THE PERPETUALLY OFFENDED. Former Iowa football coach Hayden Fry had the visitors' locker room painted pink, an act of interior decorating that has irritated numerous visiting coaches. (The idea of just ignoring it and putting your pants on one leg at a time apparently hasn't occurred to people. Well, maybe it occurred to Iowa State.) The locker room has recently been repainted (drunk tank pink?) and some people are getting their ... no, let's not go there ... knickers in a knot over it.

Now comes a visiting professor of law from somewhere in the east who is offended. (Link from Tongue Tied.)

Erin Buzuvis, 29, who moved from Boston to Iowa City to begin teaching at the law school, said she and several friends, colleagues and neighbors have been concerned for months about the message behind the locker rooms. She said the locker room promotes negative stereotypes.

Must be a real fun bunch to drink beers or play cards she hangs with.

Iowa's president, noting that some people have not taken too kindly to Professor Buzuvis taking her gripe public, has trouble sounding like a tough-talking sheriff.

University President David Skorton said Saturday that he is upset at the threats.

"It is deeply offensive and completely unacceptable that a spirited public discussion about the pink locker rooms at Kinnick Stadium has been degraded by threats of violence," Skorton said in a statement.

Skorton said the university "welcomes and open and civilized debate" on the issue.

"However, threats of violence will not be tolerated. For that reason, today I am asking the Office of the General Counsel, the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity, and the Department of Public Safety to review these threats and to take appropriate actions based on their findings," he said.

What, a mandatory locker-room repainting party for mouthy miscreants? What ever happened to "We're going to smoke those jerks out of their sports bars and bring them to justice?" I suppose diplomacy ought be given its chance first.

Buzuvis said she will raise the locker room issue Tuesday when a committee seeks public comment on a report it recently compiled on the university's compliance with NCAA regulations. The NCAA requires that each school investigate every five years to see if it is complying with NCAA rules. The locker room issue was not raised in the report. Gender equity apparently was one item on a list of topics for which the panel has solicited comments.

But this series of quotes defies parody, as does the copy editing.

"I did not wake up yesterday with a plan to discuss pink locker rooms," Buzuvis said Friday. "I don't want any more hate mail. This has got to stop."

Buzuvis has not contacted police over the threats.

"With a pink locker room, you're saying that 'You are a girlie man. You are weak, like a girl,'" Buzuvis said. "That implies that girls are nondominant, therefore, lesser. And that is offensive."

Law professor Jill Gaulding said the issue also is a sore spot among members of the women's hockey team, and she has heard similar complaints from others on campus and around town.

"This is an Iowa City issue," Gaulding said. "There are a lot of people out there who, if they felt safe saying so, would say that this has bugged them for years."

If you didn't have a plan to discuss pink locker rooms, why did you go to the NCAA with a gripe about pink locker rooms? And it really amuses to have these beneficiaries of sensitivity training, who model the proper behavior of saying "I'm offended" at the drop of a pink paintbrush, to suggest there is a climate of oppression out there.

NEVER BETTER. The Milwaukee Brewers set a season attendance record of some 2.2 million fans including some who came on "Free Attendance Day" to watch the Crew beat the Reds. Next up: three games at Pittsburgh.

Milwaukee finishes with a three-game series at Pittsburgh, where the Pirates are wrapping up their 13th straight losing season, the longest current drought in the major leagues.

But Milwaukeeans know something about playing for leaster. It's too soon to anticipate the end of the Crew's string of losing seasons.

WHAT HAPPENED TO TEACHING READING COMPREHENSION? I asked this question on a principles of microeconomics examination Wednesday.

Business owners in smaller communities often object to the construction of new Wal-Marts, claiming that the competition hurts their businesses. Wal-Mart has more recently opened stores in larger communities. There are relatively few protests from small business owners in the larger communities. Explain why not.

A number of students asked me to clarify the question. The phrasing strikes me as straightforward enough. Small business owners in larger communities don't object to Wal-Mart. Why not? I'm pleased that students exercised their right to have the point of a question clarified, and at the same time startled that not objecting -- why not? is too daunting.

A successful answer will demonstrate understanding of Adam Smith's observation, The Division of Labour is Limited by the Extent of the Market. Don at Cafe Hayek has one piece of the puzzle. The missing piece is what higher-valued tasks that labor is freed up to do. In bigger cities, it might be freed up to sell O Scale trains that Wal-Mart has never bothered to stock. In larger cities, there are sufficient trading partners (we'll later think of them as customers) to make operating a store to sell such things profitable. The small business owners in smaller towns are looking for trading partners interested in more mundane goods, and Wal-Mart has figured out how to move a wider variety of mundane goods more cheaply.

DOING MY HOMEWORK. Here is the preparation I made for Wednesday night's testimony at the House Republican Task Force on Motor Fuel Prices. I've arranged the points in the order I made them during the hearing, moving the sources of price increases first to refer to some work the Task Force's research staff had presented as an introduction to the hearings.

1. Why the higher gasoline prices? Three reasons, one temporary and two permanent. The temporary reason first. Domestic production and domestic refining have been disrupted by several hurricanes. As the damage is repaired and the workforces return, those sellers will compete for buyers. However, the transition from summer to winter blends of gasoline, which is subject to safeguards against commingling blends in the same storage tanks, leads to localized clearance sales of the blend going out of season and spot shortages of the blend coming on season. This is a permanent feature of prices under the current rules. The real permanent reason, however, is the economic growth elsewhere, with India and China in particular increasing their fuel use of all kinds, as well as replacing coal and wood with petroleum products.
   
   That demand is likely only to increase. At some world price for crude oil, the temptation to develop resources in Alaska, off the Florida coast, and possibly in the Great Lakes may be sufficiently great that policy makers will conclude we can no longer afford to preserve those areas in their current state.
   
   Note that I haven't mentioned two popular explanations. Some people have blamed environmental regulations that impede the construction of new refineries. That argument is special pleading. U.S. refinery capacity and production have both been increasing steadily since 1982, shortly after the end of the crude oil price controls in place during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations as well as the severe recession early in the Reagan administration. There is a chart available from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy from June 2005 and some commentary by James D. Hamilton, an economist at the University of California, San Diego, at his web journal. Another economist, Steve Verdon, in his web journal, notes some evidence of oil companies using the environmental regulations to thwart their competitors' construction of refineries, which the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights has been following closely. Such behavior doesn't surprise me. It reminds me of the way trucking companies would use the Interstate Commerce Commission to impede competition. “The existing service is adequate. If additional service is required, the existing carriers are ready to provide it. The applicant is incompetent to provide the service.”
   
   Others have pointed to rising concentration in oil refining. Although at the time of Exxon's merger with Mobil, I made a joke to a class about naming the company “Standard Oil Trust of New Jersey” and having done with it, the reality is an oil business that is far from a monopoly. The Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department approved that merger, as well as the BP-Amoco merger and several other mergers, with divestitures of some gasoline stations and tank farms. The top five oil refiners account for 44 percent of refining capacity in 2002 (.pdf). The domestic oil business probably qualifies as a “moderately concentrated” market according to the Justice Department's current merger guidelines. Hotels and motels and public accounting appear to be tighter oligopolies than refining. The Federal Trade Commission has a longer report of testimony by General Counsel William Kovacic before the U.S. House, detailing Commission investigation of anticompetitive behavior by refiners and gasoline distributors.
   



2. General Principles. Resources are scarce and they have competing uses. There aren't enough to satisfy everybody. Economists favor the use of prices to allocate resources because that's the least bad option. A higher price gives buyers an incentive to conserve and sellers an incentive to expand output. A higher price also raises the reward to development and commercialization of substitutes. A price control takes away both of those incentives. Consumers will attempt to buy more of the good than they would at higher prices, and producers will offer less for sale. The result is what economists call “excess demand” at the price, or more succinctly, a shortage. In the case of gasoline, the visible symptom of excess demand is a gas line.
   
   I quote my colleague Tim Schilling of the Chicago Fed.

   Prices are important. They give us information to make decisions—to make choices. And prices can make us uncomfortable. They tell us how the rest of the world values the products and services available to us…what others are willing to offer…and then ask us to evaluate our choices in light of that information. They ask us, "how badly do you want this?" "What are you willing to give up?"

   Governments have considered other methods of rationing goods. In the case of gasoline, years ago some states used an odd-even buying plan in which the last digit of a license plate controlled whether a person could gas up that day. People can simply shift their purchases to the days they can legally buy, but they might buy more at that price than they otherwise would for fear that in two days the supplies will be exhausted or the price will be higher. Or they can steal somebody else's license plates. Another possibility is for the government to issue ration coupons limiting how much gasoline a person can buy at the controlled price. Because an underground economy in ration coupons developed during World War II, modern versions envision allowing people to freely trade their ration coupons. In so doing, the government increases the wealth of people who sell off some of their ration coupons. The total price a buyer of a ration coupon pays for gas, however, will be higher than the competitive market price, as buyers of ration coupons will be competing for some part of the smaller supply of gas being offered at the lower controlled price.



3. Interfuel substitutions. I mentioned in my opening remarks that a higher price for gasoline and other crude oil products is an incentive for inventors to develop substitutes. In this vein some recent research at the Weizmann Institute, to use the heat of the sun to release hydrogen from zinc oxides is promising. In Illinois, our neighbors grow corn that can be used as an input into ethanol for extending or replacing gasoline. The economics of this technology are a bit challenging. An Argonne National Laboratory report (.pdf), finds environmental benefits from using corn as a source of ethanol as well as a positive “net fossil energy” value (less fossil energy used in cooking the ethanol than replaced by the ethanol based fuel.) A longer Argonne report (.pdf) notes improvements in the technology by which the ethanol is obtained from corn.
   
   Some of the claims the industry itself makes do call for further scrutiny. (See the American Coalition for Ethanol's “Net Energy Balance of Ethanol Production" (.pdf).) On the one hand, the document correctly notes that the cost of the fertilizer, pesticides, fertilizer runoff, or tractor fuel will be incurred whether an ear of corn is grown for ethanol or for feed. It errs in suggesting that the ear of corn will be grown in any event. A proper accounting of the environmental costs of a larger corn crop faces a tricky problem identifying how much of that work would not be done but for the demand for an ethanol feedstock. On the other hand, the document comes close to charging the entire cost of military operations in the Persian Gulf to keeping the sea lanes open. Some of those resources might have been deployed to deal with another product of that region, jihadis. Some of those resources might have been deployed even if the region did not produce oil, as a consequence of the United States being on the winning side in World War I, ending the Ottoman Empire's control of the area, and in World War II, where disarming Japan leaves the United States with the responsibility of keeping Japan's sea lanes open. Alternatives to fossil fuels might have their value, but taxpayers ought not be swayed by special pleading, whether from the ethanol coalition or petroleum interests.
   
   I have no special expertise in evaluating the use of home-grown bio-fuels as a way of defunding oil producing countries. That's more properly the purview of specialists in international relations.

My actual testimony addressed the high spots of this research, with some extemporizations to refer to material in the research service's presentation and observations made by people who testified ahead of me.

THE PROBLEM WITH CAPITALISM IS CAPITALISTS. At Sykes Writes, some scathing commentary on war profiteers defense contractors who are defending their intellectual property against ... ten year olds with Exacto knives.

The defense giants do hold trademarks on planes like the F-15, F-16 and the B-17, and they say if a model company uses their planes to build replicas, it should pay royalties.

Perhaps the plane builders got the idea from Union Pacific, where management found time in the middle of their 2004 summer meltdown to go after the manufacturers of model railroad rolling stock for royalties. UP have gone so far as to roll out some new grain hoppers with CMO reporting marks (because the programmers writing the software for car interchange decided not to write code that could handle the proper CSTPM&O.) Was that to keep the Omaha Road from becoming public domain?

PEER RECOGNITION. The editorial board of the Carnival of Education No. 42₍₈₎ thought enough of this post to include it among their Editors' Choices. Thanks! But if you've dropped in here on their recommendation be sure to go to 11-D's original post on kids with disabilities as well.

In other carnival news, Any Letter, despite getting a bit over-committed (don't we know about that here!) is hosting the Carnival of the Capitalists.

THERE ARE PRINCIPLES, AND THEN THERE IS PUBLIC CHOICE. Or perhaps there is pork. Betsy's Page is correct to suggest that "pork" is too cute a term (as is "log-rolling," the term of art I understand to describe the "grease" she identifies as the necessary evil to obtain sufficient votes to get something out of the conference committee and approved by both chambers.) There is, however, discontent all around the 'Net with this sort of business as usual, which public choice theory suggests is rational behavior on the part of legislators motivated to demonstrate their effectiveness to constituents as a way of getting re-elected. The transportation bill that passed the House just before the hurricanes, and the rent-seeking of hurricane zone politicians looking for others to make that part of the world better than it was before is fueling the discontent. Herewith Coyote Blog.

The Republicans are lost. Combine this kind of spending with their Patriot Act and Sarbabes-Oxley driven Big-Borther-Is-Watching intrusiveness, luke-warm committment to free-trade, and bizarre obsession with pornography, and I find nothing at all attractive about the party. Only the economic insanity of the opposition party continues to keep Republicans in power.

Mahablog arrives at the same conclusion, only from a different start line.

Note, if you don't know: Liberalism is not and never was about tax raises, and profligate spending. Rather, it is about effective government that meets the needs of We, the People, and taxes that are adequate to pay for what We, the People, ask it to do.

Well, no. Tax raises (on somebody else) and profligate spending (to log-roll the bills through and to get re-elected) are the quintessence of public choice. That's true even if Harry Hopkins summed up the New Deal as "We shall tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect" and Ronald Reagan later hung that on "liberalism." Liberalism, as structured by the Welfare Economics Paradigm, favors the use of government policies as the preferred method of providing some services that We, The People ask for. Conservatism, which takes more of a transaction costs approach to thinking about policy, suggests that sometimes government is less effective at meeting needs than some other institutional arrangement, including highly distributed technology and emergent networks beyond the ability of a technocrat to arrange.

WHEN IT'S A TIE AT THE RAILROAD CROSSING, YOU LOSE. As part of the New Haven - Boston electrification and acceleration project, Amtrak eliminated by construction of overpasses or underpasses most of the level crossings on the route, apart from a few near New London, Connecticut, where the curves and a stop for most trains limit speeds to 60 mph or less.

Via California Yankee, news that an automobile got in the path of an Acela Express today. The driver and her grandson died; her granddaughter lived.

National Corridors has a suggestion.

People are all too fallible, and Murphy's Law will always apply unless we end the system that permits collisions in the first place. It is time to stop the insane practice of permitting cars and trucks direct access to property where even a low-speed accident is often fatal, and which puts in danger not only railroad passengers and crew, but the health and safety of surrounding communities as well.

There are other risks for policymakers to assess, some of which have more favorable cost-benefit ratios than eliminating level crossings. (That's apparently how Illinois authorities figure. Watch a stack train hit six crossings in 10 blocks of DeKalb while crowding the official 70 mph and marvel -- from a distance.) But level crossings are dangerous on high speed railroads. Today a family, tomorrow a truckload of heating oil?

APPLIED RENT-SEEKING. I'm back from the hearing, which was called by four State Line members of the Republican Task Force on Motor Fuel Prices. My full statement, with hyperlinks, is available on another machine, and I will post it to these pages from that machine sometime tomorrow.

Among the speakers were transportation managers for transit authorities, school districts, and on-demand para-transit agencies exempt from state fuel taxes, as well as the owner of a service station who would appreciate a little help installing additional pumps and tankage for 85% ethanol motor fuel, and the owner of a trucking company who would like some of the tax relief the non-profits get as well as a change in the tolls.

Tradeoffs all. The 85% ethanol motor fuel might be a cheaper fuel, but it requires investments in different kinds of engines, as well as additional tankage, pumps, and pump fittings. (Consider the investments the railroads had to make in new kinds of engine houses and servicing facilities for the diesels that replaced steam; add to that the somewhat higher acquisition price of a first-generation diesel.) The tolls have been raised for trucks. Some of that is congestion pricing. Truck tolls in Illinois depend on weight, as well as time of use. That has generated a lot of bypass behavior, which is why my students have to dodge more 18-wheelers in town.

RAISING MONEY. The Northern Illinois women's basketball team had a fundraiser for Red Cross hurricane relief. Sponsor a player, write a check for so much per free throw made, each player shoots 100 free throws.

Several of the players made over 90 free throws out of their 100, with one player sinking 96 and another 99. I will be watching the free throw performance during the season, kids.

INDULGING THEMSELVES LIKE MEDIEVAL ARCHBISHOPS. University Diaries has been following the adventures of suspended American University president Benjamin Laidner, who apparently has parlayed a rather generous expense account into La universite? C'est moi! Professor Soltan has located a website with a Drudge-like red alert warning of a faculty revolt. Just start at the top of each linked site and keep scrolling.

Blogs for Industry has done a follow-up on my coverage of the tussle between the state legislature and the University of Wisconsin system. His digging reveals that the Madison campus employs 2,064 faculty and 16,287 employees. Money quote:

What's appalling isn't the number of administrators who have backup jobs...it's the number of administrators.

Indeed.

Here at Northern Illinois, the dwindling ranks of professors face ever-larger classes and less logistical support while the administration engages in fundraising for alumni houses and improved weight rooms. The football team itself is reverting to form. But the burdens of the president are being lightened. Yes, despite all the talk of stingy legislatures and tuition sticker shock, the powers that be came up with sufficient money to entice the president of Chadron (Neb.) State to serve as special assistant to the president. This individual spent some time at St. Cloud, perhaps I can find a scouting report there. Here's what the division of labor will be.

[Northern Illinois president John] Peters said he also looks forward to having more time to interact with students and faculty, and more energy to devote to his growing duties as a fundraiser for the university.

For his part, [new hire Tom] Krepel said he stands ready to do whatever is required to move the president's agenda forward, whether that means applying his skills in benchmarking institutional performance and planning, or simply filling in for the president at events or handling important correspondence.

I'll keep this information in mind the next time I hear a colleague crack wise about Vice President Cheney actually running the show in Washington, particularly if it comes from a campus politician.

Apparently part of being indulged like a medieval archbishop is moving a concert to a less suitable concert hall. The opening concert of the Vermeer Quartet was offered tonight in the auditorium of the original campus building, now a small castle for the upper administration. There was apparently a private party with several Important Guests who reserved the small balcony of the auditorium, leaving the rabble to scramble for fewer seats in a smaller hall with poorer acoustics. But the Important Guests didn't have to leave the castle. Hence tonight's posts. I didn't expect to have time to comment on anything today between the concert and the exams coming up and preparing for the public hearing.

IN DEFENSE OF CORRIDORS. Chris at Signifying Nothing has more thoughts about rail service in emerging corridors such as Texas.

