PEOPLE RESPOND TO INCENTIVES. I'm skeptical of second-best arguments that use other countries' distortionary subsidies as arguments for offsetting subsidies or taxes in the United States. If other countries are prepared to tear up their economies to make some U.S. citizens better off it's probably better to let it happen, even if border region residents of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas benefit by it.

Gasoline is selling for six pesos per liter across the border in Tijuana, which works out to about $2.50 a gallon, way cheaper than gas prices approaching $5 a gallon in San Diego County. Diesel fuel is cheaper still -- $2.19 a gallon.

All of this is a boon for James Blue's auto shop, located in a strip mall in the arid hills east of downtown San Diego. His business, Express Performance Center, installs extra-large fuel tanks in pickups and other work vehicles used for runs to fill up with cheap gas in Mexico.

"Purpose of your trip to Canada?"

"Buy some of Her Majesty's cheap gas."

Yes, I actually got away with that one in the spring of 1980. After President Reagan removed the price controls on U.S. produced new oil (it's too late in the evening to get into "old oil", "new oil", and "subject to windfall profit tax") that particular reason for a lunchtime trip to Canada went away.

The article explains the way in which the subsidized price rips up Mexico's economy.

There is another reason Mexicans do not like the American invasion of their filling stations. Even though Mexico is an oil exporter, it doesn't have the refinery capacity to turn enough of the oil into gasoline, and therefore imports much of its gas from the U.S. By subsidizing the fuel and reselling it to Americans at cut rates, the Mexican government loses twice.

The same argument applies to Chinese subsidies to its steel industry, intention of exporting to the United States notwithstanding, or to any other national policy that might provoke allegations of "dumping".

As Dave Tufte notes, You Can't Make This Up.

So ... get this ... they sell crude oil to the U.S. at the going rate, buys back gasoline at the going rate (about 1/3 higher), and then knocks over 40% off of that price to sell to consumers.

Taxpayers foot the bill.

Conjecture: if a trade practice is really "dumping" it hurts the dumping country more than it hurts the country being dumped on.

BROKEN WINDOW ALERT. In my back yard.

Local experts say although recent floods have caused plenty of misery, they do have a silver lining, and may in fact, stimulate our economy.When severe floods hit the stateline, people fled their homes, only to return to find carpeting ruined, furniture trashed and walls and floors warped. While no one wanted the floods, they do have a silver lining.

Insurance proceeds as well as loans and grants from FEMA, may actually help stimulate our economy. Residents and businesses may need to hire contractors to refurbish their homes. Retailers may also see a spike in business when flood victims may buy new carpet and appliances.

Floodwaters damaged more than 650 stateline homes along the Rock River.

In Minnesota.

Builders and contractors who have taken huge financial losses in recent years are finding some relief in Hugo and other east- and north-metro cities where marauding spring storms hammered thousands of houses.

Phil Miller pinch-hits for Frederic Bastiat.

The problem, as any economist worth his salt will tell you, is that disasters divert resources that would have been used more productively elsewhere. Instead of creating economic activity, disasters destroy wealth, and make the affected society, as a whole, worse off.

Consider this waterfront bar in Love's Park, Illinois that has to replace flooring it just replaced.

Business is down 75 percent, costing [owner Therese Ann] Dobson and her two daughters thousands of dollars. This after they poured more than $100-thousand into renovating the place. It was only open three weeks, before the Rock started to rise.

Then the task turned to sandbagging and pumping. But despite their best efforts, Dobson saw the water start to seep in last Wednesday.

"She came running into the kitchen and said get a mop, it was all coming through the wall actually, it wasn't coming through the door. So we had to move the sandbags," says [co-owner Paula] Schwartz.

PREDATOR CYCLES. Sometimes, the invasive species become part of the food chain.

Native walleye appear to be surviving the quagga invasion, and native lake trout seem to have adapted to eat round gobies, another freighter-borne invader that eats quaggas. Lake trout are what now sustains [Lake Huron fishing captain Janice] Deaton's charter business.

The fact that these two native species appear to be outlasting the more popular exotic salmon give conservationists some hope.

"There are native species left," says Jennifer Nalbone of the conservation group Great Lakes United. "There is some integrity to the system left, and it's our responsibility to protect it."

[National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration scientist Gary] Fahnenstiel says there is a chance [Lakes Huron and Michigan] can ultimately reach a balance with the invaders where they will have a self-sustaining but less productive - and lucrative - recreational fishery.

Self-sustaining does not rule out population fluctuations. We've already noted that Erie Island sea snakes also snack on gobies.

OBSERVATION OF THE DAY. Michael Totten goes adventuring in Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro, and Serbia.

Albanian pro-Americanism resembles that of both Poland and Iraqi Kurdistan. The unspeakably oppressive communist regime pushed Albanians strongly into the U.S.-led Western camp, and the humanitarian rescue of Albanians in Kosovo from Slobodan Milosevic's tyrannical despotism bolstered that sentiment even more.

Read the full story. The old squabble between Mao and the rest of Communism left some souvenirs on the Albania-Montenegro border, and going from one country to another is not always easy, with centuries-old disagreements leading to border guards allergic to some license plates and passport stamps.

IT'S NOT WORTH IT. A Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article asks readers to consider the potential loss of the Great Lakes.

What price would you put on our Great Lakes - the sand beaches and rocky shores; the salmon, perch and rainbow trout; the smell of a freshwater breeze? Should we give it all up so that international shippers can save about $55 million a year?

That $55 million figure appears to be valid.

Only about $55 million a year, in terms of transportation savings over truck, rail and barge alternatives, according to a 2005 Joyce Foundation-funded analysis of cargo flows on the Great Lakes. The study has been ferociously criticized by shipping interests as an overly simplistic look at a complex transportation system, but it was successfully defended before an independent panel of transportation experts.

"I don't think there is any disputing the study," says Dennis Schornack, a former President Bush appointee who served as U.S. chair of the International Joint Commission, a binational panel created to resolve boundary water disputes between the U.S. and Canada. "It was peer reviewed, and they say if anything it erred on the high side of the benefits."

Though the raw numbers indicate the public might be getting a raw deal, you are not likely to find protesters on the lakefronts.

This doesn't surprise Notre Dame biologist David Lodge, who has been working with economists for more than three years to find the shipping-specific costs tied to invasive species in the Great Lakes. He explains that most people are unaware of the scale of the problem. At the same time, the shipping industry that benefits from the traffic - and the ability to pollute - reaps most of the gain.

"The damages of invasions are spread thinly over every member of society, and the benefits of the status quo are more concentrated," Lodge says. "So the incentive to maintain the status quo is strong for the people who benefit, and the incentive on the part of society to advocate for change is small for each individual. So we don't get the political reaction."

What the article does not spell out is how small, in the scheme of things, that $55 billion is. I have been following the St. Lawrence Seaway story for some time. The overseas business for the Port of Milwaukee works out to fewer freight car loads per day than a now-abandoned Wisconsin electric railroad handled in its final years. Elsewhere, the traffic is bulk cargo in relatively small ships (ocean going tankers and container ships are larger than the Seaway permits) that serve as transportation for invasive species. The tankers will dock where the refineries are, on the coasts. The container ships will dock at Halifax, because the Canadian rail system can get those containers inland much faster than the ships can.

Meanwhile, the lake life appears headed for a Lotke-Volterra crash.

While politicians dawdle and scientists scratch their heads over how to keep the lakes safe from the next invader, a Darwinian drama plays out at a Pentium pace under the waves.

This year the U.S. Geological Survey released its annual prey fish survey for Lake Michigan, and it showed a jaw-dropping plummet in the numbers of little fish that sustain the lake's prized salmon and trout species.

The estimated "biomass," or overall weight, of prey fish in 1989, the year after the zebra mussel's discovery in the Great Lakes: about 450,000 tons. The estimated biomass now: about 31,000 tons. That's a drop in half from the approximately 60,000 tons recorded in 2006, itself a record low since the annual surveys began in 1973.

At the same time, there has been an explosion in the number and range of quagga mussels on the lake bottom. Quaggas were first documented in Lake Michigan in 1997, but remained a bit player in the lake's ecology until five years ago.

Quaggas have since squeezed out most zebra mussels and have expanded their range well beyond that of the zebras, which can survive only in shallower waters.

Quaggas are proving to be far more disruptive to the lake than zebra mussels, which must cling to a hard surface and normally don't live in water deeper than 75 feet. Quaggas can lurk at depths exceeding 500 feet and can make a living on both rocky and clay bottoms. Zebra mussels essentially formed a necklace around the lakebed's perimeter. Now quaggas are carpeting it.

As a result, the lake's invasive mussel numbers have increased a hard-to-comprehend 16-fold in just the past five years, and are spreading so fast that the biologists who make their living studying them have a hard time finding the words to describe what's happening.

"I've calculated that there are 380 trillion mussels in Lake Michigan," says Tom Nalepa of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "That was based on estimates in 2005, and I know the quagga mussel population has increased three- to possibly fourfold over 2005, so you can multiply that by threefold. I don't even know what that number is. Quadrillions?"

Yes.

"It's clear as a bell, it's like distilled water out there," says University of Michigan limnologist and Great Lakes fishery expert David Jude. "But there are all these implications for the food chain, and we haven't seen the end of it all yet."

At this point nobody can say what the lake will look like when the population of quaggas finally plateaus.

But zebra and quagga mussels are already implicated in the demise of a fatty shrimp-like animal called diaporeia that once flourished on the bottom of Lake Michigan at densities as high as 20,000 per square meter.

Diaporeia have almost completely disappeared from vast expanses of Lake Michigan. Though scientists have yet to prove the link between their demise and the mussels' arrival, few doubt the connection.

This lost battle for the bottom of the food chain affects everything above it.

Lake Michigan's struggling whitefish are an example. The regional favorite at restaurant fish boils evolved to depend heavily on nutrient-rich diaporeia. The average weight of a 7-year-old whitefish was more than 5 pounds in 1988, the year zebra mussels were found in the Great Lakes. It has since crashed to barely a pound.

With their main source of food disappearing, whitefish are trying to eat the mussels, shells and all.

The likely outcome will be a collapse of the whitefish population. But when the quaggas exhaust their food supply, the quagga population collapses? The article mentions a seaweed called cladophora that prefers clearer water. What is cladophora's food supply? What fish use cladophora for food?

BARRIERS TO MOVEMENT. Higher transportation costs have the same effect as tariffs. That dynamic is not yet evident, but a case study of a coat hanger manufacturer in Monticello, Wisconsin illustrates how that will play out.

The manufacturer is anticipating an increase in business, in response to a new tariff on coat hangers imported from China.

[In Monticello], a hanger plant that closed as the Chinese came to dominate the market has reopened, with management in the process of hiring 20 workers to add a second shift.

"Thank goodness the tariff is in place," said Jeff Bosen, manager of the plant that is owned by Shanti Industries Inc. of Foothill Ranch, Calif. Without it, "we'd be shutting the plant down."

Further into the article, one notes that dry cleaning establishments are not necessarily cheering.

John Krantz is at the center of the situation.

He is the president of Tri-Supply Co. of Loves Park, Ill., which for many years bought its hangers from the Monticello plant. Tri-Supply serves about 300 Wisconsin dry cleaners among its 1,700 customers in the upper Midwest.

In 2002, Krantz started to buy from Chinese suppliers. Although he has to order two months ahead instead of having a truck come to his warehouse daily, Krantz said he had no choice. "I started losing too much business" to competitors who were buying from China, he explained.

As more and more hangers came from China, U.S. plants began to close until only one, M&B Products Co. in Leeds, Ala., remained open. It started the case that eventually led to the tariffs. They were imposed on "wire garment hangers, fabricated from carbon steel," which were being sold for "less than fair value," according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. The tariff is from 33.85% to 221.05%, depending on what Chinese plant made the hangers.

We must have a tariff to protect our right to get just-in-time delivery of more expensive but U.S. made coat hangers, which sounds fair for U.S. makers of coat hangers, but consumers of dry cleaning services might have a different sense of fair.

According to Richard Klinke, president of the Wisconsin Fabricare Institute in Greenfield, a box of 500 hangers "is pushing over $50."

When M&B started its case, Klinke was able to guess the outcome. He is the owner of Klinke Cleaners, Madison, which has 19 outlets across the state.

As the case was pending, Klinke stuffed his warehouse with hangers. He now has about 375,000, purchased at old prices.

At the moment, he has other more pressing cost problems. "Utilities, health care make this look kind of small, to be honest," he said. But he added that eventually the hanger shortage will show up in his retail prices.

It already has at other, smaller outlets.

Some of those dry cleaners are asking consumers to return their coat hangers for recycling. That way, however, leads to the point I suggested in my title. The scrap -- the article mentions it earlier -- goes to China.

[The manager of the Monticello factory] cannot produce as much as he would like because of another challenge facing the U.S. hanger industry - a shortage of scrap steel, an important raw material.

"The availability of steel is very difficult," said Bosen. "If we had an unlimited supply of steel, we would be trying to get to 24-hour production" instead of the 16-hour days the plant will run once the second shift is hired and trained within the next two months.

The steel shortage, too, is the fault of China, industry officials say. As they see it, the Chinese have been aggressively buying scrap steel in the U.S. only to send it back across the Pacific Ocean as coat hangers, among other things.

The tariff will compel U.S. scrap dealers to sell less scrap to China. More jobs making coat hangers in Monticello, fewer jobs making coat hangers in U.S. junkyards (apologies to David D. Friedman).

That's where the transportation costs come in. More expensive oil means more expensive shipment of scrap and coat hangers overseas. On the other hand, perhaps the Chinese government will subsidize its steel industry in order to overcome either the higher transportation costs, or to overcome the tariffs. Questions: are the policies distinguishable in any way, or sustainable in any wayy?

QUOTE OF THE DAY. Glenn Reynolds.

My response to those who say that increased drilling is pointless because it won't yield immediate results -- like Arnold Schwarzenegger --is why worry about the greenhouse effect, then? Nothing we do will cool the planet immediately. Yet we're told immediate action there is vital. In fact, we're told that by none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger, in the very same speech.

Follow the links.

THE SUMMER BEFORE AMTRAK. The Milwaukee Road still offered weekend excursions to the Wisconsin Dells.

Brochure from the Cold Spring Shops research collection.

Note the timings: leave Chicago at 8.00 and arrive across the street from the boat dock at 11.30. The steam excursion out of Milwaukee has a three-hour schedule. I'm not sure what adjustments for inflation and for the additional expenses of a steam special I should make to that $8.15 fare. In those days, a box lunch with a standard-issue meat sandwich was probably less likely to provoke finicky kids or diet-obsessive parents.

The Milwaukee used push-pull gallery coaches from the Chicago commuter train pool. Those cars would otherwise sit idle the entire weekend. (Such cars made one regular round trip between Milwaukee and Chicago at the time.) Finding train crews qualified to work the cars posed no problems.

It's the ability to shift equipment from one use to another that makes me skeptical of proposals to further fragment the U.S. passenger train service, such as this offering by Green City Transit.

Amtrak should operate into brands much like European rail travel does. This will help Americans identify with what particular service they want. You can read below.

Not a good idea. In the United Kingdom, the continual and fearless shuffling and rebranding of passenger carriers spawns confusion, as well as added expense hiring-in stock. Operators borrow stock that does not bear the operator's service marks, and passengers are not sure whether their tickets are valid. (We have the same problem with Metra tickets around Chicago or Metro-North and New Jersey Transit tickets around New York not being good on Amtrak). Better to have a smaller number of operators, with more freedom to shuffle equipment as traffic warrants.

Back to that history lesson: in that summer of 1970, there still was train service from Chicago to Wausau, Wisconsin, involving a connection at New Lisbon. (The service ended in October.) The passenger, however, was dealing with one issuing carrier, The Milwaukee Road, no dealing only with Badger Cross Country at the Chicago ticket office and then finding the Marathon County Passenger Transport Executive's vending machine at New Lisbon.

EVERYTHING WE LIKE GOES AWAY. Shakey's once bragged, "We serve fun at Shakey's, also pizza." No longer in the Midwest. The pizza at Madison and Oshkosh was once pretty good, although a visit to one a few years ago, after the chain went to the everything fried buffet format, disappointed. One habitue of the Oshkosh pizzeria liked that format.

