he can announce the end of American occupation ...

One wonders what the good father would have written had he been observing the American War of Independence.

Though it is unlikely, it is still legitimate to hope that democracy can be imposed on Iraq. Of 20 Arab countries, none are democratic according to the standards established by Freedom House. There seems to be a contradiction between Arab culture and democratic governance -- any kind of democracy, much less American- style democracy. In Iraq the problem is compounded by the conflicts among the various tribal and religious groups in the country. Especially unpromising is the majority Shiite determination to wrestle power away from the Sunnis who have dominated Iraq for most of its existence.

Let's rephrase that. Try "there seems to be a contradiction between commoner behavior and self governance. Especially unpromising is the freeholder determination to wrestle power away from the planters who have dominated the colonies for much of their existence." Yes, that wrestling match was deferred for a few years, and costly when it came.

The constitutional convention to assemble in Iraq over the summer will have the opportunity to avoid some of our mistakes. The Shia parties seem to have some notion of an Establishment Clause, and the lunacy on the other shore of the Shatt-al-arab is something Iraqis of all faiths can observe and avoid. But perhaps the good father has never preached a sermon on Matthew 9.

God Helps Thofe Who Help Themfelves.

It might serve him well to review Matthew 6:1 as well.

A democratic Iraq is the last remaining justification for war, now that the administration has been deprived of weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi complicity in the World Trade Center attack. Democracy in Iraq would not justify the war but it would at least mean that all the deaths were not completely in vain.

What difference is there between a priest who gives the talking points of the ancien regime and a priest who reads the San Francisco Democrats' talking points? This commentator has long deplored the grim calculus by which some of our young people die overseas in order that we may be safer in our own homes. This commentator has long maintained that he would prefer not explain to his nephew why he must pray with his butt in the air and his nose pointed in the general direction of Cudahy, Wisconsin because a few purists insisted on beyond-courtroom-grade evidence. (If he converts of his own that gives no cause for objection. Pay attention to the compulsion.) Mike at Cold Fury (via InstaPundit) does a better job of identifying the multiple causes of war than I can. Do go there, and then do consider Rev. Greeley's cravenness.

A WITCH HUNT IN DEKALB? Two members of Congress are asking Northern Illinois University to review its connection with an adjunct faculty member who has a history of criticizing a "Holocaust industry," most likely with respect to the investigation of Ukrainian nationals for collaboration with Nazis.

The adjunct faculty member, Myron Kuropas, is retired from the DeKalb public schools. His area is Foundations of Education, a field with a suitably murky description. There is no evidence that Mr Kuropas has used his status as an adjunct academician to make an unscientific or unpopular appeal, or that he is using his course as a forum for Holocaust revision.

Who else would the right honorable gentlemen like the University to review?

Additional developments will be reported as warranted.

RUNNING EXTRA. A publicist for Northern Illinois University, and the dean of Education, both note that Mr Kuropas's views on Jewish-Christian dynamics in Ukraine and the former Soviet Union do not intrude on his work as an historian of education.

At NIU, where Kuropas is teaching two undergraduate classes and one graduate class this semester, officials drew a distinction between what he teaches and what his political views are.

"It would appear that his views are his personal views," said university spokeswoman Melanie Magara, and "not related to his employment at NIU."

Education Department Dean Christine Sorensen said there was no indication that Kuropas brought his politics into the classroom.

"He's always had good evaluations from students," she added.

Magara said there had been no complaints from students that Kuropas had made ethnically insensitive remarks.

Sorensen said that after news reports were published about his allegedly anti Semitic past statements, Kuropas apologized to her for "the uproar" and said he was not anti-Semitic.

She said his direct supervisor, Wilma Miranda, had a more extended conversation with him about the publicity. Miranda did not return phone calls for comment Thursday.Asked if Kuropas' political views made any difference in his employment status at NIU, Sorensen said, "at this point, probably not."

The President of the university also, correctly, notes that Mr Kuropas has not been exploiting his stature as an academician to make an unscientific or unpopular appeal.

On Friday, NIU released a letter from [President John] Peters to the congressmen that said the university "does not condone anti-Semitism or discrimination in any form" but pointed out that Kuropas was not hired to teach "any courses related to Ukrainian history or that would require him to express any viewpoint related to Ukrainian history."

That is the position of the office of public affairs as well.

The university could do a thorough review of statements and writings by Kuropas in the past, [Ms Magara] said, but there is not enough of a connection between Kuropas' private affairs and his teaching at NIU to warrant that.

A letter to the editor of the local paper suggests Mr Kuropas has been identified as a foil for the disappointed opposition.

For years he was involved in Ukrainian-Jewish community dialogue, often a trying chore.

I must ask if you made any attempt to investigate who sparked off these allegations against Dr. Kuropas and why? Did these unfounded allegations not, in point of fact, originate from a few disgruntled Ukrainian-American supporters of the Democratic Party, intent on discrediting the Republicans by picking on Dr. Kuropas, who is widely known to be a life long Republican?

Perhaps it is no accident that Representatives Emanuel and Waxman have been extreme loyalists to the Clinton Administration as well as noisy critics of the Bush Administration.

NOW YOU ARE BEGINNING TO CATCH ON. Illini or Huskie discovers the secret of doing economics.

CURIOUSER AND CURIOSER. Professor Tufte from Southern Utah has provided a correction to Thursday's post on the parallel experience political scientist Stephen Roberds has had at North Alabama and Southern Utah. King at SCSU Scholars has more linkage.

RULES AMENDED IN BLOOD. Last October, I reminded readers of the consequences of a failure to expect a train coming on a track obscured by the train that is passing closest to you. Apparently there have been enough accidents involving people ducking behind one train only to have too close an encounter with another that on Chicago's Metra, the crews are sounding the horn as they approach the far end of a train on an adjacent track as additional warning to line-crossers waiting for that train to pass them.

MORE ON SUBSIDIZING SLACKING. Paul at Electric Commentary suggests that the ingratitude of subsidized students toward their subsidies is not unexpected.

However, all of these contributions and subsidies to the college experience probably have something to do with students skipping classes. After all, what is their incentive, other than altruism, to not waste other people's money. This outcome is expected in a situation where students have largely been relegated to the role of free-riders (or at least cheap-riders).

Quite so, and a logical corollary to the proposition that textbooks command higher prices and receive more frequent revisions because somebody else is often picking up part of the tab.

Among the comments to King's original post (thanks for the props in the update) is one from a lawyer that has some relevance to the faculty's problem.

I require my clients to take an active part in their defense/prosecution of claims. If a prospective client blows off an appointment, as just happened, I won't allow him to retain me. Can't take a client who is casual about his time or mine. I bet you wish you could do the same with students who don't take you seriously.

I'd like to have more such power. The Northern Kentucky policy is a step in the right direction. For too long, professors have given too much and asked too little, sometimes out of genuine concern for our charges, sometimes with a little prompting from administrations concerned about retention. (The notion that retention is a function of preparation which can be evaluated before admission has not yet registered in some administrative circles.)

COUNTERBATTERYING. About noon my time the news broadcasts were reporting an attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, with fatalities. The news broadcasts are now reporting that the troops had sufficient assets to identify the launch site and chase the perps in real time to a nearby house where they were captured. That's a long way from crouching in a hole in front of the line looking for the 88s.

RUNNING EXTRA. PoliBlog followed the story carefully, and his post has a number of trackbacks to other followers.

-.. . . ..- -... _ -. --. .... . .. . -..-. In December, Joanne Jacobs noted the deleterious effect of pager notation on memoranda and other formal correspondence. A student was recently impertinent enough to send a message in that form to me.

how nice u r!!

using the shift key is my choice.

not urs.

My response: any further emails not expressed in standard English would be acknowledged, or not, at my discretion.

The pager notation is a modern version of a shorthand used by railroad telegraphers, years ago. The title of this post reflects my true reaction to such use in emails and memos. Decoding is left to the reader as an exercise.

SIXTY YEARS AGO. Soviet troops overran an abandoned prison and factory complex near Krakow that the world would later know as the Auschwitz-Birkenau. IsraPundit (via Photon Courier) has a collection of remembrances.

Sgt. Karlson's unit has been chasing the Germans out of Luxembourg and Belgium.

IT'S BEEN A HARD DAY'S NIGHT. Sorry for the sporadic free ice cream. We've had four job talks in the past eight days, with two more to come, and thus far all the presenters have been promising scholars. There's a stack of homework problems to evaluate and some derivations to keep working away on. But the prelims are done and the hammer has been dropped where required.

SUBSIDIZING SLACKING. The powers that be at St. Cloud State decided to begin the spring term on a Thursday (!?) You know the incentive that sets up.

Most students simply stayed out through the weekend and wandered up earlier this week.

Northern Kentucky University has adopted a policy, which has the Superintendent's endorsement, under which students who do not show up for the first week of classes may be removed from the course rolls. That prompts one miscreant to object.

I have never been a fan of the attendance policy. This isn't because I have bad attendance myself, but because I have never agreed with the university having the right to dictate to the students how many times they may miss class without consequence.

Stick around. You are about to witness a Group Fisking^(TM). Jonathan at Cliopatria, of the Northern Kentucky faculty, starts it in the university paper.

First, let me respectfully point out to Mr. Dressman that every student who attends NKU is subsidized to the tune of about 50 percent of costs. These funds come from state funding, the campus endowment, grants, donations and the like. Think of this as an automatic scholarship provided by the fine people of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, along with people from a host of organizations, corporations and alumni groups who have seen fit to invest in NKU students. They do so because they believe that a liberal arts education is good for both the individual and the wider community. Students are not simply customers; they are also the product.

Further, Mr. Dressman needs to be aware that he is attending an institution that was built with money other than his own. Current tuition only helps maintain the facilities and services that others generously helped to establish. When you cut class - missing class for a good reason is another matter - you throw away not only your own money but that of the generous people who helped to build this campus. That is a rather ungrateful thing to do.

Professor Reynolds is being rather kind. The miscreant's ingratitude includes ingratitude to others less well off, or perhaps less capable, who nonetheless pay taxes to make those partial scholarships possible. I have the advantage of also being able to point out to such gripers that under the Principle of Derived Demand, the consumers are really the graduate schools and the employers. A griper stupid enough to use the "I'm buying a grade argument" on an economist is generally unprepared to answer that. But there's more. Professor Reynolds also notes,

Hiring a teacher isn't just hiring somebody to help you learn, it is also a process of hiring someone to make you learn. Think of us as very demanding personal "brain trainers." We are here to get your flabby cerebral cortex off the couch and whip it into a lean, mean, critical-thinking machine.

He was kind enough not to lay some additional smack on the miscreant, who is genuinely asking for it. (What's that Texas line? He needed Fiskin'.)

To me this university has one job: provide the means to get an education and help people grow and learn. The teachers have one job: to teach and give students a good education. They should not be allowed to dictate our attendance. We pay to be here. You don't. This should be kept in mind.

Not. Wednesday night, Milt Rosenberg hosted Emory historian Patrick Allitt, shopping his recent I'm The Professor, You're The Student (it's late, I'm just grabbing Professor Rosenberg's link.) Emory is one of those places where some students believe they're buying a prestige credential: during the interview Professor Allitt observed that the most students could be said to be buying was the "opportunity" to obtain such a credential, but the onus was on the students to earn that credential. And part of the growth the miscreant is seeking is having sufficient life management skills to show up for your appointments. The worst the professor can do is give the student an empty transcript or some failing grades.

The Donald says, "you're fired."

IT'S MORE FUN TO OBSERVE THE THROWBACKS. George Will has weighed in on one prominent academician's reaction to Harvard President Larry Summers suggesting that there might be sex differences in learning skills.

Is this the fruit of feminism? A woman at the peak of the academic pyramid becomes theatrically flurried by an unwelcome idea and, like a Victorian maiden exposed to male coarseness, suffers the vapors and collapses on the drawing room carpet in a heap of crinolines until revived by smelling salts and the offending brute's contrition.

OK, are we any closer to working the problem? Everybody feel better?

JMPP has done some more useful work, unearthing research linking sub-anemic iron deficiencies to diminished brain function. Perhaps there ought to be some new Popeye cartoons in which Olive Oyl eats the spinach and then dashes off a proof of the Fermat theorem that fits the margin of the page.

PSEUDOSCIENCE. Good news on the radio tonight: the trustees at Florida State voted not to set up a college of chiropractic. The newscast specifically mentioned professors using the "P" word to describe the practice. University Diaries has a bit of coverage; FSUblius has yet to weigh in (is he hoisting multiple Sprechers? Or is Coach Sue's team playing tonight?)

The Superintendent awaits similar plain-speaking about environmental studies programs that use worst-case (high-sigma, low p, long t) global warming scenarios as consensus forecasts, and the embrace of astrology in Womens' Studies gatherings.

Amusingly, FSUblius's most recent post (as of 2200 CST) reeks of the behavior of cartels. Existing chiropractic colleges are among the opponents of the program. We know this litany: the existing service is adequate; the applicant is not competent to provide additional service; if additional service is required, the existing providers can do better.

CHALLENGE ME. Joanne Jacobs reports that the less-masculine readings on offer in today's inclusive common school are, well, less than interesting to boys. The column she bases her post on is by two researchers who might have axes of their own to grind; nonetheless their report suggests some disturbing things.

At the middle school level, the kind of quality literature that might appeal to boys has been replaced by Young Adult Literature, that is, easy-to-read, short novels about teenagers and problems such as drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, alcoholism, domestic violence, divorced parents and bullying.

We have rap and pop for that. Perhaps somebody was attempting to connect by being relevant. Didn't work. Perhaps students perceived a lame attempt to channel their after-school entertainment, which is a suboptimal teaching strategy. Kids know when they're being patronized. The old literature was not patronizing, but it's gone missing.

Older literary fare has also been replaced by something called "culturally relevant" literature -- texts that appeal to students' ethnic group identification on the assumption that sharing the leading character's ethnicity will motivate them to read.

That is about as effective as throwing a few Moeshas and Juans into an economics textbook to set up an Edgeworth Box. Apparently the editors of the textbooks see that as making the texts multicultural. But could the students get through Radford's "Economic Organisation of a P.O.W. Camp?" (I know noothink! I say noothink! noothink!)

Kimberley at No. 2 Pencil opens up a can on those who would suggest that such inclusiveness at least makes for more female readers.

When will educators get the picture? You'd think even the gynocentric ones would notice that the overall reading rates for young adult women have also slipped, which suggests that the overbearing focus on sob story books aren't doing much for the girls, either.

I think if I had been forced in middle school to read "short novels about teenagers and problems such as drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, alcoholism, domestic violence, divorced parents and bullying," as opposed to the classic novels, biographies, and sci-fi that I devoured, I too would have lost my taste for reading.

Quite. Or she'd be frequently in trouble, as was I, for clandestine reading of stuff I wanted to read rather than stuff we were supposed to read. Bring on Crusoe, or Twenty-One Balloons, or Old Man and the Sea. Heck, we got some Plutarch (in translation) and had to perform Schubert and Dvorak in orchestra.

SOMEBODY MUST HAVE BEEN TELLING LIES ABOUT JAMES R., for one fine morning he was relieved of his deanship. (Via University Diaries. Developing.)

Remember, this is Virginia, where two years ago there was a massive diversity hue-and-cry based on a manufactured mugging of a student government candidate. The disaffected dean offers the following observation.

However, larger issues of process and procedure are at stake that could impact many others. At Mr. Jefferson's University, of all places, there can be no toleration for innuendo, rumor, hearsay, and anonymous threats of any nature to torpedo a career or to challenge the presumption of integrity that the Honor pledge implies. Such behavior strikes at the very core of the community of trust that binds us as an institution and in my opinion the precedent it establishes can only be described as chilling. Due process, accountability, and basic fairness are principles upon which I have attempted to live my life and about which I lecture in my classroom. To depart from them now and furtively slink away from the University under cover of official secrecy and suspicion would go against the very core of my being. As a dear friend recently told me, sunshine is the best disinfectant.

But perhaps it is too late: who else, less exalted than a dean, at Virginia has been offered the opportunity to take the knife and plunge it into his own heart?

A COACHING CLICHE. Northern Illinois's womens' basketball team lost at home to Eastern Michigan Wednesday night. Forward Mary Basic is channeling her coach.

"Our team is scrappy, but we were out-hustled tonight," Basic said. "It was a lack of communication on all parts really."

Usually, it is the coach who gripes about being out-hustled or not working as a team. Now she's asking the players to issue her usual gripes?

One would think that a coach who has had six years to enter into mutually beneficial agreements (athletic scholarships, if you will) with players who she recruits would by now have the sophomores and juniors communicating. I have no power to recruit or to offer my own economics scholarships. All the same, only a few graduate students have repeated my theory course more than once, and the recidivism rate for undergraduates is also small, and tempered by people who encounter unforeseen circumstances.

THE DISINTEREST IN DEREGULATION. A Constrained Vision notes the connection between school district performance and house prices in the school district. That bundling of school district with house purchase is one of the midwives of sprawl, as well as a reason for egalitarians and school choice advocates to make common cause. There is, however, a kicker. To the extent that charter schools are not tied to tracts or districts, there is a potential for capital losses to householders in the current good districts. Perhaps there is a thesis topic: does that capital loss turn a householder who has no strong position on school choice into an opponent?

MUST BE THOSE RIGHT TURNS. Chris at Signifying Nothing reports that the city fathers of Jackson, Mississippi are attempting to edify the locals on the proper use of a rotary. Y'all would think that in Nascar country, those left turns once one is in the rotary as well as the lane changing, would come naturally. But the exits from the rotary are not where the pit stops would be.

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER. Voluntary Xchange reports that controversial Southern Utah political scientist Stephen Roberds was denied tenure at the University of North Alabama at about the same level of review (beyond the department) and, as has been the case at Southern Utah, students organized to protest the decision once it became public.

In both cases, students alleged that a left-wing professor has been wronged at a university deep in a conservative county (sorry, I have trouble using "red" as a metaphor for conservative.)

Professor Tufte notes that Professor Roberds has incentives to make his own files public, which he has not. That, however, is not dispositive: silence is not admission of guilt.