Amtrak probably hasn’t helped its case in “flyover country”—particularly with Republican politicians—by only operating its flagship Acela Express service in the Northeast Corridor. If other parts of the rail system had been upgraded to a similarly high standard (notwithstanding the problems Acela has had), the political case for continued Amtrak subsidies would probably be much better, even if the economic case for building high-speed rail in other areas is weak-to-nonexistent—the existence of Southwest Airlines, for example, makes a Houston–Dallas rail link a sure money-loser, even though tens of thousands of people make that trip daily.

There is, in fact, a funny public choice problem in that many of the "red" states are sparsely populated, with one long-distance train often available at inconvenient hours and subject to unreliable timekeeping. And I could raise questions about the market test for the airline or for the interstates, given the use of tax moneys to provide (inadequate) airport capacity and (perpetually under repair -- sorry, I'm still dwelling on the ever-under-construction Kingery and Borman Express[sic]ways) pavement. But it's the cost of providing the high speed service that I wish to address. Given a Hiawatha capable of spinning seven foot drivers at 120 mph on jointed rail protected by semaphore signals, or an E-7 diesel with 22:57 gearing and a top speed of 117 mph on level track, perhaps it's the imposition of (in the Superintendent's view excessively strict) safety standards mandating welded rail, centralized traffic control, and cab signalling with automatic train control as well as some romance with electrification that precludes the creation of high-speed rail in other areas. Perhaps the government ought to go away? Is there a business opportunity in the construction of new transportation corridors that government provision of the highways is crowding out? What I'm envisioning is a toll highway for trucks only, with railroad tracks suitable for fast intermodals and faster passenger trains in the median strip. Or perhaps not. If such a thing were profitable, wouldn't somebody be attempting to promote it?

In other corridor news, more renderings of the upgrade to Milwaukee's downtown passenger train station are now available, and a local paid aesthete likes what she sees.

HELP IS CHEAPER, BUT IT STILL HAS OPPORTUNITY COSTS. Laura at 11-D has organized a session of Blogging for Kids with Disabilities. The first person to join up appears to have been The Useless Tree, who notes the Fundamental Economic Problem manifesting itself.

In an abstract sense, everyone agrees with this: we should provide children with the best opportunities to develop to their full potential. We should hold them in awe. That's why Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and reauthorized it. No one argues against providing special education; indeed, it is the law of the land, all the way from the Supreme Court down. The problem comes when each individual parent sits down with each specific school district and tries to determine what is best, and what is possible, for each particular child who need special education. That's when the money problem starts.

First, a clarification of the first part of my title. We've come a long way from isolating kids with some kinds of disabilities in special schools (for the deaf, for the blind) or shipping them off to vocational rehabilitation where they might be able to earn part of their keep packaging children's toys all day or performing similar repetitive and non-challenging tasks. And kids with treatable conditions are less likely to be shipped off to reform school as "incorrigible." Medicines and calculators and spell-checking programs and tutoring gadgets that were not available at any price twenty or thirty years ago spare people the labor of tasks they might find challenging. (And would anybody begrudge people their glasses and their hearing aids? By the same token, would anybody object to 20/20 uncorrected for fighter pilots or the ability to wield a blue-pencil for an editor or a dispatcher who can juggle multiple trains and radio calls at the same time?)

But although those things are cheaper, they still use resources. Back to the Fundamental Economic Problem.

It's about the money. And what is truly unfortunate is the way that a competition is set up between "special education" (SPED) and "regular education" expenditures. SPED funds come out of the same pot of money as regular ed. If an expensive case, like Aidan (he needs lots of therapies and a one-on-one assistant), comes along, either the district has to get more money from the town or the state, or it must take the money from regular ed. programs. While I was on the School Committee, SPED spending inexorably rose (lots of kids with various levels of need) and we had to press for increases in local property taxes, because the state and the Feds would not respond.

In school districts all around the country, SPED spending is increasing and it is taking funds away from regular ed, creating all sorts of bad feelings and underfunded programs all around.

These problems are likely to remain, whether there is more money from Washington or not. Resources have opportunity costs. Teachers vary in their capability to work with different kinds of kids. (I have not yet been driven to reminding the university that I was under the impression at hiring that it was an institution of higher learning, but there are some trying days ...) Accommodations lead to resentment (Why do I get a time out for speaking out of turn but that kid with Tourette's doesn't?) And, resources or not, the existence of accommodations carries with it a moral hazard problem. I submit that the bad feelings would remain even if the opportunity costs were less onerous. Go here and keep scrolling. (There's also the problem that federalizing a policy includes codifying the response to it. Some parents, and some school districts, might end up operating under more constraints as a consequence.)

A THOUGHT FOR THE DAY. Arnold at Econ Log:

In my view, economists have to be relatively favorable toward immigration, just as we have to be relatively favorable to free trade in general.

Provided the incentives are conducive to allocative efficiency? Discuss.

FINDING THOSE TEACHABLE MOMENTS. Betsy's Page and Joanne Jacobs both link to a lament by Douglas Kern on the state of teaching in the engineering colleges. At both sites, the engineers have weighed in strongly suggesting that engineers might be born tinkerers, and the consequences of getting the Wrong Answer are sufficiently dire that the kinds of things teachers and professors might do to protect the fragile self-esteems of late adolescents (right -- name me a cohort more sure of itself than that cohort) would be somewhere between malpractice and manslaughter. Dilettantes need not apply.

All the same, some of the comments Mr Kern makes about the methods of teaching challenging things are spot on. If people are having trouble working a difficult problem (that might be "Sand falls onto a conical pile ...") simply working that problem, or a similar problem, or a variation on the problem, without laying out the concept first doesn't quite do the job. One must first get the apprentices grasping the proper Big Idea before expecting that they will be able to apply it.

SOMETHING TO REFLECT ON. Michael Barone:

Polls show that most Americans think the economy is in dreadful shape, even though almost all the numbers are good: Inflation and unemployment are low, and growth is robust despite the exogenous shocks of Sept. 11, Enron and Katrina. After a generation of almost constant low-inflation economic growth, perhaps we Americans are only satisfied when we have bubble growth, as in the late 1990s, and are unimpressed when the American economy proves once again to be amazingly resilient. This is all the more astonishing when you consider that we are going through a time of increased competition and change, as China and India, with 37 percent of the world's population, are transforming their economies from Third World to First World. Such a large proportion of mankind moving rapidly upward: This has never happened before and will never happen again.

Couple this with the facts that Japan seems to be growing again, after 15 years of deflation, that East Asia and Eastern Europe continue to grow robustly, and that major Latin countries like Mexico and Brazil are growing as well, and the economic picture around the world looks pretty good, despite sclerotic non-growth in western Europe and continued poverty in Africa.

But even if things are going well, isn't America hated around the world? By the elites and chattering classes of many countries, yes, and by much of the American elite and chattering class as well. But we are not competing in a popularity contest. In a unipolar world, the single superpower will always arouse envy and dislike. The relevant question is if we can live safely in the world; the French may dislike us, but we can live comfortably with France. The recent Pew Trust polls showing diminishing support for Islamist terrorism in Muslim countries indicate things are moving in the right direction. The increasing interweaving of China into the international economy suggests China may not be a military threat. A world spinning out of control? No, it is more like a world moving, with some backward steps, in the direction we want.

The increasing prosperity for much of the world is something to hail, despite the effects that growth is having on oil prices. I've been asked to testify at a legislative hearing on gasoline prices later this week. More details later. But one point I am going to make is that economic growth in other countries brings additional bids for oil supplies. But if you've ever seen the consequences of obtaining that power from coal or wood, as I have, you'll not likely begrudge the people who have to breathe that air every day welcoming cleaner-burning fuels. I'll leave the geopolitics to others.

I'VE ALREADY SET THE EXAM. But this Catallarchy post on price gouging has all kinds of potential for exam and problem set questions.

The run on gas, gas cans, and generators is one of the few outstanding reminders that yes a major storm just happened nearby (relatively speaking). The only difference is that now the people desperate for gas cans, and generators seem to be by-and-large people who really need them. All day I had people asking me if anyone had returned gas cans or generators - I work the returns desk at Home Depot. They were waiting for the people that didn’t need these items to return them so they could buy them the minute they came in the door.

In fact I got multiple generators returned today, and one 15-gallon fuel tank - all of which were completely unused and unopened. They were all returned by people who overreacted - just a little - to the possibility of Austin catching the edge of a hurricane. Meanwhile the people who genuinely need gas cans and generators, because there is neither open gas stations nor power where they are going to, are combing every retail store in Austin and beyond for them.

Possible prelim question: Suppose the probability of a hurricane making landfall in your neighborhood is 0.50. If it does make landfall, a portable generator will be worth $V to you. If it does not, you have paid $P for a useless asset. What premium above P will allocate the generators efficiently? I haven't framed this question very well, but it's a few months until prelims.

Possible principles question: Under what circumstances is it allocatively efficient for the buyers of generators to return them unused to the store for the full refund rather than to sell them for a higher price directly to people in the affected areas?

Possible policy class question: A person buys a generator from Home Depot in anticipation of a hurricane. The hurricane doesn't happen. The person returns the generator to Home Depot for a full refund. Evaluate the pros and cons of a law prohibiting that person from selling that generator to people who were affected by the hurricane at a price higher than the Home Depot price.

Returning to the post, this observation might help structure the risk-premium question.

And in other news the attorney general of Texas has an 800 number you can call to report incidents of price-gouging, and they've promised to fully investigate any complaints made. Which means that big box retailers are going to be much better off if they don't raise prises to meet the demand for certain items when bad weather threatens. Hardware stores don't really lose anything if they sell out of gas cans, and nobody is going to be particularly upset with the store because other people bought up the items they needed.

PRINCIPAL - AGENT PROBLEMS GALORE. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports on the friction between the University of Wisconsin system and the state government. The University has the difficulty of competing for the highest quality talent, where salaries are determined in a world market, in a state whose comparative advantages are in relatively low value-added activities. On the other hand, the University has been artless in its administration's expense-preference behavior and its willingness to take sides in the culture wars.

I've been reading up on the pros and cons of privatizing the state-located universities. Perhaps a longer column on this once the dust settles from exams.

PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION, PARLIAMENTS, PUT PRECISELY. Last week's post on the joys of coalition-forming in parliamentary systems received some useful corrections from Fruits and Votes. Head on over there and keep scrolling. There's more on the differing methods of selecting parliaments than I can summarize in a short paragraph, as well as observations on other national elections going on around the world. (It occurs to me, keeping track of the outcomes of national elections elsewhere might -- might -- be a productive way of getting too consumed with the perpetual campaign the U.S. election cycle has become. Younger readers would find The Making of the President -- 1960 instructive -- and look how cheap the paperbacks are. There was a time when the announcements would come early in the presidential election year, just ahead of the New Hampshire primary, the national campaigns for the nominees would officially begin on Labor Day, and with the World Series ending almost immediately after Labor Day, the serious campaigning would begin after the final out. I'm not inventing this history. Read it.)

NO REROUTING OLD MAN RIVER. Rita has moved north and east more expeditiously than originally anticipated. I'm not sure whether this afternoon's rain qualifies as a rain band from that tropical storm, or simply tropical moisture sucked up by the low over Lake Superior being wrung out by the polar air north of that. On the radar it sure looks like circulation around Rita, or ex-Rita.

I'm quite happy to put away my fears of the Mississippi cutting a new course to the sea, but long term my money is still on Old Man River rather than the Army Corps.

WE SOLICIT YOUR ATTENTION. (Repeating an appeal from earlier in the month.) The Red Cross appreciates the money you've sent. They also note that more money would help, and with a second large hurricane affecting the Gulf Coast (still no news from New Iberia, where Tabasco sauce comes from) they'd certainly appreciate what you can send.

Technorati tags: flood aid, Hurricane Katrina.

PROFESSIONALS STUDY LOGISTICS. At the swap meet, I ate lunch with a trader whose military buddies had extensive experience with disaster management. He was impressed with the way something like 2 1/2 million people evacuated south Texas and western Louisiana. We were hard pressed to come up with any way to prepare for such a situation better than the authorities did, especially with half again as many people evacuating as were originally anticipated. (Oh, and the Superintendent is still waiting for those individuals who made invidious comparisons of the troubles evacuating New Orleans -- where the actual results outperformed a drill -- with the Chinese evacuating 25 percent of the population of Shanghai -- to commend the local, state, and U.S. authorities for evacuating nearly the equivalent of Shanghai despite some troubles managing the use of the roads and the absence of any passenger rail capacity. You know who you are.)

Blogs for Industry has been thinking about the effectiveness of reversing the inbound lanes on the expressways, noting that the inbound lanes might be of some value for bringing fuel or breakdown crews toward the cities being cleared. He also recommends some history from Austin Bay. (And although the Germans might have pioneered counterflow, using their Autobahnen to shift resources from front to front, the picture that sticks in my mind is the U.S. Army's adaptation of the practice, using four lanes eastbound, with long columns of prisoners marching west in the medians.) What amuses, though, is the news of the well to do evacuating all their cars (Dad drives one, Mom the other, each of the kids with a driving license ...) as well as everything that can be towed. Tradeoffs. On the one hand, fewer damage claims for destroyed vehicles and adult toys. On the other hand, more congestion and a greater likelihood of people getting caught by the storm.)

DEALING WITH HIGHWAY HYPNOSIS. Brief road trip report. There was an O Scale swap meet in Indianapolis. I was able to find some detail parts for the Andreyev at the traders who cater to scratchbuilders, as well as running gear for some of the passenger cars.

To avoid the weekend congestion in Chicago (For the past 30 years I have not been able to use the stretch of 80-90-94 between Michigan City and Harvey without encountering a work zone somewhere on that stretch) I returned from Indianapolis by way of Champaign and Bloomington to Rochelle. Interstate 74 offers a bit more scenic exit from Indiana than does 65, with some up-and-down into the Wabash and Vermilion valleys as well as tributaries. One local chain of eateries caught my eye. At a number of interchanges the food listings included something called Monical's Pizza, a flatlander enterprise (Arcola, Tuscola, Pepsi-Cola) with outlets in Indiana (near Indiana Beach -- is this pizza any good?) as well as north of the Cheddar Curtain (Arbor Vitae?? That's near Hurley. I smell a mob connection.)

But I must confess that at the first few observations of this sign, I was misreading it as Monica's ... and my mind was reeling. If you're familiar with Slavic vulgarisms you'll grasp what the cruise control allows the mind to do. But when that trailing "l" registered that didn't help, as a sponsor of the women's basketball tournament kept coming to mind.

THE SEVEN WONDERS OF CHICAGO. The voters have spoken. The L makes the cut, as does the lakefront. There are treasures in Hyde Park.

HUSKIES SOFTEN UP WOLVERINES, BADGERS EAT THEM. Wisconsin 23, Michigan 20. The link to the news article reports that this Badger win ended a string of 23 consecutive Big Ten opening wins by the team with the least imaginative pep band in the universe. So that means the last time Michigan started the Big Ten 0-1 was 1981, when they went into Camp Randall as the preseason No. 1, and the Badgers won. I found out about that win while waiting for the Wildcat at Cedar Point. I found out about today's win on the 10 pm news.

It has been a while since Wisconsin beat Michigan in football. There were back to back wins in Madison in 1993, the first Rose Bowl season, and in 1994, when Wisconsin beat Duke in one of the corporate New Year's Day games. It took a few tiebreaks for Wisconsin to overcome losses to Michigan to get to the Rose Bowl after the 1998 and 1999 seasons.

The Huskies? Didn't fare so well in Akron.

ON THE READY TRACK. The locomotives being built have to have cars to pull. Tonight's modelblogging features a former Long Island combination car (which may have been intended as a control trailer for the electrified lines) in the form it served the Boston and Maine. Off screen to the right are two coaches off the Long Island, and I have several more coach kits.


The Boston and Maine bought a number of surplus day coaches from other eastern railroads late in the Depression with the hope of retiring some even older wooden coaches in commuter service. The wooden coaches had not yet been scrapped when the U.S. began mobilizing for World War II. These coaches ensured that B&M passengers could generally find a seat, even on days the Boston and Portsmouth Navy Yard personnel had liberty.

It is also these red cars that gave B&M management the idea to repaint their formerly green coaches red, a serendipitous match with the red and gold diesels.

CORRIDORS: NOT JUST FOR THE NORTHEAST ANY MORE. A late-running Empire Builder makes up time as a late-running Hiawatha gets under way from Sturtevant, Wisconsin.



The picture motivates some thoughts about whether or not Amtrak is a pork-barrel project. The context is a Shape of Days post offering a Texan perspective on Amtrak's usefulness.

I live in Dallas. If I wanted to go to San Antonio, I could get in my car and drive. It’s about a six-hour trip, depending on weather and other factors. Or I could go to the airport and buy a ticket on Southwest Airlines. Flights depart from Dallas to San Antonio every hour during the day and more frequently during rush hour. The flight takes an hour and the ticket costs $100 if I buy it at the gate.

Or I could take the train. There’s one train from Dallas to San Antonio per day; it departs at 1:40 p.m. from Union Station downtown. The price is right, at a mere $26.

But the trip takes more than ten hours.

The train departs Dallas at 1:40 p.m. and arrives in San Antonio at 11:45 p.m. with stops in Fort Worth, Cleburne, McGregor, Temple, Taylor, Austin and San Marcos. I dare you to find McGregor, Texas, on a map. I dare you.^(*)

And if you want to go from Dallas to Houston … tough. It’s apparently impossible.

But are the difficulties of finding a train in Texas evidence of an Amtrak failure, or evidence of a failure elsewhere in transportation policy? Shape of Days argues the former.

Point is, if you live in Boston and want to go to the District, rail travel is a viable option. But if you live anywhere else, forget it. It’s a total non-starter.

I think the Hiawatha passengers would disagree. Mitchell Field to the north suburbs of Chicago in less than an hour is pretty good. One can sometimes spend an hour getting from the north suburbs to the state line on the Tollway. Chicago to Springfield or Kalamazoo or Ann Arbor is pleasant enough. Did I mention California? We'd get an omnibus post out of it.

What about Texas? New Orleans - Houston - San Antonio and Dallas - Fort Worth - Bryan - Houston - Galveston have potential as corridors, as does Dallas - Austin - San Antonio. The distances are not that much greater than Vienna - Paris or Bern - Hamburg. Some of the intermediate cities are larger than their European counterparts, and the topography is suitable for fast running. And at one time (September of 1954 to be the Official Guide I consulted) there was a comprehensive passenger train service, with both the Texas and Pacific and the Cotton Belt offering a day train and a night train New Orleans - Houston - San Antonio and the Burlington - Rock Island and the Santa Fe offering a day train and a night train Dallas - Houston. The Texas and Pacific had several trains on the Dallas - Fort Worth - San Antonio line. None of these were set up as corridors in the modern fashion. But perhaps the problem was in committing resources to the interstate highways. Or perhaps the Interstate Commerce Commission encouraging the railroads to offer competing service on the same schedules, rather than complementary service throughout the day. And, good though those interstates might be, they're under a bit of stress with the evacuation of Galveston and Houston. Texas Rainmaker is live-blogging his experiences in the traffic jam. Government failure, or providing the wrong incentives to travelers? (And that's leaving aside the Texas Highway Patrol's decision to block some of the back roads and divert drivers to the interstates. On the one hand a stranded motorist on a back road might be overtaken by the hurricane, on the other a clogged interstate might become a deathtrap if this storm speeds up.)