DEALING WITH COSTLY INFORMATION. Tim Harford's The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World attempts to understand more challenging topics than The Undercover Economist. Book Review N^o. 23 suggests that the supporting material is not as carefully developed as was the case in Undercover Economist (or perhaps I'm more familiar with Undercover's supporting material). That noted, the book sheds light on a number of phenomena that appear strange if one's prior exposure to economics is to the principles style complete and perfect information (the distinction is important) economy. The chapter on business follies is instructive. (Whatever headquarters rewards, headquarters gets more of, and in a world of costly information, conflicts of interest between wealth-pursuing owners and emolument-pursuing administrators managers are inevitable, and winner-take-all tournaments with rewards out of proportion to productivity likely.) The chapters on residential self-segregation and the emergence of stereotypes, which Mr Harford refers to as "rational racism", are sobering. Agglomeration economies are non-trivial. There's more to come in an upcoming book review on that point.

Some of the stories call for further work. A mating market in which there are 19 identical men and 20 identical women leads to a Bertrand dissipation of all the gains from trade available to the women. Does that model generalize? Mr Harford doesn't tell us.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

THE COFFIN MEDAL, THE SPEED TROPHY, AND A CENTURY OF SERVICE. The centennial of the South Shore Line features a quasi-academic conference with a visit to the repair shops (which to this day have a Midwest interurban look to them). The railroad has become such an institution in northwest Indiana that this promotional model (somebody had a lot of fun with Play-Doh) from a special section of the Northwest Indiana Times includes a stylized interurban train.

RETAINING EARNINGS. It's a good idea for a business. The rules for higher education are different.

Why don't public colleges and universities salt away large sums of cash during good times to tide them over during bad times? Because the internal politics won't allow large sums to sit undisturbed. Because the external politics are such that when times get bad, legislators see those reserves as excuses to cut funding. (Apparently now in Massachusetts, the state is even applying this to endowments at private universities!)

Imagine, though, if a well-regarded and flush with cash private university used some of its retained earnings to set up a new campus. Cross-subsidy! Predation! Entrenchment! (I'm only half kidding: I have seen scholarly works suggesting that Philip Morris, by disinvesting in cigarettes, which is what happens when it buys Miller Beer, was lessening competition in brewing.)

OIL WILL BURN, AND PRICE WILL BUBBLE. Not so fast. Here's Brad DeLong, with figures, and Arnold Kling, and Greg Mankiw, and King Banaian.

WHY WE'RE NOT SPEAKING GERMAN. Nothing fascinates military historians like "what if," particularly if it's speculating about the bad guys winning. Thus How Hitler Could Have Won World War II. Book Review N^o. 22 will be auf Englisch. Some of the German errors are familiar: Hitler stopping the armour with the British and French bottled up at Dunkirk, whether with hopes of negotiating a separate peace with the British or as a favour to Hermann Goering, Hitler ordering three fronts into the USSR, leaving insufficient forces to invest Moscow and force the Soviet government to flee east of the Urals before winter came, the complete failure of German thinking in the Mediterranean, where author Bevin Alexander argues Malta was much more important than Crete, and that giving Erwin Rommel his head and free rein to capture the Suez Canal en route to the former British colonial oilfields in Iraq, a linkup with Reza Shah, who fancied himself an Aryan, and a linkup with the Japanese in India, bypassing the Soviet Union completely.

I'm not familiar enough with the arguments to be able to evaluate the author's claim that the Soviet Union could have been isolated without a single German boot in the workers' paradise, or that the North Africa - Suez - Asia Minor - India strategy would have fractured the British Empire and crippled the Royal Navy by splitting the fleets, let alone that such an approach would have kept the United States out of Germany's war. Perhaps more space devoted to such claims and less space devoted to Sicily, Italy, Normandy, and the Ardennes (by which time the outcome in western Europe was settled) would help the casual reader. The analysis of those western campaigns is similarly sketchy. For example, Mr Alexander suggests that a different deployment of German armour, with two fast panzer divisions waiting behind the limited number of landing sites within fighter range of England, including several ports and the Normandy landing sites, would have enabled the Germans to react more rapidly and more effectively to the landings, wherever they came. Perhaps so. On the other hand, the Germans might then be less able to flood fields in order to drown paratroopers and discourage glider landings, or their tank parks might have attracted a lot more air attention in the two months before the invasion, or the idea of using aircraft carriers as air-to-tank launching platforms. I'm sure other quibbles have occurred to people more versed in such things than I. The book's coverage prevents more substantive discussion of such things. The footnotes provide additional documentation of facts and analyses offered in the book: there is neither survey of the controversies nor anticipation nor debate of differing points of view.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge).

REVISITING HISTORY. Despite recent wishful thinking, it's unlikely anyone is going to dust off the plans for the Chicago - New York Electric Air Line in the near future. More obscure interurbans, on the other hand, are getting a second life. The Overhead Wire connects to a news article from Hampton Roads praising local legislators for writing a Virginia Beach extension into a proposed light rail line for Norfolk. It is difficult to agree with legislators proposing such a thing for their constituents' own good, which is the tone of their quotes. We are, however, anticipating a return of electric cars to Virginia Beach. Check Hilton and Due, here it is at page 331.

The Norfolk Southern, a railroad, operated 48 miles of electrified trackage, making a loop from Norfolk to Virginia Beach and back to Norfolk, serving the important resort area of Virginia Beach and nearby points. This operation was converted to gasoline rail-bus service in 1935, which was provided until all passenger service on the line was abandoned, November 8, 1947.

The electric service, which enthusiasts of the Norfolk Southern Railroad (it later became a Southern Railway property and ultimately lent its name to the merged Norfolk Southern system) have not yet mentioned in their chronology, required the railroad to note on its 1931 timetable listing Pullman service to points north and west that this timetable was for the Steam Division.

CONDOLENCES. Phil Miller remembers his nephew, Roger Goetsch.

IF IT SOUNDS TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE, THE FAST TALKER AT THE END EXPLAINS WHY. Modern data base management makes it possible for businesses to tailor services precisely to the requirements of consumers, and to price things accordingly. Thus there are charges for things that used to be free, and goods or services that used to be sold as bundles currently can be priced component by component. It's enough to make an economist rethink what life in a costless-information economy would be like.

Sometimes, however, there are information asymmetries. The seller knows the foibles of the buyer, but the buyer doesn't know the foibles of the seller until that late charge or peak period surcharge or inactivity charge kicks in. Such things provide the material for Gotcha Capitalism, which Book Review N^o. 21 recommends if for no other reason than the hints for dealing with customer disservice phone lines or writing letters of complaint or identifying government agencies that exist to enforce contracts and property rights, which do exist for buyers as well as for sellers.

To an extent, the book is an endorsement for living simply: make do without a mobile phone, don't subscribe to pay-per-view, pay off your credit cards in full each month, make relatively little use of rebates and gift cards, and buy only a house that you can finance on a thirty-year fixed-rate mortgage and you avoid many of the most common hidden fee traps.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge).

OVERNIGHT, EVERY NIGHT. A Pajamas Media correspondent (who is a Four Block World fan) explains Why Trains Just Don’t Work in America. Well, at least he explains why the long-distance train is a non-starter for transcontinental business travel.

Let’s just compare passenger trains and airplanes on three trips I’m likely to take for business in the next few months: Denver to Los Angeles, Denver to New York City, and Denver to Washington, DC.

Suppose fossil fuel prices are permanently higher. What happens to the value of Denver or Salt Lake City or Sioux City or Cheyenne or Phoenix as a location for a corporate headquarters as the air carriers retrench? The existing Amtrak long-distance service is pathetic. But in the days when the Union Pacific and Santa Fe offered Denver connections to the City of Los Angeles or the Chief, and the City of Denver and Denver Zephyr raced to Chicago to connect with The Twentieth Century Limited or The Broad Way Limited (or The Erie Limited if you were adventurous) to New York or to The General or The Capitol Limited to the District, that's still two days in travel. (It is no accident that Major League Baseball extended no further west than St. Louis or south than Cincinnati prior to large propliners.)

If you're going shorter distances, the train doesn't have to run terribly fast to beat the plane.

So why are trains so popular in Europe? Simple: Europe is smaller. My Basel to Paris trip is 250 miles; Denver to New York is 1,625 miles. Why is Amtrak popular in the Northeast? Because, here we go, the distances are comparable to Europe: Washington, DC, to New York is 203 miles.

That's been my message. It calls for a different kind of train service, though: frequent memory-pattern services calling at substantial intermediate cities add to the value of the network. Unfortunately, state and federal legislators have never been able to put together a coherent policy. Federal dollars underwrite the Northeast Corridor and contribute to the Michigan service, but it's up to the states to underwrite the trains and, as in California, provide the rolling stock. That fragmentation of government responsibility hampers the Midwestern services, which are not coordinated in such a way as to expedite connections between Milwaukee and Ann Arbor or Springfield and Lansing or Indianapolis and anywhere in the Chicago area, and it's killing any chances of an early development of additional Midwestern services (multiple frequencies Kansas City to Chicago, multiple frequencies Omaha to Chicago on the old Rock Island, possibly even multiple frequencies Chicago - the Cities - Fargo - Winnipeg) let alone the creation of some Ohio corridors.

TO MEET THE COMPETITION, DON'T PLAY ITS GAME. Bill Quinn does not like Wal-Mart, and he wrote How Wal Mart is Destroying America (and the World) And What You Can Do About It. We've been here before, and I hesitate to do much by way of Book Review N^o. 20. The opening of the book is the usual recitation of small businesses and small towns emptied by the big box, often at a distance (that consumers might be willing to trade transportation costs for a wider variety of cheaper stuff doesn't come up) and the tales of monopsonistic exploitation of suppliers (who might have problems of their own, and suppliers can tell big buyers no, as long as we're not talking about the government using its monopsonistic power to buy drugs or surgeons.) So far, so standard. Mr Quinn finishes with some advice to small business owners such as offering products not sold by Wal Mart, or twitting the Redneck Universalnya Magazin by offering to service the products they sell, or by offering delivery, or by setting up a coffee bar, at least for the regulars. We've been here before as well.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge).

FEASIBILITY, SUSTAINABILITY, SUBADDITIVITY, NONCONVEXITY, AND SPECIAL PLEADING. Wall Street Journal commentator Holman Jenkins sees doom for the air carriers.

Smart businesses ask themselves how they can make themselves more popular with customers by "unbundling" the goods or services they provide. Burger joints charge extra for cheese, but not usually for lettuce and tomato. Yet fairness is surely served by letting haters of lettuce and tomato escape the burden of subsidizing those who love them?

Provided the self-selection constraint is sufficiently cheap to implement. Consider McDonald's. Their "Speedee Service System" depended on consumer willingness to purchase a standard product, and Burger King, early in the 1970s, teased them with "Hold the pickle, hold the lettuce, special orders don't upset us." I don't recall if the cheeseburger was part of the original McDonald's lineup: in the early 1960s it was 18 cents against the hamburger's 15 cents, and the cook staff had to learn the mix of orders that would not leave people waiting more than 30 seconds for their hamburger or with cheeseburgers that would have to be thrown away after going unsold for 15 minutes. Bundling can be a way of exploiting cost complementarities (this appears to be the case for packet services carrying telephone, television, and computer signals, and such cost complementarities may be present in fast food). It can also be a way of segmenting markets according to ability to pay, something the airlines have been doing for years, and something that Mr Jenkins fails to understand.

Carriers are slicing away at services to create options for the most price-sensitive fliers to avoid services they don't want to pay for: checked luggage, meals, pillows and blankets.

To some extent, they've always done this: how else describe three-class cabins? Here, however, the problem is not one of bundling, it is one of pricing each component of the service in order to encourage proper self-selection by passengers -- a dodge that I think Jules Dupuit discovered was the railroads making third class miserable in order that none of the intended first class passengers would ever ride at the much lower rate -- while ensuring a total revenue high enough to make the operation of the service worthwhile.

To keep fares low, airlines also skimp on backup planes and empty seats -- even if this makes it harder to get home if your flight is cancelled.

D'oh! How much more are the time-sensitive travelers willing to pay to be sure a spare is available? There's an upper bound on what an airline can charge, as there are hungry charter operators out there. (The best way to make a small fortune in aviation is to start with a large fortune.)

Even so, it's far from enough as fuel costs price the flying public out of the air. Herb Kelleher was speaking for Southwest when he observed a basic economic reality: "Our only competition is the car or the television set. People who fly us are people who weren't going to fly in any case." He might have been speaking for all airlines. Their fleets and networks today are designed to fly thousands of people who don't have to fly. If ticket prices fully reflected current fuel prices, by common estimate the industry would have to be 20% smaller.

A supply curve shifts to the left. There is excess demand at the old price, but (barring annoying discontinuities) there will be a new equilibrium, involving a higher price and a smaller output. Some of Southwest's passengers might well be the marginal consumers, buying at the old price but substituting to something else at the new higher price.

Contrary to Mr Jenkins's lead, without the supposed subsidy (it's too late in the evening for me to spell out all the conditions for subsidies, which involve an excursion into something called stand-alone costs) from the price-sensitive coach passengers, there's no plane for the inframarginal passengers (there being no such thing as people who "have to fly" although there can be people who are willing to pay more than the cut-rate price to get on the plane.) The inframarginal passengers, who in the absence of the competition for the marginal passengers, would harvest a smaller consumer surplus, are not happy with their inframarginal status being recognized by the air carriers.

No wonder there is panic at the Business Travel Coalition, representing corporate travelers who need the discretionary grannies and backpackers to sustain a system of frequent connections even to smaller cities. "Brand name legacy carriers that we and American communities from coast-to-coast have depended upon for decades to provide us with affordable, frequent air service are running out of cash, and therefore, toward a date with bankruptcy, and even liquidation," the group warned last week.

Boo hoo. Their website has a typically vapid mission statement.

Founded in 1994, the mission of Business Travel Coalition is to bring transparency to industry and government policies and practices so that customers can influence issues of strategic importance to their organizations.

I see nothing on the main site about Passenger Rail, although I smell a quest for corporate welfare, in the form of more road and airport construction. Perhaps there are some nonconvexities in the provision of air service. Fewer passengers on fewer (smaller?) planes at lower frequencies are the logical outcome.

Mr Jenkins sees an intriguing replay of Penn Central, with one amusing twist.

Because even in the unlikely development that regulators would welcome capacity-shrinking mergers, the immediate costs and disruption would likely bankrupt the combined carriers before any benefits materialize. Continental and US Airways, looking at United as a potential life raft, looked closely and now see a ticket straight to Chapter 11.

Let's also dispense with any idea that Southwest, which continues to be profitable thanks to prescient fuel-price hedging, offers an answer. Southwest, though not much of a "low-fare" carrier anymore, sticks to its business model of mostly flying point to point.

Of the 50,000 city pairs served by the U.S. airline industry, only 3% can sustain such direct service. If you want to fly from most places in America to most places in America, you need your own plane -- or a legacy carrier's hub and spoke system.

That is, if there are any benefits to mergers. A combination of suboptimal-sized weak companies tends to create a suboptimal portfolio of capacity in a weak company: Penn Central, LTV Steel, Stroh's Beer. Then there's that hub-and-spoke reference. The rigamarole of getting cleared to land, landing, taxiing to the gate, unloading passengers, loading passengers (there's a reason air carriers have a "boarding process"), taxiing to the runway, getting cleared to take off, and heading to the next airport renders a multi-stop flight a losing proposition (in the time it takes to carry out all those steps, a Wolverine is nearly to Kalamazoo, even without benefit of the 110 mph track, and the Wolverine will unload and load through more than one door.) On the other hand, many of the speed advantages of direct flights from regional airport to hub are dissipated in the delays of changing planes at the hub.

JUST SLIGHTLY AHEAD OF MY TIME. Cross Price Elasticity of Demand: Push Reel Mower Edition. As the newspaper puts it, High gasoline prices changing lawn-mowing habits. The margin of substitution is still small.

American Lawn Mower Co., a Shelbyville, Ind., manufacturer of manual and electric lawnmowers, says sales are up 60 percent to 70 percent over last year.

"It's unbelievable," said Teri McClain, inside sales administrator. "I think gas prices are playing a part in this."