The case, however, suggests that the alleged Left monopoly of the academy is not as strong as some pundits suggest. I forget where I read the observation that a truly effective Left would buy off the best Right scholars with positions at academic backwaters, rather than foreclose academic opportunities to them completely and drive those people to Heritage or Cato. (As if there would be much use for literary critics at such places. Cato and Heritage compete with Chicago, Rochester, and assorted other not-backwater universities for people who know how to do policy analysis.) As a tactic, sending active leftists to academic backwaters where they get into trouble unrelated to their scholarship seems a bit weak.

COPYCAT CRIME? Ten people are reported dead in a triple-train collision in Glendale, California, on Union Pacific tracks. One commuter train derailed, sideswiping another, and crashing into a Union Pacific freight train. A man has been arrested for abandoning a motor vehicle on a level crossing.

Police said they had taken a man into custody and he was expected to be charged with homicide in connection with the chain reaction of crashes that left train cars mangled and seared in Glendale near the Los Angeles border.

Last November, a suicidal Briton departed this life with a bit of assistance from a First Great Western train. Six passengers and the engineer, or driver if you will, also died.

The Superintendent sends condolences to the families of the dead and injured.

IS THIS THE WAY TO CAMDEN STATION? Destination: Freedom reports on the railways of Hungary (and yes, I am considering another trip to Hapsburg territory as it was frustrating to be so close to so many exotic destinations and not go there.) But look at this Romanian train in the Budapest East station.

That locomotive channels the British electric blue livery, but those first two coaches are pure Baltimore and Ohio.

FASCISTS COULDN'T MAKE THE TRAINS RUN ON TIME, EITHER. But a proper Duce would not be a prisoner to public choice. Amtrak, alas, is not so lucky, argues Joseph Vranich in End of the Line (details or compare prices), the subject of Book Review No. 6. Mr Vranich is a former Amtrak advocate mugged once too many times by reality. He makes the case that Amtrak is an underfunded political creature incapable of being both a provider of high-speed service (in those parts of the country sufficiently populated to benefit from such investment: regular readers are well aware that what is projected for high-speed often falls short of what railroads used to do with steam locomotives running on jointed rail protected by semaphore signals) and of long-distance service (where Amtrak has not provided a consistent vision in any event, sometimes aspiring to run a deluxe cruise service and sometimes resurrecting the mail and express train with a rider coach or two) in the sparsely-settled parts of the country that nonetheless have a Member of Congress and two Senators each of whom vote on Amtrak's funding.

The funding, Mr Vranich argues, is inadequate for some important components of the permanent way, particularly along the Northeast Corridor, which -- when all is working well -- is the most impressive high-speed line in the world. In an infelicitously timed counterpoint to the snow emergency that closed airports throughout New England, the Thames River draw at New London, Connecticut, picked this weekend to act up.

Amtrak also serves as an impediment to local rail service as it owns key facilities such as the North and East River tunnels in New York as well as the basement of Madison Square Garden, otherwise known as Penn Station; in Boston Amtrak operates the commuter rail service, but not very well (although Boston suffered for years with the New Haven on the south and the Boston and Maine on the north, both ravaged by the same Patrick B. McGinnis); and in Chicago several Metra lines terminate at Union Station, an Amtrak property. Mr Vranich argues that the suburban train operators provide a basis for intercity train service operated by agencies other than Amtrak.

In a related development, Metra may be granted authority to operate commuter train service between Chicago and Milwaukee through Kenosha, Wisconsin, on a route that closely parallels Amtrak's. Should the extension occur, a policy and operational framework would permit phasing out Amtrak and substituting Metra as the operator.

That suggestion conceals a few complications. First, the parallel service, an extension of the Metra North Shore service through Waukegan and Kenosha, would be a slower local service, not competing directly with the Hiawatha service that now takes you to the planes (although providing only one platform at the airport station is penny-wise and pound foolish). Second, the Milwaukee-Racine-Kenosha line is property of Union Pacific, succeeding Chicago and North Western, which paid to join Amtrak to be relieved of passenger service; some legalities might get in the way. Third, the operational framework is not free of other public choice follies, such as a downtown Milwaukee alderman who would like a bigger station (and the beautified access to the Avenue we were promised 40 years ago.) On the other hand, at Thanksgiving the Hiawatha service is often provided by Metra's locomotives and coaches, freeing up some of Amtrak's skimpy fleet of coaches for other lines.

ON NE PASSE PAS. Or so the Packer brain trust anticipates, naming Miami Dolphin defensive coordinator Jim Bates, who was not named head coach of the Dolphins, as the third defensive coordinator in three seasons.

PRODUCTIVITY GAINS. Today's Quote of the Day comes from Douglas Kern at Tech Central Station (via Electric Commentary).

But my pessimistic conservative friends overlook the extraordinary American capacity to compensate for massive stupidity. Dummies at the fast food joints? No problem -- we'll put up pictures of the meals for the illiterate, and install clever cash registers to make change for the mathematically-addled. Knuckleheads controlling the public schools? We'll devise standardized tests to identify and promote the genuinely gifted. Nincompoops at the voting booth? Behold the butterfly ballot -- an instant IQ test to weed out the votes of the extraordinarily dull-witted. Is it any wonder that a best-selling line of books in America is titled "________ for Dummies?" In America, stupidity is no bar to the pursuit and achievement of excellence.

We have moron-proofed our society. We have sanded off the rough edges of most sharp corners in American existence. From welfare to mandatory helmets to childproof caps, we've trapped stupidity in a tight little cage. Why can't we do the same for Social Security?

It's entirely possible to contrive a private investment fund guaranteed to turn a reasonable profit for as long as Western Civilization does us the favor of not collapsing.

The context for the post is the creation of private retirement accounts that would genuinely be secure, and it draws a distinction between uninformed decision-making and wilfully wishful decision making. But the article illustrates a more important point: human progress is the story of protecting us from our own ignorance: how many of us could dig our own wells and distinguish the poisonous from the safe mushrooms, let alone cast our own frying pans?

ANOTHER POLEMIC ON THE FAILURES OF THE ACADEMY. Book Review No. 5 is Jim Nelson Black's Freefall of the American University (details or compare prices), first alluded to here. (The details page suggests the book's polemical nature: purchasers frequently purchase related polemics.)

Much of the book revisits the same set of horror stories and PC atrocities some of them dating back to Profscam and Poisoned Ivy in the late 1980s. The author offers one recollection from his own college days (p. 317.)

I still remember the words of one of my major professors when I first started classes 1in 1962. He said, "This is not a vocational school. This university exists to form your mind and help you to become a fully literate and informed person. If you've come here for any other reason, then pick up your bags and leave now."

University Diaries suggests that perspective has been lost, albeit for causes other than the triumph of the hippies. (The following is an extended excerpt from Easily Distracted.)

What really matters is this: how different are your students when they graduate from what they would have been had they not attended your institution, and how clearly can you attribute that difference to the things that you actively do in your classrooms and your institution as a whole? What, in short, did you teach them that they would not have otherwise known? How did you change them as people in a way that has some positive connection to their later lives?

That can be about income. It can be about happiness or satisfaction. It can be about civic or political contribution to their communities. It can be about competence. It can be about imagination. Not all these things can be quantified, but all of them can or ought to be made as concrete as possible.

Many colleges and universities, public and private, have gotten lazy about this essential task. They’ve relied on evidence of the income gap, and on hazy assumptions about the interior impact of a college education on character, personality, and ability. We fall back on profiles of our accomplished alumni and so implicitly claim credit for their being what they now are—but our collective ability to account clearly for such particular results in terms of particular things we do is often far weaker than we let on. Truthfully, alumni for most colleges and universities do that job for their alma mater better than the alma mater can do for itself.

Those things get lost in the fallout from vocationalism (to get a job get a good education) and an obsession with productivity measured by things that can be measured (American Economic Review page equivalents for each professor comparable to output per worker hour: neither reveals much about the quality of other inputs.)

The interaction of student with student is a major part of the university's performance. University Diaries notes,

Hanging around with a bunch of smart peers and smart teachers in a materially bountiful environment might help most people to form and sharpen their intellects and skills, but I’m not entirely sure that most colleges and universities are entitled to strongly claim that the good results of that process systematically derive from the careful design of their four-year programs. Reading Walter Kirn’s “Lost in the Meritocracy” in this month’s Atlantic Monthly [for UD's take on this article, see UD, January 21, below], describing how in his years at Princeton he and his friends shammed their way through classes and began to have the terrible suspicion that the professors and administrators were shamming right along with them, my doubts redoubled.

That interaction also provides a more effective counter to the freefall than many of the more organized efforts Mr Black hails yet again in his book. But when an insider -- Professor Burke is in the middle of the academic establishment -- begins to question the effectiveness of the enterprise,

I sometimes think the nightmare scenario for American higher education would be if both parents and employers simultaneously came to the conclusion that the expense of a college education does not justify the return. If that gap not only stopped widening but started to close, the colleges and universities that passively have come to rely on the inevitability of young people seeking a bachelor’s degree would find themselves hard-pressed.

Having just been at the American Historical Association’s meetings, I couldn’t help but recall once again my worst interview experience, over ten years ago. I went to an interview with a tertiary public institution from a Midwestern state. Most of their students, by their own description, were local people and most of them were looking for a narrowly vocational degree of some kind. The historians interviewing me had joined in a sort of pact with several other departments in the humanities at their university to force a core curriculum requirement of several humanities courses on all the students. In the case of the historians, it was a Western Civ course. Had I been hired there, I would have taught a 4/4 load of Western Civ with class sizes around 200. No T.A.s. I must have looked pale as the chair leaned over and said, “Oh, don’t worry, all our tests are Scan-Tron”. You want a profscam? That’s a profscam. 200 person lecture courses on Western Civ with multiple choice questions foisted on people looking for some very particular professional or career training. Otherwise known as, “How to make people hate the liberal arts and see them as an obstacle”. You could do a better job wheeling in a television tuned to the History Channel.

Imagine if potential students not only recognized how pointless that kind of education is in terms of aiding with their life objectives but found that the society at large also recognized the same, and found other ways to train people and differentially search for good employees. It already happens here and there, in the software industry, for example.

Even at highly selective institutions, I don’t know that many faculty and administrators think very well or very systematically about whether the implicit guarantees about skills embedded in the degrees they confer are very well realized in the students that they graduate,

perhaps the polemicists have a point.

KEEPING 'EM ROLLING. Amtrak's weekend service notices reported the regular weekend schedule between New York and Washington, with reduced service north of New York on both the Shore Line and the Empire Corridor. The bulletins alerted passengers that travel between their stations and their destinations was likely to be hazardous or prohibited. Apparently the cleanup continues to hamper travelers once away from the trains, as the Monday service is somewhat curtailed.

Due to the snow storm on the East Coast, commercial power outages and the state of emergency declared in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, Amtrak will operate on a reduced service schedule for Monday, January 24 between New York and Boston.

Also for Monday, service between Washington, D.C. and New York as well as Niagara Falls, Albany and New York will operate on a reduced schedule.

THE VILLAGE IT TAKES. Book Review No. 4 is Mary Eberstadt's Home-Alone America (details or compare prices.) This review will be less comprehensive than the roundup offered at A Constrained Vision: go there and visit the links for more extensive coverage.

The focus of the book is the deleterious effects of greater adult freedom on kids. The Constrained Vision post links to an extended excerpt in Policy Review from Chapter 6 on the reflection of those effects in the angry popular music. Other themes are familiar, including the use of treats to assuage guilt (fat children, fit parents), the use of drugs as a substitute for attention, and the -- not well established -- squeaky wheel phenomenon in which bad behavior becomes the most effective way for neglected kids to get attention.

One development new to me that the book highlights is the specialty boarding school, a contemporary refinement of the old military school (which the well-to-do used for their delinquent spawn: the miscreants from less favored backgrounds had the reformatory) without the uniforms. Ms Eberstadt suggests these "detention archipelagos" are the logical extension of parental absence. The discussion at 11-D suggests that such conclusions are hasty.

Perhaps there is trickle-down economics at work: more people are now well off enough to farm out the raising of their kids, something once reserved for the British Royals, industrialists, and famous entertainers (and note what shining examples of humanity many of those heirs are.) Home-Alone America is not definitive: there remain opportunities for serious research.

WORKING YOUR WAY THROUGH COLLEGE. Northern Illinois University illustration art major Jeny Caisman wrestles as Supa-J.

THE FRUIT OF UTOPIANISM IS REACTION. Instapundit points to John Powers, engaging in more soul-searching on the Left:

In contrast, the left has become — there’s no other word for it — reactionary.

Still unable to accept that the right has dominated our national life for the last quarter-century, the left hasn’t done the hard, slow work of thinking through what it means to be progressive during an era of ultraglobalized capitalism in which the only successful Democratic president in the last 35 years, Bill Clinton, followed policies that even he compared to Dwight Eisenhower’s.

Perhaps that's not a failing. The years from 1946 to 1965 were the last years in which civil, commercial, and political society in the United States functioned reasonably well. Milt's File links to an Economist editorial reporting this interesting development.

First-term tax cuts have already helped to reduce America's tax revenue, as a percentage of GDP, to its lowest level since the 1950s (see chart 1). If Mr Bush's new-found fiscal prudence is genuine (he promises to halve the budget deficit), he has no business making America's fiscal problems worse.

Their focus is on tax-code reform. But I see nothing in either the editorial or Mr Powers's column suggesting that the President bring spending in line with revenues, say, by ending the national government's spending on goods and services not considered in 1954. Rather than engage in hair-splitting over what is a "left" ideology or a "right" ideology, why not a conversation over what works and what institutional arrangements -- not necessarily new faces in Washington or new agencies -- most efficiently deliver?

Andrew Sullivan has noted that President Bush is not a conservative.

Bush killed off small government conservatism years ago. Bush is a Wilsonian liberal abroad and a Bismarckian at home.

That sounds about right, although his willingness to trade medical savings accounts for federally-funded prescriptions for seniors is a baby step in a new direction, and his intention to put private retirement accounts on the table is encouraging.

The old divisions lose their usefulness. Mr Powers sees it but doesn't recognize it.

The left now needs a position on how best to battle a Muslim ideology that, at bottom, despises all the freedoms we should be defending. America should be actively promoting the freedom of everyone on the planet, and the key question is, how would the left do it differently from the Bush administration?

One useless division? Here's another.

Rather than coming off as anti-consumerist puritans in a consumerist culture, the left should be fighting on the side of freedom and pleasure — for instance, arguing that ordinary people should have more time off from the endless hours of work that increasingly devour our souls. This is the kind of idea we should own — and force the right to argue against.

Huh? I'll never lack for work explaining the backward-bending labor supply curve. The Left and the Right have been trading shots for years over whether it's unions or economic growth that contributed to rising wages, and whether the shorter workweek antedated the Fair Labor Standards Act.

And then there's this.

The right controls the machinery of government and isn’t shy about using it to change the world to make it fit the twin religions that drive it — Christianity and untrammeled free-market economics. To fight such a radical, all-encompassing vision, we need an equally big countervision of our own. I’m not talking about some mad fantasy of heaven on earth (those usually lead to death camps), but a dream bigger than hopes that the Democratic Party will come back into power four years from now. To create the world we want, we have to regain the hopeful belief that we are trying to create a world thrillingly better than the one we now live in.

Is it time to revisit the fallacy of insufficient alternatives? The premise ... whether it be motivated by the Protestant Ethic or the Social Gospel ... that there is a better world and a path to it ... is the same, it's simply a struggle over who shall be the trail guide.

(Yes, I'm repeating myself. Even the brightest among you will benefit from a modicum of reiteration.) Hence:

But there is no convincing improvement offered by polemicists of the Left, nor convincing refutation offered by polemicists of the Right.

And I commend, once again, Jesse at Hit and Run, who last November expressed disappointment with the dimensions of the soul-searching.

There is no party of tolerance in Washington -- just a party that wages its crusades in the name of Christ and a party that wages its crusades in the name of Four Out Of Five Experts Agree. I say fie on both.

Exactly. Nobody has come out and said that one collective vision ought not to be a quest for a collective vision.

THE STRESSES OF VICTORY. Book Review No. 3 is Max Hastings's Armageddon (details or compare prices) describing the squeezing of Germany by the Western Allies after Market-Garden and the Soviets from the Vistula River line. The book offers many grim reminders that even a just war is one disaster after another. A few passages from pp. 185-186, addressing the Hurtgen Forest battles, describe major policy and planning failures.

In the winter of 1944, Allied fighting strength was further eroded by the loss of thousands of men who simply quit. "There were increasing signs of plummeting morale," writes Carlo d'Este, "manifested by a rapidly rising desertion rate so serious that Eisenhower ... became the first [U.S. commander] since Lincoln in the Civil War to order an American soldier executed for desertion." No reliable figures are available for overall losses caused by desertion and absences without leave ...

The Hurtgen Forest campaign could with justification be called a quagmire. There was another quagmire behind the lines.

Unsurprisingly desertion, like combat fatigue, was overwhelmingly an issue in combat units. A sample of British offenders in north-west Europe revealed that more than 80 percent of deserters had absconded from infantry rifle companies. This represented a serious haemorrhage [c.q.] of fighting manpower. The figures suggest that Eisenhower's armies were deprived of the equivalent of several divisions, men who disappeared from their units to become scavengers, supporting themselves by lives of active or passive criminality. They became familiar flotsam in every urban area of western Europe. This teeming horde sustained a huge traffic in stolen military rations, fuel, equipment and even vehicles, feeding the black markets of impoverished France, Belgium -- and Britain. In Brussels in December 1944, an average of seventy jeeps a day were being reported lost. ... In the British Army, concern about organized looting, black-marketeering and theft of military equipment became so widespread that a restriction was imposed on the value of postal money orders soldiers were permitted to send home. Disciplinary problems of all kinds were a serious issue. Eisenhower was driven to suggest the public execution of men convicted of rape.

And yes, pre-invasion planning came in for criticism.