Perhaps some passenger trains would have helped in this emergency. The objective conditions for a corridor service under normal circumstances might also be present, Amtrak or no.

^(*)McGregor is the station stop for Waco. The Cotton Belt crosses the Santa Fe there. The Amtrak route leaves the Santa Fe for the Katy at Temple. Bonus for correctly identifying the current operating companies.

SOMETHING TO WATCH. The latest forecasts of Rita's overland path have it parking for much of Saturday through Tuesday over the Arklatex. Much of that rain (up to 30 inches in some models!!?!) will flow into rivers captured by the Atchafalaya, rather than the Mississippi. There are some speculations about the significance of that here.

CARNIVAL CALL. Carnival of Education No. 41₍₈₎ returns to the Education Wonks, who continue to go above and beyond the call of duty hosting the carnival and keeping track of its previous calls.

THIS DEFIES PARODY. University of Wisconsin student affairs specialist Paul Barrows, whose lack of life management skills when his fishing off the company pier didn't turn out so well brought to light Wisconsin's backup jobs boondoggle, has now sued the University.

Embattled University of Wisconsin-Madison administrator Paul Barrows filed a civil lawsuit Tuesday against the university's chancellor, John Wiley, and former dean of students Luoluo Hong.

Barrows, whose paid leaves and backup appointments helped prompt reform of UW System personnel policies this summer, claims in the suit that Hong interfered with his contract by giving Wiley false, secondhand claims of sexual harassment.

Wiley violated his civil rights, Barrows says in the complaint, when he instructed Barrows to resign from his vice chancellor's post and take leaves that were paid for with accrued vacation and sick time, without granting him due process.

Apparently Mr Barrows's lawyer-selection skills are no better than his life-management skills. Earlier reports of the case have a medical recommendation for a leave of absence that the doctor could not release.

What particularly amuses is the reason it's "former dean of students Luolo Hong."

Hong announced her resignation in June, citing Wisconsin's refusal to grant domestic partner benefits to university employees as a major reason. A university spokesman did not return a call seeking comment from Hong and Wiley.

I can't make up stuff like this. Great universities reduced to playgrounds for therapy and identity politics. Believe it.

SQUEEZING THAT VIRTUAL SPRECHER. Brewers 7, Cubs 6. Two out when winning run scored (none of that walk-off barbarism here!) The Crew squeezed in Run 6 in the 8th. Their infield let the bullpen down in the Cub 9th, allowing two runs to tie. It's another school night, so the Black Bavarian stays in the cooler until the weekend.

THEORIES OF THE LEISURE CLASS. More reaction to the non-trend trend of a few Yale women contemplating something other than the corporate treadmill. Anchoress, Betsy's Page, and Number 2 Pencil focus on the meta-story, which is the reaction of Ivy academicians of a certain age to the fact that if people are offered more choices, they're likely to take them.

The Hamptons society page has discovered another display of conspicuous consumption, one that the anecdote trend-spotters at the Times have not yet anointed. The display in question is an indoor ice rink for your home. I am not making this up. Check it out.

GETTING STARTED IN ECONOMICS. The Wall Street Journal's Wednesday Free Feature (hie thee hence before it goes behind the fence) features a conversation between Company Mail sources Russell Roberts of Cafe Hayek and William J. Polley of Western Illinois. I like what I'm reading. Start at the end. This is WJP:

If economists do end up making movies and video games, I hope they include things like the development of institutions and the emergence of social order hand-in-hand with market order. Then, speaking out of my own rational self-interest as an economist, I hope that these ideas are clearly identified as economics somehow. I want the reaction of the consumer of these materials to be, "That's economics? It's nothing like the economics I learned in college." Then we can say, "You bet it's economics. Want to learn more?"

Do I hear an echo? Sounds like the Second Principle of Social Organization.

There's this, from RR:

Another airplane passenger story. I'm talking to the woman next to me and she asks me what I do. When I tell her I'm an economist, she says, "Too bad my husband isn't with me today, he'd love to talk to you." "Why's that?" I ask. "He's fascinated by the stock market," she replies. I had to tell her that I knew nothing about the stock market other than the virtues of indexed mutual funds. A useful thing to know -- one of the most useful insights of economics into personal finance -- but it would have made for a short conversation with her husband.

Story of my life. I get that question, or the one about interest rates, all the time. My response is usually "what's wrong with this picture?" (Answer: I wouldn't be in this sardine can on a discount ticket if I knew.) If the passenger asks, "what do you do?" I say "Economics is about sex, death, and why the lines are longest at the roller coaster." That's an excellent gambit for separating the interesting (to me) seatmates from the boring ones.

There's also this evidence of great minds thinking alike. RR:

Whenever I teach a seminar on basic economics, I always survey the audience: What proportion of the American labor force earns the minimum wage or less and what is the standard of living of the average American today relative to 100 years ago?

I do this also, on the first day of the introductory class. The results for fall 2002 are here. Today seems like a good day to comment on this year's results, as the Free Feature has the answers. As was the case in 2002, I told the students their answers would not affect their grade.

My first question: What proportion of the work force earns minimum wage? Of the 75 responses, the mean was 44.0 percent, the (divided by n-1) standard deviation was 18.7, the mode 35, the lowest estimate 12 percent, and the highest estimate 75 percent.

The reality: less than three percent of the work force earns minimum wage. (There is a teachable moment here. It's called "Do Not Generalize From Your Own Experience." Likely the bulk of the class has recently worked at a minimum wage job.)

Next: Are real living standards in the U.S. better or worse today than they were 100 years ago? 48 students offered better, 22 offered worse, 6 offered other choices.

The reality: Cornucopia.

I pose a third question as well: In a financial transaction, who benefits, the seller or the buyer? 28 respondents offered the seller, 9 the buyer, and 32 showed the initiative to answer both, and 7 offered a variant on "It depends." That's an encouraging note on which to begin the term. With the first hour exam approaching, the students are ready for some encouragement.

EMERGENCY ENGINEERING POSSESSION. Let's see if the server is willing to load last night's posts.

EDITORIALIZING, OR REPORTING THE FACTS? Tax Breaks for Katrina May Aid Rich More. Why?

The Congressional Research Service report said some elements of the tax assistance would do more for wealthier taxpayers because many lower income individuals and families pay little tax. Lower income survivors are also less likely to have retirement accounts like 401(k)s and IRAs.

Couldn't one write the headline Katrina Tax Relief Favors Poor?

However, the same tax measure includes assistance specifically for lower-income families that would help the working poor hang onto their income tax credits, which can be disrupted by unemployment or family separation.

Would it be more constructive to ask about how close to restoring people to 100% of their material position before the storm the relief gets, and if the relief more fully restores richer or poorer people?

IT'S A SCHOOL NIGHT, SO ONLY A VIRTUAL SPRECHER. Brewers 5, Cubs 3.

IT WASN'T RUNNING THE YELLOWS. This speculation proved to be in error. A review of dispatching records reveals that the dispatcher lined a diverging route for the commuter train an hour before it entered the section. The engineer claims to have seen a high green, although all parties are properly telling the press very little. Earlier today, investigators attempted to replicate the conditions at the time of the derailment.

DOES MACY TELL GIMBEL? No, in the Midwest, Gimbel becomes Macy. The genealogy is a bit complicated, but here is the quote that made Chicago furious.

On Tuesday, Federated Department Stores Inc., said it is planning to change to Macy's the name of all 62 Marshall Field's, including the one on State Street that dates back to 1892.

Here is a bit of history.

It also was something that was uniquely Chicago. Despite being the template for stores such as Filene's in Boston and Gimbel's in New York, Marshall Field's belonged to just one place.

And here's the Rest of the Story. Marshall Field operated a branch store in Milwaukee. A few years ago, Marshall Field bought the assets of Gimbel's (which had by then hived off the Schuster's stores it had bought) and renamed a few as Marshall Field. Now Marshall Field is to become Macy's. Thus, Macy's now tells Gimbel's.

SPEAKING OF THOSE DESKTOP COMPUTERS. At Market Power, some nostalgia for those good old days when your $8500 would buy you a Tandy 5000 with two meg of RAM and a 20 MHz Intel 386 Inside! That's $8500 in 1989 dollars.

IS THAT ALL THERE IS? Mahablog comments on a New York Times article discovering that female students in the Ivies aren't as interested in staying attached to the work force. Key news discovery:

Much attention has been focused on career women who leave the work force to rear children. What seems to be changing is that while many women in college two or three decades ago expected to have full-time careers, their daughters, while still in college, say they have already decided to suspend or end their careers when they have children.

"At the height of the women's movement and shortly thereafter, women were much more firm in their expectation that they could somehow combine full-time work with child rearing," said Cynthia E. Russett, a professor of American history who has taught at Yale since 1967. "The women today are, in effect, turning realistic."

That may mean your boss 20 years from now will be wearing a Northern Illinois class ring. And she's not going to be one of the Ashleys with delusions of snaring the next Donald Trump that populates the article. There's a lot more to higher education and labor force participation than what the society reporter at the Westchester, er, New York Times discovers. On the other hand, that resources are scarce and have competing uses, which prompts the title of this post.

"It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?" said Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, who served as dean for coeducation in the late 1970's and early 1980's.

It is a complicated issue and one that most schools have not addressed. The women they are counting on to lead society are likely to marry men who will make enough money to give them a real choice about whether to be full-time mothers, unlike those women who must work out of economic necessity.

Was the inventor of the desktop computer disappointed that people were buying them to play games rather than work engineering problems? Perhaps. Are we better off that desktop computers are available for game playing as well as for working engineering problems -- and with algorithms more powerful than Quick Basic? Now, on to that "economic necessity." How many times must I run a review session on the Say Aggregation Principle? More labor force participation by women, more two-income households, more prices that reflect the ability of two incomes to bid for those goods. That actions have unintended consequences ought not come as a surprise. And what's this about "lead society?" You mean that lady over there, yes, the one with the Northern Illinois class ring, ought not be viewed as a possible leader? (On the other hand, does an emergent order have to have leaders? Questions, questions.)

University officials said that success meant different things to different people and that universities were trying to broaden students' minds, not simply prepare them for jobs.

Quite. A working jive-detector is useful, whether it's being used in the employ of others, or in minding kids, or in shooting the breeze at the model railroad club.

"What does concern me," said Peter Salovey, the dean of Yale College, "is that so few students seem to be able to think outside the box; so few students seem to be able to imagine a life for themselves that isn't constructed along traditional gender roles."

Perhaps because the box evolved to reduce some transaction costs. Sometimes the proper response to these "think outside the box" cliches is to say, "respect the box." Turmoil for its own sake is not equivalent to improving one's life. That's something that Mahablog appears to be recognizing.

This, of course, rather ignores the fact that sixties feminism was very much a reaction to the mistakes of fifties Stepford-wifism.

But the larger issue no one wants to talk about is that raising children in a post-Industrial Age society is a problem with no good solution.

Again, there's the title of my post. Forty years ago, the daughters of dependent housewives were asking that question. Today, the granddaughters are observing their stressed-out moms and rephrasing the question.

So, it became socially acceptable for women to work outside the home. In fact, in recent decades the American economy has become increasingly dependent on the productivity of women, just as the famous American middle-class lifestyle has become dependent on two paychecks.

Yes. There are laws of conservation in economics. It ought come as no surprise that if some people see the financial benefit that comes from two incomes as simply incidental to the greater freedom made possible by those daughers asking my question, prices will adjust to reflect those incomes.

At least we are getting away from the "having it all" myth, which said that women can have the high-power career and be excellent parents at the same time if they just tried hard enough. There may be a few high-energy types who manage it (the ones I've met made enough money to hire nannies), but most of us who have tried this end up leading lives of unquiet desperation.

Institutions evolve to conserve on transaction costs.

I'm not sure what the solution is, other than better social supports and more Real Men who carry their share of the load. Ultimately I wish we could re-think the whole nine-to-five employment thing.

Good point. Sometimes I'd be happy to be limited to nine-to-five rather than whenever-to-whenever, depending on what's on the answering machine or in email or how imaginative the wrong answers on the homework or the methods of the research paper under review are.

I continue to notice summer rush hours beginning around lunchtime (one story here) and employers may implicitly understand that there is a backward-bending supply curve and offer promising employees with families a different combination of pay and hours. The rethinking, however, is likely to be an emergent phenomenon, with any codification in law to come later.

SECOND SECTION: Crooked Timber and Althouse comment on the Times, with spirited bull sessions in progress at both sites. In those discussions some irritation with treating one or two anecdotes about life among the priviligentsia as evidence of a social trend emerges.

THIRD SECTION: The view from 11-D.

PRIMORDIAL SHOCK AND AWE. Book Review No. 39 is Dennis Showalter's Patton and Rommel: Men of War in the Twentieth Century. There are a few aspects of these not-quite-rivals that the movies won't tell you. Erwin Rommel came from a family of modest means to be admitted to one of the German service academies. His only experience with elite troops was as a company commander in the Wuerttemberg Mountain Battalion in Romania and later in Italy, during World War I, where he demonstrated a resourcefulness in making do with little and defeating larger opposing forces. George Patton obtained some experience with the pioneering tanks toward the end of that war.

In the opening phases of World War II, Rommel's Seventh Panzer made short work of much larger opposing forces. Professor Showalter summarizes the lessons.

Erwin Rommel and the 7th Panzer had done something more than win a series of tactical victories that remain unprecedented in terms of time, space, and numbers. They had established an archetype of blitzkrieg. Ever since May, 1940, "lightning war" in military mythology is more than just quick, lethal, asceptic conflict; something other than the "shock and awe" of paralyzing aerial bombardment, or massive artillery barrages anonymously delivered, or even of hundreds of tanks rolling forward in an irresistible mass. What the 7th Panzer Division did was set a pace that transformed each enemy it faced into an obliging enemy, whose decisions and behaviors seemed to fit German requirements as closely as though Rommel himself had drawn up the plans and issued the orders. It was a virtuoso performance, after a half-century when war had become an endurance test.

The Seventh Panzer improvised methods of using Stukas for tank-busting, but had to be careful not to run too far ahead of the air support for fear of being misidentified by the Stuka pilots. The language of battlefield preparation I hear these days strikes me as refinements of what Rommel and the Seventh made up on the fly in the spring of 1940.

The legendary Afrika Korps transpires to have been a scratch force (with the Russian Front calling for more and more resources) and Professor Showalter reveals that the German leadership, including Hitler, had no idea how to defeat the United States. The United States, and the British, had to figure out how to win, and there were several false starts in North Africa and Sicily. Enter, then exit, then re-enter Patton.

Professor Showalter's most provocative suggestion is that each of these generals might have done better on the other team. An improvisational and glory-seeking Patton in Russia in 1941? A Rommel with the logistical support of the Arsenal of Democracy in 1944? Both of these generals are more intensively studied in the service academies of their old adversaries.

I also commend this observation on Patton's documented prejudices, commonplace among the old rich of those days.

His frequently graphic private language was largely confined to outlets understood at the time as private: his diary and his personal correspondence. Even there his tone as a rule invites comparison to expressions of opinion common among other kinds of elites at the turn of the century on Kenneth Starr, George W. Bush, Texans, neoconservatives, and similar upstarts who do not accept their places. The underlying motivation in each case is the same: a comprehensive, unreflective, uncritical sense of superiority.

That sounds like a colleague I'd want to say "Got your back" in a common room argument.

The book itself? Recommended reading for World War II buffs.

THE DOWNSIDE OF PROPORTIONAL REPRESENTATION. The United States Constitution apportions representation by states. Many other republics apportion representation by political parties. Successful political parties in the United States engage in coalition building to capture median voters, a reality that frustrates true believers of all sorts. (Read around the weblogs: the discontent of business Republicans with evangelicals, or of labor Democrats with pacifists, is there.) Successful political parties in parliamentary republics are able to appeal to their true believers -- who do not have to live in contiguous districts such as Berkeley, or Emporia -- to obtain seats in proportion to the true believers' share in the vote. But then comes the challenge: to form a government. No Oil for Pacifists works through the arithmetic for Germany, as well as the history. One wonders if the Germans won't soon be petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the recounts. Betsy's Page lays out the nightmare scenario for the U.S.

Can you imagine some situation in America when we would have to have a coalition government of Republicans and Democrats running the government together. I'm not talking about divided government between Congress and the president. I'm talking about running the executive branch together. It is just unimaginable. The reason we have two parties is because they disagree fundamentally on how the government should run. And thinking of some coalition between a major and minor party would just move that party more to the extremes.

I don't even want to contemplate the potential for blocking coalitions.

SOMETHING TO REFLECT ON. Simon Wiesenthal died in his sleep overnight.

Even after turning 90, Wiesenthal continued to remind and to warn. While appalled at atrocities committed by Serbs against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in the 1990s, he said no one should confuse the tragedy there with the Holocaust.

"We are living in a time of the trivialization of the word 'Holocaust,'" he told AP in 1999. "What happened to the Jews cannot be compared with all the other crimes. Every Jew had a death sentence without a date."

Keep that in mind the next time somebody attempts to escalate the debate over the separation of national, state, and local powers by invoking fascism.

OPERATE SAFELY AT ALL TIMES. Last Saturday, a Metra Rock Island district train derailed at the 47th Street crossovers, with two deaths and many injuries. The train attempted to negotiate a 10 mph crossover at track speed, 70 mph.

A similar wreck, without fatalities, occurred two years ago.

In both crashes, commuter trains were supposed to switch tracks at a crossover near 47th Street. The speed limit for such a maneuver in that location is 10 m.p.h. Both trains were traveling close to Metra's regular cruising speed of 70 m.p.h. when the accidents occurred, investigators said.

Both crashes also involved engineers who had only recently joined Metra.

What follows is speculation, and I hope to be shown wrong. The engineer of Saturday's train had recently joined Metra from CSX, which is one of the sloppier big railroads. I wonder if there isn't a pattern of engineers operating trains at track speed despite a restrictive signal, expecting a somewhat harried dispatcher to clear a signal in response to a radio request. Although such a practice is contrary to the rules, it is something I have noticed listening to freight railroad radio chatter. If the usual pattern is to clear the through route upon request, crews might be lulled into a false sense of security until, as sometimes happens, that restrictive signal is properly displayed in advance of an open switch.