McClain estimates that about 300,000 push reel mowers are sold annually in the United States. That's about the same number of electric mowers that are sold. Though growing, sales of both still are dwarfed by the roughly 6 million typical gas-powered, walk-behind mowers purchased every year.

Although American are a long-time manufacturer of reel mowers, their more recent products are not as durable as their predecessors. I've been making the case for the people-powered mower for years. I got eighteen years out of their Model 1403-14, which I then replaced with a Model 1404-16. They're using a cheaper grade of steel in their handles. I've worn out two sets of handles on it in two years. Nobody'd mistake me for a retired Green Bay Packers linebacker, but apparently a lifetime of bicycle commuting to work and thirty years of dinghy sailing gives me quite the punch when it comes to using lawn implements, particularly if they're not made of the finest Ohio tool steel. That's one reason for the new Mantis Cordless. Now the grass is in its early summer dormant phrase, and I can do most of the back yard without help from the battery.

IN BASEBALL, YOU GET TO GO HOME. At Wisconsin Sports Bar, Paul Noonan has posted the George Carlin sketch comparing football with baseball. Professor Althouse has several other sketches.


The Fat Controller has not yet told me when the railways on the Island of Sodor will pause in respect.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT. 200K. Visitor 200,000 by Site Meter's accounting stopped by at 8.36:19 from 98.28.75.# somewhere in the Eastern Time Zone and looked around for 4 minutes 51 seconds.

INSTRUCTIONAL AIDS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE HELPFUL. Economists grapple with what ought to be-self evident when it comes to presenting Marshallian crosses and Viner diagrams and level sets of quasiconcave functions. They're great fun for spatial-quantitative types but a pain for everybody else. For the record, I've removed almost all of those from any introductory class I teach.

Something similar might be said about sentence diagrams. Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Digramming Sentences, the direct object of Book Review N^o. 19, makes that case. Perhaps it's a lost art in part because the main title parses as DOG \ SISTER BERNADETTE'S \ BARKING. Author Kitty Burns Flory enjoyed showing off her skills to Sister Bernadette. She also demonstrated other methods of modelling sentence structure, some of which were less intuitive than the manual according to Sister Bernadette and John E. Warriner. A passage that refers to a model called a tree diagram notes (p. 138)

These are considered more complete and, according to a friend of mine who teaches them, easier: traditional diagrams not only distort the original word order of a sentence, but, as I've mentioned, can also be insanely complex even when they're dealing with a relatively ordinary sentence.

Never mind some of the constructions of poets and novelist, see chapter 4. And perhaps the method does not help distinguish sensible from incoherent writing. Quickly: diagram "Farmer Bill Dies in House." (See p. 61). If it did, perhaps we could ask Congress to use a diagramming method as part of crafting legislation. Try this.

Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal.

Does that prepositional phrase "in restraint of trade or commerce" attach to "conspiracy" or to all three of "contract, combination, conspiracy"? Would the Supreme Court have an easier time discerning the Intent Of Congress with sentence diagrams in the Congressional Record?

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge).

PATH DEPENDENCE. At the beginning of the month, I suggested the possibility of an inspection of the Chicago-Detroit corridor. With the postponement, until August, of the steam train to the Wisconsin Dells, I had the time and the inclination to travel.

To continue a recent theme, I'll open with an inspection of the timetables. In the summer of 1954 (and the world has been a better place since the summer of 1954 than it otherwise would be, this history notwithstanding) the New York Central offered a morning schedule called train 376, The Chicago Mercury: Chicago (Central Station) 8.30, Woodlawn 8.40 central, Niles 11.14 eastern, Kalamazoo 12.01, Battle Creek 12.30, Jackson 1.15, Ann Arbor 1.58, Detroit (Michigan Central Station) 2.45. The train offered "Reclining Seat Coaches - Porter Service, Dining Service, Observation Parlor Car (N.Y.C. Car) and a Tavern Lounge Coach." You could look it up: page 189 of the June 1954 Official Guide. New York Central passengers had to know their Chicago. The Cleveland, New York, and Cairo service, as well as The Wolverine, in those days the Chicago - Detroit - St. Thomas and points east sleeper train, left from LaSalle Street Station (behind the Board of Trade) while the Detroit, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, and Charlotte service left from Central Station (lost under the Central Station towers today, and not to be confused with Grand Central Station, the vacant lot south of Congress at Franklin). The reference to "N.Y.C. car" tells us the parlor car is not operated by The Pullman Company. By 1954 the train was probably diesel-hauled, although there were a few Super Hudsons (not as fast as Milwaukee's, streamlined or not, not as pretty as Boston and Maine's Pacifics) left on the ready tracks.

In the summer of 2008, Amtrak's morning service is called Train 350, Wolverine: Chicago (Union Station) 8.30, Hammond-Whiting 8.57 central, Niles 11.09 eastern, Dowagiac 11.21, Kalamazoo 12.10, Battle Creek 12.40, Jackson 1.30, Ann Arbor 2.09, Dearborn L2.46, Detroit L3.15. The train offers "Business Class Service, Cafe, Coaches." Business Class is Amtrak's parody of what we used to call Parlor Car service. The carrier has imposed on us 2-1 non-rotating seating, a configuration that the New Haven Railroad attempted to impose on passengers 60 years ago to great resistance. The L notation indicates the train will receive or discharge passengers but warns the train may leave ahead of the scheduled time.

The trains are on different routes between Chicago and the east interlocking limits of Porter, Indiana, where the Michigan Central used to cross the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern. Penn Central routed the Detroit trains onto the Lake Shore at Porter and onto the Pennsylvania at East Chicago.

In the intervening years, Amtrak has obtained ownership of the trackage between Porter and Kalamazoo, and in cooperation with the Michigan Department of Transportation, it has upgraded the line with fencing, signs warning HIGH SPEED TRAINS at all the level crossings, and improved track and signalling with the intention of running 110 mph trains. There are a few more stops on the line now, and a more frequent service, which has advantages and disadvantages.

A few years ago, the Michigan Department of Transportation, Amtrak, and the operating railroads rearranged the service to avoid using Detroit's crumbling and badly located Michigan Central Station and to expand service as far northeast as Pontiac. Thanks to the Bluewater Michigan Chapter's excursions, I had already logged trips on the trackage. If mileage collection is not the objective, where to turn back? (A trip out on the first eastbound train in the morning is a guaranteed return, as the same stock returns as the last westbound train.)

Consider the possibilities. The street view feature in Google Maps can be helpful.

Ann Arbor? Plenty of time to stroll uphill, browse the original Border's, check the used book store, find some exotic eats, marinate in the academic-blue-state-smug. If you seek the fruits of their policies, look around you.

Dearborn? Ample parking for commuters, if they ever ran commuter trains, but with all the office parks around this would be where the commuter trains set down passengers, not take them up. No services.

Detroit? The new station is at New Center and close to the Cultural Center. There were a few no-walk zones between the New Center and Wayne State, and on a summer Friday afternoon, Wayne was pretty buttoned up even years ago.

Royal Oak? Until the end of Grand Trunk's commuter service, there was an agency station at Eleven Mile, with a downtown including boutiques and cafes nearby.

Birmingham? Grand Trunk planned a four-track, electrified suburban service with Bloomington playing the role of Homewood and Pontiac the role of Markham. They built a fancy station that was at one time converted to a restaurant. Get off the train, get in the Escalade, fort up in the trophy house, appease the trophy wife. I never could come to terms with the social stratifications of Southeastern Michigan. Smug without the pretensions of a better world is still smug.

Pontiac? Log the entire route. Get off where Woodward Avenue turns into Wide Track Boulevard. Possibly some downscale fast food or some party stores nearby. At one time, there were more Michigan Lottery outlets along Woodward Avenue than there were in the entire Upper Peninsula.

Decisions, decisions. Come along for the ride.

Amtrak Wolverine 350, Chicago to Pontiac, 20 June 2008: P32 diesel 29, Amfleet business-cafe 48165, Horizon short distance coaches 54554, 54526, 54550, P32 diesel 32 (to save fuel, shut down.) Temperature in the 70s, partly sunny conditions, dry rail. I bought a Business Class seat, boarded at 8.05, and found some Chicago Tribune material to post on. Leave Chicago 8.29:38 (I did not synchronize my watch with a standard clock), Hammond 9.01:05 - 9.02:03 central, Niles 11.10:24 - 11.12:20 eastern, conductor announces we will hold for two trains, stop at east end of two tracks 11.15:44, first Amtrak, probably 365 off Port Huron by 11.37, second Amtrak, probably 351 off Pontiac by 11.50, moving again 11.52:03, Dowagiac 12.02:10 - 12.03:20.

The path dependence really matters on this corridor. At one time, the Michigan Central was a double track railroad. During Alfred Perlman's presidency, New York Central very actively removed tracks and installed centralized traffic control. Kalamazoo to Porter was one of the first sections converted and singled. Jackson to Kalamazoo was reduced after 1975. New York Central had a freight line from Jackson to Elkhart that was its preferred routing for westbound freight. Conrail initially planned to abandon that line but concentrate the freight on a Kalamazoo to South Bend line, and it later moved the Michigan traffic to the main line by way of Toledo. (I don't know what Norfolk Southern is now doing. They had a strong freight presence in Kalamazoo and Battle Creek.) Thus did Amtrak become the owner of the Porter to Kalamazoo trackage. It's still a one-track line with controlled sidings. A few delays elsewhere on the corridor (not unexpected, the freight railroads are keeping commerce moving despite much of Iowa and some of Missouri and Wisconsin being out of bounds) more than negate the faster running possible (twelve miles in ten minutes is a 72 average, not bad for start-to-stop) with the upgraded track. On the other hand, more second track is also expensive, and a completely two-track line is an extravagance for a corridor with three Pontiac trains and one Port Huron train each way. Frequency matters, and additional trains reduce the fully-allocated deficit ignorant number-crunchers like to assign to individual trains or individual passengers. Kalamazoo 12.31:15 - 12.36:10. That's 36.1 miles in 28 minutes, not bad. Higher speed limits, however, might buy all of five or ten minutes, still not enough to salvage that 37 minute hold.

The long dwell times at stations illustrate one of the values of a corridor: the traffic is not so much Chicago - Detroit as it is Chicago - Ann Arbor, Niles - Jackson, Kalamazoo - Birmingham, Jackson - Pontiac, Ann Arbor - Royal Oak.

The train passes Western Michigan University's sports complex west of Kalamazoo: two new practice facilities adjacent to the enlarged hillside football field. More evidence of the positional arms race in the Mid-American, including our new locker room.

Restrictive signals west of Battle Creek, freight train crossing to the Grand Trunk at the west end of shared trackage. Battle Creek 1.02:29 - 1.07:12. Restricted speed through Albion. There's recent wind damage in the adjacent trees, or is the city issuing speeeding tickets (I'm not making that up) to trains? Westbound 353, due out of Jackson 1.34, waiting in siding west of Jackson (thus do the delays accumulate); Jackson 1.57:59 - 2.01:15. Still thirty down. The stock of the Michigan Artrain, including former New York Central observation Babbling Brook, is in siding west of the Ann Arbor Railroad overpass. The bookstores will make do without my money. Ann Arbor 2.40:54 - 2.45:36, Dearborn 3.17:34 - 3.20:29.

Classic Rust Belt. Two abandoned factories frame the ruins of the Michigan Central Station and office tower, behind the trees in the middle ground. I understand some of those office towers downtown are also abandoned.


Slow running on the belt railway to the new Detroit station, an Amshack above Woodward Avenue. Arrive Detroit 3.41:22. On one hand, we're less than 30 minutes late. On the other hand, we haven't done any better than Penn Central did for Amtrak in the summer of 1971. The Detroit school board tower is in the middle ground of the picture. The art institute, library, and Wayne State are nearby. The walk south does not look inviting.


Leave Detroit 3.45:43. The connection from the belt line to the onetime Grand Trunk mainline is slow and convoluted, and we're running on restrictive signals. In the 25 years since the commuter trains stopped running, the railroad has become a single track freight line, and the crossing that allowed the commuter trains to get to the Renaissance Center terminal has been removed. The train crew is coming to terms with being delayed getting out of Pontiac (and we've seen what out-of-course running does to timekeeping.) Arrive Royal Oak 4.26:32. (You might have surmised this was where I would turn back.)

I don't recall sidewalk cafes on Main Street 25 years ago. They were already well-patronized, apparently early summer Friday getaways aren't limited to Chicago. A suburb of the Motor City uses traffic-taming recesses for parking and provides bike racks?


Fifth Avenue has been closed to vehicular traffic for a beach party, apparently under the auspices of the Irish-themed tavern hard by the tracks. I found a cafe that sold a decent baguette sandwich across the street from that tavern.


The weather cooperated for this stroll around downtown. I don't recall this much commerce, or as edgy a mix of enterprises, 25 years ago.

Train time. The Eleven Mile overpass and the right-of-way north are wide enough for those four tracks. The concrete pad is where the agency station once was.


Amtrak Wolverine 355, Royal Oak to Chicago, 20 June 2008: P32 diesel 32, Horizon coaches 54550-54526-54554, Amfleet business cafe 48165, P32 diesel 29 now along for the ride. Temperature in the low 80s, clear skies, dry rail. Leave Royal Oak 5.37:20, operate somewhat more expeditiously toward Milwaukee Junction, no tower interference at Milwaukee Junction, Detroit 5.56:12 - 6.00:21, Dearborn 6.20:37 - 6.22:40, train making up some time, runs over something west of Dearborn, much clatter on the undercarriage, stop for inspection 6.31:44 - 6.40:28, eastbound 352 holding east of Wayne Junction 6.47 (perhaps laid out by 353 which was laid out by 350 west of Jackson earlier in the day), Ann Arbor 7.06:29 - 7.10:00, Jackson 7.50:07 - 7.52:30. Stop for another inspection west of Jackson, 8.08:10 - 8.15:45, crew reports no defects, Battle Creek 8.54:18 - 8.58:25, smokers hit the platform with the departing passengers and get on behind the boarding passengers, held at CP Custer 9.08:25 - 9.15:27, no eastbound train, meet on-time 354 just east of Kalamazoo 9.33, Kalamazoo 9.36:03 - 9.39:51, Dowagiac 10.07:38 - 10.09:00, Niles 10.19:42 - 10.20:19 eastern. Fast running is possible with no opposing traffic A proper corridor, however, has sufficiently frequent trains as to provide opposing traffic. Set down passengers Michigan City 9.51:32 - 9.52:10 central, ride yellow blocks Gary to Hammond, eastbound Lake Shore by near Inland Steel, Hammond 10.47:27 - 10.49:40, held at Bridge Junction 11.00:03 - 11.02:36, arrive Chicago 11.26:56, plenty of time to make the 11.40 to Elburn as planned.

MIXED STRATEGIES. Switch hitter faces ambidextrous pitcher. The rulebook has provided for this contingency.

CRUSH LOADINGS. The Naperville Zephyrs are standing room only.

It begins with a trickle, when the 8:06 a.m. Metra express rolls out of Aurora half-full—nine cars headed for Union Station.

Minutes later, at a stop on Naperville's edge, the gates open and bleary commuters fill more than three-quarters of the train. Minutes after that it's a flood, with hundreds of travelers competing for any open seat to read the newspaper, listen to an iPod and, most important, get to work.The unluckiest are left applying makeup in the vestibule, surfing the aisles or sitting on the stairs to the second level with their cups of steaming coffee.

Sometimes passengers will sit on the steps or stand rather than ask a seat-hogging passenger to move over. Recent ridership increases have, however, made standing-room-only less exceptional than it once was. This graphic probably does not capture a long-delayed reaction to the abandonment of the North Shore Line: rather, it reflects ongoing construction on Illinois 53 and Interstates 290 (the Tri-State) and 94 (the Edens Expressway), all to provide new surfaces for overweight trucks to wreck.

A related article reports that Metra bought back, from Virginia Railway Express, five coaches it had once sold as surplus to its requirements. The legislature's failure to pass a capital spending bill hampers the agency's ability to purchase additional new coaches (the Virginia agency likely encountering capacity constraints of its own.)

Yes, that's the same capital spending bill that's required before our Stevens Building and Cole Hall are renovated.