The U.S. Army suffered severely in north-west Europe for the grave policy error it had made earlier in the war, of according a low priority to manning infantry formations and providing replacements for their casualties. "We are about to invade the continent," General Marshall wrote to Stimson, the U.S. secretary of war, in May 1944, "and we have staked our success on our air superiority, on Soviet numerical preponderance, and on the high quality of our ground combat units. Marshall might have added: "and on the willingness of the Soviets to accept the overwhelming burden of ground casualties." It was also debatable whether the Chief of Staff had, indeed, given the emphasis he claimed to ensuring the quality of fighting manpower. The U. S. Army's belief that quality personnel were wasted in ground combat units is readily demonstrated by the manner in which it allocated recruits after educational testing. ... The educational standard of men shipped to combat arms ranked far below that of those posted to administrative branches. ... Many riflemen in the U.S. Army felt themselves abandoned by God and by their own country. Charles Felix's unit was outraged to read in Stars & Stripes that men sentenced to imprisonment for rear-area disciplinary offences were being offered a transfer to infantry as an alternative. "So that's what they really think of us!" -- shades here of Hollywood's The Dirty Dozen.

That belief persisted after the victory. The U.S. military draft is administered by the Selective Service System. I leave it to the reader to explain that "Selective."

Troops frequently took no chances with prisoners that might be dangerous. One famous incident receives brief mention at p. 436.

At Dachau, in an outburst of spontaneous rage the American liberators summarily executed twenty-one guards, including seventeen SS.

Life magazine later published photographs of this event. But it was not unique. Captured panzergrenadieren often did not make it to the prisoner cages in the rear, Mr Hastings writes, because their black tankers' uniforms were similar to those of the SS, whose fanaticism was frequently repaid in kind by the GIs.

AN URBAN LEGEND DEBUNKED. A Constrained Vision has an update on the origins of the impractical pastry known as a "croissant," which I noted here. Apparently this roll first appeared in French bakeries after 1850.

I suppose one clue lies in the very different Magyar words for the roll, "kifli," and the moon, "felhold" or "holdsarlo."

The notion, also circulating, that this roll was invented in Vienna to commemorate a later repulse of the Turks is less plausible as an urban legend. The roll is neither robust enough to handle a double-brat, which is what the Semmel does, nor is it as tasty as a torte, and the Austrians are unconscious at making those. Schmects gut.

ROGER RABBIT HOPS ON THE DEMOCRATIC UNDERGROUND. John at Right Wing News finds a Democratic Underground thread that rediscovers, for the n-th time, for n large, the long-discredited Snell Report making much of a finding, in the National City Lines case, that General Motors, Standard Oil of California, and Firestone conspired with the National City Lines company to replace electric streetcars with diesel buses, built by General Motors and riding on Firestone tires. If memory serves, the company paid nominal damages.

Professor Newmark has done yeoman work on this story, including a quote from one researcher that sheds light on the story's persistence.

The GM conspiracy myth, understood in this way, makes a great deal of sense. It becomes irrelevant that GM did or did not cause or even contribute to the decline of mass transit in the U.S. What becomes compelling, from a larger perspective, is the manner in which the GM story is used, the political and economic climates in which it is most likely to emerge, and the types of policy initiatives under consideration during the periods in which the story is being told.

The Democratic Underground poster that has touched off a lengthy thread has his own compulsion.

In a matter of a day, in some places, workers were forced to stop the use of trams, ultimately forcing the purchase of cars. They had no choice. It was forced capitulation and a segragation of those with the means and those without.

The assertion is historically inaccurate. The trams -- streetcars, if you will; sometimes trackless trolleys -- were replaced with buses. The toiling masses would have the opportunity to board a bus at the same corner where the car stopped, and the bus offered the transit company the opportunity to more cheaply extend the route as the city expanded. (To this day, the Milwaukee bus network, which despite my long tenure in DeKalb, is still the network I am most familiar with, still uses the route numbers and central-city routes of the predecessor streetcars, although -- as one example -- the Holton-Mitchell Route 14 that in streetcar and trackless trolley days turned back at 43rd Street and Oklahoma Avenue now runs beyond 92nd Street.)

My own assessment of the case and of streetcar to bus conversions is here, with some related observations on the pace of conversion in National City and other cities here, and a canard sighting from someone who should know better is here.

RECOMPENSE. Last fall, the International Railway History conference in Semmering coincided with a Brahms-Dvorak festival in Mürzzuschlag. I passed on the last concerts of the festival in order to hang out with some conference participants atop the Hirschenkogel. Wednesday night, the Vermeer Quartet made up for what I missed, performing Dvorak's Op. 80 in E (1876), a new work to my ears, which doesn't take on that Dvorak flavor until the fourth movement, which a Czech colleague who was at the concert tells me is based on a Czech folktune; and concluding with Brahms's Op. 51 no. 2 in a (1873), one that I might have heard before that's also quite good.

The performance also featured Joan Tower's Incandescent, a case study in the follies of writing music for academic tenure. As a piece of pure music it is just fine, not the usual assault on the ears one expects of a distinguished professor at Bard College. But the good professor had to provide program notes.

What I try to do in my music, and particularly in this piece, is to create a heat from within, so that what unfolds is not only motivated by the architecture of this piece (which I consider the most important goal), but also that each idea or phrase contains a strong "radiance" of texture and feeling about it. In other words, the complete "action" of rhythm, texture, dynamic, harmony, and register has a strong enough profile that it creates an identity with a "temperature," one felt rather than observed.

One observes a temperature on a thermometer. One feels it on one's face. All snarking aside, it's a fine work, which received its Chicago premiere in November of last year. Perhaps, to refer to an interview with the composer, composers don't get much respect because they're trying too hard to be arch. Never mind disclosing your intentions, just write.

Northern Illinois University readers new to this site might wonder, what's my message? Here's my message. A quartet that can perform Chicago premieres of good contemporary music, an accounting program that is widely recognized, and rising enrollment are all worth noting and hailing. When the administration, or constituencies within the university, perpetuate the counterproductive fads of the past thirty years, that hampers the university's ability to achieve up to its potential. My purpose is to call counterproductive fads counterproductive, something I've been doing for years.

INSECURE IN THEIR CONVICTIONS? In what way is a tree falling over in a deserted forest like a holiday observance when the campus is closed? At Northern Illinois University, a re-enactment of a 1960s style civil rights march just doesn't have that swing unless people leave class to participate.

Willard Draper, adviser for the NIU chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and director of resident life for Student Housing and Dining Services, organized the march.

“We want students to remember how it is to march,” Draper said. “It is important for students to get a sense of what it’s like to be involved in something that changed the nation.”

The Center for Black Studies plans to cancel its classes scheduled during the march so students enrolled in those classes can participate.

LaVerne Gyant, director of the Center for Black Studies, is lending her support by canceling her own classes.

“The teachers here at the Center for Black Studies usually go to the march and the
celebration,” Gyant said. “We always cancel classes during the march to encourage our students to go as well.”

Let's take Mr Draper's suggestion seriously. Classes generally don't meet on Memorial Day. Isn't it important for students to experience the nation-changing events it commemorates? Why not invite people to leave class sometime in May to purchase poppies for the disabled veterans and to carry the flag in a parade? And many of our overseas students are out of country in July. Why not invite them to leave class on a warm April evening to watch a fireworks display and listen to a reading of the Declaration of Independence and a two-hour stem-winder from a Congressman. (Our Member of Congress is the Speaker of the House, and he's pretty laconic for a speaker, so we might have to modify that part of the script.)

(These observances strike me as more sensible than, say, encouraging students to miss their Tuesday evening classes in order to fill the football stadium. The administration spent the swimming pool repair money taking advertisements out in the school paper with that message.)

And then let's consider Ms Gyant's priorities. It's these misplaced priorities that cause me to claim there's a Diversity Boondoggle. One of the purposes of those real demonstrations was to end the cruel fiction of "separate but equal." Wouldn't the more fitting tribute to the civil rights demonstrators be to use that access to address some of the ways the dream has been deferred. La Shawn Barber has some good discussion topics.

King rose from obscurity proposing a radical idea — a colorblind society. While he knew he’d never see it in his lifetime, he gave his life for equal justice. King would surely be disappointed by liberal elites and career politicians who exploit his vision for their own gain. He’d be alarmed that his so-called successors consistently fail to address urgent matters in the black community, such as the cycle of poverty associated with black illegitimacy and the high rate of black-on-black crime. King would be dismayed to know that:

70% of black children are born out of wedlock.

85% of black children living in poverty are raised in single parent households.

94% of all black homicide victims are slain by other blacks.

Low-income black children are condemned to failing government-run schools because black politicians are beholden to teachers’ unions.

And I would add: condemned by the cruel delusion that anti-intellectualism is somehow "authentic."

Character consists of doing the right thing when nobody is watching. One wonders for whose benefit this public parading of one's civil rights credentials is intended. If a high university official attends a memorial service or a rally on the holiday Monday and nobody at the university notices, has that act of respect not taken place?

TAKE ON THE SERIOUS CRITICS. Don at Left2Right is not happy with the latest polemic on the decline of the universities (of which more later, I will be unleashing a torrent of book reviews over the weekend,) this time being shopped on Rev. Pat Robertson's show. Sample objection:

Meanwhile, back on planet earth, the universities I know are still teaching freshman English and American history, math and science. (You can check out the University of Michigan's liberal arts offerings here.) And I don't think the baleful emanations of postmodernism and moral relativism have penetrated, oh, the courses on introductory astrophysics and boundary value problems for partial differential equations.

Even though I don't think CBN should be peddling arrant nonsense, I don't mean to suggest that everything going on in American universities is beyond reproach. There are plenty of problems, including some that the broader public has been less interested in: the recent report on plagiarism by academics is horrifying, and I'm much troubled by the increasing use of a two-tiered faculty, with lower-paid lecturers doing lots of teaching.

So far, so good. There is also a recognition that resources are scarce and have competing uses.

Then again, I bet my colleagues in economics spend lots of time touting free markets, and critics of mainstream neoclassical approaches -- Austrians, radical political economists, and so on -- are underrepresented in and out of the classroom. And I don't think economics classes should always start over from ground zero to consider fundamental alternatives.

May professors silence or sneer at some positions? I think so, though there's a reasonable case on the other side. I once had an undergraduate in American political thought who wanted to explain, at great and tiresome length, that there really are witches and we really should burn them. I decided one round of that was plenty. And I would probably shut down defenses of chattel slavery or the Holocaust. But I will, and have, let students defend a radically exclusive franchise, or socialist expropriation, or the night-watchman state, or anarchism. The raging controversies about political correctness, I think, aren't about whether anything is ever out of bounds; they are about whether the current bounds are too narrow, whether reasonable positions entitled to a hearing are being ruled out.

Quite so. All the same, it strikes me as dangerous to suggest, as Pharyngula appears to be doing, that these criticisms are misleading and irresponsible, and call for a vigorous response.

The barbarians are at the gate, and we respond by sitting down to a civil discourse on academic obligations? What the hell is wrong with us? We should be wrenching the rusty old claymore down off the mantlepiece and charging off to fight, not having a tea party.

Perhaps, but make sure you know what you're fighting.

Robertson and Black weren’t inviting a quiet round-table discussion, they were hauling out the shivs and motorcycle chains. We have to wake up and start responding appropriately!

Alas, it will not do to suggest that a bunch of alley fighters and demagogues are seeking to destroy something that might otherwise be working, as one response Professor Myers makes to a commenter does.

We have problems with less-qualified students having to struggle to keep up, and we’re often having to waste time with remedial coursework, but the root of that problem lies with the Republicans, and their ongoing attempts to destroy public education. Support our high schools, stop trying to cram your ideological nonsense like creationism into them, and we’ll have to offer fewer remedial courses.

The idea of an Establishment Clause for the schools is for another day. For now, let me remind readers that the proliferation of remedial courses at universities long antedates the Christian capture of some school boards, No Child Left Behind, and President Clinton's redefinition of oral sex as not sex. Universities have been struggling with remediation and retention for a long time (this National Association of Scholars report on general education notices the phenomenon as early as 1993 and these American Council of Trustees and Alumni reports do more than recite once again the "water buffalo" anecdote and other PC atrocities Rev. Robertson's guest relies on.)

And yet, and yet, no willingness to recognize error and deal honestly with the high defect rate. King at SCSU Scholars has found a service that provides six year graduation rates (to repeat, that sounds like an Amtrak definition of "on time".) At Northern Illinois University, about 53% of all students complete within six years: the performance of several protected status populations is well below that aggregate, and men do less well than women. Rather, it's time for yet another study of freshman attrition.

NIU needs better data to track student retention, said Vice Provost Earl Seaver.

In 2002 and 2003, freshmen were interviewed to gather data on why they were leaving. The results of these surveys are just now becoming available, he said.

No doubt the administration will find money somewhere for an improved survey. Meanwhile, there is a leaking swimming pool that will remain closed.

CARNIVAL CALL. This week's Carnival of the Capitalists calls at Small Business Trends. The Carnival of the Vanities is performing in eight rings at People's Republic of Seabrook.

Two new sideshows have come to the Superintendent's attention. Villainous Company has discovered Carnival of the Commies at Tigerhawk, which has already attracted a riposte in the form of Wingnut Butter blended by The Poor Man. There are lots of riffs on respectively "moonbat" and "wingnut," giving the exchange a certain charm that will appeal to fans of womens' roller derby.

DAIRYLAND POOL. The Badger Blog Alliance is set up running north of the Cheddar Curtain, with posting by several well-known cheeseheads and links to other Wisconsinites known to the alliance administration. Sean at The American Mind provided the information.

NASHE LUSHCHE. British and French leaders hail the rollout of the Airbus 380.

French President Jacques Chirac and other European leaders struck a triumphal note at the ceremony, hailing the A380 as a sign of Europe's capacity to generate world-beating industries.

"It's a symbol of economic strength, technological innovation, the dedication of the work force that built it and above all of a confidence that we can compete and win in the global market," British Prime Minister Tony Blair said.

Why does that flying ocean liner remind me of this?

The Economist suggests that a new vision of air transportation is emerging, in which more frequent direct flights with smaller planes have their place.

Boeing’s latest attempt to put things right, the 250-seat 7E7 “Dreamliner”, is born out of a belief that passengers will demand, and future deregulation allow, a big increase in “point-to-point” travel: direct flights between small and medium-sized cities, as opposed to the traditional hub-and-spoke model, in which international passengers fly between a few major airports and are then taken to more out of the way places on feeder flights. Boeing hopes the new plane will prove popular with the time-conscious business flyer. It says that the 7E7’s advanced engines will cut airlines’ fuel costs by 20%. So far it has received 56 firm orders.

Quite so. And the airlines have yet to master the art of loading through more than one door, something railroads have been doing for going on 180 years. Visualize the ruckus 800 self-important types all of whom have to be first off this post-modern Zeppelin will create.

SAD NEWS. The Northern Star leads its first issue of the new semester with a report of the death, from leukemia, of business graduate student Ben Peters, who earned an A in the public policy class I teach. He finished the class on time despite having to travel to hospital to begin chemotherapy. My condolences to the family and Mr Peters's friends, some of whom might also have passed through my classroom.

TAKE THE TRAIN TO THE PLANES. Chicago-area residents now have one-seat service from Union Station, Glenview, or Sturtevant, Wisconsin, to Milwaukee's Mitchell International Airport. The Chicago Tribune's Jon Hilkevitch notes,

The 74-minute train ride from Union Station to the Milwaukee airport (52 minutes from the Glenview station) will likely tempt many airline passengers weary of the travel hassles at congested O'Hare International Airport but who haven't discovered the convenience of Mitchell.

Some days you're hard pressed to get from downtown to the state line in 74 minutes, let alone north to Milwaukee, on the alleged expressways. Now if Amtrak and the state departments of transportation could get their act together on those 65 minute trains ...

CHORNIY NEG, BELIY SNEG, VETER, VETER. Does the weather forecast sound any better in Russian?

RUNNING EXTRA. Oops ... misremembered that first line. Chorniy vecher ... no wonder I couldn't find it on Google. (English translation) As penance, I will refrain from being a yob by not going to the mat over this!

SIXTY YEARS AGO. Sgt. Karlson moved from Freux to Jenneville, Belgium. But that proved not to be his unit's direction of advance.

Then turned around and headed through Luxembourg, Luxembourg City and arrived in the town of Berborg, Lux., just south of the City. Had a nice room here and six hour radio shifts. Snowy and cold. Stayed in the former home for the blind so there was plenty of room. Stayed 10 days here and fought the Nazis all the time. Shortly before the end of January, headed back to Belgium, spending one-night stops in uncomfortable spots chasing the Wehrmacht which was retreating rapidly. Heavy fighting through January, and returning to Belgium, following the Germans.

A different letter notes that the Wehrmacht was "rolling pretty fast just then -- in reverse!"

TONE DEAF? Word reaches the Superintendent's office of a new BMW coupe called the 645Ci. The name is a losing proposition, with none of the associations of speed and power of the A-4 or the old 4-4-2. Does an association with the 645E3 V-20 diesel powering a glamorized freight locomotive compensate for a lack of aesthetics?

KEEPING THOSE TRACKS OPEN. Union Pacific is having trouble moving goods out of California account mudslides assisting the deterioration of former Southern Pacific tracks in the Los Angeles area. Brian at Hit and Run has been hosting a discussion that invokes Atlas Shrugged. (In some ways Union Pacific resembles Taggart Transportation, although it has its moments of excellence.)

It's no help to west-coast importers, but the old Chippewa-Hiawatha line will remain open from Saukville to Kiel, in Wisconsin. The Wisconsin and Southern Railroad (their website is today suggesting that weather does not bother them) will take over operation from Canadian National, who took over for Wisconsin Central, who took over for Soo Line, who took over for the Milwaukee Road, who took over for the Milwaukee and Northern, potentially the inventor of the Milwaukee's parallelogram herald.)

DID PRINCE HARRY SPILL THE BEANS? Julian at Hit and Run notes London Underground's efforts to discourage youthful misbehavior in the Tube by playing unfamiliar music.

Tube bosses intend to use recordings of Pavarotti recitals, Vivaldi and Mozart in a battle against anti-social behaviour at 35 stations on the District, East London, Metropolitan and Hammersmith & City lines.

He has just one fear.

Just hope they don't accidentally get anything from Siegfried in the mix; I assume Tony Blair doesn't want to have to explain why a bunch of soccer hooligans just annexed the Sudetenland.

Or sought Anschluss with Brittany?