Years ago, a practice called "running on the yellows" was a cause of rear-end collisions. The engineer of a train running behind another train might become frustrated by reducing speed for an approach aspect (usually yellow) only to see a clear aspect (green) at the next signal, then having to reduce speed for the next yellow. He might become lulled into the idea that as long as the train ahead continues to run at track speed, he can stay closer to schedule by pushing the yellows at track speed. Works just fine as long as the train ahead doesn't stop with its hind end just beyond the unanticipated stop aspect (red) the preceding yellow is supposed to call attention to.

LET'S THINK ABOUT OUR HISTORY. The Northern Star speaks with some colleagues who have been peacefully assembling seeking redress of grievances.

The rally protesting the Iraq war was established in Dec. 2001. However, the DeKalb Interface for Peace and Justice recently celebrated 20 years together as an organization.

No, the vigil that began in late 2001 was first to draw attention to the human costs of liberating Afghanistan. Is the half-life of our memory so short that objections some people raised to that campaign have gone past the event horizon?

This, on the other hand, is priceless.

"I saw the group protest and I had a sense that I needed to do something," [DeKalb resident Frances] Loubere said. "I was astounded and surprised that Bush was voted into office again."

In microcosm, that's the intelligentsia's echo chamber. "How could Nixon win [Anderson lose]? Nobody [Everybody] I know voted against [for] him?"

BATTEN THE HATCHES. The glass is falling and my peg-leg socket aches.

From the Northern Illinois University forecast for Monday afternoon.

Rita. I looked at the latest model data and I just shook my head. Here's what the media and the National Hurricane Center (NHC) AREN'T telling you: the model late this morning shifted the track eastward from what they are showing here as of 11 AM Monday:

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_at3+shtml/153924.shtml?5day

The latest GFDL model, one of the best hurricane models out there, is in fact showing a 150 MPH hurricane (strong category 4) slamming into New Orleans on Friday, with the NHC model taking it right through the city as well. The official NHC track will be adjusted eastward later today; they like to be conservative and want to make sure this thing is heading into Louisiana before they cause inevitable alarm along the Gulf coast. However, they should have 60 hours of lead time on this one, wherever it heads inland.

Irish Trojan is also following events in the gulf. Voluntary Xchange recalls some troubling history.

What New Orleans does not need, but which is possible, is a repeat of 1998, in which Earl, Frances, Hermine, and Georges bothered the city over a 3 week period in September. Frances was the worst - even though its eye hit Corpus Christi, feeder bands on its eastern side dropped 21 inches of rain in suburban New Orleans (although I remember something about 34 inches over a 4 day period that included days before and after Frances).

Mayor Nagin of New Orleans has asked residents who have returned to leave again. But this interpretation of events from that report is a bit disturbing.

The dispute over the reopening was just the latest example of the lack of federal-local coordination that has marked the disaster practically from the start.

Nagin saw a quick reopening as a way to get the storm-battered city back in the business of luring tourists. But federal officials warned that such a move could be a few weeks premature, pointing out much of the area does not yet have full electricity and still has no drinkable water, 911 service or working hospitals.

With the approach of Rita, Bush added his voice, saying he had "deep concern" about the possibility that New Orleans' levees could be breached again.

In addition, Bush said there are significant environmental concerns. New Orleans still lacks safe drinking water, and there are fears about the contamination in the remaining floodwaters and the muck left behind in drained areas of the city.

"The mayor - you know, he's got this dream about having a city up and running, and we share that dream," the president said. "But we also want to be realistic about some of the hurdles and obstacles that we all confront in repopulating New Orleans."

It is interesting to watch the term "states rights" go from a code word for "Southern racism" to a watchword in defense against "fascism" (Yes, I have seen that charge on some sites. Find them yourself.) faster than those levees gave way as this tussle over authority plays out.

MAKE THE GATEKEEPERS WALK THE PLANK. The dean at Anonymous Junior doesn't like creating a college-wide textbook selection committee either.

Bundling books with tuition would render those options irrelevant. Finally, and most damningly, have you looked at a high school textbook lately? College texts have their shortcomings, to be sure, but at least they don’t have to get approved by central committees. Start bundling the texts for the huge intro classes, and the central committees will become relevant.

Quite. Not to mention the increase in buyer concentration that would result as the high-school oligopsony gets reinforced by some kind of collegiate oligopsony. (Membership on a college textbook committee might not be without its rewards for suitably avaricious faculty. I was once principles coordinator at a fairly large university and received more than one offer of baseball tickets and the like.)

THERE BE BURIED TREASURE. Steer a course to WILLisms for the latest Carnival of the Capitalists. And if ye be boardin' on his recommendation, the grog is in the wardroom and the idea shop is open.

LOOK AHEAD AND LOOK ASTERN, LOOK TO WEATHER AND TO LEE. No man-of-war nor American privateer be we, for 'tis Talk Like a Pirate Day. These laddies be collectin' yarns, and remindin' all buccaneers to spare some booty for the wenches of the Gulf Coast. This scribbler is advisin' landlubbers, and this fine lady givin' lessons.

CONDOLENCES. University Diaries notes the recent passing of two great Polish artists, creator of metaphoric posters Henryk Tomaszewski and father-in-law and Harvard professor Jerzy Soltan.

SPITE CHECK. Northern Illinois gets into the win column with a 42-3 win over the Tennessee Tech Golden Eagles (did this team once have an Indian theme?) The field goal came late in the game, well after the outcome was determined.

RETHINKING THE WELFARE ECONOMICS PARADIGM. Kash at Angry Bear has an instructive meditation on the citizen and the state.

Liberals like me tend to believe that when that happens, our society as a whole will be better off if the rest of us try to help out those individuals who have suffered from circumstance. This doesn't mean that we think that we can eliminate suffering, or ensure that nothing bad ever happens, or that we should insulate individuals from the consequences of their own actions. But when things outside of an individual's control devastates their life, we think that it is compassionate and good and just - and even in our own enlightened self-interest - to help out.

Most conservatives, on the other hand, tend to believe that society should play a relatively small role in helping people when they're down - the primary responsibility for recovery from bad times rests with the individual and his or her family, not with society in a broader sense. Perhaps this difference largely springs from the presumption of many conservatives that if an individual is experiencing bad times, it is probably largely a consequence of their own actions, and that they should have to bear full responsibility for their poor choices.

This argument might be phrased more felicitously, as it conflates "society" with "government." Betsy's Page links to an Anne Applebaum column suggesting that society has been stepping up more effectively via non-governmental organizations such as the Red Cross, Move On, or the Salvation Army. The latest poll roundup from Public Brewery notes a decline of confidence in government. The poll appears to focus on whether "Washington" can do the right thing; had somebody asked about "City Hall" or "the Governor" my conjecture is that the decline would have been more pronounced.

Don at Cafe Hayek has an excellent summary of what might be going on in people's minds.

Katrina, in addition to stripping my hometown of life, unmasked the pretenses of government as savior.

David Brooks is thinking along similar lines.

Back to the Angry Bear essay. Economic theory might propose a role for the government.

The reason for this actually goes back to economic theory. One powerful insight that every first-year economics microeconomics student learns is that when something has a positive externality, or is a public good, the provision of that public good by private individuals will be less than each of those individuals would like. The problem is that such goods suffer from the free-rider problem. In such cases, society is unambiguously better off if the government provides the public good.

That argument appends an ideological statement to a logical proposition. A positive externality is a situation in which one person's actions provide uncompensated benefits to other people. The person who provides the benefit has insufficient incentive to exploit all the possible gains from trade, because some people will free-ride. A sufficiently well-informed and properly managed government is indeed able to design the proper rules and taxes to achieve that allocative efficiency. But unexploited gains from trade are equivalent to $100 bills on the sidewalk if one is clever enough to pick up the $100 bill at an expenditure of less than $100. Society will be unambiguously better off if the $100 is picked up at an expenditure of less than $100. The tussle between big-government and limited-government advocates often reduces to an empirical question, namely, is government able to pick up the $100 more cheaply than some other organization?

The Kash essay continues with a bit of elaboration, then this statement of a general principle.

So what does this mean in practice? It means that liberals support government policies that provide help to those who have suffered from the powerful forces that buffet each of our lives but are outside of our control. As I said, that doesn't mean that liberals want to try to completely insulate everyone from anything bad ever happening... just that when bad stuff happens that individuals have no control over, we think the government should help out a bit.

As long as one confines the discussion to the provision of a public good, and grants the national government a superiority over other institutional arrangements at discouraging free-riding, the essay stands. However, it neglects another problem with public policy, namely the moral hazard that is present any time a person who is at risk from forces outside his control holds some kind of insurance against those forces. There have been some lurid criticisms of the moral hazard effect of the Welfare State on the behavior of people left behind in New Orleans. Brendan Miniter at the Wall Street Journal proposes to remove the source of the moral hazard itself.

It is time to break free of the narrow thinking that has prevented progress for decades. It's time to rethink how we, as a society, combat poverty. Are we going to try another big-government program and expect better results this time? Or are we now going to realize that ownership is the most likely path to the middle class? School vouchers can help poor parents take ownership of their children's education and finally break the grip teachers unions have on the public schools. Health savings accounts and private accounts for Medicaid and Social Security will give those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder the skills as well as the assets necessary to climb higher. In late August the levees broke in New Orleans. But the welfare state had left the poor stuck in the mud long before that.

There is one further consideration. Any attempt at changing peoples' behavior by changing policy ought have an answer to Deirdre McCloskey's takedown of the Social Engineering Vice: "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" Because any allocative inefficiency leaves unexploited gains from trade, advocates of any attempt at a policy change -- whether to expand the power of government or to take functions away from it -- owes voters an explanation of whether the proposed change will in fact be cheaper to implement than the social benefits it attempts to harvest. Mr Miniter's post lapses into what I refer to as Utopian Wonkery. That accounting has not been offered in it.

I'LL NEVER LACK FOR WORK. Phantom Professor links to a proposal by a Yale law professor to Do Something about the rising price of college textbooks. What was that line about "better to be governed by 500 people randomly chosen from the Boston phone book" again?

The real problem is the lack of price competition. A series of mergers has ensured that although there are hundreds of textbooks to choose from, the five largest publishers control 80 percent of the market.

Possibly, although those concentration statistics suggest an aggregation of collegiate and common-school publishers. (I'm going to have to return to that later.) I'd be surprised if I couldn't come up with 30 potential independent vendors of a principles text, and at least eight options for an antitrust text. University presses are potential entrants into textbook publication, and at least one observer of the peculiar economics of the university press would welcome such entry. Curiously, the professor does not explore the implications of rational cooperation in a repeated interaction between five firms. Rather, we get yet another gripe about the bundling of add-ons.

It's easy for prices to drift upward when the person choosing the product doesn't really care how much it costs. Instead of competing on price, publishers compete for professors' attention with an excess of computerized bells and whistles.

But the professor's role in choosing the text is a derived demand, derived from the demand for the class by the students. And the students don't always have the right incentive to shop around. The professor comes close to grasping this point, then fails to think it through.

Indeed, the pricing problems with textbooks are eerily analogous to those affecting prescription drugs. In both cases you have doctors (Ph.D.'s or M.D.'s) prescribing products. In neither case does the doctor pay for the product prescribed - in many cases, he or she doesn't even know what it costs. And the clincher is that in both cases, the manufacturers sell the same product at substantially reduced prices abroad.

The analogy to prescription drugs suggests a possible solution. Perhaps universities can take a lesson from managed health care. Health maintenance organizations are often criticized for being too stingy, but let's not forget that they've played an important role in containing health care costs.

But neither the medical doctor nor the doctor of philosophy sees any of the benefit of shopping around, and in many cases neither the patient nor the student doesn't have the right incentive to shop around. Insurance covers the prescription. Financial aid covers the books. Do I hear an echo? (Yes, this is an old theme of mine, but this site continues to gain readers.)

So just imagine what would happen if universities started to provide textbooks to their students as part of the tuition package. Of course tuition would have to rise, but for the first time universities would start caring about whether their professors were too extravagant in the selection of class materials.

I think Southern Illinois does something like this already. I disagree with the assertion that universities don't care about these things. Northern Illinois has been cut off by some publishers' representatives for our bookstore's diligence in locating used copies. On the other hand, if your student bodies are willing to drop $5000 on a day of shopping, what's a few bucks on a textbook?

Still think a system where schools provide free textbooks would never work? Well, we already have one at the elementary and secondary levels. Unlike Hogwarts, which requires Harry Potter to buy books each year, most American public schools own their assigned books and buy new editions only when it's absolutely necessary.

On the other hand, the common school system is one source of concentration in publishing. Books that satisfy the California or Texas or New York or Illinois content standards become the de facto national books, as publishers that fail to win acceptance in one of the big states fail to pass a market test presented by the big state oligopsony.

WHY AM I HERE? Friday saw the first regular meeting of the expanded all-university committee I've been conscripted onto. Should I be offended by the under-representation, both relative to the general population and relative to the faculty, of middle-aged white guys on the committee? (On the other hand, it is a committee structured to provide equal votes for Education and for Liberal Arts, as well as representation by Allied Health and Arts. The pink collar ghettoes of the university?) The fashion statements of a majority of the committee run the usual range of dowdy to frumpy to butch. It's too soon to identify who the scholars are, the true believers, the hacks, suck-ups, and time-servers, and the cynics.

So what did we do? A lot of "the current business is no new business." A statement (complete with our imitation of a biohazard warning label) generalizing the "conceptual framework" to apply to school administrators, as well as to teachers. Some other committee took a look at this statement and recommended some changes. Herewith a sampling.

The tenets of knowledge, practice, and reflection are central to the Teacher Education Educator Preparation Program. Each of these areas is outlined below in relation to candidate knowledge, practice and reflection. The faculty believes that future professional educators need to demonstrate competencies identified by the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium (INTASC) and the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) for the initial certification programs and by the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) appropriate state and national professional associations for the advanced certification/endorsement programs. These competencies, as well as those established by the national organizations in each of the disciplines, are integral to the core tenets of knowledge, practice, and reflection that define the exemplary educator. As such, they are also a part of our University Assessment Plan for Certification in Education.

I don't know how many people labored over this at the other committee, but we had 40 people occupied with ratifying this for about 15 minutes. We also had to be informed of a foul-up affecting our students' ability to obtain background checks. Illinois now requires a state background check, with fingerprints, for aspiring teachers. This is not a Federal background check. A number of local police departments and school boards have not yet gotten the word. Whether the Illinois rules allow, for example, a convicted pedophile from New Jersey with a clean record in Illinois to become a teacher I don't know. But the absence of cooperation between school boards and local police on the background checks is yet another symptom of governance-in-a-vacuum. Perhaps the authorities in New Orleans had no idea where the school buses were, because the school board never told the police.

CHALLENGE ME. In U.S. News content available online is an interview with Barrett Seaman, a reporter who went back to college undercover and wrote a book about it. There's a provocative argument about the effects of a higher legal drinking age.

When I was in college we'd invite faculty members and their wives to our cocktail parties. You felt like a grownup and you ended up, as a result, acting like a grownup. You could also see that adults could have two drinks and then stop. Now they don't see that because no adult who doesn't want to be sued is going to be anywhere near an underage drinker.

There's a recognition of the Nash equilibrium in faculty expectations.

Students are not working as hard as they used to. Grade inflation is a real thing. I've had students tell me, if they handed us more work to do, we'd rise to the occasion. If you keep them busy doing what they're supposed to be doing in college they're not going to have time to get in trouble. And that's where the disconnection comes in—the disconnection between faculty and students. There's a kid at Duke who said there's an unwritten contract here which says "We won't bother you if you won't bother us." It's unfortunately quite true, even at these high-end schools.

But the interview ends on a discordant positive note.

One thing I wanted to avoid doing was suggesting that in all the mayhem of drinking and smoking marijuana and date rape and stuff that this is a doomed generation. It's not. It does work out most of the time. The girl I don't identify in the book who knocked back 22 shots of vodka and got taken off to the hospital her freshman year, she's now going off to get her Ph.D. in a pretty complicated science. And they're all capable of doing that, as long as they can survive. I came out of this with enormous faith in the students themselves.

Yes, but how many are sidetracked or derailed by the rabbit culture and sucked into the slacker's rationalizations and never finish?

RECLAIMING PRINCIPLES. Phil at Market Power suggests that an introduction to economics begin with opportunity cost and comparative advantage. We will reclaim the curriculum, one section at a time. King at SCSU appears to be thinking along the same lines.

I begin with voluntary exchange of already existing goods (Tom Sawyer is in the supporting cast) and introduce production by way of voluntary exchange between producers who would otherwise practice autarky. (I borrow heavily from Alchian and Allen here; Robert Frost and Socrates get involved.) Hence, the First Principle of Social Organization: There are incentives for the low-opportunity cost producers of goods to specialize in those goods. (Thus, students have a logical basis for criticizing the use of firemen as leaflet distributors as well as a way of resolving the paradox of a rich country importing food from a poor country.) Not only that, the production possibility frontier is a logical extension of opportunity cost and comparative advantage. At Northern Illinois, most of my price theory class will take income theory next.

Next up: the Second Principle of Social Organization: Institutions evolve to conserve on transaction costs. Hey, if we didn't have transaction costs, there wouldn't be any Chicago.

After that will come the markets, and the demand-and-supply analysis that some people enjoy and some people hate.

TROUBLES? WE'VE GOT A FEW. I've been cleaning out the office, and in the archive of no-longer-useful stuff is an issue of U.S. News. Or, perhaps, this is perfectly useful.

Page 18: Snafus in air travel are only the latest in a series of developments making it harder to get from home to places of work, study, or play. Highways and urban streets are falling into disrepair, sometimes dangerously so. City buses -- even the newest ones -- break down with startling regularity. Older subways are crumbling, and new systems are so costly that governments don't want to spend the money any more.

Page 20: Attempts to cut Amtrak back to just a few high-density routes are certain to continue so long as the public corporation is so heavily dependent on government.

Page 41: Certainly last year and again this year, we're noting ocean temperatures that are more normal ... Without question, we've felt through the years that New Orleans is one of the most vulnerable places in the United States. Not only does the area have bad hurricanes fairly frequently, but it has a tremendous concentration of people. Many of those people live in low-lying areas that could be severely flooded by a hurricane. They really don't have a workable evacuation plan for that city.

Page 56: The speedup of communications and trade between nations has much to do with making the world a smaller place. So does the growing exchange of students, tourists, artists, scientists, and entertainers. The rapid increase in students going abroad to study insures an even broader outlook by future world citizens. And a vast increase in world trade points to a growing economic dependence of nations upon each other.