FIFTY YEARS AGO. Chicago's last streetcars lowered their poles on Midsummer Day. (With video.) The last streetcars to run were relatively new, and the Chicago Transit Authority salvaged some electrical equipment and all the window cranks for use in rapid transit cars. The last example of those streetcars is car 4391, which occasionally transports visitors around the Illinois Railway Museum.

Illinois Railway Museum, 1 September 2007.

The museum also operates several Chicago Surface Lines cars, a number of which required extensive work to convert them from work motors (particularly salt cars) back into streetcars.

A CHICAGOAN ASKS. Which team's fans are fatter? He's comparing Thirteenth Generation widebodies with loyalties to the Cubs or the White Sox. There's nothing in the column that Wisconsinites haven't suspected for years. It prompts two social-scientific observations. First, I'm waiting for the popular press to get beyond the balding yet ponytailed hippie and contemplate those Thirteeners as they approach middle age. Second, it's probably asking too much of Pigouvian taxation to apply it to those widebodies with mid-calf shorts and inverted-bowling-pin lower legs. Not pretty, gentlemen.

ALMOST TIME FOR A VIDEO. All the motion components are in place, although they require a bit of fine tuning before I decide to apply power.


The geared axle also has the eccentric crank, which poses all sorts of engineering problems if something binds.

LIMA, LIMA, LIMA. Brewers sweep, Cubs swept. Lynne, Phil, the flag hoist and the Sprecher are for you.

GETTING THE OBJECTIVES RIGHT. Megan McArdle is taking requests, including "Why does [passenger] rail suck?" Some of her post focuses on the government's schizophrenic role in funding on the one hand and doing environmental protection on the other hand, and there is a followup on the peculiarities of fully allocated cost accounting as well as a response to Chris Lawrence weighing the costs and benefits of a less dirigiste structure for government. Vermont Tiger's Geoffrey Norman offers a less cheerful view of public servants.

When the Chris Dodds of the world are running the railroads, they'll get sleepers and eat off good china in the dining car.

The rest of us will be packed into boxcars and eating stale bread.

That's not far from the perception many Midwesterners have of Acela Expresses for Boswash and standing-room-only three car Horizon rakes in Illinois and Indiana.

But it's a response to the lead-in to Chris Lawrence's post inviting me to weigh in that I'll work on here. Consider the example Ms McArdle uses to introduce the procedural thicket.

Why isn't there a high speed train from New York to Chicago? Well, first of all, this would greatly anger legislators from New York and Michigan, who like the fact that the Chicago train must pass through Buffalo and Detroit, even if this assures that almost no one with a job will actually use it.

She rules out partial privatization of Amtrak.

Amtrak can't be even partially privatised, because then who would run trains from New York through Buffalo and Detroit to Chicago in a speedy eighteen hours?

Here's why the objective of the rail system matters. At one time, The Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central reached New York from Chicago in sixteen hours (for one brief shining moment, in 15:30) with steam power. (The Pennsylvania had the more direct route, but east of Pittsburgh comes The Mountain, while New York Central used Lake Erie and the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers to run a longer distance at a faster speed.)

Going the great way around struck some railroad promoters as silly, particularly because that New York Central train headed west by way of Albany, which left the passenger at a greater air distance from Chicago than he or she was at Grand Central Terminal.

Thus, the figure of merit for a genuine high-speed train service linking Chicago and New York begins at ten hours.

Promotional poster image from Mary MacLane's Air Line historical photos. Click to enlarge.

If your objective is to provide a high-speed rail line that permits ten-hour timings, your railroad will be an undertaking of Biblical proportions. Ev'ry valley shall be exalted, every hill made low, the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.

Air Line proposal map from Mary MacLane's Air Line historical photos. Click to enlarge.

On the other hand, that's only a 90 mph railroad. Upgrade it for field-shunted Electroliners and you're in New York about 7 1/2 hours after you've left Chicago, and if you give it the fourth-generation Electroliner treatment and you can have your coffee in New York and meet a client for lunch in Chicago. On the other hand, you've laid out a railroad that misses the intervening cities, precisely the problem that would prevent politicians in those cities from committing public monies to be treated as a third-rail equivalent of flyover country.

(A historical note before I get back to the objectives: there really was an attempt to build the Chicago-New York Electric Air Line, which rather cheekily advertised its initial service between Gary and La Porte, Indiana. The aforementioned Mary MacLane has assembled a comprehensive Air Line website, including a page of contemporary images of its ruins. La Porte County in Indiana is home to two historical associations that include Air Line material on their websites.)

The problem of blending long-distance and short-haul corridor services has long challenged railroads. Those sixteen-hour flyers tended to be overnight sleeping car trains that called at Pittsburgh or Buffalo at times used by the military to begin invasions, and New York Central's Twentieth Century Limited, perhaps the most famous of the flyers, rolled through Cleveland without stopping. In the year or so leading up to the Penn Central merger, New York Central conducted a speed test with a jet-assisted rail diesel car, announced its plans to restructure its passenger train service, discontinued the Twentieth Century Limited, and introduced a memory-pattern service between Buffalo and Grand Central Terminal. No other corridors were set up at that time. The Pennsylvania Railroad discontinued the Broadway Limited and renamed the General as the Broadway Limited. After the merger, the resulting railroad was too overwhelmed with other problems to be able to set up promising corridors such as Pittsburgh-Cleveland-Detroit, Pittsburgh-Columbus-Indianapolis-St. Louis, Cincinnati-Indianapolis-Chicago, or Cleveland-Columbus-Cincinnati. A Trains speed survey of the era noted that those cities would have merited Trans-Europ Express service, the precursor to the TGV and ICE and Eurostar and Great North Eastern. Even with the skimpy offerings, the Penn Central timetables offered more frequent New-York Chicago services over more routes (via Pittsburgh on The Pennsylvania Railroad, via St. Thomas and Detroit west of Buffalo on the Michigan Central, and via Cleveland and Toledo on the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern). The grubby day trains that remained in Ohio and Indiana all died before Amtrak, although the memory pattern service east of Buffalo persists under the same Empire Service label.

And thus the problem facing people who wish to expand Amtrak. That north central corridor service in the region west of Pittsburgh and Buffalo and east of St. Louis and Chicago would be a very different service from one predicated on longer distance high-speed service, such as Denver-Chicago (doable dawn to dusk with existing technology) or Chicago-New York. But perhaps people who wish to expand the passenger rail network as a way of coping with (permanently?) higher gasoline prices would do well to study old timetables. Thanks to that Vermont Tiger post, we discover editorialists at The Brattleboro Reformer doing just that.

It's 1938 and you want to take a weekday trip from Brattleboro to New York City. A glance at the Boston and Maine Railroad's turntable shows six trains to choose from.

The Washingtonian, the top overnight train run jointly by the Central Vermont, Boston and Maine, New Haven and Pennsylvania railroads between Montreal and Washington, D.C., leaves Brattleboro at 3:30 a.m. and arrives at Penn Station at 8:12 a.m.

If you're not that much of an early riser, Train 74, the Connecticut Yankee, leaves Brattleboro at 4:35 a.m. and gets you to Grand Central Terminal by 9:45 a.m. -- the quickest train to the city. Or you could catch Train 78, which leaves Brattleboro at 5:52 a.m. and arrives at Grand Central at 11:40 a.m.

If you're sleeping in ...

They conclude,"There is no reason for rail service to be worse today than it was in 1938." That was a very good year. The Milwaukee Road introduced the world's fastest steam locomotives. But perhaps there are good reasons for the rail service to change (somehow the Boston and Maine enlarging Hoosac Tunnel for double-stacks, which hadn't yet been invented, strikes me as an improvement in rail service.) All the same, the renewed focus on passenger rail is reason for advocates and policy makers to review the best practices, and the errors, of the late steam era.

PAGING AMERICAN FLYER. The elder Walter Dorwin Teague, who design historians tend to recognize for his work on consumer goods and airliners, also worked with Pullman's Osgood Bradley division and the New Haven Railroad to design a fleet of streamlined passenger coaches that were on northeastern rails a little bit ahead of the Union Pacific's and Burlington's motor trains and well ahead of the Hiawatha (or the Coronation). The largest fleet was on New Haven, with Bangor and Aroostook and Boston and Maine also using the design. (A few railroads outside New England also bought such cars.)


The design allowed for easy tooling in a tin shop, with New Haven's A.C. Gilbert quickly turning out S (and later O-27) approximation of the cars, which may be the first time in ferroequinology that a fleet of prototype cars received a nickname based on a model. (Yes, American Flyer put names on incorrect cars: only Bangor and Aroostook had Teague baggage cars.)

I just received the 40^th anniversary issue of Passenger Train Journal, which included an intriguing article on the Alaska Railroad's passenger trains, including an interior shot of what looked like an updated American Flyer car. The article mentioned some Pullman-design cars licensed to Daewoo. I did a bit more research and came up with some exterior shots.

Going shot of a train Near Denali, from the Alaska Railroad gallery.

Here's a roster shot.

Alaska Rails image.

I suppose the roof had to be squared-off for manufacturing practicality. Now, if Amtrak ever had a proper capital budget, wouldn't a rake of these look good on the Downeasters or the Northeast Regionals? Heck, I wouldn't mind some being assigned to the Hiawathas and the Illinois service. The Passenger Train Journal article noted that Daewoo built the cars for Alaska in order to establish a presence in the North American rolling stock market.

TIT FOR TAT. I've previously reviewed books about the very real Cold War conflict under the sea. In one such review, I wrote,

The official explanation for K-129's loss depends on who one asks. The authors of Rogue suggest that escorts of a Soviet fleet exercise later detected and sank SSN-589 Scorpion in retaliation for the sinking of K-129 by collision with SSN-579 Swordfish. As the book alludes to highly placed anonymous sources and documents not yet declassified, it's up to the reader to decide.

That's precisely what All Hands Down: The True Story of the Soviet Attack on the USS Scorpion argues, which makes for a pretty brief Book Review N^o. 18, inasmuch as the subtitle, as well as the suggestion in Red Star Rogue, tell the main story. Turncoat naval officer John Walker gets an assist helping a Sov fleet locate Scorpion to sink it. Maritime archaeologist Robert Ballard turns out to have been busy locating the sunken Scorpion, using searches for Titanic as cover. The Navy's treatment of the crewmens' families was less than exemplary. Did the Sovs do Scorpion, with high officials in the District and Moscow independently backing off from investigating the mysterious sinkings of one submarine on each side so as to avoid further conflict? I don't know enough about the other explanations of Scorpion's sinking to fully evaluate the claims in the book.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge).

EXPECT PERMANENTLY HIGHER PRICES. President Bush, today, asking Congress to authorize oilfield development and new refinery construction.

For many years, the high cost of extracting oil from shale exceeded the benefit. But today the calculus is changing. Companies have invested in technology to make oil shale production more affordable and efficient. And while the cost of extracting oil from shale is still more than the cost of traditional production, it is also less than the current market price of oil. This makes oil shale a highly promising resource.

Yes, but if oil prices are in a rational expectations hyperinflation, the current price is not necessarily the best signal of an investment opportunity in a backstop technology. On the other hand, the Hotelling valuation principle for an exhaustible resource suggests the existence of a price at which the backstop technology becomes an investment opportunity. That price has never been exceeded long enough to make the oil shale or tar sand development worth doing. Perhaps that fear is behind U.S. automakers requesting federal assistance for plug-in hybrids.

Does [a Ford special pleader] mean that $4 gas, which has torpedoed the market for Hummer, isn't shifting consumer demand sufficiently to create a near-term business case for plug-in hybrid R&D?

Cynical answer: if someone is willing to help pay for it, why not ask?

Somewhat more theoretical answer: perhaps the near-term business case is only to undertake exploratory investments in concepts and in laboratory work, not in the scaling-up to actual building. Perhaps I should dust off some of my work on economic hysteresis and technology diffusion.

Next question: is there a speculative bubble at work? This post suggests not.

KEEPING ONE'S MODESTY. Capital Commerce contemplates presidential politics.

Far down the list were the environment and global warming, at a minuscule 4 percent. So despite all the media attention on global warming as an existential threat to humanity, it still scores a bit below illegal immigration in the hierarchy of voter concerns.

So much for any immediate increases in my value as a policy wonk.

GOING DOWNSCALE. Two stories from Chicago's inner suburbs (they were outer suburbs 30 years ago, but things change) illustrate the limitations of public policy as a way to reverse decline. Addison's city council believes that banning streetside window air conditioners will improve the aesthetics.

The ordinance isn't geared to just apartments and condos but applies to all structures in the village and is intended to improve the appearance of the entire community, said Mayor Larry Hartwig.

He conceded that the bulk of street-facing, window-mounted units are found in apartment buildings but said he's also received complaints of unsightly air-conditioning units in single-family homes.

Unsightly is in the eye of the beholder.

Village officials said the ordinance is geared toward window-mounted units that tend to look shabby, especially when spaces around the units are jammed with cardboard or boards. Also unsightly, they said, are the slap-dash braces made of two-by-fours that support some units on outside walls.The ordinance allows window-mounted units elsewhere in a building and allows air conditioners that are installed in their own opening in a wall.

But some landlords said retrofitting their apartments with wall units is expensive, and those type of units won't work well in many applications. Their only realistic alternative, they say, is to bar tenants from putting units in the prohibited locations.Village officials said some building owners overstate the difficulty and the expense of complying with the ordinance.

"I do daily battle with these landlords," said John Berly, assistant village manager. "Most of them are absentee landlords who don't care that much."

One wonders, then, if those landlords will really bother with the $500 fines for building code violations that will be levied starting next year.

In nearby Rolling Meadows, police have identified an apartment complex as a nest for criminal enterprises and set up a perimeter with a checkpoint at one entry. A legal challenge is in progress.

A RADICAL'S CONSERVATIVE SIDE. Former Madison mayor Paul Soglin identifies a change he can't believe in.

Umpires' mistakes like home runs that appear to wrap around the foul pole or calling out runners who clearly beat the throw home are part of the game.

I can see it now. It is the top of the 5th inning and the clean up batter has a 3-2 count with two outs and the bases loaded. The batter takes the pitch and the umpire calls it a strike as the ball drifts outside. The batter drags his bat muttering under his breath something about the umpire's relatives and suddenly the arm goes up to the sky and Dave Ortiz is summarily tossed from the game.

Instant replay shows the pitch was a ball, the batter is given first base and reinstated into the game.

Instant replay will end the game as we know it. First they will only use it for select plays such as the home run or the play at the plate. Eventually it will be used for calling balls and strikes.

Finally the game will be perfected when the umpires are replaced by lasers, a gps, and microchips.

There are two problems with the game today. It takes too long and the expensive hot dogs stink. The instant replay will lengthen the time of the game, increase the price of the hot dog, and do nothing to improve its taste.

REACTIONARY UTOPIANISM. David Frum, who not too long ago described President Bush as The Right Man (this just before Saddam Hussein was winkled out of his spider hole) has since grown frustrated with the President and his party, and he offers Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again. Maybe, but Book Review N^o. 17 suggests that conservatism, Washington-style has been obsessed with winning to the exclusion of getting things done. Whether that's Grover Norquist taking battles with self-styled progressives personally, or Ronald Reagan toning down his libertarian instincts in order to win 49 or 50 states rather than put personal retirement accounts in the 1984 platform, the past quarter-century has been one of frequent missed opportunities to rethink failed public policies. (To a large extent, the so-called progressives are really the conservatives, as in conserving precisely those policies.) Mr Frum recognizes that the failures of those policies created opportunities for conservatives. He also recognizes that many of the mainstream conservative positions are not popular with the public. Perhaps he's really arguing that there is no coherent libertarian voice in the Republican line-up. Consider his first policy goal, "A Better Deal for the Middle Class," where he notes failures of the government-funded schools, pension plans, and medical monopolies, without offering a coherent alternative to the status quo. Somehow, though, those schools, pension plans, and medicine men, along with new immigration and trade policies are supposed to "Keep China Number Two," the second policy goal. (That the Chinese might be inflicting that on themselves with their monetary policies and gasoline subsidies and export of their brightest economists does not come up.) Next comes the obligatory nod to the culture warriors in the Republican coalition, "New Life for the Pro-Life." Is this a great country or what? One political party allies Ph.D.s and high school dropouts, the other entrepreneurs and creationists. Thus, despite the failures of the regulatory commissions, the alphabet agencies, the Great Society departments, and Homeland Security, the country needs an Office of Marriage and Children. There's "Green Conservatism" (a case for a carbon tax: are those bacteria that fix carbon by excreting petroleum to be subsidized or taxed? It's also necessary to "Win the War on Terror" and "Rediscover Conservative Ideals." That is, if there is any shared vision of what those ideals are.