DC-9, FINIS. (That's the model later known as the MD-80 and after the merger, perhaps with some modifications, as the Boeing 717.) Insufficient market for a small flying bus, apparently.

RUNNING EXTRA: The closing hits Matt Welch right in the old neighborhood.

RESTRUCTURING IN GREEN BAY. Packer general manager Bob Harlan is announcing the appointment of Ted Thompson as general manager, with Mike Sherman holding the titles of vice president and head coach. We knew that was coming, although Mr Harlan has been contemplating this move since early in October.

No mention in this statement of any changes in the defensive coaching or personnel, as noted here, or of an extension of Coach Sherman's contract. The second-guessing and recriminations are not yet over.

It is difficult to combine the jobs of coach and general manager in one person, complexities of the salary cap or consequences of injuries or no. The coach has to motivate people. The general manager has to tell them they haven't earned a pay raise.

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE CLEAR SKIES. (But it's so cold outside.) No matter. There's a new barely naked-eye comet, Machholz, that's easily picked up in binoculars, and Sky and Telescope has the details. (There is a good picture, but it's protected. Click and study.)

That got me thinking about NASA's space station sighting site. It has been improved. But the news releases on new orbiting objects are sadly old.

OPEN YOUR MOUTH, TELL ME WHO YOU ARE. Christopher Orlet provides the Quote of the Day in an American Spectator column.

Often there is good reason to be skeptical of change, particularly when it comes about out of laziness and the dumbing-down of grammar rules. Again, compare Fowler's inflexible 1926 Dictionary of Modern English Usage to current grammars like Woe is I, in which rules that are troublesome or too difficult to remember are pronounced outdated or dead. (Rats, if I had known this was possible in my college days I would have pronounced Algebra outdated and dead and gotten on with my binge drinking.)

What the conservative sees as threats to the mother tongue are dismissed by the linguist as the natural progression of language, and nature trumps civilization (here represented by long-established rules) every time. These threats include the politicization of language, as in politically correct speech; threats from bureaucrats, businessmen, and politicians who use language to obfuscate, confuse and deceive, or in the case of academics to disguise a dearth of ideas; and, finally, threats from linguists who promote a laissez-faire approach to language.

The punchline, misuse of "prove" excused:

A slovenly, anarchic language reflects poorly on us. The language liberals may have abandoned their duty to preserve the language, but the recent popularity of "why oh why" books such as Lynne Truss' Eats, Shoots & Leaves and Robert Hartwell Fiske's Dictionary Of Disagreeable English prove that the public is serious about its upkeep.

(Via Joanne Jacobs.)

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE FISH WANTS A BICYCLE? Maureen Dowd of the alleged newspaper of record discovers she's been had.

So was the feminist movement some sort of cruel hoax? The more women achieve, the less desirable they are? Women want to be in a relationship with guys they can seriously talk to - unfortunately, a lot of those guys want to be in relationships with women they don't have to talk to.

Villainous Company is, shall we say, unimpressed.

Ms. Dowd might also contemplate the difference between masculine fantasies and what they decide in real life. I think we can all agree that, if asked by an 'unbiased researcher', most men would say they "prefer" to hook up with [insert mindless, sex-starved starlet with surgically enhanced breasts and serious dependency issues here].

Um, not necessarily. Mark Kleiman (via Unfogged, where a lively discussion of the Dowd column is in progress) has gone public with his objective function. (Reword it to include "ability to re-rig your own sailboat is a plus" and it could be mine.)

But there's more serious stuff in the Villainous Company post, including a link to something resembling real research. Money quote:

Mary Balfour, director of Drawing Down the Moon, an executive dating agency based in London, says that college-educated and professional men in their 20s and 30s now want women who match their intellect and earning abilities. "It is only those in their 50s and 60s who tend to take a deep breath when introduced to powerful women," she says.

No surprise. The older cohort came of age as the times they were a-changin', and those changes were disruptive to everybody, as the men had to confront at the time and the women are now discovering. (Well, perhaps I exaggerate. I recall in the early 1970s a number of policy changes that the activist types had long advocated taking effect in rapid succession, without observing much of an increase in the happiness of the activist types.) There is also a quote about money.

Most couples require two paychecks to stay in the middle class, a math lesson that is not lost on men.

Just can't get away from that Say Aggregation Principle, can we? There's more.

A 1999 nationally representative sample--meaning it mirrors the population as a whole--of 4,405 couples found that divorce was more likely when a woman has no earnings than when she brings home a paycheck. In particular, the marriage of a woman with no earnings was more than twice as likely to dissolve as that of a woman who had a paycheck.

Having no income can be risky for a woman, and not just in the stability of her marriage. A wife who drops out of the work force and stays out for a long time will never make up that lost economic ground, even if she returns to the work force. Worse, if her husband's income starts to slip--an all too common event these days--the couple can be in trouble, both financially and emotionally.

Here we go again, what is the effect of no-fault divorce on the labor force participation rates of married women? Villainous Company summarizes the lesson.

And so once again, we're back to economics and tradeoffs and maximizing utility after all. Men and women don't behave all that differently - it's just a question of what we value. And the answers (at least in the real world) are more easily divined by looking at the decisions we make than about what we say we value.

Actions speak louder than words.

Laura at 11-D (if you want to keep busy, go to the top and start reading; she's been doing a lot of thinking and linking) is hosting a discussion based on this observation.

Whenever Maureen Dowd goes after the flaws in the male character, I get a little uncomfortable, which is odd, because I really have no problem with male bashing. But when Maureen does it, I start shifting around in my seat and tapping my feet. I feel like she's showing too much of her cards. Maureen has a full set of Samsonite baggage. ...

Maureen's baggage aside, does she make a good point? Do men really want to jump a non-English speaking maid in a uniform over an award winning columnist?

An award winning columnist who has made repeated disclosure of her baggage? (Don't you just love the words people use to speak of human interaction. Issues. Baggage. Co-dependency. Bleah.) And what do all of her references to nannies and maids say about the men she's observing?

ONE YEAR AND COUNTING: Professor Althouse:

It's been pretty cool. I remember starting off in utter obscurity, thinking I'd better take care what I write, because I've got to assume that, eventually, some people who know me are going to find this. And now the Sitemeter is up over 900,000.

Reminder to the Superintendent's younger readers: it's not who you know, it's who knows you. One of the people who knows Professor Althouse is Professor Reynolds at the farm team for Northern Illinois administrators.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Here comes Book Review No. 2: Michael Crichton's State of Fear (details or compare prices) which I disposed of overnight. I won't give away too much, although the basic plot (catastrophic weather events staged by overwrought environmentalists) is in common knowledge and I found the fate of one famous primitive-celebrating naif particularly appetizing. Mr Crichton has apparently had enough of academic fads (the postlude includes a riff on eugenics that is worth your attention) including one retired academician holding forth as follows. (pp. 458-459).

"What happened," [the retired professor] continued, "is the universities transformed themselves in the 1980s. Formerly bastions of intellectual freedom in a world of Babbittry [dubious premise, but I digress -- Ed.], formerly the locus of sexual freedom and experimentation, they now became the most restrictive environments in modern society. Because they had a new role to play. They became the creators of new fears for the [political-legal-media complex.] Universities today are factories of fear. They invent all the new terrors and all the new social anxieties. All the new restrictive codes. Words you can't say. Thoughts you can't think. They produce a steady stream of new anxieties, dangers, and social terrors to be used by politicians, lawyers, and reporters. Foods that are bad for you. Behaviors that are unacceptable. Can't sweat, can't swear, can't screw, can't think. These institutions have been stood on their heads in a generation. It is really quite extraordinary.

"The modern State of Fear could never exist without universities feeding it. There is a peculiar neo-Stalinist mode of thought that is required to support all this, and it can thrive only in a restrictive setting, behind closed doors, without due process. In our society, only universities have created that -- so far. The notion that these institutions are liberal is a cruel joke. They are fascist to the core, I am telling you."

That's all I'm going to tell you, but you've just received more substance from me than you'll get from Dwight Garner at the alleged paper of record. (via Russell at Cafe Hayek.)

INVESTING YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY "CONTRIBUTIONS." Deinonychus antirrhopus links to a proposal by recent Nobelist Edward Prescott for the creation of a savings fund rather than the current (mislabeled, in the Superintendent's view) trust fund.

Prescott favors augmenting Social Security with forced savings plan that would put the savings into something like the Federal Thrift Savings Plan. The plan would institute graduated payroll taxes with the money going into these private accounts.

Advantages:

The benefits is that since the workers taxes really aren't taxes, but forced savings the negative impact of higher taxes is minimized or even eliminated. In fact, labor force participation might increase and savings should increase as well, according to Prescott.

My only issue, is that a forced savings plan might be offset savings by people who are currently saving via 401ks. However, those workers who do not have access to such retirement accounts would now be saving. So on the whole I'd say that savings would probably increase.

Also, the increased savings would mean higher investment and capital, which could very well translate into higher wages. Also, more productive capital will mean a more productive economy, which is also good for the current Social Security system.

Nathan Newman has given some thought to the management of such a fund as well, and proposes that it be managed directly by the government. Why?(these are the points, go to Mr Newman's site for the details.)

(1) Greater efficiency: Administering personal accounts that function like 401(k)s for 150 million social security beneficiars would be an administrative nightmare.

(2) Risks are distributed through collective investments: The point of any insurance system is to distribute risk.

At the heart of these proposals are two basic policy ideas: horizontal equity and natural monopoly. The horizontal equity argument cuts two ways. All participants in a single public program will be equally exposed to risks in a single National Retirement Mutual Fund would do; as participants might differ in their risk preferences, however, all participants will be exposed to the risk preferences of the fund managers, who might, or might not (but I'm getting ahead of my story) reflect the preferences of the median voter (or will it be the marginal voter, or the most vociferous voter?) The natural monopoly argument suggests that the cost of administering and partitioning a larger pool of money imposes a smaller burden on each account holder than would be true of smaller pools of money with fewer account holders and more reallocations by each account holder. But is that true of mutual funds? An investor has a choice among mutual funds that have similar investment objectives if different managers. Mightn't it be simpler to obtain a break for the small investors that won't come up with a big grubstake out of 4% of a minimum wage part time job by holding a Demsetz auction for the right to manage one of four to ten approved mutual funds?

There is a third point Mr Newman offers in favor of a government-managed trust fund.

(3) Government investments could be directed to investments that strengthen wage growth: The idea that the government might actually use all this capital in the social security trust fund in a pro-active manner gives rightwing economists hives, but it makes a lot of sense.

One does not have to invoke the specter of socialism to raise questions about this proposal.

While social security investments would not give the government control of existing industrial production, the government could strategically direct those investments to companies and industries that strengthen job growth and the wage base of the american economy, which in turn would expand the payroll taxes being paid into the social security system. Such Economically Targetted Investments (ETIs) are used by state and city pensions funds to strengthen their local economies on the same principle. See here, here and here for examples of such programs in pension funds around the country.

That sounds a lot like industrial policy, or perhaps like the so-called socially responsible investment funds that act on the aesthetics, or perhaps the prejudices, of some investors. We are, however, talking about investment managers that serve at the pleasure of the President, or who might be subject to vetting by the Senate (much as Federal Trade Commissioners?) The administrative costs that are saved in pooling all the moneys might be dissipated in rent-seeking over who shall be appointed as commissioners and what investments are in the national interest in addition to offering lower returns than mutual funds less constrained. The suggestion is interesting, but leaves open future criticism of the national investment monopoly for robbing poorer workers of returns they could have under a competition for the right to invest their forced savings in several funds.

It might be wise for Mr Newman to rethink income accounting. Consider this.

Privatizers want to talk about "returns on investment" from social security, while ignoring the fact that social insurance systems are not like regular investments. Individuals start out with a fixed amount of capital and the only returns that matter are from annual investment returns. But governments investing their capital have two sources of economic returns from those investments -- conventional returns from equity or bond markets PLUS the taxes derived from the domestic economic growth fueled by those government investments.

Given that the strength of the social security system is going to be heavily influenced by domestic growth rates over the next 75 years, to ignore the second part of that equation in developing an investment policy for social security would be completely irrational.

The concluding operation is correct: any public project that relies on taxing gains from trade (that, kiddies, is what any consumption or income tax, including a payroll tax does, and a head tax relies indirectly on gains from trade) is only as effective as the ability of the economy to generate gains from trade. A tax is a wedge between productivity and return, and to suggest that there is somehow a free lunch to taxing returns, or to using tax revenue to support local but less productive activities, weakens some of the observations that precede it.

Alex at Marginal Revolution has some clarifying thoughts on the distinction between investments and insurance that are worth your perusal.

RUNNING EXTRA: Nathan Newman has responses to this post, as well as responses to View from a Height and Deinonychus antirrhopus.

YOUR HELP MAKES US LOOK BAD. Via Betsy's Page, news that the Indonesian government would like the U.S. military to be less helpful.

[Indonesian Vice President Jusuf] Kalla's government also forced the Abraham Lincoln, from which Navy pilots have flown dozens of food supply missions to the hard-hit Aceh Province, to steam out of Indonesian waters because they refused to let U.S. pilots fly training missions in their air space.

The Indonesians also refused to let the Marines coming ashore rebuild roads, establish a base camp or carry arms.

The opposition is also afraid of looking bad.

A spokesman for Abu Bakar Bashir said the Indonesian cleric, who is on trial for terrorism, regarded the relief operations by Australian and US military personnel as a dangerous development, overshadowing the role of the Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI).

"We are suspicious of the presence of foreign soldiers and their show of force and the minimum publicity given to assistance from Arab states," said Fauzan Al Anshari, a spokesman for Bashir's militant Majelis Mujahidin Indonesia group.

"It's dangerous, this idea by Acehnese that US and Australian forces are their guardian angels - more popular than the TNI."

Tough. You have to have a functioning civil society, and neither the Indonesian government nor the mullahs get that yet. Captain Ed is pleased with the consequences.

I'm happy to see that I underestimated the impact of the aid. While I still don't think that the gratitude will be permanent, especially at this level, it helps in the short run. It also serves to discredit much of the propaganda of the Islamofascists in the region, a development that Bashir laments in his statement. That also indicates how little of the Islamofascist energy really goes to helping Muslims, as groups like Jemaah Islamiyah and Hamas (and countries like Saudi Arabia) have had slow to non-existent responses to the humanitarian need of their own within in the ummah.

The Indonesians may now understand that these groups offer nothing but human sacrifice and blood-drinking murder to appease their conception of Allah, unrecognizable by any others. And the Islamofascists might now have to confront their own emptiness before ever gaining back any credibility outside of the serial-killer lunatic fringe among them.

Find me the sura that reads God Helps Thofe Who Help Themfelves.

ARE FIRST IMPRESSIONS LASTING? The Eclectic Econoclast (making a slight name change to avoid confusion with a consultant trading as Econoclast) discovers something about course evaluations.

If students can, in five seconds(!!!), provide instructor evaluations that are the same as the ones we get from students who have actually been in the course for an entire semester, there is a very good chance that the standard evaluations conducted near the end of each term are not measuring much more than presentability, performance, and atmosphere.

Does that mean course evaluations are a waste of time?

My skepticism does not, however, mean I would favour abolishing student evaluations of instructors. As I said at the outset, evaluations are probably important for measuring consumer satisfaction with the product universities provide.

But the consumers are not the students. Students participate in a process called learning. The ability to make connections and not be fooled makes them somewhat more valuable to employers (to get a good job, get a good education and all that.) Are people sufficiently intuitive to see that potential in five seconds?

ANOTHER GIANT PASSES. King at SCSU Scholars notes the passing of Robert Heilbroner.

He wrote The Worldly Philosophers, which during my generation in undergraduate economics programs was fairly required of all econ majors. As I've mentioned, through most of my undergraduate program I waffled between business/economics and philosophy as majors, ending up with a minor in the latter. I have to say I liked Heilbroner's book, even though it was far too praising of command and control economic policies. It was an exposure to how much economics touched political philosophy and vice versa., which during my generation in undergraduate economics programs was fairly required of all econ majors. As I've mentioned, through most of my undergraduate program I waffled between business/economics and philosophy as majors, ending up with a minor in the latter. I have to say I liked Heilbroner's book, even though it was far too praising of command and control economic policies. It was an exposure to how much economics touched political philosophy and vice versa.

I'm a bit older than King, and my first exposure to economics was three weeks of history of thought at the beginning of an introductory macroeconomics course required of all business majors. Lucky me. I learned only later that my course was one of the last to be structured that way: most begin with production possibilities or income-expenditure and no context on Why This Matters.

Professor Heilbroner was in touch with the Zeitgeist in Worldly Philosophers. Guest lecturers at Wisconsin in those days addressed such topics as fine-tuning the economy.

REDISCOVERING INFORMATION CASCADES. Do you stop at the truck stop where all the trucks are because that's a signal the food is better? Newmark's Door links to a column that rediscovers the information cascade. (The parking lot is full because the first trucker made a choice, the second trucker matched the first choice, repeat as necessary.) The article, which has a fun information cascade simulator, and links to others, explains,

So, just because one restaurant is crowded and its neighbors have few customers doesn't necessarily mean that the packed bistro is the place to be. By a fluke, it may have attracted the first few customers in the area, and the rest just followed the crowd.

Professor Newmark calls the columnist out.

Mr. Peterson doesn't seem to realize that, far from being a surprise, his story is an example of a phenomenon that has been well studied by economists. We call it a negative network externality and it is unlikely to persist in the real world. Is there no word-of-mouth about restaurants and are there no restaurant reviewers? Can't the better restaurants find ways to convince potential customers of their quality? Would people continue to eat at a restaurant solely because they had eaten there before by chance?

And herein rests an interesting economics problem. The information cascade generating the network externality is an illustration of a potentially suboptimal pattern of imitation. It might have been present in the adoption of basic oxygen steel furnaces and the jury on diesel locomotives is still out. But there is another phenomenon in economics, particularly where commitments are not easily reversed, called "economic hysteresis," a potentially suboptimal pattern of delayed action. But modeling the flow of information about desirable and undesirable restaurants, given initial choices, is not easy, although I hope to have something more intelligent to say about it by semester's end.

MORE ON THE CALCULATION PROBLEM. David at Catallarchy has weighed in on Marginal Revolution's calculation debate questions. This answer to the first question is a more succinct version of mine.