Page 63: Delegates [to a United Nations energy conference] stressed that it is essential for Third World nations to switch more and more to renewable energy from the sun, water, wind, and organic matter. These sources now provide about 15 percent of the world's energy, mostly from burning wood. In fact, the heavy reliance on wood is described by U.N. experts as the "second energy crisis." ... In many parts of the world, people are denuding the landscape in a desperate attempt to gather scarce firewood.

It's unlikely that the August 31, 1981 issue is available online at the U.S. News site.

I THINK I'M GOING TO LIKE THIS GUY. Betsy's Page finds a report that Chief Justice nominee John Roberts likes Dr. Zhivago and North By Northwest. That might be reason enough for me to respond to a request from Eclectic Econoclast that I list the movies I thought of as my favorites, using the years of release. This game of weblog tag appears to have originated at Marginal Revolution.

First, a disclaimer. Bill Sjostrom, who worked with me for a while, will confirm that I'm somewhat clueless about the talkies, and that the usual movie-fan's gambit of "You have to know that. [Leading man.] [Leading lady.] [Vintage and plot summary.]" elicits nothing for me. On the other hand, there are some pictures that I'll make the time to watch when they turn up in reruns, and the chronological list relies on those. I have to leave Zhivago and any Howard Hawks John Wayne picture off the list, as these I discovered later. But, as readers will note, any of those will crowd out anything from the past 20 years. (I'm using King's algorithm to rule out stuff I discovered in reruns or at the college film clubs. He has some thoughts about Tinseltown's more recent efforts.)

So, on to the list. I'll start with North by Northwest. My folks let me stay up late enough to watch it sometime in the mid-1960s. They were amused by Hitchcock's cameo (he had discovered that people would watch for him rather than his directing, so in this picture he attempted to board a bus as the doors were closing) but what really stuck to my ribs were the trains.

Next up: 2001: A Space Odyssey, around 1970. What would you expect of a science club guy? "I'm sorry, Frank, I think you've missed it. Queen to Bishop's six. Bishop takes Queen. Knight takes Bishop, checkmate."

And that, intellectualoids, is as close as you're going to get to anything you'd refer to as film. Next up, however, is something with subtitles. Patton. I have not been able to convince the university to issue me a polished steel helmet, a riding crop, and a giant 48 star flag as considerations for offering a large lecture course.

Thereafter, my life became more complicated, and movies I'd bother to see better be relatively free of ambiguity. Case in point: Midway, in 1976. Might have worked better with the Japanese acting panicked in Japanese with subtitles, but in theaters of the day the Sensurround effects were marvelous, and the audience reaction as first three, then the fourth flattop got scratched was electric.

What else? Return of the Jedi, in 1983. It clarified what had happened in the preceding two movies. My father had recently died. Our relationship was nowhere near as strained as Luke's and Anakin's, fortunately.

The ensuing twenty years? Boring.

SOME WORKBENCH TIME. Tonight's progress: adjusting the clearances on the motion and laying out the crosshead guides.


It's fairly easy to make a ledge-type crosshead guide out of a section of channel and an L section. The crosshead guide supports, which also anchor the combination lever forward and the reversing link aft, will take a bit more thinking.

CLOCKMAKERS OR BEEKEEPERS? The Welfare Economics Paradigm approach to public policy suggests that a properly designed tax, transfer, subsidy, or rule will improve allocative efficiency in the economy, or provide a more egalitarian set of initial endowments from which to achieve a Pareto optimal allocation of resources. Such thinking is receiving a lot of attention, sometimes from people who haven't had occasion to think about such things, in the aftermath of Katrina.

In public policy classes, I sometimes suggest that the usual liberal-conservative classification of policy positions is not useful compared to the concepts enumerated in the title. If one views a social organization as a clockwork, when the clock fails to keep time, you fix the clock. A liberal will use the government to ban SUVs. A conservative will use the government to ban pornography. Got a problem, get a program. If one views a social organization as a swarm of bees, when the bees have to improve their position, they find an improvement that is not necessarily globally optimal. A liberal will endorse diversity. A conservative will endorse shopping around.

Arnold at Econ Log has been thinking about these things, without using my terminology. First, he recommends a longer essay of his that poses a challenge to Berkeley's Brad DeLong (who is continuing to ask hard questions of anthropologists when he's not seeking revenge for President Clinton.) First, the challenge.

An Intelligent Designer can create policies, programs, and organizations through legislative fiat and top-down administration that operate effectively in a centralized manner. Government agencies and bureaucracies are like highly-tuned cars, needing only good navigators and drivers to race them to their goals.

Highly tuned car, clockwork, same metaphor. Professor DeLong has taken a first crack at a riposte.

Serious thoughts about when wants to use market and when one wants to use command-and-large-organizations--and how one then controls command-and-bureaucracy--would be very welcome here.

How about "Institutions evolve to reduce transaction costs?" (Professor DeLong also suggests it's time for serious Republicans to look for manifestations of public choice among their politicians. Indeed.)

There is an update at Econ Log to some thoughts by Temple mathematician John Allen Paulos, whose books manage to be entertaining while communicating his dismay with the staggering innumeracy of people who ought to know better. He starts with some thinking about complex adaptive systems.

What is more than a bit odd, however, is that some of the most ardent opponents of Darwinian evolution -- for example, many fundamentalist Christians -- are among the most ardent supporters of the free market. They accept the market's complexity without qualm, yet insist the complexity of biological phenomena requires a designer.

That's a bit of a generalization. One of the potential fractures of the Republican coalition is precisely along religious lines. Communism is a common enemy of religion and of capitalism. Capitalism untempered by a moral framework gives consumers safer and cheaper abortions, and Britney Spears. Operationally, the emergence of markets must be constrained by laws consistent with God's -- or is it Gaia's? -- design. Ponder, however, this.

These analogies prompt two final questions. What would you think of someone who studied economic entities and their interactions in a modern free market economy and insisted that they were, despite a perfectly reasonable and empirically supported Smithian account of their development, the consequence of some all-powerful, detail-obsessed economic law-giver? You might deem such a person a conspiracy theorist.

Here, Professor Paulos might benefit by a careful reading of Ronald Coase, as well as some of the more challenging bits of Karl Marx. We have a more substantive, to use the professor's words, science of biology precisely because the testable hypotheses are more easily proposed, and falsified. Complex adaptive systems tend to do what they darn well please. Empirical support is thus harder to marshal. (I have had modest success at marshalling empirical evidence for various behaviors of heavy industry, and I have a file of referee reports that offer a wide range of evaluations of my abilities.)

And what would you think of someone who studied biological processes and organisms and insisted that they were, despite an perfectly reasonable and empirically supported Darwinian account of their development, the consequence of some all-powerful, detail-obsessed biological law-giver?

Easier for the biologists to agree on the rules of inference, and the rules of evidence. Complexity theory by itself is probably insufficient framework for a theory of the citizen and the state.

A WELL-INTENTIONED FAILURE. Book Review No. 38 is Kevin John Robertson's Blue Pullman, a history of British Railways' attempt to build a longer first-class version of the New Haven Comet. (I'm teasing, but only slightly.) The book will please readers who would like their railroad reading to include some analysis to accompany the pictures. (It would be very easy for me to have completed the fifty book challenge by including the modeling and prototype photo compendia that have come into the Shops library this year. I'm taking the challenge seriously.) The trains were an attempt to by the railway to retain time-sensitive business traffic in busy corridors. With a maximum speed of 90 mph and relatively low-capacity consists, the trains never did find a proper market, although the service was later concentrated on the Great Western. The trains suffered an unattractive image makeover toward the end, and were withdrawn within 15 years.

One problem that cropped up with the trains was the use of Swiss running gear on British tracks. The Mexican railroad had a similar problem with some North American pattern rolling stock built by Schindler of Switzerland for their Aguila Azteca, also riding on Swiss running gear. (I found a link to a model of the Swiss cars. Online information about the prototype still eludes me. It's possible that some 1934-vintage Hiawatha coaches on first-generation Nystrom trucks are still serving the remoter parts of Mexico. The Milwaukee was the world's fastest dirt-track railroad. Use the right tool for the job.)

Where Worlds Collide has a review of the book giving the home team's perspective as well as a reader-provided link to a trader who will likely be a faster provider of the book, particularly for British readers.

I'd also recommend that Blue Pullman enthusiasts buy the Kingfisher Blue Pullman DVD. This disk includes a standard-issue promotional movie as well as two demonstrations of the train's capabilities that border on being art films. The promotional movie has the obligatory Voice of God narrator, as well as the Fifties-hustle-bustle background music characteristic of documentaries and school films of the era. But that background music gives way to Elgaresque strings when the Pullman decals (modelers, watch that part carefully) go on and when the fancy food comes out of the kitchen. The first demonstration movie has almost no dialog and a soundtrack evocative of spy movies of those days! But what really sticks to the ribs is the content ... here's a diesel train running on Britain's equivalent of the "clear the 400 by 15 minutes" rule being shepherded by signalmen clearing semaphore signals with armstrong levers as the train meets and passes freights and inferior passenger trains tied to hand-fired steamers. This is the early 1960s, by which time no North American day train offered only first-class accommodation, and the GP18s and GP20s were replacing the original freight diesels.

SAYS PHOEBE SNOW: "THE WAY TO GO. BETWEEN NEW YORK AND THE POCONOS." Live from the Third Rail posts a call for a resumption of train service New York-Scranton. (The Poconos used to be a honeymoon destination. "My gown stays white/From morn to night/Upon the Road of Anthracite" might still work as a marketing ploy.)

IMPROVING THAT ANCHOR FOR THE CORRIDOR. The plans for upgrading downtown Milwaukee's Amtrak station and converting it into an "intermodal facility" (meaning one can walk from trackside to more buses) are now public, and work continues on planning suburban train service to lakeshore points south. The station upgrade is still no replacement for the Everett Street Depot. A Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel editorial that hails the upgrade alas takes an unnecessary swipe at Soviet train station design.

Almost anything would be an improvement on Milwaukee's downtown Amtrak station which, sad to say, looks like it would have been right at home in the old Soviet Union.

Truth to tell, old Joe Stalin would probably have exiled the designer to Kolyma for fifty years. Consider the current Novosibirsk station, which is one of the more ornate on the Trans-Siberian.

Image taken by Valentina and available at Virtual Tourist. Those are not New Orleans schoolbuses in the forecourt. The station design is a caricature of a single-driver steam locomotive.

The station that preceded it might have inspired the Boston and Maine's North Conway station.

CARNIVAL CALL. Ms. Frizzle has set up the Back to School Edition of the Carnival of Education. Impressive banner line and menagerie this week.

THE INTERCHANGE TRACK IS BUSY with traffic delivered by SCSU Scholars, Villainous Company, and Watcher of Weasels. Welcome. Additional trains of thought will be made up and dispatched for your thinking pleasure.

WANT TO SCHEDULE A MONETARY CONFERENCE? The Mt. Washington Resort in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire offers the opportunity to charter the entire lodge for the night of November 9. The proceeds of the auction will be used for Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. The details suggest the winning bidder will not be obligated to use all of the space at one time. The title of my post refers to the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference at this resort that set up the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as well as some agreements on exchange rates.

A POLICY PRIMER. Last week, Newmark's Door suggested that the failure of governments at all levels would give critics of the expansion of government an example far more lurid than the department of motor vehicles or air traffic control. Andrew Gelman at Statistical Modeling has a bit of a follow-up, which elicits a further response nailed to Newmark's Door. The conversation has remained civil, which is commendable in light of much of the angry disagreement making its way around the Web.

I have found some other instructive posts on the role of government and the usefulness of economics in policy making and intend to write a longer post on this score in the near future. Professor Gelman has identified the key to the disagreement: keep this in mind in your own readings.

At some level we just have to assume that politicians are motivated by doing the right thing.

That is a hazardous assumption. Professor Newmark hints at, but does not pursue, all the consequences of making, or relaxing, that assumption. The work by Professor Buchanan that he hints at builds off the following observation: Public officials have objectives of their own, which might not be to emulate King Solomon or Aristides the Just. The temptation to pursue those objectives is no respecter of party affiliation. Consider Illinois. The mainly Democratic government of the City of Chicago is alleged to have found a way to reward cronies in the hiring of trucks for public works. A Republican secretary of state who became governor is accused of raising campaign funds by selling commercial driving licenses to people with no truck-driving skills. (Does that mean Illinois joins Louisiana among the Third World States of America?) Where public officials have the opportunity to dispose of opportunities to make money, something called rent-seeking will follow. It comes as little surprise that embattled New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin was an executive of a cable company. Cable service providers enjoy local monopoly status. Although they are notionally subject to local governmental review, the quality of that review may vary. The local authorities that regulate cable service, or that grant liquor licenses, are well-placed to dispense valuable favors. Sometimes those authorities do their job. Sometimes they are led into temptation.

THE RATE OF CHANGE OF THE RATE OF CHANGE. WHATEVER. I wish business types would understand a little calculus. Destination: Freedom links to an interview with the president of the Genesee and Wyoming Railroad, expecting better times for short lines.

A renaissance -- that's what Mortimer Fuller, chief executive officer of Genesee & Wyoming, the Greenwich-based owner and operator of regional and short-line railroads, is hoping for in the rail industry.

For many decades, railroads have been on the decline, losing share to the highway system and trucks. Fuller, however, believes the industry has an opportunity to get back on track.

"We are at an inflection point," Fuller said. "All the factors just might be in place to win back share from trucks."

Umm, no, that's a critical point, making a transition from losing share to trucks to gaining share from trucks. The second derivative is positive throughout. The inflection point will come as rail continues to gain share from trucks, but at a diminishing rate. The second derivative changes sign from positive to negative. Not there yet. Sometimes it's better to use the usual business jargon and sound unimaginative, e.g. "lots of upside potential," rather than to lapse into bad mathematics and sound foolish.

TRANSITIONS. Joanne Jacobs moves house and announces a betrothal.

PROVIDE YOUR OWN KICKS. Although there no longer is a Route 66, the right-of-way of the old westbound lanes through Illinois remains in place.


In Lexington, the westbound lanes have been reclaimed as a bike trail.

That 2.2-mile path--paved on a decrepit, unused section of old Route 66--has become a model for a state plan to stretch a bike path along its entire 300-mile stretch--from the Chicago lakefront to the Chain of Rocks Bridge, which leads to St. Louis.Illinois officials say they're the first of the eight states along Route 66 to consider such a plan. It may take a decade or more before a significant portion of the path is completed, but planners and Route 66 aficionados see it as a potential boon to bikers with ambitions, both local and long-distance. Tourism and preservation efforts may also benefit along what may be America's most storied road, still dotted with original diners, gas stations and some of the nation's first motels.

Those are some of the classic Forties drive-ins and gas stations in the background. Old 66 also parallels the old Gulf Mobile and Ohio rail route, which is receiving a bit of an upgrade for higher-speed passenger trains.

SHOOTOUT. Halftime. Northwestern 24, Northern Illinois 14. Beach volleyball coverage also done for the day.

ECONOMICS FOR EVERYBODY. Cornell's Robert Frank has a New York Times column questioning the effectiveness of introductory college economics.

Another problem is that the introductory course is increasingly tailored not for the majority of students for whom it will be their only economics course, but for the negligible fraction who will go on to become professional economists. Such courses focus on the mathematical models that have become the cornerstone of modern economic theory. These models prove daunting for many students and leave them little time and energy to focus on how basic economic principles help explain everyday behavior.

But there is an even more troubling explanation for students' failure to learn fundamental economic concepts. It is that many of their professors may have only a tenuous grasp of these concepts, since they, too, took encyclopedic introductory courses, followed by advanced courses that were even more technical.

There's something to this gripe. We have asked a variant of the following question of graduate students on qualifying exams. "A perfectly competitive industry operating under conditions of constant returns to scale experiences a permanent increase in demand. What are the long-run and short-run effects on equilibrium price." The answers are pretty dismal. Perhaps I haven't done as good a job as I might in presenting the Jacob Viner article from which all else follows. Or perhaps our students concentrate on the Hessians and Lagrangians rather than honing their intuition.

The column includes an opportunity cost quiz that stumped most of the economists who tackled it. William J. Polley has a roundup of commentary on the column and some thinking about the quiz.

It would be useful, for example, for students completing their first economics course, to be able to answer the following question. "Suppose an economics department and a fire department show up at a volunteer center for flood relief. The center director wants some leaflets handed out in the flood zone. Do the economists or the firefighters get the leafletting task? Explain your answer."

I suspect that if more people understood the comparative advantage argument behind that question, they'd be more upset with this.

QUESTIONING UNIVERSAL COLLEGE. Dymphna at Gates of Vienna sees a problem.

We are not training enough people in maintaining anything. Maintenance jobs are considered “low status” and kids who shouldn’t be there are pushed into college.

More specifics:

And guess what did not get funded by that slab of pork called “No Child Left Behind”? Vocational training. No money for “them.” We need to educate more English majors to work at Starbucks while we complain over our lattes about outsourcing.

That may be a bit harsh, but people within College, Inc. are also beginning to stir. Here's Chris at Crooked Timber.

[T]here’s far too much higher education in Western societies and that it constitutes a real barrier to social mobility (and is probably bad for demographics too). To put it in a nutshell: strategies for improving social mobility by getting a broader swathe of the population into higher ed are bound to fail because it is too easy for the middle classes to maintain their grip on access to education. A better strategy would be to take that card out of middle class hands by abandoning the insistence on credentials that aren’t materially relevant to the job at hand.

Or, he continues, a worthwhile investment.

Another thing to mention is that whilst the possession of credentials has become more and more a necessary condition for career success and high lifetime earnings, it looks like less and less of a sufficient condition. More people are being pushed through the higher ed system with the promise that they will get higher earnings, but very very many of them are not actually doing any better . Unless their studies are of instrinsic benefit to them—which they very well may be—those people are spening years of their lives acquiring tickets to a lottery even though their number is less and less likely to be drawn as the proportion of graduates increases. Those people are simply engaged in pointless and wasteful jockeying for positional advantage.

John, also at Crooked Timber, offers additional thoughts.

If we’re going to get labour market conditions favourable to more social mobility and less inequality, it’s not sufficient to expand access to education. Growth in education has to outpace the rise in relative demand for educated workers, and growth in access to education for students from poor backgrounds has to outpace the growth in participation among the middle and upper classes. On average, we haven’t managed to do this, and it’s not surprising therefore, that the results hoped for by advocates of expanded education haven’t, in general, been delivered.

There's a further complication. Colleges and universities are now doing much of the screening, as well as much of the teaching, that high schools used to do. And it's beginning to take its toll on the people in the trenches. The practice at some universities of allowing students a week or two to shop around for classes and then commit is coming in for some criticism (I'll update with links if I wander back to where I saw that) and several sites are crankier than usual about the poor preparation and lax work habits of their charges.