GETTING THE FUNDAMENTALS RIGHT. An Inside Higher Ed report assesses access, remediation, and retention. The report has the provocative headline, "Double Whammy of Disadvantage," with the following elaboration.

Students who are both low income and first generation are far less likely than their peers to transfer; six years after starting at public two-year or for-profit colleges, only 26 percent of low-income, first generation students have transferred anywhere else, compared to about 40 percent of those who are either first generation or low income and 62 percent of students who are neither. The numbers who have transferred to four-year institutions are even lower — 14 percent for low-income and first-generation students, 25 percent for those who are one or the other, and 50 percent for students who are neither first generation nor low income.

And first-generation, low-income students are one fifth as likely — 11 percent compared to 55 percent — to have earned a bachelor’s degree after six years as are students who are neither low income nor first generation.

“For too many low-income, first-generation students, the newly opened door to American higher education has been a revolving one,” said Vincent Tinto, a Pell Institute Senior Scholar and distinguished professor of higher education at Syracuse University, who worked with [Syracuse's Jennifer] Engle on the new data. “The unavoidable fact is that while college access has increased for this population, the opportunity to successfully earn a college degree, especially the four-year degree, has not.”

After a few tables supporting the prima facie case, the report elaborates,

A broad mix of factors — financial, cultural and academic — may account for the underperformance of low-income first-generation students, the Pell Institute’s data show. The students come into college with many more of the risk factors that researchers have widely embraced as diminishing college success, including delaying entry into postsecondary education after high school, attending college part time, working full-time while enrolled, having dependent children, being a single parent, and having a GED. The average first-generation/low-income student has three such risk factors, while the average student who is neither first generation nor low income has one.

Next come some policy recommendations.

But recognizing that significant numbers will continue to choose to attend two-year or for-profit institutions, or to have no choice but to do so, Engle and her fellow researchers offer a set of recommendations for those institutions and state and federal policy makers. Among them:

• Strengthening academic preparation for college, such as greater access to quality college prep classes and better information about college “gateway” courses while students are still in high school.
• Increasing financial aid for college.
• Improving transfer rates to four-year colleges, by strengthening transfer counseling and developing favorable articulation policies and agreements.
• Easing the transition to college, through better bridge/orientation programs and special programs for at-risk popultions.
• Encouraging engagement on the college campus, including by creating better work study policies to let students work on campuses.

That's more of the same failed policies that have led to the retention problems in the first place. I've gone on and on and on about the common schools abdicating their onetime mission of inculcating the habits of effective people, and I continue to maintain that special programs for people who have bad life-management skills that are not crash courses in developing proper life management skills will waste resources.

At Econ Log, Arnold Kling has read and reported on recent research (as .pdf) by Chicago's James Heckman on those noncognitive skills.

An important inference to draw from the paper is that trying to reduce economic inequality by, say, subsidizing more young people to go to college, is likely to be very ineffective. Even interventions at the primary school level are mostly too late.

The research poses a challenge to Mr Kling's libertarian inclinations.

In the conclusion to his paper, Heckman stresses making sure that these early interventions "respect the sanctity of early family life and...cultural diversity." It is not clear that the basis for this concern is practical, or whether it is because Heckman is experiencing queasiness over promoting state intervention into family life. I can appreciate a libertarian concern with having the state take a large role in child-rearing. I am less persuaded if the concern is one of political correctness, where you want the state to intervene but then fret about the self-esteem of the families or groups where the intervention is undertaken.

Difficult trade-offs indeed. The Bureau of Indian Affairs and its Canadian counterpart well might have had as their objective the inculcation of the habits of effective people in their charges. On the other hand, the self-selected interventions, where school choices come bundled with house choices, and district test scores are capitalized in house prices, lead to self-selected social stratification where a youngster's acquisition of those habits is an accident of his or her birth.

ANATOMY OF A FINANCIAL CRISIS. Scott Ott.

The U.S. housing crisis reached fever pitch this month, with potential foreclosures up 48 percent compared with May 2007.

The devastation of receiving foreclosure notices has now swept through a full 2/10ths of one percent of American homes. About 1/10th of one percent of owners may lose their homes. For some of those people, it’s actually their primary residence in jeopardy, rather than a second home, rental property or vacation condo.

To add insult to misery, mortgage rates skyrocketed this month to 6.32 percent, a shocking figure a full third of what it was during the Carter administration.

As a result of the flood of homes on the market, real estate agent commissions have dipped precariously, and home buyers increasingly wrestle with the guilt of paying bargain prices for excellent properties.

Market analysts say home prices could plummet as much as another 10 percent by the end of 2009, leaving first-time home buyers to face the specter of owning a more spacious residence. The additional square footage inequitably boosts the burden of cleaning, heating and air conditioning.

MORE WATER WOES. Now it's Iowa's turn, with unprecedented flooding in Cedar Rapids and the University of Iowa live-blogging their troubles.

BALANCE OF TRADE SURPLUSES. I wonder how they taste with kimchi and Chinese mustard?

Getting consumers to taste the product has been a key to Johnsonville Sausage's marketing strategy for years. Now the Wisconsin-based sausage maker is taking the effort to a new level, with Orya, a chain of bratwurst restaurants in Shanghai.

China is an interesting place to try to sell brats, said Bill Morgan, Johnsonville's president.

They're starting small.

The Chinese bratwurst restaurant is the latest effort in an international strategy that Johnsonville embarked upon during the 1990s. International sales are a small but fast-growing part of Johnsonville's business, totaling $35 million last year, when the company had sales of about $700 million.

Thanks in part to the growth of the international business, Johnsonville has nearly doubled its work force in the past five years, to 1,400 now, up from 750. The company, which is still owned by the family of founder Ralph Stayer, refers to employees as "members."

But the company itself started small.

Chief Executive Officer Ralph C. Stayer, son of the founder, first decided in the early 1990s to pursue sales outside the United States as a way to keep growing after Johnsonville achieved distribution across the country. By 2003, international sales had increased to the point that the company had to build an additional plant at its headquarters campus in Sheboygan Falls.

The headquarters is located just south of the site of the original Johnsonville butcher shop, in the unincorporated community that was its namesake. Stayer's parents, Ralph F. and Alice Stayer, started the business in 1945.

At one time, that butcher shop and some Red Owl stores in Plymouth and Sheboygan were the only retail outlets. How things change.

In the U.S., Johnsonville dominates the market in sales in some categories, including bratwurst, smoked cooked link sausage and breakfast link sausage. Johnsonville's biggest competitors in the U.S. in most categories are small regional or local companies such as Klement's and Usingers in Milwaukee, Morgan said.

Usingers bratwursts are pretty good, although the more recent national grand champion from Ream's in Elburn are better. (The store even stocks proper mustard, no mean feat south of the Cheddar Curtain where that thin yellow gruel from French's is supposedly a gastronomic experience.)

Not surprisingly, bratwurst season coincides with air show season, or baseball season.

Together, all of the Johnsonville plants are capable of turning out 1 million pounds of sausage per day. From Easter to October, the company cranks up production to peak levels, because it's the season when [ad character] Charlie [Murphy], and his counterparts all over the world, grill a lot of Johnsonville brats.

Here's more on Orya. Freedom Eden quips, "I like the thought of a product being sold in China with a "made in America" label." The chopstick factory near Duluth and the ginseng fields in Indianhead country and the soy sauce works in Walworth also come to mind. U.S. higher education also exports a lot of Ph.D.s to China.

EXPENSIVE CUPCAKES. The twelfth regular-season game puts the thirty or forty college football teams with aspirations of playing after New Year's Day in a bidding war for additional wins.

Ohio State, for example, will pay $1.4 million for Navy to come to Columbus in the 2009 season. Wisconsin will pay "just under $1 million" for each of two home games against Northern Illinois, according to athletics director Barry Alvarez. Texas is paying $900,000 to Florida Atlantic this fall. Arkansas is paying Tulsa $850,000, and Georgia and Tennessee are paying more than $800,000 for a single home foe.

"I would say it has been building over the last five to eight years, and I think what really triggered upward mobility of guarantees was the addition of the 12th game (in 2006)," Kevin White, new AD at Duke and president of the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics, said at the group's convention. "I think it's just subject to whatever the market will bear. There is no way to legislate against this kind of escalation. I think at some point it will move into a maintenance phase. But the cost of doing business has become much steeper than in years gone by as it relates to having a one-way opponent."

Major powers often are eager to pay guarantees because they take in several million dollars at a home game, not to mention the ripple effects in their towns from a crowd of 90,000 or 100,000. It also gives them a competitive advantage that could have implications for Bowl Championship Series spots. Less successful teams or those with smaller athletic budgets see guarantee games as a way to build their coffers and give players the experience of facing a major power in a huge stadium.

I wonder if there's a further premium for a Saturday game with network television coverage. Tuesday night football and games available only on the Big Ten Network, which is to say, by flag hoist from the main truck on even-numbered Thursdays after the first full moon of a month with an "R" in its name. Those guarantee games also serve as a way for the mid-major conferences to keep their attendance above levels at which the conference gets derated. It's amateur sports. It's for the experience. It has nothing to do with money.

Every so often the guarantee games have play value. Here's Market Power.

Yes, it's still good to be the cupcake. Here's more on the cupcake diet. Be careful, lest one of those cupcakes comes back to bite you.

Red and Black Attack's Mad Mike observes,

Not saying that's gonna happen, but let's not forget about what happened to Michigan last year. Now can somebody tell me where exactly does that money go?

Wisconsin, in particular, knows better than to treat Northern Illinois as a cupcake. There was a game in Madison in September 1988 when John Ivanic kicked the go-ahead field goal in the waning minutes, an event that still plays on the Huskie Stadium Jumbotron. There was another game in 1992 in which Darrell Bevell's go-ahead two point conversion is still disputed in DeKalb (Mr Bevell says he knew he scored because the pile of players on top of him kept getting heavier). Then there was the September 2002 game in which the referees made three very odd penalty calls in a row, all in Wisconsin's favor.

But I don't know where all the money goes either, or why the pursuit of the revenue warrants Tuesday night football.

KEEPING 'EM ROLLING. Flooding in the Rock and Wisconsin Rivers is affecting the Mississippi River as well, with the railroads doing what they can to keep time-sensitive cargo moving. Here are excerpts of a two hour visit to Rochelle this afternoon.

First up, some Powder River empties. These generally go by way of Galesburg, but with that route closed in Iowa, the northern route is what's left. (Although the rebuilding of the Dakota Minnesota & Eastern line as another coal route could be a boondoggle, that capacity could come in handy some day.)

I won't post this kind of material too often, but readers might want to contemplate two diesels 5721-6067 and 113 empties. It's compelling evidence that Europe's 300 km/h fourth-generation Electroliners aren't necessarily the most impressive thing on rails.

About half an hour later, an intermodal train led by 5427-4714-CN 5434 with 84 platforms was held back by a restrictive signal. Again, if you aren't into full runbys of trains, don't watch the video.

At about 4 pm, the detouring Empire Builder passed through. It was running close enough behind the intermodals that the dispatcher might have set up a pass at Flagg Center, which is the end of two main tracks just northwest of Rochelle.

Amtrak's website reports that the Burlington line is closed effective this morning. Thus this consist of motors 45-138 with 1 baggage car and 10 Superliners is the only westbound Builder to have made the detour.

INTERURBAN TRADITION. The South Shore Line has been running trains between Chicago and South Bend for a century.

Today, eastbound train 9 (the odd number inherited from the Illinois Central's numbering system) navigates the streets of Michigan City.

Like many interurbans, the South Shore began as streetcar operators in adjacent cities connected their lines to provide the interurban service. Although today's light rail systems tend to be a bit more spatially separated, the precedent is there. Many light rail systems reuse abandoned railroad grades. That's nothing new either. The East Troy branch of Milwaukee Electric uses the antebellum grade of the Milwaukee and Beloit Rail Road (I am told that some of that grade also exists in the Root River Parkway) and the Burlington branch built on the also antebellum Racine and Burlington grade. Experienced ferroequinologists tell me that traces of that grade beyond Burlington toward Lake Geneva and Richmond, Illinois can be seen at wintertime.

Eight car consists are becoming the standard on the South Shore, often with all eight cars running beyond Michigan City although only four cars are on the platform at South Bend. The tradition used to be to make a cut eastbound or an add westbound at the shops. Into the 1960s many trains would also make a cut or add at Gary, where there is still a tail track, used only to turn Gary expresses (and a couple of morning limiteds, apparently respecting the logic that a few fares on what would otherwise be an empty stock move reduce the deficit).

Passenger loadings were pretty good. There were a few Michigan people awaiting passengers off the train. A person can live in far southwestern Michigan and commute to Chicago on the South Shore, thereby avoiding Illinois utility taxes, although Michigan is income tax hell.

Elsewhere on the rails, Amtrak's California Zephyr is turning eastbound at Denver, with the Empire Builder detouring from Hastings to Chicago on the Burlington. There may be a news report on the latter development from Rochelle, as tomorrow promises to be a sunny day.

HE DOESN'T GET OUT ENOUGH. I'm talking about you, Richard Vedder.

Colleges have viewed restricted admissions as a virtue --a means of raising prestige. Education is the only business I know where success is obtained by turning customers away and snubbing them.

Studio 54 comes to mind. Limited edition collectibles come to mind.

If Yale or Harvard thought like a railroad, it would not apologize for running an all-Pullman, extra-fare, by reservation only Panama Limited (it being no accident that the last such train in the States offered its operator a way to keep the poor and black on the coach-only City of New Orleans, civil rights laws or not.)

I suggest that the administrators of the name colleges are in a no-win situation: raise tuitions to ration spaces, which is what prices are supposed to do, and get mau-maued for adding to their retained earnings, otherwise known as "endowments," or keep tuitions low, and get mau-maued for dashing young people's hopes.

Professor Vedder's suggestion that the name colleges set up branches in other states intrigues, for the likely reaction of the flagship campuses. Imagine Harvard establishing a branch campus in Naperville. Would Northern Illinois or DePaul or Northwestern or Chicago be the first to run to the state board of higher education arguing "the existing service is adequate" and "if additional capacity is required, the existing providers are capable of expanding"?

QUOTE OF THE DAY. My favorite administrator, Peter Wood, with his colleage Adam Kissel's homage to Dr. Seuss.

If I ran the university zoo,
The number of administrators would be divided by two,
And two, and two, and two, and two,
Leaving more resources available for me and for you.

And maybe I’d do something about peer review.
The sociologist will learn how to speak with the entomologist
And the psychologist and the geologist
And the philologist and the astronomist and the economist
So that the Faculty Club will again serve discussion
And not only the gastronomist.

The faculty will know the difference
Between liberal education and general education,
Between liberal education and liberalism,
Between liberal education and illiberal policies,
Between liberal education and secondary education,
Between liberal education and research,
Between liberal education and Division I athletics.

Via Minding the Campus.

TROUBLE IN THE BARABOO BLUFFS. Rock Springs, Wisconsin, which is home to the "pink lady" ballast quarry as well as to a little-known horseshoe curve on the Chicago and North Western, is under seven feet of water. The nearby Mid-Continent Railway Museum, home to one of the better collection of nineteenth-century wooden coaching stock in the country, is closed until further notice. The museum has suspended internet connectivity to its webcams to conserve bandwidth, with online photo galleries illustrating the extent of the flooding. As of yet, the museum has not reported any washouts or other severings of the line. Although the Wisconsin Dells Ducks are not making any excursion trips into Lake Delton, they are doing emergency service in nearby Baraboo.

Original Wisconsin Ducks are in Baraboo tonight helping rescue people from homes and businesses due to flooding of the Baraboo River. General Manager Dan Gavinski says he received a call from Sauk County authorities around 4:30 p.m. today requesting assistance from the amphibious Ducks. Gavinski says several of his crew members immediately boarded their Ducks and went to Baraboo. Within 20 minutes they were in Baraboo beginning to evacuate residents from their homes and businesses. There are about 8 Original Wisconsin Ducks in Baraboo helping.