How does rational calculation take place within a firm? In some ways it doesn’t. Fortunately for the firms, there are enough other market factors and external prices available that managers are not totally blind. Many decisions can be determined to be good or bad by the reaction of the relevant stakeholders. Bad decisions are punished by employees quiting or demanding higher wages, customers going elsewhere, vendors giving stricter terms, and owners dumping the stock.

(Note that all of these rely on markets to resolve disagreements over the best use of a resource.)

WE ARE WEARING OUR PAJAMAS. Milwaukee's Charlie Sykes is currently chatting with Owen at Boots and Sabers, who is liveblogging his interview, along with Reciprocal Switching source Sean at The American Mind, and some new sources to me including Badger Pundit, Brain Post, Patrick at Web Nuts, and Kevin, near 8D1, who operates Lakeshore Laments.

The title comes from a quip one of the guys made during the radio show.

BY THEIR FRUITS SHALL YE KNOW THEM. The starting point for today's mini-dissertation is John at Left2Right holding forth on the Port Huron Statement.

During the 1960s the efforts of the student left to bring about social change became intertwined with the counterculture, and subsequently, as our memory of the period blurs, those efforts and the seriousness of purpose behind them have lost their separate identity. The loss has been a boon to social critics of the right. After all, how hard can it be to dismiss the political movements of that period if you identify their ideals with the simplistic utopianism of Woodstock?

Um, not too hard, if that's exactly what is still going on.

The reason The Port Huron Statement remains an important document is that it is a model political manifesto of the American left. It puts forth a simple but very powerful idea, democracy that enlists the active participation of its citizens in its institutions, and it uses this idea to analyze the social conditions of its time, to criticize, in view of those conditions, the political and economic institutions that produced them, and to propose remedies that would move the country toward being a more truly democratic republic. The American left, as far as I'm aware, has produced nothing like it since.

You sure you want to have a more "democratic" republic, what with 80% of the population observing Christmas? One does not have to be familiar with Gramsci (although Rush Limbaugh has invoked him) to understand "capturing the institutions." Perhaps there is something happening here, although it's going to be the use of Gramscian tactics for other ends.

If you want clarity, read Armed Liberal.

I find myself in a risky place surrounded by people who have lost the ability to tell bullshit from reality. Our party is wounded, leaking ideologically and demographically, and we sit here drinking quack nostrums made from apricot pits and listening to fake spirit mediums tell us everything will be OK because our dead ancestors FDR, JFK, and LBJ are looking over us.

His context is the continued denial in the Liberal Media (TM) that there is in fact a Liberal Media (TM). But he's got a message for his side.

First, we can't decide on good actions because we have no idea what reality looks like.

Second, we won't get elected because the voters don't believe we're connected to any reality that they recognize or that we can prove.

Both are bad for the Democratic Party, bad for journalism, and bad for the country. Are only the Democrats like this? Of course not. But right now, we're the party stuck in the mud and sinking.

Mark Steyn has the same observations, if not the same sympathies.

Two plausible parties are necessary for a functioning democracy, especially in war, especially in a long war which will inevitably have to be fought by presidents both Republican and Democrat. The Dems might get lucky. The GOP might nominate some freaky goofball in '08, and the other fellow will win by default. But, as the 2004 field reminded us, this isn't a party exactly brimming with talent and fresh faces. And, as for ideas, when was the last time you heard a fresh policy from a Democrat? The serious arguments about war, social security, immigration and pretty much everything else are all within factions of the right. The Democrats' only contribution is to insist that someone in Halliburton has figured out a way to get the touch-screen voting machines to make Democrats' votes vanish. Democrats' votes are vanishing because Democrat voters are vanishing because Democrat intellectual energy has all but vanished. Or as Republican Congresswoman Deborah Pryce summed up Thursday's Boxer rebellion: ''Their objection is a front for their lack of ideas.''

And people notice. Andrew Sullivan points to a City Journal article continuing the rediscovery of a different sort of student rebellion on campus.

The new-millennium campus conservative is comfortably at home in popular culture, as I’ve found interviewing 50 or so from across the country. A favorite TV show, for instance, is Comedy Central’s breathtakingly vulgar cartoon South Park. “Not only is it hilariously uncouth, but it also criticizes the hypocrisy of liberals,” explains Washington University economics major Matt Arnold. “The funniest part is that most liberals watch the show but are so stupid that they’re unaware they’re being made fun of,” he says, uncharitably. The young conservatives, again like typical college kids, also play their iPods night and day, listening less to Bach and Beethoven than to alt-rock, country-and-western, and hip-hop.

But the youngsters have noticed something.

Yet a deeper reason for the rightward shift, which began well before 9/11, is the Left’s broader intellectual and political failure. American college kids grew up in an era that witnessed both communism’s fall and the unchained U.S. economy’s breathtaking productivity surge. They’ve seen that anyone willing to work hard—regardless of race or sex—can thrive in such an opportunity-rich system. “I’m only 20, so I don’t remember segregation or the oppression of women—in fact, my mother had a very successful career since I was a kid,” one student observed in an online discussion. “I look around and don’t see any discrimination against minorities or women.” Left-wing charges of U.S. economic injustice sound like so much BS to many kids today.

The destructive effects of “just-do-it” values on the family are equally evident to many undergrads, who have painfully felt those effects themselves or watched them rip up the homes of their friends. They turn to family values with the enthusiasm of converts. Even their support of homosexual civil unions may spring from their rejection of the world of casual hookups, broken marriages, and wounded children that liberalism has produced. “Heterosexuals have already done a decent job of cheapening marriage on their own,” observes Vanderbilt’s Malinee.

To the university administrators, however, the hook-ups and the friendships with benefits are permissible in the "gender-neutral" dorms and in the remaining hippie communes, but not -- another echo of the Sixties -- in the "irrelevant" fraternities.

It's doom and gloom time for many fraternity boys at Northwestern and at colleges across the country. University administrators, alarmed by the extent of binge drinking on their campuses, are cracking down on the excesses of Greek life, saying it's high time for fraternity boys to shape up and sober up. While all kinds of college students binge drink, the 2001 College Alcohol Study by the Harvard School of Public Health found that fraternity house residents are twice as likely to do so as other students.

University Diaries has a proper smackdown of those efforts.

The Times article helps UD understand why she, a “fraternity-mocking English major” (as the NU grad who wrote the Times piece calls himself), has always found fraternities and sororities pretty rank. Like a lot of people who become professors (see UD post dated February 11, 2004), UD is both group-averse and kitsch-phobic. Life in frats, judging by the Times article, represents a distillation of her dreads: it’s about sloppy sentiment in large gatherings.

So, for instance, in place of the pissed-boy bonding at the heart of frat life, reformers have inaugurated equally embarrassing alcohol-free campaigns: frats, according to the Times, are now about “Brotherhood - Our Substance of Choice,” and “Balanced Man” programs. Ick.

Apparently "do your own thing" does not apply to the fraternities.

So how hard, then, to dismiss the ideals of the Sixties? Simply evaluate their consequences. It's not too hard to get polemical. Here comes Book Review No. 1 of an intended fifty (via Will at Crescat Sententia and Chris at Signifying Nothing) to complete within a year. The first arrived last Friday and I've already finished it: Mona Charen's Do-Gooders (details or compare prices.) Ms Charen has written a polemic. If you like the red meat, by all means read it. Sample (from p. 121):

Just as liberals claim to be pro-worker but urge policies that are antibusiness, they claim to be pro-child while encouraging social mores and government policies that undermine the family. Every liberal initiative, from welfare to antismoking measures, is justified by reference to "the children." Yet the clear result of liberal policies is to harm children even more than adults. Liberals are prepared to erect social welfare scaffolding to support the "families" of single women -- those families that are most likely to cause harm to children -- and yet they shrink from the most obvious solution to child maltreatment: encouraging and promoting marriage and traditional family structure. The children of divorce and illegitimacy have paid the price for liberalism's attachment to free love and radical individualism. Abused and neglected children have paid the price for liberalism's tendency to sentimentalize the poor.

In fact, liberalism in various guises -- feminism, the sexual revolution, gay activism -- has been at war with marriage and family for several decades now. And when do-gooders look around at the wreckage of human lives caused by disintegrating families, they call for government to act as father, mother, brother, and sister.

Wow. Take two deep breaths. I know just enough about the post hoc fallacy to be dangerous. To be sure, what came after some of the reforms Ms Charen condemns was not the outcome the reformers anticipated. All the same, her book would be more credible with at least some acknowledgement of the legal thinking behind some of the Warren Court's (yes, she, too, is refighting the Sixties) rulings or of the social science policy analysis that's out there.

To pull it all together, perhaps there is nothing more than the "simplistic utopianism of Woodstock" in much public policy. But there is no convincing improvement offered by polemicists of the Left, nor convincing refutation offered by polemicists of the Right.

RIGHT NAME, WRONG TERMINAL DEGREE. Steve Verdon discovers the National Center for Science Education's Project Steve.

Creationists draw up these lists to convince the public that evolution is somehow being rejected by scientists, that it is a "theory in crisis." Most members of the public lack sufficient contact with the scientific community to know that this claim is totally unfounded. NCSE has been exhorted by its members to compile a list of thousands of scientists affirming the validity of the theory of evolution, but although we easily could have done so, we have resisted such pressure. We did not wish to mislead the public into thinking that scientific issues are decided by who has the longer list of scientists!

Project Steve mocks this practice with a bit of humor, and because "Steves" are only about 1% of scientists, it incidentally makes the point that tens of thousands of scientists support evolution. And it honors the late Stephen Jay Gould, NCSE supporter and friend.

We'd like to think that after Project Steve, we'll have seen the last of bogus "scientists doubting evolution" lists, but it's probably too much to ask. We do hope that at least when such lists are proposed, reporters and other citizens will ask, "but how many Steves are on your list!?"

The criteria for membership are here. Although the Center is not interested in Economics Ph.D.s, the project merits mention here for two substantive reasons. (The nonsubstantive reason comes at the end of the post.) First, the exposure to experimental science most youngsters receive is pretty slim, which contributes to the lack of contact with the "scientific community." Second, the project illustrates the dangers inherent in government-provided schooling, as school boards are subject to capture by scientific illiterates or by mushy-headed multiculturalists. The problem, dear readers, is with the government provision of the schools themselves, rather than with the means to attend the schools.

As far as the lists themselves go, we require strengthening of philosophical reasoning as well. A list perpetuates the ad popularum fallacy (hey, the operator of that site oughta join Project Steve too.)

DO I HEAR AN ECHO? Remember yesterday's sermon?

A "secure retirement" is only as secure as the productivity of the current crop of workers.

Matt at Tapped is beginning to understand.

Is it true that faster economic growth can't make Social Security solvent? No. Now it is true that faster growth leads to higher wages, and that higher wages lead to higher benefits along with higher revenue. But faster growth (driven by higher productivity and resulting in higher wages) increases revenue by more than it increases benefits. It does so because a retiree's benefits only get adjusted by the wage index once, when you first start drawing checks. After that initial check, future increases are pegged to the slower-growing Consumer Price Index.

At any rate, the math is complicated, but seeing that the Ponnuru/Longman line is wrong isn't. Just ask yourself why the projected doomsday year for the Social Security trust fund has moved 13 years into the future over the past seven years. It wasn't the magic of mandatory stock ownership (the Ponnuru plan) or a sharp increase in the birth rate (Longman's favored solution) -- it was the end of the 1973-1995 productivity slump and a return to the higher historical pattern. The persistence of a weak labor market over the past several years in the context of strong productivity growth (manifested in the statistics by labor's declining share of national income) suggests that the economy could actually be growing significantly faster in real terms than it is now, especially if we avoid the sort of fiscal meltdown that could be precipitated by the $2 trillion borrowing binge implicit in
privatization plans.

The next challenge: get Mr Yglesias to grasp the next point from the sermon.

The Social Security tax drives a wedge between productivity and reward, which reduces economic growth. Because the bonds currently representing the Trust Fund's "surplus" will be refinanced out of expected tax revenues, the status quo means reliance on that lower rate of economic growth -- or on refinancing the bonds at the Fed, which means your defined benefit of $1 is an inflated $1.

We have agreement that the tax base reflects the gains from trade in a growing economy. That's the beginning of wisdom, young apprentice.

The editorial board at the Washington Post (via Pike Speak) indirectly recognizes that connection.

If these cuts sound harsh, that's partly because the current system makes
promises that aren't affordable. The practice of wage indexing that the
administration appears keen to scrap is one source of this excessive generosity.

Nathan Newman suggests that there is more than one way to address that revenue deficiency.

So since we're talking about expanding the base for social security, why shouldn't non-wage income be taxed to help fund the system? And to help out Medicare by assessing that portion of the wage tax as well on investment income.

His post lays out a case for making federal taxes as a whole proportional, or perhaps taking a greater share of higher incomes. But in doing so, he's illustrated a law of conservation at work that ought give pause to anyone who asserts a "defined benefit" pension plan is preferable. In order to preserve the same level of benefits (or, perhaps, some more conservatively indexed benefits) he is proposing to redefine the contributions, either by redefining those components of income subject to tax, or by rewriting the tax code such that Social Security becomes simply another on-budget item (which is what refinancing the trust fund as government bonds after 2009 really is.) The benefit stays as promised. The investment individual taxpayers make to secure that benefit rises. The return on their investment falls. Isn't that the argument the privatizers are making, which is resonating with younger workers?

A REMINDER. Captain Ed's World Relief Day is Wednesday, 12 January.

CARNIVAL CALL. This week's Carnival of the Capitalists calls at Odyssey of the Mind.

THE DIRTY LITTLE SECRET OF "MERIT GOODS." The Onion lets it out.

A study released Monday by the American Public Transportation Association reveals that 98 percent of Americans support the use of mass transit by others.

It's supposed to be satire, but there is something to this.

Anaheim, CA, resident Lance Holland, who drives 80 miles a day to his job in downtown Los Angeles, was among the proponents of public transit.

"Expanding mass transit isn't just a good idea, it's a necessity," Holland said. "My drive to work is unbelievable. I spend more than two hours stuck in 12 lanes of traffic. It's about time somebody did something to get some of these other cars off the road."

(Hat tip: The Econoclast.)

HERE COME THE RECRIMINATIONS. Defeat may be an orphan, but (as expected) somebody has to be responsible. Paul at The Electric Commentary has a list of things that went wrong, and an invitation to join in the lamentations. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's Bob McGinn suggests the recriminations, and the reevaluations, will go on for some time.

Suffice to say that the Minnesota Vikings’ 31-17 victory over the Packers in an NFC wild-card game should force club President Bob Harlan to hold accountable just about everything and everybody in the organization.

Coach Mike Sherman has won a ton of regular-season games but hasn’t even reached the NFC Championship Game in five years. His team failed even to compete Sunday, just as it didn’t against St. Louis in 2001 and against Atlanta in 2002. Last year, Sherman blew it himself in Philadelphia by not going for it on a fateful late fourth and 1.

The defense as sloppily coordinated by Bob Slowik was a dysfunctional mess all season long, including Sunday. Players have begun openly questioning his schemes, which they apparently do not understand and aren’t executing.

Quarterback Brett Favre, the face of the Packers if not the National Football League, was embarrassingly bad for the third time in four elimination games. His passer rating of 55.4 against the Vikings followed a 53.5 against the Rams, a 54.4 against the Falcons and an 82.4 against the Eagles in a game that effectively ended on Favre’s woefully overthrown interception.

Tom Silverstein is somewhat harsher.

If there was ever a death knell for the status of first-year defensive coordinator Bob Slowik, it rang with the 31 points the Packers allowed for the third consecutive game against the Vikings. The Packers did not improve one iota in the three meetings, allowing the same number of points, failing to secure a turnover and looking as inept tackling as they did carrying out assignments.

Under Slowik, the Packers dropped from 17th in the NFL in total defense to 25th and on Sunday they looked every bit worthy of their ranking. It wasn’t that they couldn’t compete physically with the Vikings, who have one of the best offenses in the league, it was that they couldn’t function as a team.

Should make for an interesting off-season.

PRESERVED AS IF IN AMBER. Harold Meyerson reaches back forty years to offer a defense of Social Security.

Above all, what changed the lives of America's senior citizens were the significant increases in Social Security benefits enacted in the 1960s and '70s, and the indexing of those benefits to average wage growth. But since the Bush administration is reportedly soon to propose ending that indexing, and replacing it with a different formula that would greatly reduce benefits, it's worth taking a moment to look back at senior poverty as it existed in the year of John F. Kennedy's election as president.

Mr Meyerson perpetuates a logical error: there is less poverty among pensioners today than there was forty years ago, and Social Security is the cause.

Today, however, the United States is governed by a president who is affronted by the very idea of a successful government program. According to a story in yesterday's Post, President Bush wants to change the Social Security indexing formula in a way that will reduce monthly payments by 32.5 percent by 2052 and 45.9 percent by 2075. Today a retiree receives a Social Security check that equals 42 percent of the average worker's wage; if Bush's plan is enacted, that check will shrink to just 20 percent of that wage.

Better watch the political spouting, Mr Meyerson. In the absence of any action, that check will disappear, or perhaps be paid off in inflated currency. And that "successful government program" might have achieved some of those results by stealing the future from younger workers.

Perhaps there is yet another answer: there is more childhood poverty today because Social Security and Medicare have reduced economic growth compared to what it would have been with a different tax regime. Martin Feldstein has worked on this topic for years. There is also a paper by Alan J. Auerbach, Jagadeesh Gokhale, and Laurence J. Kotlikoff called "Generational Accounting: A Meaningful Way to Evaluate Fiscal Policy" (requires J-STOR privileges) in the Winter 1994 Journal of Economic Perspectives that illustrates the extent to which the current crop of elders are stealing from future generations.

Mr Meyerson would rather score more polemical points.

In 1980, 39 percent of American workers had defined-benefit pension plans; today just 21 percent do, as employers have shunted their employees into 401(k) investment plans. If Bush gets his way, both the government's retirement plan and employers' will be supplanted by plans based on stock performance. If Bush gets his way, his chief domestic achievement will be to have turned "secure retirement" into an oxymoron.