RECOGNIZING PERSISTENCE. Three years and counting for SCSU Scholars; two years for Professor Bainbridge.

AFTER THE LIGHTS WENT OUT. Tom McMahon has satellite photos that very clearly illustrate the extent of the power outages after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.

WHAT PEOPLE WILL DO FOR AN ENDORSEMENT. No televised college football games of any interest this afternoon, but one of the sports networks has time for a beach volleyball tournament from Manhattan Beach. One team is sporting temporary tattoos -- I would hope they're temporary -- touting Visa and Gatorade. Egad.

As of this posting, the radio is reporting Northern Illinois 14, Northwestern 3.

RESTRICTING OUTPUT TO RAISE PRICES? Father Andrew Greeley preaches a sermon on "Pride goeth before the fall." Too much stuff there for a careful analysis this evening, but let's concentrate on one line.

The cost of gasoline climbs almost every day because the obscenely profitable oil companies have not plowed any money into building new refineries for the last 15 years.

A New Republic article from 2004 suggests both competitive and collusive explanations for this phenomenon. First, economic losses are a signal to investors to withdraw capacity. That was the case in the mid-to-late 1990s.

In a 1996 internal Texaco document released by Senator Ron Wyden's office, the company bemoaned "surplus refining capacity, and the surplus gasoline production capacity" in which "supply significantly exceeds demand year-round. This results in very poor refinery margins, and very poor refinery financial results." In 1995, a similar document from Chevron argued that "if the U.S. petroleum industry doesn't reduce its refining capacity, it will never see any substantial increase in refining margins."

The obvious solution was to slow the growth of capacity, primarily by cutting the number of refineries. And that's just what happened. Since 1995, 23 refineries have closed ...

On the other hand, economic profits are a signal to investors to provide capacity. The article suggests an oligopolistic rather than competitive instinct at work.

In a normal market, increased demand and profit would immediately spur producers to increase supply. And yet in the last four years oil companies have neither significantly expanded capacity at existing facilities nor begun serious efforts to open new refineries. How do they get away with it? Quite simply, because gasoline is no longer a normal market. Thanks to a wave of industry mergers over the last decade, there are now significantly fewer independent refineries; they are, instead, controlled by a shrinking number of oil-industry giants--there have been 33 mergers in all since 2001 alone, totaling $19.5 billion. According to a recent General Accounting Office study, these mergers have drastically changed the structure of the nation's regional gas markets, such that every single market is now considered "heavily concentrated." According to a report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, markets in 28 states are "tight oligopolies," in which four companies control 60 percent or more of gasoline supply. The upshot of this concentration, combined with the difficulty of opening new refineries, has been that oil companies can reduce capacity without much fear that a competitor will try to undercut them. And while gas prices will likely go down as demand declines following its early-summer peak, low refinery capacity virtually guarantees that gas prices will stay high for a long time. That's good news for the oil industry--but bad news for the rest of us.

There are two caveats to this argument, however. First, immediate entry is a prediction of a competitive or contestable market model with no irreversibilities. A refinery involves a great deal of asset-specificity that renders a bad investment only useful as scrap. Second, refineries produce a lot of pollution as a byproduct and obtaining a permit to build one is not without costs. (Knowledge Problem has some more recent observations.)

SECOND SECTION: Deinonychus antirrhopus notes that environmental regulations abet the oligopolists' desire to keep the club closed.

The basic idea in all of this is that the oil companies like the environmental laws (although they may claim otherwise) in the sense that it can prevent entry into the market. The hostile environment in CA to new refineries helps the oil companies drive up prices.

But creating new refining companies to break open the club is a bit more of a challenge.

MORE INSTITUTIONS TO RECLAIM. Andrew Sullivan recommends this Mark Helprin column. Mr Sullivan's suggestion: "We need better."

MAINTAINING ACADEMIC INTEGRITY. Via Pirate Ballerina, a Rocky Mountain News report on the status of Colorado's investigation of Ward Churchill.

The allegations of research misconduct referred by the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct for further investigation include alleged instances of plagiarism, misuse of others' work, falsification and fabrication of authority, CU officials said in a statement.

This sounds about right.

Colorado ought to investigate itself for hiring such a fourth-rate Barrington Moore in the first place. That a fourth-rate Barrington Moore says foolish things in public is about what one would expect. Plagiarism and misattribution, however, are contrary to cardinal values of the academy, even among postmodernists and constructivists with integrity.

Technorati tag: Ward Churchill.

RECLAIMING THE INSTITUTIONS. Late for high school? No problem, keep your pajamas on. (Via Joanne Jacobs.)

Some school districts would like to raise expectations a bit.

Pajama pants became taboo for students in the Royal Oak [Michigan] school district when administrators cracked down on the dress code two years ago, stressing the need for clean and appropriate dress they say is needed to prepare students for the workplace.

The Berkley [Michigan] School District also stressed that pajamas are inappropriate attire at its elementary schools.

About time, too.

Nothing, however, is quite so entertaining as the rationalizations of slacker subcultures.

Kristen Klosterhaus, 18, doesn't see it that way.

"I don't think it's disrespectful at all. I don't see how it could be," said Klosterhaus, a recent Romeo [Michigan, high school] graduate. "It was a comfortable thing, especially senior year. You have to get up so early for school, so why do you have to put on uncomfortable clothes?"

Egad. Devote a little more energy to getting up early and preparing for work, rather than thinking up excuses.

THE SEVEN WONDERS OF CHICAGO. The Chicago Tribune offers fourteen nominees, with an opportunity to vote for your favorite seven (or fewer.)

REWRITING HISTORY? General Electric's latest diesel locomotives are not much prettier than Cadillac's latest slab-sides. Their promotional efforts are somewhat more clever. From PBS, here is the most important day in the Nineteenth Century.


Cecil B. DeMille's Union Pacific reenacts the picture as a still-shot within the movie. A recent commercial for GE Transportation's Evolution series diesels shows us what really happened. Mr DeMille missed a steamer coughing a funnel full of cinders onto the dignitaries just before the pictures. Nothing changes in a century. The original publicity for GE's Milwaukee Road electric locomotives spoke of liberating passengers from "cinders that blind," and some of the publicity for the original oil-electric (what we now call Diesel) locomotives also promoted the new power's ability to clear the air.

ON MY WORKBENCH. More progress on the Andreyev. The buffer sockets have been installed on the pilot beam.


The four pop valves and the boiler bands have been added to the boiler. Rest assured, work on mocking up a cab floor and fettling the roof in the Soviet style is in progress.


Big stack of homework assignments to score. Modeling opportunities will be scant this weekend.

YOU CAN'T FOOL (WITH?) MOTHER NATURE. At National Review, John Berlau takes issue with the Louisiana chapter of the Sierra Club over the latter's efforts to keep the Atchafalaya Basin, an area between the Mississippi River and the Atchafalaya River, which might be described as an alternate passage of the Mississippi to the Gulf, "wet and wild."

Mr Berlau's focus is on delays in the strengthening of levees as a consequence of the club's efforts. One wonders, however, whether there's any point to the argument. This site describes what the Army Corps of Engineers is attempting to do at the north end of the basin.

The problem is that the Mississippi is on the verge of switching to a new channel along what is now the Atchafalaya River.

The Corps itself admits as much.

If it weren't for the work of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Mississippi River would not flow past New Orleans.

I've been aware of this situation for some 20 years. In the Iowa and Missouri floods of 1993, I wondered whether Old Man River would fill up enough to take that westerly course. It didn't. The Big One at New Madrid still hasn't happened. But my money is still on the river, not on the Corps. Whether some other transshipment point for barge and rail cargo bound from the Mississippi basin overseas ought be developed will be on somebody's agenda sometime.

LAISSEZ DIE FASCHINGDIENSTAG ROULANT? Word has reached Cold Spring Shops that New Orleans has been the location of an annual pre-Lenten party. In much of the world, that party is known as "Carnival," which is derived from a Latin word involving the eating of meat in anticipation of the meatless days to come. The German version is Karneval, with "Faschingdienstag" having much the same meaning as "Mardi Gras." Milwaukee? Cincinnati? New Braunfels? Ready to pick up the slack? There's a traditional Baltic cure for hangovers.

GETTING THE INCENTIVES RIGHT. Today's big story is a decision by Louisiana emergency management officials to hold the Red Cross and other eelymosynary institutions outside of New Orleans. Why? Not only to encourage the residents to leave, but apparently to discourage people from lingering at the Superdome and the Convention Center. Betsy's Page has the money quote from the Red Cross site.

Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.

Apparently it's easier to pick up stragglers piecemeal from the neighborhoods, rather than to get the incentives right to gather people at a few centers from where mass evacuations can be put together. This transcript of Hugh Hewitt interviewing Major Garrett has more.

Some emergency responders caught in town by a convention made this observation (got the link here. These people were apparently part of the emergent civil society noted here.)

If the relief organizations had saturated the City with food and water in the first 2 or 3 days, the desperation, the frustration and the ugliness would not have set in.

Apparently the relief organizations were ready to go. Look, this matters on a personal level. I would not have remained a member of the Chicago Chapter Circle of Friends or recommended writing a check to the Red Cross had I doubted the organization's ability to get things done. I'd also rather not have to refer to such a dismal example of policymakers misunderstanding the incentives so badly.

TONE DEAF. Cadillac's latest slab-sided sedans are butt-ugly. Now comes a television commercial to suit the car. A silver sedan backs into the tunnel. I'm not sure whether what comes next is the firing up of a linear induction motor or the firing of a pistol, but the sedan departs the tunnel at some great velocity.

What's the message, that the owner can simultaneously demonstrate a lack of aesthetics and a surfeit of road rage?

LOSING CONFIDENCE IN THE INSTITUTIONS? Laura at 11-D approves of a David Brooks column suggesting shifts in the public mood. Here's the take from 11-D.

Fourth, there is going to be a lot of rebuilding going on. Not just in New Orleans, but in Washington. Institutions and levees are going to torn down and rebuilt.

Possibly. (I'm going to gloss over the preceding three points, which focus on the role of government and future political alignments. More on that another day.)

Here's Mr Brooks.

The economy and the moral culture are strong. But there is a loss of confidence in institutions. In case after case there has been a failure of administration, of sheer competence. Hence, polls show a widespread feeling the country is headed in the wrong direction.

Katrina means that the political culture, already sour and bloody-minded in many quarters, will shift. There will be a reaction. There will be more impatience for something new. There is going to be some sort of big bang as people respond to the cumulative blows of bad events and try to fundamentally change the way things are.

The economy, strong? Perhaps. But we still have the fallout from the dot.com mania and the cult of the CEO to work through, let alone energy prices comparable to those linked in economics to the productivity slowdown of the 1970s. The moral culture? I have seen some truly nasty writing the last couple of days, from all points of the political compass. Here is one of the more temperate observations on the moral culture.

In other words, in a culture where many people dress like gangstas, talk like gangstas, and strut like gangstas, should we be shocked and horrified that they start engaging in gangsta crime when given the opportunity?

I can't help but conclude that if the tragic natural disaster in New Orleans had occurred in a culture that had daily practiced the Golden Rule, rather than the Gangsta Rot, we would have seen more scenes of neighbors helping neighbors and far fewer scenes of neighbors preying upon neighbors.

If you want to go looking for the Superfund sites of commentary, whether Angry Left or Moralistic Right, you're on your own. I want to take a shower.

The political culture? Look no further than Tuesday's Best of the Web, taking a dig at Mr. Brooks attempting to resurrect "national greatness conservatism." At Hit and Run, Jesse Walker finds a High Clearing post asserting this disaster produces a win for everybody.

Katrina has chiefly served to confirm people in their previously held views. Liberals proclaim it proof of the need for a robust federal government (shades of Bill Moyers in September 2001), conservatives find themselves confirmed in their belief in the overriding importance of social order vigorously enforced, and libertarians regard the disaster and its aftermath as an exemplary failure of government. (Anarchists see government failing at even its core functions. State-accepting libertarians see government as having ignored its core functions for inappropriate pursuits.) Environmentalists amaze themselves with the realization that Katrina proves we need cars with better gas mileage and religious nuts of all persuasions discern the hand of God smiting their - and, need it be said, his own - enemies.

Bleah. Heat up a second tank of water.

So what about the institutions? Government at all levels failed the residents of New Orleans. My view of the excesses of Big Entertainment, fundraising efforts notwithstanding, is not favorable. So what about the institutions? Eleventh grade precalculus students are beginning the semester doing collages. So are Harvard's current 1-Ls. Perhaps it is time to reconsider the damage that was done to institutions of long standing during the unrest of the 1960s and the 1970s.

SENSITIVE INSENSITIVITY? Instapundit on the prohibition of the Red Cross and other non-governmental eelymosynary institutions from bringing supplies into New Orleans.

Apparently, they wanted people hungry, thirsty, and anxious to leave.

They also wanted the relief workers who came into the area to avoid being accused of harassment, a development that annoys commentators as diverse as The Anchoress and Mahablog.

Something there is about the deployment of relief workers, whether they be professionals or volunteers, that reminds me of the much-maligned "Repple Depple" system of restoring the strength of U.S. Army units during World War II. Apparently teams of relief workers are being held outside the recovery zone and being split up once the authorities -- and there is still division of command, and that might not be all bad -- decide how many people they'd like to deploy and where.

At the other end of the replacement pipeline, replacements were trained by replacement centers (or stripped from divisions), shipped as anonymous replacement increments to a theater of war, and held at the repple-depple until needed by units. These men were military orphans with little esprit de corps and no cohesion. Many thought of themselves as replaceable parts in the giant army "machine," or as rounds of ammunition. The sole virtue of this system was that it allowed divisions to stay in near continuous combat for days on end, theoretically without eroding their numerical strength. As casualties left, replacements came in. However, the reality became that replacements came in, and with no combat experience and no one in their new unit looking out for them (the "I don't know him and don't want to know him, he's only gonna be a casualty" syndrome), they quickly became casualties.

Those that do not recall the past ...

BEER, CIRCUSES, AND RABBITS. The latest news on last Friday's rumble suggests the football players got caught up in somebody else's scrap. (At Northern Illinois, disciplinary hearings are kept confidential; the absence of specific facts or of comment from the athletic department ought not be interpreted as evidence of a coverup.) But this quote from one of the players is priceless.

"Nobody goes to a frat house looking for a fight."

Riiiiight ...

AVOID THE STRAIN, TAKE THE TRAIN. Cousin Eddie offers Ten Reasons. Closer to home, no rebirth of the Kate Shelley 400 in the immediate future.

MAKING THE CASE THE WRONG WAY? There has been a change in editors at Destination:Freedom and the new editor's manifesto is not encouraging.

China is out-producing us (and everyone else) despite massive inefficiencies (the Chinese use eight times as much energy to produce a ton of steel as we do, yet still beat us on price). In part, that is because there are essentially no environmental or labor laws in China. Those are important factors, and we need to make sure that American workers are not forced into the kind of filthy, slave-labor environment in which the third world toils. But they are also producing engineers by the millions, and we are not. We can’t simply bemoan the competition, because they are winning. We have to beat it, and to do that we will have to do everything smarter and better and more innovatively, and that means travel and shipping have to be faster, cheaper, and more efficient. Take a close look and listen to what Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric, is doing with his company, because he gets it. America needs to rationalize --- by that I mean make sensible and logical what is presently wasteful and stupid --- all that it does.

But apparently working faster does not include using aircraft to connect cities separated by farmland or empty space.

For example, it made no sense for jet planes to hop between cities less than 400-500 miles apart when jet fuel was 90 cents a gallon. Now that it is going to $4-5 a gallon, it makes even less sense. Yet we are still going at a snail’s pace in building high speed rail between America’s cities, and a good distribution network at train terminals so people can get around when they get where they want to go. It’s not about wanting choo-choos. It’s not about nostalgia. It’s about winning.

Outside of California, the Official Region, and the Chicago area, where are the emerging corridors that will support a train service calling at stations spaced 50-100 miles apart?

The cost of housing is through the roof in many parts of America, yet as energy costs spiral upward, and congestion worsens, the pressure to live closer to jobs will increase, not decrease, putting still more upward pressure on housing costs. One solution: much better, faster, and more frequent commuter rail, and transit-oriented development.

Possibly. But the houses that will gain in value will be precisely the kind of transit-located, space-conserving high-rises that people have been paying money to move away from. Will the school districts that come bundled with those houses be up to the challenge?

Of course, the question is always raised, how do we pay for all that? And one answer has got to be: stop building unnecessary highways that only make congestion worse. The Highway Trust Fund needs to become a Transportation Trust Fund, and we need a Congress that understands why that is true. As I am fond of saying, highways are a great thing, but they can’t be the only thing.

What unnecessary highways? Private vehicle miles driven have grown far more rapidly than highway miles. Although the Superintendent is partial to Anthony Downs's corollary to Parkinson's Laws on highway congestion, surely the slow expansion of capacity, coupled with the rebuilding-in-place of the existing roads is a more plausible villain than the provision of a few mile roads into now more-settled areas.

THE DRESS REHEARSAL MIGHT HAVE WORKED. Last night, some recollections of Hurricane Ivan's effect on New Orleans in 2004. This morning, a Richard Baehr column in American Thinker (via Betsy's Page) notes that around 80% of New Orleans residents did evacuate this time. The figure of merit I alluded to last week was an estimate of 1/3 of the population ignoring the orders to evacuate.

A LITTLE PRE-GAME SCRIMMAGE. Football players involved in altercation at Pi Kappa Alpha. Remind me ... winning the Silicon Valley Bowl and building the new Alumni House and the weight room and study hall was supposed to elevate the university's image.

SPEAKING OF BASTIAT'S BROKEN WINDOW. There is a weblog called Bastiat's Window, currently keeping track of Katrina-related manifestations of ... guess what?

Technorati tags: hurricane katrina, bastiat's broken window.

OVER A MILLION DOLLARS RAISED. The weekend fundraiser has brought in over $1 million in contributions recorded at Truth Laid Bear, as well as unknown unrecorded sums. Thanks to all for pitching in. The reconstruction is likely to take a lot of time, money, and patience.

CIVUS ROMANUS SUM. Background entertainment for tonight's posting: Rome: Engineering an Empire on The History Channel. All hail covered stadiums! Enclosed malls! Running water! Sanitary sewers! What the show suggests is that the project that precipitated the decline of the Roman Empire was the Baths of Caracalla, also known as the ruins that inspired the original Pennsylvania Station. The baths themselves were rather expensive, and Caracalla rather foolish.

MORAL HAZARD? John at Common Sense and Wonder turns up some New York Times commentary recognizing the moral hazards inherent in federal flood relief aid ... if it's the Dakotas in the winter or Iowa in the summer where floodplain redevelopment is involved. More on the moral hazard dimension in a few days.