As of 7:30 p.m., Gavinski reported that his Ducks and 3 ducks from another company had already taken several dozen people from their homes. Each of the World War II-era Ducks can carry about 20 people. The Ducks are retrieving people and evacuating them to a parking lot near Circus World Museum. From there, local authorities have arranged for buses to shuttle the evacuated residents to Baraboo’s downtown square. In one case, a Duck was used to go back and rescue a person’s dog.

“This kind of operation is exactly what these unique vehicles were made for and we are glad to be of help in Baraboo’s time of need,” said Gavinski. “But we need this rain to stop.”

This is the second time this week that the Ducks have been called into action. On Monday, as local authorities and volunteers struggled to save Lake Delton, Original Wisconsin Ducks were asked to come in to help remove debris from the Dell Creek Dam so it would not clog. Gavinski says his crew members used tow ropes to pull boat piers and other large pieces of broken up wood from the dam. The efforts worked and the dam stayed in tact.

The authentic Ducks were originally built by General Motors for World War II. Known for their rugged attributes, able to travel over land and water, Ducks were lauded by WWII leaders for their versatility. The Ducks finest hour came on June 6, 1944, when more than 2,000 Ducks shuttled troops and supplies to hard-to-reach areas for the D-Day invasion on the beaches of Normandy, France. It was touted as the greatest amphibious operation in history.

The Original Wisconsin Ducks is the largest fleet of amphibious tour ducks in the country with 90 ducks. The tour has 60 Ducks that shuttle visitors in and around the scenic waterways of Wisconsin Dells. The remainder of the fleet is in storage to use in future years.

WIND WOES. Kansas State University has to improvise after a tornado damages several classroom buildings as well as one housing a research reactor.

COUNTERING FAITH WITH FAITH. Douglas Preston's Blasphemy allows readers to contemplate the consequences of modeling the universe to within nanoseconds after the Big Bang. Does God speak in the antimatter? Book Review N^o. 16 will not reveal that. The story itself is not that great, although it might offer insights into the mental makeup of grant-funded scientists, environmental activists, and fundamentalist believers.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge).

MORE WATER WOES. There are carp in Pewaukee Lake, but when the lake rises by more than six inches, there is carping about the carp.

Debbie Aarestad looked out the front door of her W. Wisconsin Ave. bakery Tuesday morning and couldn't believe what she saw.

Swarms of carp were swimming down the street.

Village employees nabbed about 200 of the fast-swimming fish from the street, using whatever items would work - their hands, shovels, pitchforks, Village Clerk Susan Atherton said.

Pewaukee Lake, which has swallowed the beach and the adjacent Wisconsin Ave. since the weekend's storms, prevented Aarestad from opening her bakery, Cakes While U Wait, for regular business Tuesday.

Restaurants that have dry serving areas remain in operation, some of them temporarily offering lakeside dining.

HOW OTHERS SEE US. The Atlantic's John Staddon evaluates U.S. road traffic control.

I grew up in Great Britain, and over the past five years I’ve split my time between England and the United States. I’ve long found driving in the U.S. to be both annoying and boring. Annoying because of lots of unnecessary waits at stop signs and stoplights, and because of the need to obsess over speed when not waiting. Boring, scenery apart, because to avoid speeding tickets, I feel compelled to set the cruise control on long trips, driving at the same mind-numbing rate, regardless of road conditions.

He doesn't mention another difference: the slow reaction time of U.S. drivers to a traffic light change. Or perhaps I'm projecting my own irritation with maltimed traffic lights and he's subsumed the slow-thinking sport-ute jockey in with the poor timing and the left arrows. The left arrows, however, are a symptom of a larger complaint.

I began to think that the American system of traffic control, with its many signs and stops, and with its specific rules tailored to every bend in the road, has had the unintended consequence of causing more accidents than it prevents. Paradoxically, almost every new sign put up in the U.S. probably makes drivers a little safer on the stretch of road it guards. But collectively, the forests of signs along American roadways, and the multitude of rules to look out for, are quite deadly.

The signage attenuates situational awareness. Take stop signs. Please.

Then there’s the sheer number of them. They sit at almost every intersection in most American neighborhoods. In some, every intersection seems to have a four-way stop. Stop signs are costly to drivers and bad for the environment: stop/start driving uses more gas, and vehicles pollute most when starting up from rest. More to the point, however, the overabundance of stop signs teaches drivers to be less observant of cross traffic and to exercise less judgment when driving—instead, they look for signs and drive according to what the signs tell them to do.

He then addresses the four-way stop sign, something that isn't used in Britain.

The four-way stop deserves special recognition as a masterpiece of counterproductive public-safety efforts. Where should the driver look? What must he remember? State driving manuals can be surprisingly coy about exactly what drivers should do at four-way stops. The North Carolina Driver’s Handbook, for example, doesn’t mention four-ways as a separate category at all. Yahoo Answers imparts the following wisdom: “The rules for a four-way stop are like those for a two-way: Stop and look for oncoming traffic, and proceed when it is safe to do so.” So far so good, but then: “You may occasionally arrive at a four-way stop sign at the same time as another driver. In such cases the driver to the right has the right of way. However, not all drivers know this. If someone to your left decides to go first, let them!” Thanks! But remind me: aside from bewildering the driver, what’s the point of stopping traffic in all four directions?

The four way stop usually replaces a two-way stop, and it's installed after traffic volume has reached a level at which drivers on the inferior road begin taking risks to get through gaps in the superior road traffic that have little margin of error. In Illinois, there are rules, based on traffic counts and on accident rates, that govern the installation of four-way stop signs. There are similar rules that govern the replacement of stop signs with traffic lights. Because traffic lights are more expensive, the volume and fatality thresholds are set higher. (This application of the cost-benefit principle comes as a surprise to some students. Rules written in blood.)

The rules, however, do provide for some confusion.

The four-way stop weakens the force of all stop signs by muddling the main question drivers need to answer, namely: Which road has priority? And indeed, American drivers have apparently become confused enough by this question that some communities are now beginning to affix another sign to the poles of stop signs that aren’t four-way, warning CROSS TRAFFIC DOES NOT STOP.

Mr Staddon proposes to simplify.

What I propose is more modest: the adoption of something like the British traffic system, which is free of many of the problems that plague American roads. One British alternative to the stop sign is just a dashed line on the pavement, right in front of the driver. It actually means “yield,” not “stop”; it tells the driver which road has the right of way. Another alternative is the roundabout. Roundabouts in the U.S. are typically large. But as drivers get used to them—as they have in the U.K. over the past three or four decades—they can be made smaller and smaller. A “mini-roundabout” in the U.K. is essentially just a large white dot in the middle of the intersection. In this form, it amounts to no more than an instruction to give way to traffic coming from the right (that would be the left over here, of course, since the Brits drive on the left).

Ah, yes, rotaries. (There is a wrinkle here: at one time Massachusetts road rules gave the right of way to cars already in the rotary while New York gave the right of way to cars entering it.) There are a few in the southwest suburbs of Milwaukee, including at least one that has traffic lights controlling entry to it?? So far, none of the interlaced circles the British sometimes provide at five- or six-way junctions. I like rotaries. Many native Midwesterners do not. The mind boggles at a cell-phone distracted Hummer driver attempting to keep a large white dot to port. (Via Market Power).

FASTER, PLEASE. An Olympiad in Chicago means Olympian Hiawathas.

If people could get from downtown Milwaukee to downtown Chicago in one hour on Amtrak, there would be a lot of Olympics spectators who would prefer to book hotel rooms in the Milwaukee area, [Chicago 2016 chairman Patrick] Ryan said. That trip currently takes about 90 minutes.

Olympics or not, 60 minute trains on memory-pattern two hour headways are laudable policy goals. The last 75 minute timing on that line was 50 years ago.

SPONTANEOUS SUPREMACY? In Day of Empire, the subject of Book Review N^o. 15, author Amy Chua's subtitle, How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance -- and Why They Fall, summarizes her story. A passage in the introduction summarizes her conclusion.

For all their enormous differences, every single world hyperpower in history -- every society that could even arguably be described as having achieved global hegemony -- was, at least by the standards of its time, extraordinarily pluralistic and tolerant during its rise to preeminence. Indeed, in every case tolerance was indispensable to the achievement of hegemony. Just as strikingly, the decline of empire has repeatedly coincided with intolerance, xenophobia, and calls for racial, religious, or ethnic "purity." But here's the catch: It was also tolerance that sowed the seeds of decline. In virtually every case, tolerance eventually hit a tipping point, triggering conflict, hatred, and violence.

The book requires over 300 pages in order for Professor Chua to qualify her case, beginning with "world-dominant power" and continuing with "tolerance" as compared to the standards of the time. That requires some work, as the list of clear "world-dominant powers" includes pre-Alexandrian Persia, Antonine Rome and Tang China (dominating different parts of the world at the same time), the short-lived Mongol empire, the Dutch and British commercial empires (Spain comes close, but no hegemon), and the United States, possibly for only a brief time between Christmas 1991 and Labor Day 2001. As history, it's a bit of a stretch, as is often the case with attempts to construct a General Theory of Everything. As advice for people in the United States and in its trading partners that might also be rivals it might have some use. One element of "world dominance" that merits further consideration is that of dominance as a byproduct of actions undertaken for other purposes. Certainly there is no consensus in U.S. political or business circles over what the Correct Course ought to be, whether in dealing with emerging middle class markets in other countries, or with bitter-enders nostalgic for the Caliphate (an also-ran) or for the second coming of Cyrus and Xerxes. I had the opportunity to attend the Chicago stop of Professor Chua's book tour, where I raised the possibility of accidental hegemony and of social development being somewhat messier than any one policymaker or committee of policymakers could control, a possibility that she did not rule out.

(Cross-posted to the 50 Book Challenge).

WATER WOES. The University of Northern Iowa itself is not at risk of rising waters, although the university is closed and there's a call for volunteers to help with sandbagging downtown Cedar Falls.

ACROSS SIBERIA BY RAIL. For National Train Day, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel featured a luxury train across Siberia.

Second, perhaps, only to the Orient Express, the Trans-Siberian is one of the last exotic, historical rail routes in the world, a railroad straight from the pages of "Doctor Zhivago."

There are cheaper and quicker ways to travel on the rails traversing Russia's vast territory but none so luxurious as the Golden Eagle Trans-Siberian Express, which made its maiden trip last May. For rail buffs and adventurers willing to part with their cash to take their time crossing through the Ural Mountains, the seemingly endless evergreen forests, tundra and steppes, the Golden Eagle may be just the ticket.

Eleven years ago, I rode the Nostalgie Istanbul Orient Express train that offers a similar experience on the Beijing-Ulanbataar-Moscow run. Although these trains are much more expensive than the regular Russian Railways transcontinental trains, their itineraries include side trips that are probably difficult for a recreational traveler, even one fluent in Russian and Chinese, to organize.

For those who simply want to ride the Trans-Siberian Railroad from Moscow to Vladivostok, it can be done in six days at prices ranging from $300 to $600, depending on accommodations. That doesn't include food, showers or sightseeing. In fact, if you want to get off and spend more than half an hour in Irkutsk or Ekaterinburg or dip your toe in breathtaking Lake Baikal, you're out of luck.

Which is what makes the Golden Eagle an attractive, albeit much more expensive, option for those who want to experience the Trans-Siberian rather than getting from Point A to B. Plus it includes a side trip to Mongolia - engines are switched from diesel to electric there - with a day spent in the capital, Ulaanbaatar, that includes lunch in a yurt and horseback riding.

That's part of the standard package. Thus I can claim to have ridden a horse on the Mongolian steppe. How far or how fast we will leave to the reader's imagination.

Some of the other side trips are noteworthy. The article does not mention a likely side trip to the ethnographic museum north of Ulan Ude. Those structures sure look like a tipi and a wigwam, and one of my traveling companions said a Buryat chant sounded like a Lakota song.


In central Ulan Ude is a Guinness Book of World Records entry that is likely to last for some time, competitions for world's largest Lenin head being so 1970s.


West of Ulan Ude, the Trans-Siberian main line uses the Selenga River valley for easy access to Lake Baikal.


The south shore of Lake Baikal poses challenges similar to those faced by the Canadian Pacific along the northwest shore of Lake Superior.

The great lake, the world's largest by volume, used to stop the Trans-Siberian Railroad in its tracks. Passengers had to disembark, ride a ferry across when it was water and sleighs when it was ice, before resuming their train trip on the other side. But eventually 33 tunnels were blasted into the countryside and 200 bridges were built and now the Trans-Siberian tracks continuously link Moscow in the west to Vladivostok in the east.

There are service and inspection stops. The railroading can be pretty intense. Nizhneudinsk, west of Irkutsk, is typical of a Siberian division point yard. The characteristic pedestrian overpass is out of the picture. That's a steam era enclosed water tank in the background.


The featured train makes an extended stop in Yekaterinburg, formerly Sverdlovsk. Mine paused there only long enough to change motors, here to one of the Skoda passenger C-C units.


Mine also went to Moscow by way of Yaroslavl rather than Kazan. The Yaroslavl route passes Zheldor, where I was able to obtain this grab shot of the monasteries. (It's usually my luck that these opportunities come at the end of the reel. Digital cameras don't pose that problem.)


There were a few rainy days, but a westbound train is able to run out from under the rain.

THE NAIVETE OF THE DEMOCRATS. The American Spectator's Jeffery Lord offers a polemical version of last night's gripe.

You mean all those LBJ Great Society programs didn't provide care for the sick, secure good jobs for the jobless and take care of the environment? On the off-chance the Internet has a space limitation, let's settle for a partial listing of LBJ's efforts for the sick, the jobless, the environment and more as reflected in the list of legislation he proudly compiled and boasted of in his presidential memoir The Vantage Point.

He goes on at great length to suggest that this year's Democratic presidential platform is likely to be more of the same Utopian Wonkery.

RAILROAD MODELLING. The use of operations research to model railroad operations requires an expression distinct from model railroading.

Imagine trying to create a system detailing the precise movements of 5,500 daily train services, thousands of pieces of rolling stock and all the personnel needed to run a railway network (a typical day on the Dutch railway involves 15,000 driver journeys). Then figure that, as with a Rubik's Cube, moving any piece of the puzzle could have knock-on effects on another part - meaning that the problem always has to be tackled as a whole, rather than in its component pieces.

Imagine, also, that the timetable must be flexible enough to withstand everyday disturbances and that it needs to strike a balance between operating costs and service quality. Quite complex.

Thus another reason one cannot treat a railroad as an open-access network. The Netherlands system is in a position to use operations research algorithms to coordinate operations of its trains in such a way that they don't interfere with each other. I suspect that any such modelling effort on shared trackage would be orders of magnitude more challenging. Richard Nixon's wisecrack about six months to agree on the shape of the table comes to mind. I am aware that the various train operating companies in Britain are continually at odds with Network Rail over the timing of maintenance windows (engineering possessions over there) that appear to favor some companies over others, and there is an article from about 20 years ago about the kind of horse-trading that goes on between Amtrak and the commuter train operators, primarily New Jersey Transit, on the Pennsylvania west of New York.

It is possible to work such things out with pencil and paper, but that, too, is cumbersome and it tends to break down.

The team began work on the new timetable in 2002, when the operators and ProRail realised that the old system was no longer fit for purpose. Passenger and freight volume had roughly doubled in 30 years, leading to increased delays and declining satisfaction among passengers.

The year before, the entire board of Netherlands Railways had been forced to resign following falling punctuality rates and disputes over working practices.

"The old timetable had grown larger and larger as new trains were added," says [Erasmus operations research] Prof [Leo] Kroon. "In the end, it was better to do a complete redesign, rather than try to add even more trains to the system. That was not really going to be possible in the future anyway."

The new timetable, introduced in December 2006, has been a success by a number of measures. Passenger demand has increased by 15 per cent on some lines. Passenger satisfaction, measured in surveys, has gone up. More trains arrive on time. And Netherlands Railways makes better use of its resources. Its profits rose by €40m ($61.8m) in the first year of the timetable, with more profit growth expected down the line.

"The cost reductions come mainly from more efficient rolling stock circulation and crew scheduling," Prof Kroon explains.

"Until recently, these were both created manually and the whole process was down to the planners. Now we can create rolling-stock circulations and crew schedules based more on computer models. This also reduces the throughput time of the process."