No. A "secure retirement" is only as secure as the productivity of the current crop of workers. The Social Security tax drives a wedge between productivity and reward, which reduces economic growth. Because the bonds currently representing the Trust Fund's "surplus" will be refinanced out of expected tax revenues, the status quo means reliance on that lower rate of economic growth -- or on refinancing the bonds at the Fed, which means your defined benefit of $1 is an inflated $1.

Arnold Kling has some useful observations.

If benefit growth is not slowed, then the taxes required to both pay for Social Security and provide subsidies to low-wage workers's savings plans will be too onerous. Regardless of how private accounts are implemented, we need a "plan B" policy to slow the growth of benefits, using either price indexing or adjustments to the retirement age.That would be true even in the absence of private accounts.

How "defined" is a benefit if Congress can at any time redefine the retirement age?

Mr Kling also offers useful advice to policy wonks. Stop lecturing us about your good intentions.

[The transition to private accounts] would cut the regressive Social Security tax, shifting the burden of paying current benefits to other taxes that are more likely to fall on the wealthy. Thus, the consequence of privatization would be quite progressive, even though [Professor Paul] Krugman assumes that the motives of the Bush Administration do not favor the working class. In my view, this demonstrates the importance for economists of focusing on consequences rather than on motives.

Hear! Hear!

Villainous Company has also spent some time over the weekend following the Social Security debates and has a collection of gems worth your perusal.

THE POINT OF THEORY IS TO DEVELOP REFUTABLE IMPLICATIONS. Relax, humanities types, everybody knows your "theory" has none. This post is about real theory. I start with Constrained Vision's smackdown of a Jodie Allen column criticizing economics as "common sense made complicated." That smackdown concludes with a link to an Agoraphilia post with some rigorous modeling of a coordination failure problem. I'm not sure there will be rigorous empirical testing of the hypotheses that appear in the post, but perhaps I underestimate the current crop of economists.

Alex at Marginal Revolution links to a more encouraging development. David Warsh attended the just-concluded economics meetings, in Philadelphia (did they sanitize the city after the MLA left?)

Work was presented on all kinds of practical topics. For example: cars, gas and pollution policies; downtown parking and traffic congestion; kidney exchange; private funding in china's education system; patent examiners impact on enforcement; rural and urban poverty in Africa; the sources of racial differences in health care in the United States; the relationship between wealth and democracy; the U.S. gender pay gap; the growing population of postdoctoral students in U.S. universities; the question of who receives IPO allocations and why -- all of them buttressed by careful empirical work.

The conference also featured work of redeeming social value.

The centerpiece of the Philadelphia meetings was a call by a leading applied economist, Martin Feldstein of Harvard University, for an ambitious program of forced savings to replace a series of government social insurance programs -- unemployment insurance, Social Security and Medicare -- that he said had been shown to have deleterious effects.

The state of the art has improved since Professor Feldstein began this research. (He had to publish extensive corrections of his first paper after somebody discovered a glitch in his estimating program.)

Econometric theory is like an exquisitely balanced French recipe, spelling out precisely with how many turn to mix the sauce, how many carats of spice to add, and for how many milliseconds to bake the mixture at 474 degrees of temperature. But when the statistical cook turns to raw materials, he finds that hearts of cactus fruit are unavailable, so he substitutes chunks of cantaloupe; where the recipe calls for vermicelli, he uses shredded wheat; and he substitutes green garment dye for curry; ping-pong ball for turtles' eggs; and, for Chalifougnac 1883, a can of turpentine.

Things have changed since then. Data have been improved, particularly microeconomic data. Theory is more subtle. Mainly sophisticate number-crunching software has made it possible to implement ambiguity-reducing procedures that would have been unthinkable before. The improved precision is real.

This is an encouraging development. Some days I wonder whether I can do neither theory nor empirics well; other days, I give one or both a shot nonetheless. But one story from years ago will set the quote in context. I one day telephoned an eminent theoretical econometrician, who was a bit surprised that anyone would actually attempt to use his rather challenging looking specification test on observed variables. I did, and published that paper.

NOW THEY ARE BEGINNING TO UNDERSTAND. Virginia Postrel comments on a USA Today article that discovers people opting out of the 24/7 treadmill. The article itself might be introduced as a Fourth Turning Alert(TM).

Nobody knows why the change is happening, but there are several possible causes, Galinsky says. "What I hear all the time from young men is that they want to be different than their fathers, who often worked long hours. They want to be more involved in their children's lives."

Many young workers grew up in an era of rising divorce rates and corporate layoffs. "They saw the 'rewards' parents could get for work loyalty," Galinsky says. Gen X'ers and Y'ers also saw stressed-out boomer parents multitasking, Galinsky says. And fears of terrorism may have increased the value of comforting families to young Americans, she says.

There are still incentives at work.

Flexibility at work is a prized benefit for young working moms, according to another recent survey by Galinsky's institute. On a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 most valued), employed mothers gave flexibility a 9.2 and advancement 5.5.

That's not to say working mothers are quitting in droves to go home. Even if they wanted to, most can't afford it. "The idea that mothers work for pin money should have died a long time ago," says Stanford University economist Myra Strober.

More precisely, the death of that idea contributes to the higher labor force participation of women, with the Say Aggregation Principle at work. The existence of no-fault divorce induces additional labor-force participation by married women, for reasons of insurance independent of any reason to help pay a higher price for a house that comes bundled with a better school district.

Ms Postrel notes something else at work.

If you're a highly skilled, highly educated professional, you can make quite a good living these days without working terribly long hours or putting your work first. (You can, of course, make more if you work obsessively. But even the most rationalistic economist believes people maximize utility, not income.) And, contrary to widespread belief in places like LA, Washington, and New York, in most of the United States, a family can live a comfortable middle-class life on middle-class pay, in many cases on a single salary. You won't have every luxury, but you'll have more than your parents.

Sounds like a backward-bending supply curve of labor to me. Regular readers knew about the fallacy of longer hours equating more productivity and about income and substitution effects long ago.

REINVENTING THE WELFARE ECONOMICS PARADIGM? Elizabeth at Left2Right suggests it is time to discard ancient classifications of belief systems.

Here's another legacy of the Cold War that should be discarded: the convention of classifying the systems of economic organization on a continuous spectrum from left to right, with communism on the far left, then socialism, then the so-called "mixed" economies of Western Europe and North America, and, on the right, the laissez-faire capitalist minimal state, and on the far right, anarcho-capitalism. We should know this spectrum is in trouble when we recollect that when fascism was still considered a serious alternative, or threat, it was represented as the far-right position.

What you mean, "we?" Fascism travelled in Germany under a much more accurate name, "national sozialistische," and I recall Keynsian professors in the early 1970s describing the German economic recovery of the 1930s as the correct amount, if not best applied, of fiscal stimulus. But perhaps I quibble too much. Let's go here.

Now that communism is thankfully dead, along with such lamentable economic ideas as centralized economic planning, state ownership of major industries, and comprehensive wage and price controls, which were tried by many "mixed" economies as well as communist regimes, we should start reflecting on the economy we have with a clearer eye. The key features of the economy that amount to departures from laissez-faire are:

1. State provision of public goods, such as roads, public health programs, and schools.
2. Centralized banking.
3. Regulation of the environment, securities markets, food and drugs,auto safety, etc.
4. Social insurance, and, to a much smaller extent, "welfare."
5. Laws enabling labor unions (weak in the U.S., but much stronger in Europe).

We still have barriers to trade, to be sure, but the long-run trends here are definitely in the direction of reduction, even in the stubborn area of archaic agricultural subsidies, which should certainly be eliminated. (Here right and left ought to enjoy real common ground. The (libertarian) right hates them because they involve departures from free-market principles. Some parts of the left (e.g., NGO's such as Oxfam), including myself, hate them because they impoverish poor countries that could improve their economies if they were free to export their agricultural products, textiles, and cheap manufactures to rich countries without barriers. Alas, neither element of left or right is numerically dominant in domestic U.S. and European political institutions. But the WTO may force the hands of the U.S. and Europe anyway: chalk one up in favor of sovereignty-compromising global institutions.)

That sounds pretty much like the Welfare Economics Paradigm with market "failures" warranting government "correctives." (It also anticipates the outline of my public policy course; fortune favors the prepared.) Whether or not one wants to get away from the "mixed economy" meme as Professor Anderson suggests, there is much to commend her post.

My point is rather that these five should be seen as developments internal to the dynamics of democratic capitalism itself, rather than borrowings from fundamentally alien economic systems. So it makes no sense to call economies that have them "mixed," as opposed to advanced variants of democratic capitalism. Public provision of infrastructure and education, and sponsorship of science research, has long been a great engine of capitalist development. Even if socialism and communism had never existed, it would have been necessary to invent centralized banking to moderate the effects of capitalism's business cycles. (By contrast, socialists and communists had always hoped to eliminate business cycles through centralized planning.) Regulation of private sector actions to reduce pollution, ensure public safety, etc. was brought to capitalism by popular demand. (By contrast, communism never tried to repair its catastrophic environmental policies and its workplace safety record is disastrous, nor was environmentalism ever much of a socialist issue until capitalist economies embraced it.) Ditto for social insurance and independent labor unions, neither of which were part of the imaginary communist utopia, nor happy in the dreadful communist reality (recall the wretched state of health care in ex-communist Europe, and Solidarity in Poland). Socialists and progressive liberals can take the historical credit (or blame, depending on your point of view) for some of these five.

Precisely the point of the upcoming course. Government actions have the potential to address some outcomes from some kinds of markets. Whether those policies work properly, or achieve allocative efficiency, or some kind of equity, or might be done more effectively by other means, remains an open question.

NOTICE OF SUSPENSION. Bill at Atlantic Blog is standing down until February. His reason for doing so is very good. Stay tuned.

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Joanne Jacobs:

Designing a merit pay system that's accepted as fair is quite difficult.

Tradeoffs are everywhere.

NOTHING TO LOSE. The Minnesota Vikings were getting this sort of press (via Wizbang) going into this afternoon's playoff game in Green Bay.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune took a trip to a local sports shop this week to find that jerseys of the Minnesota Wild hockey team - which isn't even playing this season - are outselling Viking jerseys.

Now that the Vikings are in the playoffs - losing two straight games to back their way in - the cold reality of statistics suggests that they won't be there long.

Not only has no 8-8 team ever won a playoff game since the NFL went to a 16-game season in 1978, the Vikings haven't won one in four years. In their last playoff game, they were on the wrong end of a 41-0 loss to the Giants in the 2001 NFC championship game.

Worse yet, a team from the cold can't play in the cold - or anywhere where there's no roof over their heads. The Vikings are 2-18 in their last 20 outdoor games, and it doesn't get any more outdoor than January at Lambeau Field.

Yes, the Packers have a leaky secondary that Daunte Culpepper and Nate Burleson can exploit, perhaps even Moss if he shows up. But the Packers are 12-1 in playoff games at Lambeau and Brett Favre always seems to play well against the Vikings.

Emotionally, it's a blowout. The Packers won nine of their last 11 games, are playing before the home fans and have the magic of Lambeau in their favor.

Pregame commentary from Milwaukee was more measured.

When the Vikings come in today, [first-year defensive coordinator Bob] Slowik’s unit is going to have to do better than it did in the previous two meetings - allowing 31 points in the first and 24 in the second - or else there will be enormous pressure on the Packers offense. Somehow, the defense has to pick up its play.

“The biggest thing is, are we getting better, have we gotten better, can we get better tomorrow in practice and be better against the Vikings,” Slowik said.

Minnesota got its 31 points again, exploiting four interceptions. The Packers finished with 17. Expect more recriminations and second-guessing in Green Bay.

NO CRUSHING OF DISSENT AT SOUTHERN UTAH. Voluntary Xchange has the latest developments on the firing, or not, of a political scientist at Southern Utah, who was denied tenure by the book, as this letter notes.

WHAT DOES NOT KILL ME MAKES ME STRONGER. The Quote of the Day comes from Discoshaman:

An intelligent conservative in America has had his beliefs tested by fire. And he knows the opposing system intimately, rather than having it translated to him through an echo chamber.

The qualifying statement is also noteworthy.

No faction holds intellectual honesty and curiousity as an exclusive preserve,
and plenty of liberals have taken the time to study conservatism.

A 225 PAGE INSTRUCTION MANUAL AND 3104 PARTS. Stephen at VodkaPundit provides an impressive display of model-blogging. The use of empty pop cans to provide scale in the photos helpful to people viewing a project that is not 1/48 actual size.

I was under the impression that British assembly instructions were detailed, but there is nothing in the stack of 1/43.5 projects with that large a manual.

POSSIBLE SOURCE OF COMPANY MAIL? New (Sub)urbanism looks at policy problems of interest to residents of Greater DeKalb.

BETTERMENT REPORT. A Suggestion Box has been installed at Cold Spring Shops.

Provocative give-and-take is permissible, as is curmudgeonliness. Brevity is encouraged.

The use of profanity is prohibited.

IS 13-12 TOO CHRISTIAN TO CELEBRATE? Bear with me, there is method in this.

Mungowitz End questions the use of public moneys to pay for creative arts.

The Soviet Union had public funding for the arts, and (to be fair) their performance arts, of existing works, were nonpareil. Russian ballet and dance companies were among the best in the world, ticket prices were low, and there seemed to be a genuine success for public funding, especially in the larger cities.

But there were some problems with the picture. First, the costs were enormous. Because it was impossible (or at least dangerous) to question spending priorities, there was no problem as long as the totalitarian regime persisted. But with democracy has come a lot of questions about whether this is best use of funds.

Second, public funding in the former USSR did not create good new art. The new art in the Soviet Union was awful! It seems to me there are three kinds of art: Great art (which is great), popular art (some of which is great, and some of which is only good), and politically acceptable art (which is awful).

True enough. Soviet ballet did a great job with works commissioned by tsarist princes. It is that politically acceptable art that I am addressing. Here's an example from the Stalin era, recommended by King at SCSU Scholars.

With the Building of Dirigibles, We Increase the Might of the Soviet Union, 1931.

(I cannot think about the Diversity Boondoggle without images of gasbags coming to mind.)

King's post notes the Stalinesque qualities of the sensitivity trainers' efforts on his campus. At Northern Illinois, the food court area of the student center-cum-bus station displays a number of the posters created for the annual "Unity in Diversity" efforts. One year's winner had the slogan "Unity in Diversity: Celebrating the Differences that Make Us One." Hence the title of this post. Presumably 2-1 is non-controversial, as might be 2,250-2249, and a countable set of others.

WHEN MEN WERE MEN AND NOT AFRAID TO NOTE IT. Some advice from Locomotive Catechism about hanging valve gear.

Q. Where should the point of connection between the eccentric rod and the link and the link motion be?

A. As near to the center line of motion of the main rod as this correction for rod angularities will permit.

Q. With what requirement is this often coupled?

A. Excessive eccentric throw.

Q. What is to be done in such a case?

A. Compromise.

Trade-offs everywhere.

I do not intend to post a review of this Catechism, although it should not be difficult for me to post fifty reviews of varying length in the upcoming year, given the reading I do. Do note this dedication.

TO

Theodore N. Ely,

Superintendent of Motive Power, Pennsylvania Railroad

IN APPRECIATION OF HIS

ENGINEERING AND EXECUTIVE ABILITY

AND HIS

COURTESY AND MANLY QUALITIES.

I'd like to see anything that muscular in a contemporary book.

SOCIAL SCLEROSIS. A recent Economist editorial raises the possibility that upward mobility in the United States isn't what it used to be.

Members of the American elite live in an intensely competitive universe. As children, they are ferried from piano lessons to ballet lessons to early-reading classes. As adolescents, they cram in as much after-school coaching as possible. As students, they compete to get into the best graduate schools. As young professionals, they burn the midnight oil for their employers. And, as parents, they agonise about getting their children into the best universities. It is hard for such people to imagine that America is anything but a meritocracy: their lives are a perpetual competition. Yet it is a competition among people very much like themselves—the offspring of a tiny slither of society—rather than among the full range of talents that the country has to offer.

Perhaps it is the Economist's writer who is examining a tiny sliver of society. There is little difference in lifetime earnings of graduates of the less famous universities compared with similarly-capable individuals with more nameworthy degrees. That's not where the meritocracy comes unglued.

America's engines of upward mobility are no longer working as effectively as they once were. The most obvious example lies in the education system. Upward mobility is increasingly determined by education. The income of people with just a high-school diploma was flat in 1975-99, whereas that of people with a bachelor's degree rose substantially, and that of people with advanced degrees rocketed.

The education system is increasingly stratified by social class, and poor children have a double disadvantage. They attend schools with fewer resources than those of their richer contemporaries (school finances are largely determined by local property taxes). And they have to deal with the legacy of what Michael Barone, a conservative commentator, has labelled “soft America”. Soft America is allergic to introducing accountability and measurement in education, particularly if it takes the form of merit pay for successful teachers or rewards for outstanding pupils. Dumbed-down schools are particularly harmful to poor children, who are unlikely to be able to compensate for them at home.

Villainous Company (via Robert at Signifying Nothing) suggests there is another omitted variable.

Nor, when they cite the supposed decline in social mobility since the 1970's, does the Economist once mention the flood of illegal immigration that has dramatically impacted America in the past three decades. One would think this factor might, perhaps, be germane.

I believe it is, but don't have the numbers to hand at the moment. William at Truck and Barter offers additional criticism.

Andrew Sullivan simply asks, "Meritocracy in Trouble?" I will repeat an observation from last year: it is difficult to take seriously any lamentations about social stratification from opinion magazines with a strong propensity to hire graduates from the same twenty or thirty universities.

I'D LIKE A KIFLI WITH STRAWBERRY JAM. A Constrained Vision reports the true origin of the roll now known as a "croissant." It commemorates a military victory. (That ought be enough to rule out any French origins right there.)

Got the Magyar word here.

GET INVOLVED. Kindly be advised that Captain Ed is seeking your cooperation in raising money for earthquake and tsunami relief.

At Captain's Quarters, we're declaring January 12th World Relief Day. I ask that CQ readers donate their take-home pay for January 12th to the tsunami relief effort at World Vision.

Reminders will be posted.