DRESS REHEARSAL. Last fall, I was doing some sabbatical-related work in Europe, with Hurricane Ivan bearing down on New Orleans. I do recall turning in one night wondering whether I would wake up the next morning to learn that there would no longer be a New Orleans. We were spared that time. But Generation Why has looked at the archives for that day. The Interstates were configured to all-lanes outward somewhat more rapidly this time. We will probably not know for some time whether more people took it upon themselves to get out, or hitch a ride out, or head for the official shelters sooner, when ex post it mattered, than they did last year, when ex post riding it out was not an error.

HERE WE GO AGAIN. Robert A. Samuelson's latest Newsweek column.

Even the direct effects of Katrina aren't entirely clear. Airlines will inevitably suffer from higher jet-fuel prices, and tourism to the Gulf Coast will plummet. But the impact on agriculture, aside from higher fuel prices, may be slight. In 2004, Gulf ports handled 22 percent of U.S. wheat exports, 71 percent of corn exports and 65 percent of soybean exports, according to the Agriculture Department. By themselves, the figures imply a nasty bottleneck for U.S. exports and global food supplies. The good news is that the big grain movements don't occur until late fall, after the harvests, and, by that time, Gulf ports may be working again. Finally, the rebuilding of devastated areas could actually boost the economy in late 2005 and 2006.

Um, no, the money going to restore communities that have been wiped off the map is money that could have been spent differently by the residents of those communities had they not been wiped out, and the [undisclosed] donations that my readers and I have made for disaster relief is money we could have spent on pizzas or home improvement or travel or hobbies instead.

In honor of this column, I have just created a new Technorati tag: bastiat broken window. Economist readers, use it.

SAD NEWS ON A SMALLER SCALE. A construction helicopter dropped a load of concrete on a ski-lift gondola near Innsbruck, Austria. Nine died. The surrounding mountains are snow-covered all summer, and this accident spoiled some skiing trips.

Last fall, I attended the Railway History Conference up on the Semmering Pass, and I was impressed with the legions of day-hikers making their way across the mountains and boarding the trains back to the cities at sunset. (The gondola on the Hirschenkogel sells one-way tickets. Day hikers buy a return ticket, walk up, hoist a brew, and ride down at sundown.) Yes, we are digging out from some difficulties in the States. Spare some thoughts for the Germans and Austrians.

MARGINAL AND INFRAMARGINAL USES. Rabbi Marc Gellman explains "triage."

The allocation of scarce resources to an overwhelming number of needy people is one of the most daunting ethical conflicts a healer or protector can face. Who is to be saved when not all can be saved? This is not just an ethical question, it is an ethical nightmare, and we are watching the nightmare on television every night.

The procedure that has evolved involves ... basic economics.

The reason for triage decisions is the fact of limited resources. Now there is much to say about why lifesaving resources are limited in this catastrophe, but only a fool or an abject ideologue cannot grasp the fact that when the strongest possible storm hit the most vulnerable possible city, death, devastation and chaos were sure to follow in its wake no matter what the preparations for the storm. Yes, more could have been done, and nothing I say or believe ought to be construed in any way as justifying any possible malfeasance of what public officials could have or should have done ahead of this killer storm.

But the act of preparing to do more includes opportunity costs.

It is not merely naive but profoundly foolish to have expected that 100,000 troops with water and food and patrol vehicles and helicopters and busses and trains and showers and shelters and electricity and bulldozers and levee-repair crews and mobile kitchens and tent cities and psychological services and identity checkers and employment services and construction crews and electrical linemen and mechanical and structural and civil engineers and architects and water-control experts and animal-removal experts could have all been set up somewhere out of the storm path but close enough to swoop in and pluck the soaking victims out of harm’s way despite the collapsed bridges and levees the minute the winds stopped blowing and minute the tide subsided without missing a heartbeat.

And so to the heart of the matter.

Triage is where morality meets reality. It is precisely at times of chaos that morally informed but tough-minded triage decisions must be made, otherwise morality is simply a dilettante’s luxury and a mere intellectual puzzle for the philosophy classroom, but irrelevant on the street.

Guiding that morality: allocative efficiency.

In general, triage requires the splitting of the affected population into three groups. The first group is the group that is suffering fatal injuries and will probably not live no matter what is done to help them. The second group is the group of people who are affected but who are not suffering any life-threatening injuries. The third group is the group of people whose lives are at risk, and who will die soon if they are not treated right away but who will live if they are treated. The moral thrust of triage is to identify the third group as soon as possible and give them the first claim on the scarce resources that are available.

The people who will recover are inframarginal patients, as are the people who will not recover. At the margin, resources allocated to anything more than making those patients comfortable are resources not available to help the people who will die without the help. Behind what Rabbi Gelman describes as the "moral thrust" is pure allocative efficiency, making the marginal patients better off while leaving the inframarginal patients no worse off.

And his conclusion restates the fundamental economic problem.

I believe we are compelled to acknowledge that no possible scenario of human existence will ever free us from more than occasionally having too much need and not enough help. Killer storms, wars, famines and other natural catastrophes will test us forever. That is the most sad fact of life here on planet earth. And in the face of temporarily scarce lifesaving resources, there will always be those whose idea of helping is to scream, accuse and point fingers at people they hated before the storm.

Read the whole column, and reflect on the accomplishments that enable the Rabbi to refer to "temporarily scarce" lifesaving resources.

WILL YOU LOOK THIS GOOD PUSHING 100? Today offered an opportunity to make an end-of-summer visit to the nearby Illinois Railway Museum. The grounds were fairly full, with a good-sized contingent of kids. Many of the kids might have been just a little old for Thomas and friends, or their parents aware of how crowded the grounds get for Day Out with Thomas. (The place has parking areas designated for strollers on such days.)

One of the trains running on the main line was this Chicago Aurora and Elgin Wheaton Local. Closest to the camera: Car 309, built by Hicks in 1907. On the far end: Car 308, built by Jewett in 1906. (There is also a somewhat newer wooden car, No. 321, being worked on in the car barn.)

The Town of Union Band came over to play Dixieland tunes. Here the band uses a new picnic shelter as an improvised bandstand. The kid cutting the rug at trackside is an extra. The band provided concerts on one of the streetcars for a while. (An open car is one item missing from the collection. With nearby Milwaukee's tradition -- a big chunk of surviving Milwaukee equipment is in this collection -- of illuminated party trolleys, that might be something to consider.)

Inside a preserved Chicago streetcar, some vintage advertising cards. This one appears to be a promotion of the Atoms for Peace program. Uncle Sam is doodling with an atom, and he's got a microscope and a most sinister collection of flasks and stills to his left.

The big print: "You bet we have CONFIDENCE IN A PROSPEROUS AMERICA." The subtext: federally-funded research anticipates the best that is yet to come. On the other hand, the $35 digital camera is revealing its limitations. The Truman-era trainspotters who made do with Kodachrome 10 would no doubt think I'm crying with my mouth full.

IF YOU HAVEN'T GOT A PENNY, THEN A HA'PENNY WILL DO. The campaign to raise money for hurricane relief and recovery in the Gulf Coast continues all weekend. I repeat my recommendation to write checks to the McCormick Tribune Foundation Hurricane Katrina Relief Campaign (which has raised the $2 million in contributions to be matched with $1 million of foundation money, but will appreciate additional resources) and to the American Red Cross.

Technorati tags: flood aid, Hurricane Katrina.

STARTING OUR FOURTH YEAR. Was it as recently as September 5, 2002, that the Cold Spring Shops opened? Feels like a lifetime ago. Unbeknownst to me, Bill Sjostrom, who once put up with me at Northern Illinois, opened Atlantic Blog the same day. Newmark's Door and Chicago Boyz also have September 2002 startups. Check them out, if you've not been there lately. We all started on Blogger with the same base template. I'm the remnant. Judge for yourself whether some 5000 posts over three years is "sporadic" posting.

PROFESSIONALS STUDY LOGISTICS. In the Civil War, the end of the Rebellion was ordained when President Lincoln was able to observe, "The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the seas." Via Tiger Hawk come a number of observations about the events in New Orleans, including a link to an instructive Stratfor essay that spells out the commercial usefulness of a Mississippi Delta port.

Rather, it was geography -- the extraordinary system of rivers that flowed through the Midwest and allowed them to ship their surplus to the rest of the world. All of the rivers flowed into one -- the Mississippi -- and the Mississippi flowed to the ports in and around one city: New Orleans. It was in New Orleans that the barges from upstream were unloaded and their cargos stored, sold and reloaded on ocean-going vessels. Until last Sunday, New Orleans was, in many ways, the pivot of the American economy.

That's President Lincoln's point. And it is something to ponder. Our youngsters ought to reflect on the existence of an inland river system allowing unvexed access to the high seas from places as scattered as Mobridge, South Dakota, Tulsa, Oklahoma, LaCrosse, Wisconsin, and Morgantown West Virginia. (Contrast that with Russia, where Mother Volga, despite all the efforts of Ivan Grozny, Peter the Great, and Josef Stalin, gives western Russia access to a Black Sea under the control of a rival power, and the several major rivers of Siberia follow parallel, northerly courses toward the ice cap.)

During the Cold War, a macabre topic of discussion among bored graduate students who studied such things was this: If the Soviets could destroy one city with a large nuclear device, which would it be? The usual answers were Washington or New York. For me, the answer was simple: New Orleans. If the Mississippi River was shut to traffic, then the foundations of the economy would be shattered. The industrial minerals needed in the factories wouldn't come in, and the agricultural wealth wouldn't flow out. Alternative routes really weren't available. The Germans knew it too: A U-boat campaign occurred near the mouth of the Mississippi during World War II. Both the Germans and Stratfor have stood with Andy Jackson: New Orleans was the prize.

True up to a point. (The German saboteurs who landed by U-boat on Long Island had the responsibility of inter alia destroying the Gallitzin and Portage tunnels on The Pennsylvania Railroad.) How much money, however, goes into maintaining the Mississippi-Missouri-Ohio and connecting river canals? Some of the smaller inland waterways, including the now-abandoned Portage, Wisconsin canal and the Hennepin Canal, both of which connected the Great Lakes system to the Mississippi River system, never produced the hoped-for public benefits.

Syracuse to Baton Rouge by way of Oshkosh?

The problem is that there are no good shipping alternatives. River transport is cheap, and most of the commodities we are discussing have low value-to-weight ratios. The U.S. transport system was built on the assumption that these commodities would travel to and from New Orleans by barge, where they would be loaded on ships or offloaded. Apart from port capacity elsewhere in the United States, there aren't enough trucks or rail cars to handle the long-distance hauling of these enormous quantities -- assuming for the moment that the economics could be managed, which they can't be.

But the presence or absence of good shipping alternatives reflects the decisions to subsidize -- or not -- the internal improvements. I don't recall any convincing argument that the net social benefits of the Army Corps of Engineers' tax-subsidized provision of waterways are positive. To be sure, additional freight cars, or tracks, or dedicated toll roads reserved for heavy trucks, would be costly to provide. But maintaining a river system that might be contributing to the sinking of the Gulf Coast -- and don't get me started on Tulsa Port of Catoosa -- and in the course of events inducing substitution away from the rails, might be something else for discussion in the weeks to come.

KICK BUTT AND TAKE NAMES. Lee at Right Thinking from the Left Coast has been thinking about the responsibility for the failure of emergency management efforts in the last week.

The head of a corporation is called its CEO, the Chief Executive Officer. The CEO’s job does not require that he actually know anything about the type of product the corporation produces. For example, take a software company. The CEO’s job is to run the company, and he leaves the actual creation of software products to his vice presidents, engineers and marketing people, who he hires.

The president of the United States is really nothing more than our national CEO. His job is to make sure things get done, and in this regard he is authorized to hire people to whom he delegates the specific authority to pursue the president’s agenda. This is why we have cabinet secretaries and heads of departments and all of the other people who make up the executive branch of our government. They report to the president. The head of FEMA, for example, is one such appointee.

In a corporation, when a subordinate is discovered to have committed some kind of malfeasance, or is revealed to be grossly incompetent for the job at hand, the CEO is faced with a decision. One option is to immediately fire the employee .... The other option is to keep him around and weather the criticism for doing so.

To an extent, the "CEO" metaphor fails. The national government has taken much of the responsibility for disaster relief unto itself (with consequences I wish to explore in a future post.) Presumably part of a President's agenda is ensuring that the disaster relief will be carried out expeditiously. The States, however, are not wholly-owned subsidiaries (Congressional bundling of transportation money with drinking ages and speed limits notwithstanding) and those States, and their counties and cities have some freedom of action. That makes it less likely a President, even one with a Harvard MBA, can go to the morning meeting and "expect" results.
That a CEO can safeguard the interests of the company's owners without actually knowing "anything about the type of product the corporation produces" is also a bit of a stretch. Although the railroads took a bit of stick during the 1950s and 1960s for continuing to promote section hands to chairman of the board, after stints in the engineering or mechanical or rate department along the way, the professional-manager types brought in from other sorts of businesses tended not to acquit themselves very well. Companies, the six-dollar "succeed in business" paperbacks at the airport bookseller notwithstanding, are not homogeneous dollar machines.

The poster's conclusion, however, is correct. In a constitutional republic, the voters do have the responsibility of voting out of office those officials that fail to assume responsibility.

THE EVOLUTION OF COOPERATION. Division of labor emerges in the French Quarter.

In the absence of information and outside assistance, groups of rich and poor banded together in the French Quarter, forming "tribes" and dividing up the labor.

As some went down to the river to do the wash, others remained behind to protect property. In a bar, a bartender put near-perfect stitches into the torn ear of a robbery victim.

While mold and contagion grew in the muck that engulfed most of the city, something else sprouted in this most decadent of American neighborhoods - humanity.

The Quarter had the advantages of being located on the precolonial high ground, as well as supplies of comestibles to draw upon. Robinson Crusoe, forsooth!

Yes, wealthy people feasted on steak and quaffed warm champagne in the days after the storm. But many who stayed behind were the working poor - residents of the cramped spaces above the restaurants and shops.

Tired of waiting for trucks to come with food and water, residents turned to each other.

Johnny White's is famous for never closing, even during a hurricane. The doors don't even have locks.

Since the storm, it has become more than a bar. Along with the warm beer and shots, the bartenders passed out scrounged military Meals Ready to Eat and bottled water to the people who drive the mule carts, bus the tables and hawk the T-shirts that keep the Quarter's economy humming.

I think I have some less grim material for this week's classes. Read the rest.

Elsewhere in the Crescent City, attention turns to the fate of the Super Dome. To paraphrase General Patton, "Corporate-welfare stadiums are monuments to the folly of mankind." Get rid of it.

RECOLLECTIONS OF EASIER DAYS. Chief Justice Rehnquist has died. As of this evening, the commentary on the legal weblogs known to the Superintendent has been of the "just the facts variety," if in fact there has been commentary. Apparently some of the interest groups couldn't wait for the end of Saturday's college football games to begin alerting their bases. That's just part of the gathering political storm. Elephants in Academia has been thinking about some of the other parts.

And how things have probably changed. The Chief Justice gave a speech at Northern Illinois University, sometime in the fall of 1988 or 1989. The speech itself was delayed a few minutes to allow the John Lennon Society, a bridge between the Students for a Democratic Society and Move On, to protest the speech. Never mind that. The next morning, the Chief Justice and the dean of the College of Law were having breakfast in the university snack bar. I was able to slip into the table across the room divider from the two to have breakfast, after bidding both a good morning. The Chief Justice did have security (a rather alert-looking man a few years older than I was who I did not recognize as faculty and who did not resemble a student) a few tables over, but apparently a professor grabbing a coffee and a sweet roll after his morning swim was not a risk.

BREAKING NEWS. Chief Justice Rehnquist has died. The perfect political storm continues to gain strength. More in the morning.

WE CONTINUE TO SOLICIT YOUR ATTENTION. The campaign to raise money for hurricane relief and recovery in the Gulf Coast continues all weekend. I repeat my recommendation to write checks to the McCormick Tribune Foundation Hurricane Katrina Relief Campaign (which would like to match $2 million in individual contributions with $1 million of its own) and to the American Red Cross. (Consider helping finance the government's efforts as well. Although there is no War Bonds campaign, many employers have a Payroll Savings Plan, or park some of your No-Touchies in a Treasury Bill fund.)

Should those suggestions not be to your liking, please consider the nominees listed at The Truth Laid Bear's clearinghouse.

Many of our neighbors on the Gulf Coast would like to kick back and watch a college football game or toss some brats (or a regional facsimile thereof) on the Weber this weekend, but those plans have been overtaken by events. The relief agencies are now welcoming walk-on volunteers, but they'd rather have cash as opposed to in-kind contributions. Get involved.

The Interdictor continues to post from New Orleans. He's received a resupply from the authorities. Photon Courier has located a Texan now live-blogging from the Astrodome.

Technorati tags: flood aid, Hurricane Katrina.

PROFITEERING, OR CONSERVING? What is price gouging? Rand Simberg notes the propensity of legislators to conduct experiments against reality.

Imagine the headlines, "Legislature Mandates Pi To Equal 3.00000 -- Some Analysts Warn Move May Spur Engineering Problems," or "King Canute Command Tide To Recede -- Some Analysts Warn Move May Spur Wet Footwear Problems." What would we think of the analysts who thought that the proposed mandates were no problem, perfectly in consonance with the laws of physics and human nature? Even most people with typical journalism educations would recognize such heads and subheads as the jokes they are, but somehow when it comes to basic economics, the laws of supply and demand, and the function of prices in a market economy bizarrely remain subjects for public debate.

(As a footnote, early in this century the Indiana House attempted to define pi as 22/7, a figure close enough to the true, if transcendental value, for much engineering work. A legislator also proposed to introduce a formula for squaring the circle into the curriculum -- and you thought you had trouble with the intelligent design crowd. A mathematics professor at Indiana U. spoke with his state senator -- there might be wisdom in specifying bicameral legislatures -- and spared the state the embarrassment of making such outlandish statements in public. But I digress.)

Back to Mr Simberg:

Let's recap, briefly, for those who never took the class, or have forgotten it. It's really simple. In any locality, when the supply of a particular item is reduced with no change in demand, or the demand for it increased with no change in supply, or supply is decreased with a demand increase, prices will go up.

This is a signal to the market. To those demanding the product, it is a signal that the supply is relatively short, and that they should perhaps rethink the level of their demand, if possible. To the suppliers, it is a signal that more of the resources must be brought to market. In both cases, it will result in a change in behavior on both parties that will restore the balance between supply and demand. Moreover, it does so in a useful, quantitative way. It tells the supplier how much expense, risk and effort she should expend to increase the supply. This calculation may even bring new suppliers into the market. It also indicates the degree to which it is sensible for the consumer to change their demand. When by fiat we pretend that the price has not gone up, it's like covering up the signposts, and we shouldn't be surprised when those supplying no longer attempt to increase the supply, and those demanding can't be bothered to reduce their usage of that particular commodity.