In the United States, the Hours of Service Law is frequently the binding constraint. It's not unknown for the power and consists to be on hand but not enough rested crews. It would not do ProRail (why do I have visions of the opposite of Conrail) to have a crew expire on the hours of service somewhere in the polders with no relief crew alerted and on its way.

Fine tuning the schedule does not make everyone better off.

But it was not a Pareto move, as we economists say; some passengers in some locations complain that their journeys are longer now with the new timetable.

The article notes some tweaks were made to the schedule in response to political pressures. (What's Dutch for "Mike Mansfield"?) It does not note whether the longer journey times are more dependable. On a tightly scheduled service, it's often possible for an out of course train to affect adversely the performance of other trains, or to delay the departure of the next service to use the power and stock. The mathematicians are working on algorithms for such contingencies.

A REPLAY OF 1968. That year, a song titled Reach Out Of The Darkness treated listeners to

Think it's so groovy now
That people are finally getting together
Think it's wonderful now
That people are finally getting together.

Heavy, man. But here it is, in Senator Obama's victory speech.

[I]t's about the need to change Washington. There are young people, and African-Americans, and Latinos, and women of all ages who have voted in numbers that have broken records and inspired a nation.

A few years later, John Lennon wrote

Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one.

Imagine Senator Clinton's concession speech.

Imagine how far we could've come, how much we could've achieved if we had just had a Democrat in the White House.

We cannot let this moment slip away. We have come too far and accomplished too much.

The campaign has gotten to the stage that national Democrats, and their court intellectuals on the campuses, and their cheerleaders in the establishment press, begin to raise those false hopes about the powers of a President. Why do responsible and intelligent people interpret the "leap" in leap year as a leap of faith, repeatedly, despite the accumulation of evidence that Presidents, even with large majorities in both legislative chambers and with the sometimes unsubtle support of the academicians and the reporters, do well to pass one-third of their programs? Perhaps it's simply the expected behavior of political figures.

Whatever the reason, here's Senator Clinton's leap of faith, which served as a refrain to assorted bits of griping and wonkery.

[W]e will live in a stronger America. That's why we need to help elect Barack Obama our President.

Perhaps she believes that. No doubt many of the enthusiasts who attended the speech and cheered at the end of each stanza did.

But hers is the standard academic-establishment-Democratic cliche approach about the necessary election of a Democratic president as prerequisite to establishing paradise on earth. Senator Obama deviates from the standard.

I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth. This was the moment – this was the time – when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves, and our highest ideals.

By way of reality check, Vermont Tiger's Geoffrey Norton notes,

You have to wonder how so many people can expect governments to do so many ambitious things -- fix health care, end global warming, etc. -- when they have such a hard time with the basics. Further discussion here & here.

That doesn't deter true believers. Walter Mondale's campaign manager elaborates.

To respond effectively to our long-term challenges, the federal government must command an increased share of gross domestic product and extend its reach in other ways as well. The public sector will be called upon to provide new forms of insurance against economic risks and volatility and to assume more responsibility for health insurance and retirement security. To the extent that markets cannot police themselves or provide reasonable returns for workers, government will have to step in. Through the public mobilization of capital and will, we must supply the public goods--investment in infrastructure, research, and post-secondary education, among others--that we have neglected at our peril. And many millions of Americans will be unable to save for the future without new forms of public encouragement and support.

He understands something that both Senators missed.

In short, we need nothing less than a new social contract that reorganizes responsibilities among government, individuals, and the private sector. It will take time, experimentation, and political contestation to hammer out its terms.

This would never have been easy, and it is especially challenging now. With large short-term and long-term deficits looming, clearing fiscal space for new initiatives will be difficult at best. And while the public is demanding change, the current administration's woeful performance since 2002 has reduced public trust and confidence in government's ability to produce change.

That's a realistic evaluation of the situation, as well as a warning in advance about any optimism, should President Obama be working with large Democratic majorities in both houses.

Compared to this Reason essay, it's optimistic.

Fifth, and finally in our sad saga, that same year, 2008, saw the election of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) as the 44th President, spelling the final end of the Rand Era. In retrospect, we can see that the political triumph of a military leader, carrying his stern message of national service and sacrifice, was made inevitable by the continuation of the Iraq and Afghan wars; in times of severe crisis, democratic electorates naturally turn to the Strong Man. A few lonely figures, notably Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), argued that McCain-style policies were not the solution to America's problems, but rather the cause of the problems. But despite big fundraising totals, Paul's argument was little regarded during the 2008 Republican primary. And in the general election, McCain swept to victory against the Democrats, who, interestingly enough, seemed actually to be more libertarian than McCain. And as president, as we all know, McCain was supremely eager to stride manfully in the Progressive footsteps of his activist-interventionist idol, Theodore Roosevelt.

The preceding four points of the essay are not speculative. Go and read it.

I'll close with another song.

I can’t twist the truth, it knows no regulation.
Handful of senators don’t pass legislation
And marches alone can’t bring integration
When human respect is disintegratin’
This whole crazy world is just too frustratin’
And you tell me
Over and over and over again, my friend
Ah, you don’t believe
We’re on the eve
of destruction.

SENDING THE WRONG MESSAGE. Although Union Pacific and Burlington Northern are able to repair their tracks and keep the freight moving, Amtrak fails to understand the message its decision to close the Northeast Corridor between New Haven and Boston completely during replacement of the Thames River bridge at New London.

Amtrak has placed itself into a no-win situation by announcing the suspension of essentially all rail service between Boston and New Haven (and south) for four days. If Amtrak is as necessary to the nation’s (and especially the Northeast Region’s) transportation picture as it claims to be, its decision to suspend service on such a vital and heavily-traveled route appears reckless and indifferent to the public interest. If the suspension is implemented and people still manage to get to their destinations without Amtrak, Amtrak’s enemies will gain a significant measure of credibility when they say that Amtrak is not as necessary as it claims to be (and rail advocates like me say it is). If Amtrak is to emerge from this situation looking concerned and competent, it has no alternative but to deliver the riding public to their destinations as efficiently as possible.

The replacement service consists of the one and only Inland Route train.

All Amtrak offers is a single train leaving Boston at 11:40 a.m. and New York at 3:00 p.m., running via Springfield. The proposed running time is two hours longer than the running time for conventional (not Acela) trains between the two cities. This option is not offered at all on June 14^th, which would have the infamous distinction of being the day when no trains run between the big Apple and the Big Bean. Both Amtrak and the riding public deserve better.

The work zone is the bridge itself, which is Bostonside of the New London station. The highway bridge is in service, which would make possible a British-style connecting bus to Mystic, which is Bostonside of the Thames.

Perhaps Amtrak's managers are holdovers from the Former Soviet Union, where month long maintenance shutdowns of the collective hot water supply are routine.

THE WATER CANNOT OVERTOP THE LEVEE. When it does, bad things happen.

Brenda Ketelhut, the secretary at Lake Delton Elementary School, where village officials opened a shelter, said she stopped to see the lake Monday.

"It's unbelievable. You'd never believe it would happen," Ketelhut said. "I saw where the earth gave way and Lake Delton flowed out over County Highway A. ... It's a wonderful area, but Mother Nature let it rain too much."

Dell Creek Dam on Lake Delton did not fail, said Laurel Steffes, spokeswoman for the state Department of Natural Resources, but state officials worried about other dams that were overflowing or near failure.

A couple thousand people in Columbia County about 30 miles north of Madison were urged to evacuate below the Wyocena and Pardeeville dams, said Pat Beghin, a spokesman for the county's emergency management.

The Wyocena Dam's spillway had washed out, and workers were sandbagging to try to save it, Beghin said. The Pardeeville dam also was overflowing, he said.

The Upper Spring Dam in Palmyra was failing, state emergency management officials said. But only one house in the rural area was in danger, Palmyra town chairman Stewart Calkins said.

Madison television station WMTV has video of Lake Delton finding a new path to the sea. The lake is an impoundment that provides a wide flat surface for the water ski show as well as a launching ramp for the Dells Ducks. I will alert readers to fundraising efforts for Southern Wisconsin.

SHARED ASSETS. A railroad is not an open access facility. This sequence of pictures taken today at Rochelle illustrates why not. We first see track surfacing in progress on the Union Pacific where it crosses the Burlington. (I know it's BNSF but that sounds too much like a government agency.) The Track Renewal Train and the cleanup equipment has done its work, and the track is receiving the finishing touches to be ready for trains. Obscured behind the pole at left is a ballast regulator, followed by a car whose purpose I don't know, then by a ballast tamper with some equipment that allows the operator to calibrate superelevation on curves as well as to keep the tangents straight and level, and at right, another ballast regulator. (The crooked straight, and the rough places planed.)


Although the machinery is sophisticated, there is no substitute for the track foreman eyeballing the alignment.


Weekends on a transcontinental freight railroad do not mean a fall-off in traffic. Coal mines in Wyoming expect empty hopper cars, container ships on the Pacific Coast expect their loads, east coast power plants are at full power supplying those air conditioners (How hot was it?) and farmers want their Deeres to get that ethanol in the ground. There is no option of putting lighter loads on the roads, which British Rail does as a matter of routine (Shrewsbury to Telford in my logbook, 2004 Guildex) or of a skeleton service going the long way around (Bristol to Reading by way of the Salisbury Line as far as Westbury, also in my logbook) as the other freight lines are also stretched to capacity.

Thus, as work progresses on the north track, Main 1, here come those westbound containers on Main 2. When the rebuild campaign gets to Main 2, this will be quite the project getting container trains in and out of Global 3, just west of Rochelle.


The stacks were last in line after a train of Wisconsin Electric coal empties, a merchandise train, and a string of ethanol empties.

Then came the Deeres eastbound. The lead locomotive has the felicitous number 4001.


This work is going on at a crossing. Union Pacific can plan its operations (or plan to park trains) so as to work around maintenance possessions on its own track. That surfacing team, however, has the Burlington blocked. (The laws governing provision of interlockings and the responsibility of the second railroad to maintain them and the tactics used by the first railroad to impede the second railroad might be material for a different kind of post.) Burlington knows this, and Union Pacific and Burlington have made careful plans to offer windows during which Burlington runs trains.

The photos in this essay are not in chronological order. One such window opened around 3 pm. There's a very hot intermodal train on the Burlington bound for the Pacific Northwest which obtains all the deference once given to silk specials or President Theodore Roosevelt returning from big-game hunting along the Great Northern. The work crew takes advantage of the window to refuel. Stand back, do not delay this train.


There it goes. I'm always pleased to see over-the-road trailers that aren't on the road.


Now for the economics lesson. Ownership of the crossing includes negotiable rights to do maintenance on the crossing without delay to the other railroad's trains. That's a straightforward exercise for two railroads, each operating their own trains on their own track. My reading of the British railway press suggests that the division of operating from infrastructure companies has not carefully established those ownership rights, with the not surprising result that some operating companies accuse the maintenance division of the infrastructure company (whether it's the privately held Railtrack or the state-owned Network Rail) of doing them harm. When the same company owns the trains and the tracks, the operating department and the way and structure department have incentives in common. When these departments are properties of different companies, their incentives diverge.

NINE OLYMPIADS AGO. The Soling team of Buddy Melges, Bill Allen, and Bill Bentsen won the 1972 gold medal, the last time a U.S. program did so.

Here, Messrs. Allen and Melges offer encouragement to the Inland Lake Yachting Association's entrants in this year's Olympics. Sally Barkow, Debbie Capozzi, and Carrie Howe's Team 7 Sailing are the Yngling team, and John Ruf's White Buffalo Sailing races a 2.4 Meter. (Mr Bentsen was present although with the inclement weather, which raised Pewaukee Lake six inches, he had left for the evening.)

The sailing events will be in Qingdao, which some readers might want to render as Tsing Tao, which is fitting for Inland sailors. (Anyone who has hung out with the collegiate sailors when they hit Lake Geneva, sail well all day, then close Chuck's and get up early the next morning to sail well all day, d. c. al fine knows what I mean. Perhaps it's a good thing the summer regatta season is also the summer doldrum season, as the postponements can be therapeutic.)

A CENTURY AGO. The Milwaukee Light, Heat, and Traction Company completed construction into East Troy, Wisconsin in late December of 1907. There has been an electrified railroad in East Troy ever since, although there was a 33 year hiatus in passenger service from August 13, 1939 to the first preservation railway.


A precursor company of the Chicago South Shore and South Bend began operations in June of 1908. For about half of the line's history, these steel cars transported steel workers, football fans, and day trippers to the Dunes.

The cars that went into preservation were in rough shape at their retirement. Car 9, also from the Pullman order of 1926, has a better roof but its electrical equipment is incomplete.


Milwaukee Electric locomotive L8 probably never ran into East Troy in freight service, as the locomotives were intended to switch coal hoppers at the power plants.

NOT THE ROAD TO BAGHDAD. Friday was windy.

The windy weather kept area police busy Friday afternoon. County dispatchers received about 30 calls from noon-6:30 p.m., according to a Friday night news release from The DeKalb County Sheriff's Office. The majority of the calls were complaints of blowing dirt, which lead to reduced visibility and wire and trees down throughout the county.

The village of Kirkland was the hardest hit, according to the news release, with several calls of wires and trees down and a construction vehicle overturned at Route 72 near Malta Road. No injuries were reported.

The village also had a report of a partially blown-off roof from a building, which damaged at least two parked vehicles, according to the news release.

Elsewhere in the county, police responded to Lincoln Highway east of Nelson Road for a vehicle that was pulling two trailers loaded with canoes. Both trailers were blown off the roadway and overturned, according to the news release. A tree was reported down near Shabbona State Park at about 3 p.m. and a tree fell in Sycamore and knocked out power lines near the intersection of Governor Avenue and Exchange Street, Sheriff Roger Scott said during a phone interview Friday afternoon.

The dust blown into the air made it hard for motorists to see either the roadway or the vehicles in front of them, and several pulled over to the shoulder of the road rather than risk driving.

Here's Peace Road, otherwise known as the DeKalb Beltway, on Friday afternoon. Those are scary conditions for attempting a left turn (note the lane markers.)

DeKalb Chronicle photo by Kate Weber Carlson.

Closer to home, the dust storm wasn't quite as spectacular.

THE EVOLUTION OF CREATIVITY. The University of Buckingham's Terence Kealey is no fan of government-financed science. In this interview, he suggests that the benefits of sponsored research are small. In Sex, Science & Profits, the subject of Book Review N^o. 14, he expands on the argument. The subtitle, How people evolved to make money, suggests the ambitious task he has set for himself, which is to start in the Stone Age and argue forward to today that state-sponsored court intellectuals are not fountainheads of productivity growth. Along the way he touches on the logic of the oriental despot's harem and Pythagoras's rejection of the proof of the irrationality of the square root of 2. There's a great deal of economic history in the book, as Mr Kealey intends to draw parallels between evolution in economic activity and biological evolution. (I suggest people treat such parallels carefully: the pepper that selects for inflicting pain on squirrels is not in the same position as the entrepreneur that selects for shareholder value.) His argument covers some of the ground Rosenberg and Birdzell's How The West Grew Rich does, if less comprehensively. (Yes, double entry bookkeeping and insurance contracts matter in a way that Guelfs and Ghibellines do not.) He also addresses one of the great unanswered questions in economics: why are there entrepreneurs. The welfare-economics paradigm argument for government funded science relies heavily on the nonrivalrous use of ideas once created: this becomes a disincentive for inventors to invent. But the same ought be true of business models: everybody can see what a sports bar or retail store or steel mill is all about. The system of conferences and scholarly journals evolved to allow some appropriability of the rewards to ideas, although Pythagoras would now argue against Hippasus's tenure rather than casting him into the sea.

The book's attempt to address almost everything from t₀ to the present frustrates me. Perhaps something shorter with a more direct focus either on the information-externality argument or on the public-choice antics of grant-seeking professors would have been more persuasive. The author's expertise as a biochemist comes at the cost of some understanding of the underlying economics: we don't know whether it's the sunk cost of pursuing a research project or the information spillover that deters research activity, or whether there's inefficiently much research activity for fear of coming in second. There is a great deal of work in economics reacting to, and improving on, Edwin Mansfield and Paul Romer and Paul David, who the author characterizes as the "three most famous economists who claim market failure in science."