SIXTY YEARS AGO. Sgt. Karlson went to Freux for the next 11-12 days and stayed in a fairly decent house. While there, he received his first boxes from home.

POSITIONAL ARMS RACES. This service is not an advice column (unless one is hanging valve gear), but some observations on preening, primping, and pumping deserve a bit of attention.

There's yet another intellectual exchange on the "social construction" of body images, with Professor Kipnis ringing all the changes on femininity as thesis, feminism as antithesis (or is it the other way around?) and Professor Althouse expressing doubts.

Constrained Vision weighs in, invoking the positional arms race that leads people to overinvest in pumping, primping and preening (once a few people develop an advantage, others have to follow.) But isn't this a logical error.

Consider yet another post by Professor Althouse, this one on the latest disadvantage smart girls face, that of being too smart for prospective mates. (I am not making this up.)

I'm going to quibble with the larger assumption that the desire to marry is the same for men and women and at all levels of intelligence. The preference for marriage results from many factors. It may well be that some or all of these things are true: 1. women have less to gain from marriage once they are able to provide for themselves economically, 2. women with a higher IQ are more likely to be able to support themselves well, 3. more intelligent persons are better able to form preferences by analyzing real world factors and less likely to adopt established conventions, and 4. not marrying is the more rational choice for an intelligent woman. If some or all of these things are at least partially true, a high IQ in women might be a hindrance for the institution of marriage, but not for the woman herself.

It is hazardous to generalize from my own experience, but I have made numerous observations of points 1 and 3 over the past 30 years, and points 2 and 4 appear respectively to follow from those points.

Now, let's walk that proposition back to a Constrained Vision observation.

If all women chose to wear sweatpants, not makeup and heels, and/or if all women held men to a higher standard of beauty, all women would be better off.

(The hoochie look might not be required to gain the attention of others in the first place, but that's a different advice columnist writing.)

Let's consider another corollary proposition. Why let the narcissists at the local gym serve as your exemplars? Mean Mr. Mustard has located some exercise regimens that do not require any capital equipment. Or ditch the gym membership, sell the power lawn equipment, and make your yardwork your workout. Or ... and here may be another way to multitask ... locate a sailing club. Lots of people with disposable income seeking additional help turning winches and doing other strenuous things. For Constrained Vision and other D.C. area readers ... King Street in Alexandria, head to the riverfront. Get a good start and sail on the lifted tack.

RUNNING EXTRA: More thoughts on intellect, perceived or actual, and matching, hypothetical or actual, at Althouse and at Villainous Company.

NOBODY LIKES A SORE LOSER. Captain Ed is not impressed with the efforts of a few Democrats from majority-minority districts to raise questions about voting procedures in Ohio.

What a waste of time and effort. Hand recounts and smearing Ohio's Secretary of State and Chief Justice of their Supreme Court isn't enough for the lunatics of the American Left. They want to hold Congress hostage for two hours in order to rant away at their abject failure to win an election in Ohio. Their excuse? Long lines and a lack of voting machines in predominantly Democratic counties -- where the officials in charge of the election were Democrats! Just as in Florida, the Democrats blame the GOP for what they consider poorly-run elections, when Democrats themselves ran them.

Boxer, Conyers, and Harry Reid will get their debate -- a two-hour marathon of smoke and bile which will change nothing, except their prestige and honor with the American electorate. They continue their Great March To The Fringe, now at double-time.

Brainpost suggests that two can play at that game.

I would hope that the Republicans would bring up the inconsistencies in Wisconsin, Philadelphia and other places and would consider instituting voter ID requirements for all states.

Why interfere with an adversary that is self-destructing? The Ohio margin, even with the disputed ballots, wasn't close enough to be reversed. To be sure, reversals in Ohio and in Wisconsin work out as a Bush victory, but if the guttersnipes are in the gutter, why get in with them?

IN MEMORIAM. Via Sports Economist, news of the passing, in Paris on 31 December, of Nobel Laureate Gerard Debreu.

JUST SUCK IT UP. Jacqueline Passey has to deal with a dusting of snow, which the local paper treats as only slightly less scary than a tsunami.

Let's get a grip. Knowledge Problem has already dealt with her snow, and some stocky middle aged guys avoid heart attacks by firing up a snow thrower only slightly smaller than a rotary snowplow. (Only in the State Line and points north: there was a discussion on Charlie Sykes' show this morning about proper snow thrower etiquette in tight spaces, such as driveways between houses.)

WELCOME DISPLACED CHEESEHEADS. Electric Commentary's request for Reciprocal Switching has been approved.

IT'S STILL SNOWING. The Sunday punch is still somewhere west of the Father of Waters.

Common Sense and Wonder at work.

THIS MORNING'S SOCIAL SECURITY ROUNDUP. Owen at Boots and Sabers is not impressed with the American Association of Retired Persons' advocacy of the status quo when it comes to Social Security.

Will all due respect, screw you, AARP. AARP has done nothing but push lawmakers to ignore Social Security until we have reached crisis level. AARP is one of the primary groups that electrified the “third rail.” Remember that they are an advocacy organization for people who receive Social Security - not the people who pay for it.

Quite. And many of them will have stolen my nephew's future and taken it to their graves.

Too many Americans have frittered away their life’s earnings under the belief that Social Security will be enough, when it was never meant to be “enough.” Furthermore, the trillions of dollars that we’ve spent on Social Security are dollars that were prevented from serving as capital.

It is true that Social Security is based on a promise. We should honor that promise. At the same time, we should make the promise to our children that they won’t be burdened with the promises made to their parents by their grandparents.

Here's the problem:

In 2018, the Fed will start having to put general revenue monies into Social Security. Where do you think that money comes from? You. So, on top of the money paid in payroll taxes for Social Security, you will also be using some of your income taxes, and other taxes, to fund Social Security.

In the except, the term "Fed" probably refers to the national government. If that is a reference to the Federal Reserve monetizing the obligation, there's trouble. Angry Bear (who has been following the debate closely, keep scrolling) is attempting to be sarcastic (I think; I could be wrong):

I'd add that if you really believe the federal government will default on its debt obligations, whether held by the SSTF, the Chinese, or US citizens, then you might also want to consider stocking up on guns and gold.

That is also something to consider if the Federal Reserve monetizes the obligation. But I digress.

Random Jottings (via Libertarian Girl, who has a link-rich post, as well as offering visual evidence that the mood on campus is unlikely to trend leftward in the near future) provides the artwork that summarizes Owen's argument.

Annual income ten shillings, annual expenditures 10/6: result, misery.

Hoystory, who understands national income accounting, and a late-retiring Constrained Vision, who discovers the role model for the AARP, are also worth reading.

Meanwhile, the patronizing continues among the Reactionary Progressives.

The only impression I was left with after Lieberman's appearance is that the Democrats have no fresh faces and nothing memorable or clear to say about Social Security or the president's partial-privatization plan, and are not going to try to defend their own most important accomplishment very fiercely. A false impression, no doubt, but as The Note noted this morning, the Democratic "carping, themeless-pudding approach ... that it brought to most everything in 2004" seems to still be the leading operational style for the opposition. Even the House Democrats' list of "Priorities for the New Year" could only come up with a tepid "we will defend the security and stability of our retirement system" tacked onto the end of a paragraph that led off by reminding people that "45 million Americans are without health insurance." Which is an important issue, to be sure, but not one that's going to be dominating the legislative agenda in the months ahead. And not any kind of memorable or sophisticated way to talk about Social Security, either.

But of course. The overlap between AARP members and people who remember Franklin Roosevelt and hope to use the term "New Deal" as a magic talisman is large. The rest of us have our futures to secure. Let us also recall that the bundling of health insurance with a job is a World War II era fiddle by which employers could retain better workers without making an illegal wage increase.

THE USE OF THE TERM "QUACKERY" IS OPPRESSIVE. University Diaries has been following a proposal from Florida's Senate that Florida State University include a chiropractic college. She has most recently linked to a weblog from Tallahassee, FSUblius, devoted entirely to the issue.

President Wetherell also reminds readers that the university is based on "inclusion," but if a masters degree in chiropractic is not any more of an issue for medicine than, say, religion, then what kind of chiropractic program is FSU proposing to establish? At what point is this pluralism run amok?

Why is chiropractic (or alternative medicine) going to be housed in its own, separate college and why, based on academic merit, would it qualify for a masters or doctorate degree? Why wouldn't FSU follow the model of other universities -- housing alternative medicine within the medical school, or establishing a program in physical therapy that includes chirporactic techniques? No one has addressed the relative merits of the program to its alternatives.

The burden of establishing a new degree, and an entirely new academic and research discipline, is on its advocates, not those who question whether this has any place at a research university.

That weblog points to suggestions that somebody would like to get a bit more external funding, as well as recognition of the realities of state funding. Although the Official Defense of the policy is that it keeps college cheap for state residents, despite evidence that such policies are a subsidy to the upper middle class, faculty are learning that the people who pay the piper call the tune.

Faculty members say they are afraid to question the chiropractic school because they fear retribution from either top administrators or the powerful state lawmakers who support it.

The atmosphere is grim, said Marc Freeman, a distinguished research professor in the biology department. "We feel as if something is being shoved down our throats that we don't want."

A little late for that, isn't it? Did you object to the Diversity Boondoggle second-guessing your searches?

J. Stanley Marshall, a former FSU president who sits on the board of trustees, said he's heard indirectly about scared professors. He urged anyone who feels threatened to come forward.

"The university should never be a place where people are not able to speak out on any topic," Marshall said.

Provided, of course, the speech does not create a demeaning, hostile, or oppressive environment. Or give a member of the humanities faculty cause to suspect one is a Republican.

More practically, what is likely to happen to anyone who suggests chiropractic is New Age quackery?

THE DIVERSITY BOONDOGGLE'S PLAYBOOK. Professor Plum has annotated a McGraw-Hill information site that tackles "The Challenge of Defining a Single 'Multicultural Education'." (I'd use nested scare quotes on that final word, but let us stay focussed.)

Consider the five core principles for "multicultural transformation" spelled out in that challenge.

Every student must have an equal opportunity to achieve to her or his full potential.

Every student must be prepared to competently participate in an increasingly intercultural society.

Teachers must be prepared to effectively facilitate learning for every individual student, no matter how culturally similar or different from her- or himself.

Schools must be active participants in ending oppression of all types, first by ending oppression within their own walls, then by producing socially and critically active and aware students.

Education must become more fully student-centered and inclusive of the voices and experiences of the students.

Educators, activists, and others must take a more active role in reexamining all educational practices and how they affect the learning of all students: testing methods, teaching approaches, evaluation and assessment, school psychology and counseling, educational materials and textbooks, etc.

Catch the tension? There are differences in potentials. Somebody who is weak at abstract analysis has little potential as an economic theorist. Does the first principle mean such an individual deserves extra help, or that such a person ought be directed to a field better able to use that person's comparative advantages. That, however, has less to do with cultural differences than with differences in ability or in individual preferences. (Yes, this is an economics site, and an argument from preference is weak. That is why we speak of optimization under constraints. Perhaps some people ought be dissuaded from acting on their preferences to become economic theorists, or lawyers, or computer engineers, or violinists.)

And what to make of that "student-centered" stuff? "I was never very good at math." Well, suck it up and practice, or find a victim studies program that will have you. On to the final point. Can that reexamination include the deduction that admitting unprepared students and calling it access is a mistake?

I also like this.

Overall school cultures must be closely examined to determine how they might be cycling and supporting oppressive societal conditions.

Administrative hierarchies in schools must be examined to assess whether they produce positive teaching environments for all teachers.

Do "oppressive societal conditions" include setting unprepared students up to fail? What is more oppressive than sending someone out the door barely prepared to ask, "want fries with that?" Does the second point mean a professor has cause of action against an administration that asks faculty to fill out all sorts of forms from the therapeutic bureaucracy, or allows students who have not satisfied the prerequisites to enroll?

CLIMBDOWN. The House Republican leadership has abandoned a planned change in ethics rules.

The proposal would have made it more difficult for lawmakers to discipline a colleague for unethical behavior and would have allowed Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) to keep his post if he is indicted by a Texas grand jury that is looking into his campaign finance practices.

Before the GOP leadership reversed itself, Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.), chairman of the House ethics committee, had denounced the proposed changes to ethics rules. "This package is not bipartisan," Hefley said.

The sudden reversal came amid growing indications of dissension within the GOP. Just before House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert's office announced that the measures were being dropped, the chairman of the House ethics committee issued an unusual statement denouncing the leadership's plan.

Good.

Andrew Sullivan correctly notes,

Bending ethics rules for their own purposes was never going to fly.

Chris at Signifying Nothing also comments.

LET IT SNOW. Two inches on the ground, more to come.

TONIGHT'S SOCIAL SECURITY ROUNDUP. Just One Minute has been busy. Hie thee hence, and explore.

I particularly liked Dead Parrot Society's smackdown of the idea that Social Security is defensible as an insurance program. (It is always heartening to read people who recognize that it is no defense of a poor investment program to note that it is bundled with a poor insurance program. Read on.)

To Angry Bear's credit, he isn't trying to argue that Social Security isn't a great financial deal on its own; he's just arguing that we should put up with it because it resembles "insurance". Insurance works, of course, because people are willing to pay to avoid risk. Let's restrict ourselves to the main Social Security retirement program, aside from widower's benefits and disability benefits, and ask ourselves what risk has Social Security protected us against?

That's particularly pertinent for new entrants to the work force.

Let's take a male child born in 2005. Let's tell that child that if he signs up for Social Security, he will, on average, lose between 15 and 30% of the present value of his payroll taxes. In return, we tell that child that if he ends up being a low wage earner, we'll be so generous and actually give him back all his payroll taxes. Oh yeah, and if he dies early, tough luck, his estate loses it all.

Deinonychus also chews on the insurance argument.

RESTORING THE ANCIENT VERITIES. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni claims a legislative victory in Colorado, where a new law requires the following.

The core curriculum will be more streamlined and rigorous.

Grade inflation will be addressed and grade distributions must be made public.

Education schools will prepare better K-12 teachers.

Students' knowledge and skills will be assessed using meaningful measures.

Disclaimer: the Superintendent is a member of this Council. The devil will be in the details; for example, there are plenty of ways to assess the obvious. Likewise, one mandatory victim studies course in lieu of a plethora of the same is streamlining.

IN PRAISE OF FRAGMENTATION. A passenger train salesman makes a pitch for corporate welfare.

What does a federal transportation program look like? Simple: like our highway and airport programs. The federal government doesn't operate the vehicles or market the service. There's no such company as "Amcar" or "Amflight." Instead, Washington helps the states to fund a state-of-the-art infrastructure that private operators can have access to -- highways for private cars and commercial motor coaches, airports for airliners. Congress needs to stop focusing solely on Amtrak, a government-owned train company operating on obsolete private and public infrastructure, so that it can refocus on getting matching funds out to states and communities that want to build up their intercity railroad tracks and start running fast, frequent, comfortable trains that people will pay to ride.

State of the art infrastructure? In Illinois, we have two seasons, winter and construction, and equipment failures in the Chicago area air traffic control system are legendary. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Impatient, I guess.

Several impatient states -- California, North Carolina and Washington -- couldn't wait for a federal program, so during the go-go '90s they spent some of their taxpayers' money to build track capacity and buy trains on their own. Their programs are successful -- California's 60 daily departures are carrying more than 4 million riders a year, and growth is quickly surpassing the capacity of the state-owned fleet.

But even rich states such as California have hit the fiscal wall, much as Pennsylvania did in 1939, when it ran out of money to finish its new turnpike and had to wait for an emergency grant sought by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Unless Congress develops a federal-state matching-grant plan for railroad tracks like the highway program it started in 1916 and the airport aid program it passed in 1946, passenger trains will continue to starve, highway and airport backups will grow, and Mead's successors at the Transportation Department will continue to scratch their heads about why the federal government can't seem to run a profitable train business.

I thought we had state of the art infrastructure. Why the delays at the airports and on the highways? The trains account for a small fraction of daily miles travelled. Perhaps the simpler solution is to abolish the subsidies?

Passenger trains used to be a profitable business in this country -- many, many years ago, when railroads enjoyed a monopoly over mechanized overland transportation and the federal government was not yet building and subsidizing two competing travel systems. But those days are gone. To expect a passenger train company to earn a profit on today's underfunded, obsolete and downsized track network is an exercise in nostalgia.

Underfunded, obsolete, downsized? Watch the double-stacks rip through DeKalb at 70 mph and tell me it's obsolete. Look at Santa Fe's second main track program and tell me it's underfunded. Look at Union Pacific's third main track in Nebraska and tell me it's downsized. The problem is that passenger trains don't mix well with freight trains. Asking a freight railroad to run one passenger train a day, the usual Amtrak long distance frequency, is akin to asking a steel mill to bake a pizza in a reheat furnace. Asking a freight railroad to accommodate a fleet of passenger trains is even more disruptive. The secret is to provide passenger tracks separate from the freight tracks, which the eastern trunk lines understood years ago.

But to expect fast, frequent, efficient trains to carry masses of travelers who now fly, drive or stay home is the height of reality -- provided the funding is there for a railroad infrastructure as modern as the ones government provides for cars and airplanes. The key is our proven federal system of matching grants. It's amazing how much money a state legislature will appropriate for a project when it knows there's money waiting in Washington to match it. And it's amazing how eager entrepreneurs are to provide quality transportation once they're sure government will keep funding the infrastructure.

What is that quip about the State being the fiction by which each expects to live at the expense of the other? Does anybody remember another Congressional fiddle of the 1990s, not spending all the gasoline and tire tax money intended for the Highway Trust Fund, in order to make the budget deficit look smaller?

Jack O'Toole, who located the article, notes,

As a train enthusiast, I have to admit that opening the door to fundamental change in the current system makes me a little nervous; fact is, an awful lot of folks in DC are bound and determined to let passenger rail die, and they’re almost certain to try to use any major reform effort as a Trojan coach car to achieve that end. Still, what Coston says above makes sense. In the end, rail can only get well if it’s organized like every other mode of transportation in the country, with private companies operating in a subsidized environment (and hiring their share of lobbyists to ensure that the subsidies are sufficient to keep the whole enterprise afloat).