Then head on over to William Polley.

Any potential "gouging" going on is more a function of economic illiteracy than anything else. And it's bad because it stimulates bad behavior by policymakers. Extreme cases garner a lot of attention and turns the tide in favor of price controls, which would be a big mistake. The appropriate thing to do is to let prices rise and let consumers search for the best deal. Let the market deal with "gougers". The market is a hard master.

And by all means, if you are in college and haven't taken a basic economics course, run, don't walk, to the registrar and sign up now.

(He's at Western Illinois. His department's budget reflects enrollments, as does ours.)

La Profesora Abstraida links to an executive order from Georgia Governor Sonny "Son of Canute" Perdue cautioning retailers against price gouging. It looks like a reasonable request.

For example, a retailer may increase the price of their products as is necessary to replenish their existing daily stock at current market rates, maintaining the same markup percentage he or she applied prior to the enactment of the price gouging statute.

The devil is in that "markup percentage." There are conditions on the elasticities of supply, demand and resource supplies sufficient to ensure that the equilibrium retail price maintains a constant ratio to the wholesale price of a single input. Those sufficient conditions are unlikely to hold in the presence of at the moment inelastic supplies of gasoline, particularly summer grades in ozone-impact areas, and relatively inelastic demands for gasoline. (Each of you may thank me for doing my part to not bid the prices higher. The weather has been quite conducive to bike commuting to work.)

CATCH THAT HUSKIE PRIDE. Tom McMahon reports that Monsanto is having a closeout on 8 ounce styrofoam flying corn cups at $11 for 250.

EMERGENCY MISMANAGEMENT? Don at Cafe Hayek links to a statement from the American Red Cross to the effect that by order of the National Guard and at the request of the Louisiana Department of Homeland Security, the Red Cross must set up outside New Orleans.

The state Homeland Security Department had requested--and continues to request--that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.

There will be plenty of opportunities to second-guess this decision, but Mr Boudreaux's judgement might be too harsh.

Judging from the Red Cross's explanation (above), government apparently feared that the Red Cross would deliver relief with too much success. Why else would people choose not to leave a destroyed city, and even want to return to it?

So, government decided that letting people die was a better course than risking any success that the Red Cross would likely have at providing disaster relief.

On the other hand, if New Orleans is in fact the country's largest Superfund site, aid stations within the city might have kept more people in greater danger longer. It's still too soon to sort that out. But if there are aid stations close to the city, those buses in a drowned motor pool not far from the Super Dome will stand in mute reproach to somebody's decision not to coordinate the city and parish government's plans with the Red Cross.

ADDITIONAL RESTORATION OF TRAIN SERVICE. Amtrak now intends to begin turning the Southern Crescent at Meridian, Mississippi, rather than Atlanta, beginning 12 September, and the City of New Orleans at Jackson, Mississippi, rather than Memphis, beginning 5 September. Connecting services to points south or west of Meridian or Jackson are not yet anticipated.

TOUGH DAY FOR THE MAC. The Big Ten teams got their quota of bought wins today, with Central Michigan, Kent State, Ohio, Miami of Ohio, Ball State, and South Florida joining Bowling Green and Northern Illinois as losers. In games of interest to Cold Spring Shops, Wisconsin held Bowling Green to twelve touches in the third quarter while scoring three touchdowns enroute to a 56-42 win. (That combined score might exceed the total points in some Badger basketball games.) Northern Illinois outscored Michigan in the second half, but five turnovers and two or three special team errors stood the team with the world's least imaginative pep band to enough first-half points to win.

GOING FROM DISASTER TO DISASTER. Going Underground reports that New Orleans Police Captain Tami Brisset travelled to London to participate in Tube Relief, a fund raiser in the aftermath of the July attacks on London Transport.


Captain Brisset has since returned to the States, from where she notified Going Underground that she had located most of her immediate family, which is scattered to several places in the southeast.

TONIGHT'S RAILROAD READING. The October Trains came in today's mail, with coverage of a steam train that circled Louisiana as part of that state's bicentennial.

This picture, from the tour pages, shows the train crossing the Mississippi River on the Huey P. Long Bridge, departing New Orleans for New Iberia and points west.

Note how far below the top of the levee the streets and houses to the right are.

THERE WAS SUCH A FIRE. Insta Pundit attempts to put the fate of the Gulf Coast in perspective.

But this is a natural disaster without parallel in American history -- like the Chicago Fire if it had spread across three states -- and disaster relief isn't like calling Domino's. Nor does the fact that we're Americans somehow offer supernatural protection from the consequences of a calamity like this.

Yup. Make that "like the Chicago Fire if it had spread across three thickly settled states." We observe Fire Prevention Week the first week of October because the same day as the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Peshtigo Fire killed some 1500 people in Michigan and Wisconsin (two states, but the fire jumped across the waters of Green Bay to the Door Peninsula.) The death toll in Chicago: 300. Firefighters in Milwaukee or Sheboygan would be second-guessed for choosing to go south or north to help.

THE TRAINS THAT GO TO COLLEGE. Students and employees at Southern Illinois, Illinois, Illinois State, and Western Illinois as well as a few fortunately-sited private colleges generally like their Amtrak. But here's the economics question. Officials at Western Illinois claim to spend $100K less on transportation when faculty and staff use the Illinois Zephyr (as .pdf) rather than drive or attempt to fly. Would they be willing to kick in, oh, say, $50K to the Illinois Department of Transportation to replace the general funding paid for, inter alia, by residents of DeKalb, or of Stevens Point, Wisconsin, to name two college towns not currently served by Amtrak?

AN INTELLECTUAL SNOB TEST. I thought Adlai Stevenson said this, but this site attributes it to Dan Rather:

An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.

JMPP has been attending the Ring whilst trying hard not to think of Bugs Bunny.

RIDING ON THE CITY OF HARAHAN? Freight trains will be able to make their way to the north suburbs of New Orleans along Canadian National's old "Main Line of Mid-America." Trucking and barge companies face difficulties with shifting river channels and collapsed bridges. Amtrak service to the area is out with the City of New Orleans turning at Memphis, the Southern Crescent at Atlanta, and the Sunset Limited operating between San Antonio and Los Angeles. Nothing doing east of Pensacola to Jacksonville. The only bright spot is that the carrier might be able to run some Superliners through maintenance with fewer sets required to cover the routes.

But it takes a lot to completely block a freight railroad. Many years ago, Army Air Force General Van Fleet wrote an article in Trains explaining the difficulties of knocking out a railroad with the biggest air armada in the world. Railroad maintenance crews have a lot of practice clearing derailments and restoring tracks clearly. The stuff is as close as Jackson, Mississippi, and this site challenges observers to come up with a way to crank up a disaster relief effort any faster or offer evidence of one cranked up any faster elsewhere.

In that light, President Bush's morning characterization of relief efforts to date as "not acceptable" illustrates the limitations of his Harvard Business training, which is where he probably picked up that "expect" he likes to use. It is easy for the CEO to go to the morning meeting and bang his fist on the table and "expect" a higher performance; one must first have some idea of the objective and the capabilities.

The recriminations over the relief effort and what to do about rebuilding the Gulf Coast continue. Sometimes about the best one can do is make a joke.

"I'll take 'Cities of the World' for $200, Alex."

"The answer is: 'The troops were not welcomed with open arms, the relief plan did not anticipate the looting, and renegade elements shoot at helicopters.'"

"What is New Orleans?"

A Chicago Tribune editorial this morning makes the same point in a somewhat more earnest way.

At the Louisiana Superdome, a near riot broke out Thursday among survivors desperate to flee the filth and fear and board buses to be whisked to safety in Houston. Armored vehicles and National Guard troops moved into the city even as gunfire halted some rescue efforts.

Yes, the very people dispatched to save New Orleans came under attack.What began as a natural disaster morphed into human disaster as authority crumbled and mob mentality ruled. In a city with no electricity, no potable water and no way out, desperate people took desperate measures. Surely many of those who took loaves of bread and bottles of water from grocery stores sought to feed themselves and their families. But what occurred in New Orleans went beyond mere survival. Jewelry shops and clothing stores were ransacked. Guns and knives were taken. Gangs roamed the watery city.

We have seen such images before, but usually in other cities, other lands. Some who watched the crowds of looters likened the scenes to Baghdad after the fall of Saddam Hussein, when the Iraqi capital was literally sacked by its inhabitants.

The editorial also notes that there is a time to gather stones together, and then a time for recriminations.

Later, there may be time to sort out what really happened in New Orleans. Why a city that knew it was vulnerable to just this kind of natural disaster was so woefully unprepared to respond. How some people's fear or frustration--or sense of opportunity--overwhelmed them. How many single acts of vandalism turned into a crescendo of looting and violence.

Mark Kleiman has some musings on what is to come next.

New Orleans is an historic city, but maybe it ought to be relocated to the north of (i.e., above) Lake Pontchartrain rather than being rebuilt where it is sure, eventually, to be re-flooded. (When the shifting course of the Euphrates made Babylon uninhabitable, the inhabitants build Baghdad instead.)

Or maybe the economics and the equities suggest, instead, rebuilding it where it was. I'm not sure, and neither, I think, is Mike, but we both think the question ought to be considered rather than giving in to the reflexive demand to build a new city to be drowned again.

That has nothing to do with the question of whether, as a nation, we ought to help people located in harm's way, rather than merely sitting back and watching them drown if the poverty of their local government doesn't allow them to adequately protect themselves from disasters and from the consequences of disasters. Of course those levees should have been shored up. Of course those hospital ships should have been located offshore last week. Of course there should have been an evacuation plan. Of course there ought to be someone in charge of the rescue effort now. The vast outpouring of private money is welcome, but this is not a case where sponanteous self-organization is going to get the job done.

Yes, disaster relief has some second-order moral-hazard problems associated with it. But that's not a reason to neglect it, any more than we should neglect the victims of car crashes in order to teach people to drive more carefully.

(This post will probably run in two sections. I recall a post I read last night, on a different machine, remarking on an evacuation drill that suggested one-third of the population would blow off the evacuation. That would be 150,000 people remaining in New Orleans alone. It also occurs to me that having hospital ships parked offshore a week ago, with an at that time Category 1 storm closing on Florida to become a Cat 5 over the Gulf sounds like a good way to waste money if the storm doesn't strengthen, or a good way to lose the ships if it does. And until the forensic engineers do their work, I'm going to leave the jury out on whether the levee strengthening, complete or not, would have had any effect.)

Eric Zorn has also been thinking about preparations and consequences, including some observations about Speaker Hastert's infelicitously timed suggestion that much of the city ought revert to wetland. Just scroll.

We can maintain focus on the humanitarian crisis while not allowing the depth of that crisis to cloud our judgment about whether it makes financial sense to re-create the city on the spot.

Indeed. Read this and this as well. And let's not make this a partisan argument. Professor Kleiman's post noted that the Clinton Administration's flood relief plans involved buying out some particularly vulnerable properties rather than rebuilding those towns in place. Valmeyer, Illinois, although a much smaller settlement than New Orleans, was replaced in toto on the bluffs, not on Old Man River's floodplain. That is an option to consider.

And in consideration of that option, let me be a controversialist. News reports indicate the Louisiana Superdome is no longer safe for human use. A suggestion.

Get. Rid. Of. It. And. Do. Not. Replace. It.

Why? Because it is the most notorious symbol of the worst excesses of the entertainment business. It has hosted more Super Bowls than any other enclosed stadium. That's the game where excessive showboating by players sometimes takes second place to the halftime show, and the game that many people watch just for the commercials. It has hosted a number of Final Fours of the college basketball tournament. That's the most obnoxious manifestation of the beer-and-circus mentality in education, as well as the sport that most notoriously uses student-athletes for the latter without providing the diploma implicit in the former. And what employment opportunities does the stadium itself offer? Parking attendants? Beer vendors? A very few get sent to finishing school to serve as butlers in the skyboxes. Enough.

SECOND SECTION. Oh, dear. Captain's Quarters reports that it was a rebuilt section of the Seventeenth Street levee that failed. The forensic engineers will have their work cut out for them.

THIRD SECTION. Check out two posts at Free Will. One recalls an emergency-response exercise at Southern Illinois University.

I was invited to participate in a think-tank type of workshop at SIU on a similar scenario for Southern Illinois if the New Madrid [fault] were to blow and turn this joint into a sandbox. You know what we found? That we were screwed. There was no way to plan ourselves out of the worst-case-scenario. That, as it turned out, was the point of the exercise: To impress upon us that there was no Batman, there was no Superman, and that if the earthquake hit, with hundreds of thousands of people spread out across dozens of devastated towns, it would take days, at a bare minimum, before anyone could reach us, and that we had to take this threat seriously and convey to others the importance of preparing for the disaster, having a bugout kit, being at least moderately prepared for a survival situation.

Another recalls the rapid-response to a much less deadly but still costly urban flood.

To a non-engineer, this seems like a fairly straightforward problem, and, just as now, people who didn't know any better raged wondering why it couldn't be fixed instantly. In practice, however, engineers spent days attempting various fixes, most of which were colossal failures. The breach was the size of a car, and they tried filling it with rock, with cement, even with mattresses. They sent in mine divers from Kentucky to swim in under the breach and try to figure out how to seal it.

Again: if there is a faster more effective response to the troubles in New Orleans, please suggest it.

MORE REASON TO DIG DOWN. Illini or Huskie also recommends the McCormick Tribune Foundation Hurricane Katrina Relief Campaign. The Foundation will now match the first $2 million in contributions at the rate of 50 cents for each dollar.

ON MY WORKBENCH. There have been a few free minutes to do a bit more work on the Andreyev class 4-14-4. I've been installing the front nameplate and working hinges on the smokebox door, as well as putting the running boards together.




Here is a closer look at the piston rod extensions and the smokebox door.



The Shops have recently taken delivery of a cheap digital camera. Additional model-blogging is likely.

INVEST IN THE RECONSTRUCTION. Katrina's effect on the Port of New Orleans and the Chemical Coast will not be without macroeconomic consequences. William Polley has a survey of the early speculation about the effects of idle refining capacity and oil prices. Market Power is weighing the role of the national government in rebuilding or relocating New Orleans and some of the other populated areas below sea level.

The internet is abuzz with recrimination and speculation about governmental reallocation of resources from the Army Corps of Engineers to other military projects, about tax cuts depriving Washington of resources to spend on internal improvements, and about the fiscal stimulus or lack thereof from the reconstruction effort. I'm too tired to sort all of that out today. There is something I'd like the policy makers to consider, however.

The picture dates from the World War II years. This is Third Street at State Street in Milwaukee, looking north toward Mader's restaurant, which is still serving those German specialties as well as the beer chaser in a glass boot. The lead coach on the train came out of Cold Spring Shops lettered "Buy War Bonds." There might be some advantage to the government financing whatever Gulf Coast reconstruction plan emerges that way. To the individual, a war bond is a way of prepaying one's future taxes. Some of the commentary I'm seeing about possible reluctance of overseas investors to hold additional U.S. debt in the face of a potentially large economic hit suggests the creation of an equivalent to the war bond as a way of preempting that reluctance as well as providing something symbolic. (If nothing else, that bond sale might placate such commentators as have argued the Bush administration has asked little of most citizens. The price of gasoline promises to be more effective at prompting another symbolic sacrifice some commentators have urged, namely exhorting suburbanites to unload their sport-utes. A week ago I counted some eight pickups, minivans, and sport utes as well as two big motorboats parked at roadside with "For Sale" signs on them.)

I TOUCH THE FUTURE. I TEACH. Professor Gustaaf van Cramphout has crossed the final summit. The English Department's announcement notes,

There are few among us who profoundly touch the lives of all they meet. Gustaaf was such a person. By his very essence, he raised the standard by which we all hope to live; his spirit and legacy of intellectual accomplishment and compassion remain with us all.

A student columnist offers a similar tribute.

[T]he many lives he has touched - my own included - struggle through our thoughts and prayers to repay some measure of the kindness, caring and belief that he has for so long demonstrated to - and inspired in - all of us.

Case in point:

For former Star columnist Leah Kind, who received her master’s in English from NIU in 2004, Van Cromphout’s kindness sets him apart.

"I remember a girl in our program had signed up for too many classes and had to drop his after the first day," Kind said. "But for the next two years, every time he saw her in the hall, he said hello and asked her how school was going. That after one day of one class - he cared that much."

It is on behalf of the efforts of Gustaaf and others like him that these pages will continue to defend what is best about the university. No doubt some Jack Welch wannabe with a vulgar "business model" of an education product would see the "efficiencies" in replacing the tenured faculty with freeway flyers who could be had cheaply without a 36 year commitment, and why bother keeping a man who speaks ten languages and gets the fine points of Transcendentalism, involving ideas too complex to fit a Power Point slide? Would a harried freeway flyer be able to shape the progress of freshmen into seniors, or post-graduates? Clear signals, Gustaaf.

THANKS FOR LOOKING IN. The referral logs suggest the presence of extra readers looking at the charitable recommendations. I trust you did write your checks. I have. Other sites are doing yeoman work keeping up with the news; you know who they are. Here are a couple of finds of interest. Blue Star father Donald Sensing notes that the Marines have arrived, and their job description is "an amphibious force for whom flooding is no hindrance." Will at Vodka Pundit has discovered ... I am not making this up ... a weblog being posted from an office somewhere in New Orleans.

DIG DOWN. Today's sole post is a recommendation that readers find some money to assist with Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. Although your tax dollars are at work, the federal emergency managers coordinate their efforts with those of the relief agencies. Consider writing a check to each of the following agencies.

The Instapundit post summarizing this effort includes a reader suggestion.

I would suggest people donate through their companies whenever possible. Most major corporations offer matching funds to the dollar for charitable donations. Find who's collecting money for relief efforts, then file for a match through your employer instead of sending to the agency directly.

For those readers who work in higher education, the public sector, or the nonprofits, consider a contribution to the McCormick Tribune Foundation Hurricane Katrina Relief Campaign. The Foundation will match the first $1 million in donations with 50 cents for each dollar. (Terry Teachout has noted this effort.) I'm not quite flush enough to come up with that million myself. Help me out.

In addition, for the past fifteen or so years I have been a member of the Circle of Friends of the American Red Cross of Greater Chicago. Although the national organization has had some rough times, they're still among the first responders, and the Red Cross volunteers who have had time to talk with the fourth estate at the refugee centers in north Louisiana and Texas are unanimous in asking people to send money. The national organization provides a number of methods by which readers can donate.

Should those suggestions not be to your liking, please consider the nominees listed at The Truth Laid Bear's clearinghouse.

(Speaking of "clearinghouse," what are you waiting for? Send it in!)

Technorati tags: flood aid, Hurricane Katrina.