Considering the fate of the legacy air carriers, the intercity buses, and many of the trucking companies, I'm not sure that's the improvement. (I have been doing some reading on Amtrak reform over the Christmas break and will weigh in on that shortly.) Ending Amtrak, which is what the Post article is about, is not equivalent to ending passenger rail, which in several cities operates as a commuter authority independently of Amtrak (consider Indiana's South Shore Line and Metra's former Union Pacific and Rock Island services in Chicago), and which includes land cruise operators such as American Orient Express, and the (sometimes steam-powered!) Grand Canyon Railway, which the National Park Service recommends visitors to the South Rim use.

And speaking of public investment in transportation, Belle Waring's recollections of the Washington (DC) Union Station in the 1970s are spot on.

RESTORING THE ANCIENT VERITIES. At last, women lash out at hip hop's abuses.

The most successful black women's magazine, Essence, is in the middle of a campaign that could have monumental cultural significance.

Essence is taking on the slut images and verbal abuse projected onto black women by hip hop lyrics and videos.

The magazine is the first powerful presence in the black media with the courage to examine the cultural pollution that is too often excused because of the wealth it brings to knuckleheads and amoral executives.

(Hat tip: Shot in the Dark, who notes, "It's high time.")

RESTORING THE ANCIENT VERITIES. The Quote of the Day comes from Oxford don Richard Jenkyns.

People care about their language because it forms part of their identity, and part of the resistance to changes in English is a resistance to change itself. But correct usage is not an elite affectation; it is a badge of competence.

That's the abstract. Here are some of the details.

For instance, universities are now expected to produce mission statements. That ught to be easy: "We teach, study and write, and try to do these things as well as we can." But of course such plain, frank words will not do, and we are driven to swathe simple meaning in the language of bureaucracy. I am unsure why the language of management, Don Watson's main target, is so deplorable, but it is a serious matter, as it clogs the working of schools, hospitals and other public and private businesses.

In the academic world, it may be easier to detect the forces which discourage good, plain English. Modern societies have created large salaried intelligentsias, which are required to keep publishing. Some subject matter is essentially difficult: philosophy, for example, must often be done at a high level of abstraction. But the aim ought always to be to make difficult matters as simple as the subject allows, and the conditions of modern academic life tempt people to do the opposite. History is an almost limitless field, and my impression is that historians usually write well. But the study of popular culture easily tends to statement of the obvious, and its practitioners naturally want to disguise that fact. The English literature industry is so big that in many areas there is not enough material to go around, and here the emptation is to claim that even the most perspicuous authors need the professionals to interpret them. It is like the plumber telling you that it will cost a grand to fix that leaky tap.

As for politics, all governments reasonably stress their successes and palliate their failures, but many people seem to feel that the present government is more widely and systematically dishonest with fact and language than any of its predecessors. In my view, this suspicion is justified.

But wait, there's more. Henry at Crooked Timber links to an article that suggests some of the Modern Language Association (yes!) are considering how to re-connect the humanities to the public.

"I can't say just how long this will take," [outgoing Association president Robert Scholes] said. "But I do believe that this is happening. There is more interest in these things ... grammar, rhetoric, and also logic. ... There needs to be an overall recognition that what you say has to be reasonable. That it has to be answerable to certain disciplinary considerations. Within this discipline, you can only say x if y and z are in fact reasonable suppositions."

Perhaps the literati have been mugged by reality.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, a professor of philosophy at Princeton University, deplored the humanities' inability to give a "publicly intelligible account of what we are doing." If the greater public was uninterested in the humanities, he argued, "it is our fault, not their fault."

Professor Appiah is a member of the Left2Right collective, which advertises itself as such an effort.

A rediscovery of the eternal verities by the loopier precincts of the humanities would suit me just fine. There are plenty of other topics for me to comment on.

CROSSING THE CHEDDAR CURTAIN. Illinois has raised the cash tolls as an incentive for regular commuters to buy the I-Pass prepaid transponder (which also provides the state with some cash flow in the form of $10 deposits on the transponder plus at least $40 of prepaid tolls.) Wisconsin residents, who already have plenty of complaints about Illinoisans (note: the state line area is pretty tolerant of everybody, but get north of Wisconsin 20 or south of U.S. 30 and things change) now must deal with those higher entry and exit taxes.

Paul at Electric Commentary is not pleased.

From this information you may deduce that the state of Illinois is trying to screw Wisconsin residents, and you are correct. Fortunately, If memory serves, screwing people from other states is in this fashion is unconstitutional.

We await the test case. Sean at The American Mind chooses to exploit other taxpayers, recommending the Hiawatha. As contemporary trains go it's fine, but that beverage cart on selected runs is a poor replacement for the bomb bay lounge in the Super Dome. Ah, to blast through Bannockburn at 100 mph, hoisting a libation.

PRIORITIES? Self-Esteem: Downfall of a Great Nation? Karen Burke has a, shall we say contrarian, view of the great time-squeeze.

We have become a society of helpless victims who feel we are only held back by the world’s refusal to see what awesome individuals we are and its failure to pay us proper homage. Then there is the precious self-esteem. This juggernaut, which has parents afraid to rear their children for fear of damaging fragile young psyches, will be the downfall of this society because generation after generation children will become more unruly and less likely to take responsibility for any of their actions. For every convict in the system today there are ten psychotherapists willing to help blame their mothers for their crimes.

Why? Because moms just didn’t do enough to make them feel good about themselves.

These days we are running children to soccer, dance, Tae Kwon Doe, baby gym, and scheduled play dates as if they need to be socialized like dogs. Parents transport their children miles to spend time with the proper influences while the children barely know any of the other children on their street. Moms will spend countless hours being a taxi service to avoid spending five minutes of idle time with their children. The inability to spend five minutes alone with oneself and not go berserk is not a disorder such as ADHD. It is being taught. It is a behavior that is being fostered by families who are so desperate to keep busy that a child feels disoriented and neglected if it actually has to entertain itself with something as simple as a Mr. Potato Head. Parents have erased idle time from any of their youngsters’ schedules because they fear what boredom might lead to, and then, as a result, these same parents suffer periodic meltdowns due to a lack of “me time.” It’s a self-feeding disorder.

When did it become a crime for children to be bored? It is these same children who expect to be entertained every minute of their lives that are falling apart in the real world because, low and behold, their boss isn’t there to entertain them. It is these same children that are turning to drugs because they have been taught that they have to feel good every minute of the day or there is something wrong with them. It is these same children who are completely narcissistic because never until adulthood has anyone said to them, “That was a stupid thing to do.” These are the same children who fail in the workplace because they feel entitled to have everything handed to them on a silver platter. They’ve never taken orders without questioning them, and they don’t know how.

It is this “I’m special,” attitude that fuels one lawsuit after another because people are offended. Narcissistic parenting and guarded self-esteem are turning people into a bunch of whiners, victims, addicts, and hapless misfits. The government is so concerned with protecting children’s precious self-esteem that using red pens to correct children’s school work is frowned upon as too traumatic. A teens’ rights to privacy overshadow parents’ responsibility to parent and to know where their children are, who they’re with, and what they’re doing. A person’s need for “me time” is slowly disintegrating the notion of families spending time together. Mom’s taxi service and the kids’ busy schedule has obliterated the notion that it’s alright to be alone for five minutes and quite possibly even to be bored. In many cases the need for “me time” has caused folks to abandon their children altogether. These children will in turn learn that “me time” is more important that any responsibility they may have to others and think nothing of abandoning their own children in turn.

Her solution: restore the ancient verities.

Children need to be taught to deal with boredom, idle time, criticism, and disappointment. They need to be taught that they will not always like what they have to do in life, but they will have to do it anyway. They need to be taught that they do not know as much as their parents regardless of what it does to their self-esteem. They need to be taught respect for their elders and simple manners. They need to be taught that if they don’t take responsibility for their actions, their actions will take them places they don’t want to go.

(Hat tip: Milt Rosenberg.)

THE PERILS OF MARKET SEGMENTATION. Newmark's Door has identified a potentially useful primer on price-searching behavior. But see if you can spot the error in the counterexample to the Law of Demand.

TWO MAIN TRACKS. Photon Courier quotes one of the great 19th Century railroad work songs to introduce a discussion of the addition of a second main track to the Union Pacific's Sunset Route and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe's Panhandle Route, both to handle additional traffic from Los Angeles and Long Beach. Destination:Freedom notes these are high-stakes projects.

Whoever first spans the continent with a two-lane rail line stands to capture the deluge of Asian DVD players, toasters, apparel and toys that are unloaded at Southern California seaports. The winner also will take the lead in eliminating the bottlenecks that snarl the nation’s tracks.

A pedantic note: these projects are not "double tracking." As the Destination:Freedom article notes,

The contemporary 2,100-mile double-track railroad will allow multiple trains to travel the same route at different speeds and in opposite directions without trains having to stop or use sidings.

We are therefore talking about two main track operation, with centralized traffic control allowing the dispatcher to allow faster trains to overtake slower trains, which is not possible on a double track railroad, which has current-of-traffic operation. On a double track railroad, faster trains get stuck behind slower trains, particularly if train crews must manually throw switches to hole up in sidings to be overtaken. The long-gone caboose provided quarters for the train crew that would throw switches behind the train.

Tracklaying has progressed from the days in which those work songs provided a rhythm for the crews to swing their hammers.

Track workers with nicknames like “Rabbit” and “Tiny” take pride in the powerful machines that do the work once done by armies of laborers. Chief among their equipment is the massive track-laying machine made by Harsco Track Technologies, a unit of Harsco Corp., Camp Hill, Pa. It costs between $2 million and $5 million to buy.

“It’s a thrill, it’s adrenaline,” said Jim Lyons, who operates the machine’s mobile crane amid the Oklahoma sagebrush. The crane hovers over flatcars loaded with 800-pound concrete crossties, grabs 21 at a time and moves them to the front of the machine. There, a conveyor belt lowers the ties to the ground, where track workers push them into position.

Note, however, that the tracklaying record was set by a Central Pacific crew, in early May of 1869, of ten miles of new rails laid down (although not aligned or ballasted) in one long day.

The songs are international. The closing sequence of a video on England's Settle and Carlisle includes a song -- of a very American West flavor -- with a chorus that goes "pick up your hammer and lay another rail."

WHAT BUSINESS COULD TOLERATE THIS REJECT RATE? Congratulations! You're About to Fail.

Free and open to all, the public school system tricks students into believing they've been well educated, then shoves them into higher education, where learning is rationed by cost and capacity. And despite the decades-long effort to beef up academic demands and the tens of billions of dollars spent to open college doors to students who can't pay on their own, the percentage of U.S. college students who eventually earn degrees has been about the same since the 1970s.

Over the same period, the nation's economy, demographics and international competition have become more hostile to the ill-prepared. The sort of manufacturing jobs that can support a family are rapidly being outsourced overseas. The 14 million white-collar jobs that retiring baby boomers are leaving require more college education than the potential candidates for those jobs — who are, increasingly, Latino and African American — have to offer, according to an analysis by economist Anthony Carnevale that has pedagogues chattering.

An economist, eh? Must do some digging and post a followup. For the moment, consider the suggestions on offer in the article.

The education world's best answers are those that focus on high schools, those that focus on what colleges can do, and those that focus on the students themselves.

The emerging consensus in the first category is that just having high schools do a better job of what they do now won't be enough. All students need to be pushed more. They need more support. They need to see college as a realistic option. Exit exams, most of which measure what students should learn in middle school, aren't enough and may be a distraction from preparing students for college and a more-demanding workplace.

On the other hand, perhaps such pushing in middle and high school would equip students for many of those white-collar jobs. Does a degree in English or in area studies or communication really add any value for a middle manager at a grocery store?

With so many eager students queued up outside admissions offices, many colleges don't care much if students drop out or flunk out once their tuition checks have been cashed. A second group of advocates counters this approach by pressing colleges to help students get up to speed, suggesting the schools connect freshmen with mentors, increase financial aid so students won't have to work and could live on campus, and push schools to offer more of the courses in greatest demand so financially strapped students can graduate on time. A third category of problem-solvers pushes for programs such as those in Indiana, Michigan, Georgia and Texas, where the state provides scholarships to high school students who take harder classes. Research confirms the common sense of this: Students who work harder in high school do better afterward.

Some questions: What is wrong with working one's way through college? What is "on time?" (Note the Amtrak-like redefinition of "on time" as finishing within six years implicit in one self-study.) How many recipients of those state scholarships attempt to guilt-trip their professors into higher grades? ("I have to get a B to keep the scholarship.) To what extent does that mentoring and other hand-holding keep slower students around who hold back the pace of classes?

We must grasp that the system that served us well is a failure, producing only two bachelor degrees for every 10 students who start high school. We must acknowledge this failure as our own and recognize it as a threat to the future well-being of our children — even those who think they have a lock on the Ivy League.

Yes. And perhaps the root cause of the failure is the conceit that college is for everybody. (Via Joanne Jacobs. Be sure to read the comments.)

CARNIVAL CALL. Carnival of the Capitalists calls at Management Craft.

Kindly be advised that future consignments to the Carnival of the Capitalists be routed via a new agent, http://www.gongol.com/random/cotc/. The agency at elhide.com is closed.

NOTICE OF REORGANIZATION. J.V.C. Comments is now trading as Quid Nomen Illius?

GAINS FROM TRADE. The North Sails loft that manufactures sails for Laser, Sunfish, Vanguard 15, and several other sailboats is located in Sri Lanka. The manager of North Sails in Sri Lanka reports on the tsunami's effect.

The Island was hit by a Tsunami on Sunday Dec 26th around 9:45 am. The coastal regions of the East, south and south west coasts were hardest hit and were destroyed. These areas are about a 1-6 hour drive from our factory. They have high concentration of population as well as many resort hotels. Unofficially I was told last night that over 30,000 people have died with over a million left homeless. The city of Colombo where 6 million of the country's 19 million live, was not affected much at all. The port was closed temporarily and is now open expecting to clear the backlog in a week or so. The airport remains open as normal. Our factories are located about 20 kilometers inland from Colombo and were not affected.

Our focus for the last few days has been on our employees. Last weekend was a long holiday weekend with many traveling to their coastal villages to visit family. Some visited beaches for the weekend. We opened for business Tuesday and were operating as normal although the atmosphere was very sombre. All of our Management, supervisors are accounted for, but we still are missing 5 factory employees, and have located another who has lost her house and is at a refugee camp. Today Ajantha,our Production Manager,is going to get the one girl we have located and bring her from the camp. Tomorrow we will send out two teams to search for the remaining 5 missing.

Business for North Sails Sri Lanka will continue as normal with perhaps some minor delays due to some shipping backlogs.

Many of you have asked us how you can help. The employees of North Sails Sri Lanka set up a fund and all pledged one day salary from this week to get it established. The fund is to be used to help our employees rebuild houses, buy clothing, water, food, and medicine to assist them getting their lives back to some sense of normalcy. If there is any remaining in the fund it will be used to help others in Sri Lanka.

The North Sails employee effort provides an opportunity to call your attention to World Relief Day, January 12. Captain's Quarters has already posted the Orders of the Day for that Wednesday.

At Captain's Quarters, we're declaring January 12th World Relief Day. I ask that CQ readers donate their take-home pay for January 12th to the tsunami relief effort at World Vision. Obviously, we cannot hope to match the funds raised by governments -- but we can show what a handful of determined private individuals can do to help. If you can't afford to donate all of your take-home pay for that day, please donate what you can.

Updates on this effort will be tracked here as well.

THE REAL MEANING OF SUPER POWER. King at SCSU Scholars links to a collection of Soviet propaganda posters. This one caught the Superintendent's attention.

"Six orders of Stalin to work for transportation., 1932"

Take a close look at that train in the foreground. Definitely American, possibly Lima Super Power, with American coaches behind the tender. I wonder if the artist later disappeared, a nameless number on a list that was later misplaced.

It is true that the Soviets did some crazy things to imitate American Super Power, but never this.

The site offers more railroading outrages for your viewing pleasure.

PLAY THAT OOM-PAH MUSIC. A perusal of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel's 2004 Wisconsin obituaries includes a reference to polka band leader Dick Rodgers, a pioneer in televised dance shows. What ever happened to the Sunday afternoon polka show?

RELYING ON CHEAP FOREIGN LABOR? A Constrained Vision covers efforts by Wichita State University to provide accent-modification for faculty and graduate assistants in math, engineering, and the lab sciences in particular. (Do these efforts include an explanation of Midwestern idioms?)

What were those critics of the academy saying about professors that are overpaid and underworked? You'd think there would be swarms of native-English speakers pursuing those jobs.

FIVE MINUTES DO NOT A GAME MAKE. Vince Lombardi's teams never lost; sometimes time ran out on them. The Chicago Bears, on the other hand, give their fan false hopes:

Chicago is up 7-0 at the moment.

Reminds me of those weak Wisconsin teams of years ago that would score first and then run out of tricks. It's a sixty minute game.

A noted traditionalist, [Packer coach Mike] Sherman didn’t want to become the first Packers coach since Lindy Infante in 1991 to be swept by Green Bay’s ancient enemy.

Also, after spotting the Bears a quick touchdown, the Packers blew apart the hapless Bears with two 86-yard touchdown drives followed by Darren Sharper’s 43-yard interception return for a touchdown.

Next up: a 3:30 pm kickoff on Sunday, with the Vikings, who demonstrated a better understanding of playing for leaster than the Panthers and the Saints, visiting Lambeau.

OVERACHIEVING? That appears to be Wisconsin football coach Barry Alvarez's take on the Outback Bowl, which Georgia won, 24-21.

“Quite frankly, I think we overachieved this season,” UW coach Barry Alvarez said after seeing his team suffer its third consecutive loss to finish 9-3. “I think this is a football team that had a lot of adversity, had key players hurt. . . . Yet we found ways to win.”

You mean the team didn't have as one of its preseason goals "play in January?" And consider that the selection committees had to round out their schedule with five MAC teams. Overachieve?

The sidebar to the story shows records for ineffectiveness by Wisconsin's offense and defense. In addition, numerous seniors will have to be replaced.

The Outback Bowl provided another technical delay when an aerial camera stalled on the playing field, delaying the game for about ten minutes. Is wiring one's stadium to ESPN's specifications really the best use of development money?