(Cross-posted at the Fifty Book Challenge).

OPERATING TRAINS. I've had the opportunity to help operate some ambitious model railroads.

Railroad 1. State Line Tower, Hammond, Indiana.

Railroad 1. Joliet Union Station. The owner likes special work.

Railroad 2. Naperville, Illinois, with an early-Amtrak San Francisco Zephyr.

Railroad 3. Flagstaff, Arizona.

THINK ABOUT THE CORRIDORS FIRST. Megan McArdle reacts to Senator McCain's plans to defund Amtrak.

The lines that actually run at a profit--those in the Virginia-Massachussetts corridor--would still be profitable, and presumably operated by some private company. The other lines are a mixed bag, environmentally; it isn't really good for the environment to run trains at low capacity. And the federal government, because of the EIS process, other procedural barriers, and a great deal of logrolling, has so far not succeeded in making sensible upgrades to the system. The Acela was announced in 1994, actually went live six years later despite the really rather minor infrastructure improvements required, and at lavish expense now gets passengers to Boston one half-hour quicker in slightly comfier seats.

The New Haven-Boston electrification is hardly a minor infrastructure improvement, although it made possible a substantial time saving at New Haven, where the motor came off and a diesel came on. The short stretches of 150 mph track in Massachusetts and Rhode Island are mainly for show.

Moreover, if oil prices stay high, the math changes substantially for passenger rail, making new routes more profitable. People will probably never take the train en masse from New York to Los Angeles, but a direct train from New York to Chicago could start looking good, particularly when you factor in the drive to out-of-the way airports, delays, and time spent removing your shoes in security lines.

Let's start with something simpler. Give the GM&O free rein to 110 mph from Pequot to Carlinville and add more Chicago-Springfield-St. Louis frequencies. Restore the 110 mph between Morton Grove and Tomah on the Milwaukee and add more Chicago-Milwaukee-La Crosse-St. Paul frequencies. Use the Water Level Route more aggressively between Chicago and Cleveland. Chicago to New York is a bit much right now, although the old Penn Central managed an eighteen hour timing. On the other hand, I was listening to a radio debate about expanding O'Hare Field (more corporate welfare for United and American) in which a critic of the proposal noted that a plane from Cleveland would spend more time on the ground than in the air (and that's gate-to-gate, we haven't mentioned check-in and security and the "boarding process".)

America's freight rail system, while it needs a lot of work, is world-class. Its passenger rail should be too. But it's so far proven pretty much impossible for the government to make it that way--and not merely because we don't have enough liberal politicians who like rail. Most politicians like rail. But they like a lot of other things better, like getting re-elected.

The problem with writing for a policy magazine in the Official Region is that one sees everything in terms of politics. I keep noting the passenger-unfriendly Union Pacific and the possibility for public funding of passenger services being a way to adjust their attitudes. On the other hand, when Union Pacific fires stack trains through DeKalb at 70 mph on a railroad capable of 110, perhaps the railroad is getting something right.

TWO WRONGS DO NOT MAKE ... The Los Angeles Times reports on an openly libertarian university, Guatemala's Francisco Marroquin University, with economics in the core curriculum. The founder, Manuel Francisco Ayau Cordon, is making some of the right people uncomfortable.

Some leftists deride him as a lackey of the ruling classes, dishing up neo-liberal dogma to rich kids in a nation where a few powerful families still call most of the shots. Conservative elites chafe at his op-ed harangues about their cozy oligopolies and government protections.

Critical Mass suggests that the absence of economics in the curriculum goes a long way toward understanding some of the academy's common prejudices.

So much comes down to money--and so few of us have any clue whatsoever about how money really works. I'm among the ignorant--knowing just enough to know that I know very little indeed. But I'm like most of us. And it's been interesting to watch certain economic discussions unfold--about, for example, what Harvard should or should not be doing with its huge endowment; or about universal health care (which we can't begin to afford, but which we continue to see as a panacea); or about the capital gains tax (which Obama would raise without understanding)--when you can recognize both your own ignorance about economics and the ignorance of many who are influential in shaping national discussions about money. Everybody thinks he is an authority on how money ought to be managed and spent. But few of us really understand what money is, how it works, or what kinds of consequences can come from certain kinds of financial decisions.

And small wonder. Very few of us have ever studied economics. And the problem is so big that it's not even on the radar. You hear so much about how our educational system is shortchanging students when it comes to math, science, civics, and history. But you never hear about the crippling effects of ignorance about money and economies. Colleges and universities, as ACTA observed in a 2004 study, don't require students to study it--not even those rare schools with a solid core curriculum.

This is the flip side of the problem produced by academe's broadly socialist monoculture--there is a great deal of friendliness, explicit and tacit, to such things as collectivism and cooperation, redistribution of wealth, government-run social programs, single-payer health care, and so on. There is likewise a broad hostility to capitalism and free market principles. But these leanings are rarely undergirded with a grasp of economic facts or realities. And that's a calculated gap. You don't have to look hard at all to find colleges and universities that press students, in course after course, to make moral determinations about how economies ought to be run--but you would be hard pressed to find a school that requires students to ground those determinations in actual economic knowledge.

An economics curriculum that taught the controversies, whether as a required course or not, would not necessarily inoculate students against the "broadly socialist monoculture." Students would have the opportunity to decide whether Stiglitz or Stigler have the more compelling analyses of institutions, including the state, or whether Friedman or Keynes have the more accurate understanding of consumption behavior. That's a lot of work. It's probably easier to offer Samuelson's operators manual for the welfare state, or one of its many imitators, as reinforcement for the "market failures warrant corrective action by the national government" normative position. In so doing, however, the fundamentals might go missing.

TONIGHTS AMUSING SEARCH STRING. Elburn Train station to Quincy IL. You can make that trip by train, with a change of stations in Chicago, although it's easier to board at Naperville or Plano on the Burlington.

KUDOS. The Chicago Cubs honor retired Northern Illinois baseball coach Walt Owens.

The Special Negro Leagues Player Draft, aired live exclusively on BaseballChannel.TV, allows each Major League club to pick one surviving former Negro League player to represent every player who did not have the opportunity to play Major League Baseball.

Owens, who led the Huskie baseball program from 1976-82, played three seasons in the Negro Leagues (1953-55) as a pitcher/first baseman for the Detroit Stars. When baseball integrated in Detroit in 1957, Owens played for the all-white Detroit Pepsi-Cola team. During his playing career, Owens was a part of three high school championship teams and won four National Amateur Baseball Championships.

The things you learn: the Tigers were segregated as late as 1957?

Current basketball coach Carol Owens (not a relative as far as I know) will coach the United States U18 basketball team, which will make a winter trip to Argentina. Should the team advance in the tournament, it will be eligible for the U19 world championship, which will play in Bangkok in midsummer 2009. The nomenclature appears to refer to apprentice players, younger than 18 or 19 respectively.

A NEW SOURCE OF COMPANY MAIL. The Overhead Wire follows electric traction developments in the statehouses and occasionally at the carhouses.

UP WITH THE LOAD AND DOWN WITH THE TARE. Big boxes are fuel wasted.

Foodmakers love big boxes because they serve as billboards on store shelves. Wal-Mart has been working to change that by promising suppliers that their shelf space won't shrink even if their boxes do. As a result, some of its vendors have reengineered their packaging. General Mills' (GIS, Fortune 500) Hamburger Helper is now made with denser pasta shapes, allowing the same amount of food to fit into a 20% smaller box at the same price. The change has saved 890,000 pounds of paper fiber and eliminated 500 trucks from the road, giving General Mills a cushion to absorb some of the rising costs.

Via Division of Labour.

THERE'S NO CAPITAL PLAN. Once again, the Illinois legislature was not able to pass a capital spending bill before the supermajority deadline arrived. The state's senators, however, would like Amtrak to make capital out of the scrap line.

The Quad City Times’ Ed Tibbetts reports that all four Iowa and Illinois Senators “…are asking that Amtrak move quickly to prepare rail cars in the event Amtrak connections between Chicago and Iowa are built.”

“U.S. Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Barack Obama, D-Ill., Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, made the request in a letter dated Tuesday. Rail advocates are seeking funds for high-speed rail connections between Chicago and Iowa City through the Quad-Cities and also from Chicago to Dubuque,” the paper reported

“To accommodate the expected boom in ridership ... we want to ensure that we have the absolute best rolling stock available,” the senators said in a letter to Amtrak Chief Executive Officer Alexander Kummant, the paper said.

“An Amtrak feasibility study in January said the supply of rolling stock is limited and train sets for the new lines would likely have to come from its inventory. The cost and time needed for repairing rail cars is significant, however. The feasibility study estimated the cost of rail cars for the Chicago to Quad-Cities route at $4.2 million,” said the paper.

A shorter news item notes additional weekend service on the Metra Fox Lake line. Weekday ridership is also up, apparently enough to delay 2140, the 2.45 off Fox Lake which is due at Union Station at 4.18, enough that it gets in the way of the 3.00 Hiawatha, an 89 minute train.

IT'S FICTION. Owen Sheer's Resistance is a story of the German occupation of Wales. I suppose there is a universe in which the Wehrmacht could not have crossed the English Channel with the British heavy equipment abandoned in Dunkirk and the Royal Air Force almost broken but they could have rolled up the Normandy invasion and then made that Channel crossing in the face of a rebuilt Royal Air Force assisted by the Army Air Force and the U.S. Navy. The military history is not the book's strong suit in any event, as it's supposed to be a human interest story. For this Book Review N^o. 13, I won't offer any plot spoilers, although I'll note that the most plausible part of the plot is Heinrich Himmler's obsession with identity politics. In the stack of works to review is one that suggests he would have put to shame the academy's questers after influential medieval lesbian writers of colour: thus a special SS unit looking for Aryan relics in the hills west of Shropshire is less of a stretch than that Channel crossing.

(Cross-posted at the Fifty Book Challenge).

THE COMPANY HE KEEPS. Our junior senator, still the favorite for the Democratic nomination, has to keep distancing himself from his old friends. The talk-radio types like to describe an older colleague, former Weatherman Bill Ayers, as an "unrepentant terrorist." Mr Ayers also holds a distinguished professorship in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois, Chicago. That position might reveal more about the nature of the colleges of education. In advance of an Extension 720 discussion of Senator Obama's association with Mr Ayers, host Milt Rosenberg linked to a number of commentaries on Mr Ayers, most of which focused on the Days of Rage connection. The conversation that night focused -- in a reasoned way -- on Mr Ayers's thinking about educational reform. This American Thinker essay is one of the less polemical pieces about that topic. Here's Mr Ayers's list of publications. I'll leave it to the reader to decide whether they are of sufficient quality and quantity to warrant a distinguished professorship, or if memoirs of the Days of Rage deserve equal billing with university press monographs. I would note only that the proliferation of radical approaches to pedagogy have not produced improvements in the communication and reasoning skills of the students who have been exposed to those approaches.

HOW OTHERS SEE US. The Weekly Standard's Charlotte Allen travels to Kalamazoo for the annual International Congress on Medieval Studies. Nothing is more likely to confirm the prejudices of one order of higher education's critics than a blend of Marxism, literary theory, and poop.

Jeff Persels, a lanky associate professor of French and director of European studies at the University of South Carolina, was reading aloud a scholarly paper at the 43rd International Congress on Medieval Studies. The paper's title was "The Wine in the Urine: Managing Human Waste in French Farce." The paper was about, well, the wine in the urine, or perhaps the urine in the wine. Its topic is a 15th-century farce, or lowlife comic drama, about an adulterous wife who uses a wine bottle as an impromptu chamber pot, with predictably gross results involving her husband and her lover.

Persels's paper didn't discuss the play simply as an example of Rabelaisian-style scatology, however. The perspective he used was the postmodernist discipline of "cultural studies," which means pushing works of literature (or movies or television shows or ad campaigns or whatever) through a Marxist cheesegrater as examples of the way society conditions its members to accept the views of a dominant class. In Persels's view, the wine-bottle farce marked a stage in the development of what he called the "bourgeois fecal habitus." Translated out of postmodern-ese into plain English, that means the tendency of uptight middle-class people not to want to talk in public about matters pertaining to the bathroom and to assume that those who do are kind of crude.

Our friendly connection at Unlocked Wordhoard reacts.

Regular readers of the Wordhoard know that I share her concerns about certain types of cultural studies, since they apply a cultural Marxist paradigm to a pre-capitalist world. Nor am I a big fan of scholars who do "transgressive" work just because it's "transgressive" -- first of all, since it'll get you tenure, it isn't all that transgressive,^* and second, it's stupid to do anything just because it's transgressive.

[Superintendent's note: I have also copied the footnote as a footnote to this post.] Also at Unlocked Wordhoard is a preliminary bibliography of reactions by other practitioners. The "cultural Marxist" observation intrigues. One commenter to the post suggests that Marxian interpretations of social evolution provide a useful framework for understanding "precapitalist" society. Perhaps. Double-entry bookkeeping, hull insurance distinct from commodity insurance, and contracts for future delivery don't sound sexy.

Back to the Weekly Standard article. Amid the culture-studies references are some observations about life in the mid-majors.

Western Michigan, occupying 1,200 hilly acres on the far western outskirts of Kalamazoo, is one of those state normal schools that during the mid-1950s decided to switch identities overnight from poky teachers' college to populous state research university via a massive building campaign entailing awe-inspiring quantities of cinderblock. Today the student population totals 26,000, and its enormous campus is dotted with midcentury structures of an architectural style that can be described as "non-descript but sturdy."

Shortly after I moved to Northern Illinois, a Western Michigan colleague that I worked with from Wayne State asked about setting up a Ph.D. program in their economics department. (There now is one. Their graduates get jobs.) The description is accurate. The enrollment is a bit larger, the acreage half again larger, and the hills substantially larger than those of Northern Illinois.

Engineering, science, and business are Western Michigan's strong suits, along with Division 1A football--not exactly promising soil for nurturing study of the Middle Ages. Still, the campus houses a Medieval Institute that sponsored the first congress in 1962 and continues to do so to this day, as well as an Institute of Cistercian Studies (complete with an impressive rare-books library) that started sponsoring theological sessions at the congress during the early 1970s. The congress, with its lingering overtones of 1960s hippie culture, was designed as a gathering of the tribes in all things medieval: history, literature, theology, philosophy, drama, art, and music.

Apart from the Compass Point State designation, the rest of that topic sentence could apply to Purdue or Wisconsin or Northwestern or Duke, well, you have to pick your football samples somewhat selectively. There's no reason for the mid-majors not to model themselves on the state flagships or the larger selective private universities. But when it comes to research presence, depressingly frequently, they don't.

The pecking-order realities of academic life, even among otherworldly medievalists, leave a vast army of poorly paid, overworked lower-echelon professors at not-so-big-name universities and, of course, legions of strapped graduate students for whom a trip to Western Michigan and the dorms of "the Zoo," as they call it, may well be the high point of the academic year.

Many state schools and smaller colleges on tight budgets pay for at most one or two trips to academic conferences per professor per year, and often at the rate of just $500 or even $300 per conference--hardly enough to cover air fare--and usually only if the recipient delivers a paper. You scarcely need to put two and two together to figure out why this year's congress featured 1,500 papers and why so many of them, delivered by graduate students afraid to venture outside the postmodernist box in which their theory-laden seminars have confined them, or professors who seemed to have hastily thrown their notes together in order to qualify for a free plane trip, were, to put it kindly, not so hot.

And thus, the proliferation of archival journals that exist solely to validate scholarly activity, if not necessarily deep thought, and the too-common mid-major mindset of counting pages or articles published, rather than considering the outlet in which it is published. The mid-majors are in the same business as the state flagships and the private selectives. There's nothing wrong with acting like it.

The article mentions the "rail line" between Chicago and Detroit. I know Amtrak bisects the Western campus (football field to the east, hockey arena to the west) but the university is a fair distance from the station (albeit not the 20 miles to Elburn). A route inspection may be in order, as Kalamazoo is the east end of the Porter-Kalamazoo section under Amtrak ownership that has been upgraded for 110 mph running.

Oh, that footnote.

^*True transgression would be to do scholarship supportive of the Bush Administration, as that kind of thing could get you fired despite tenure. Unless you're taking actual, real risks, don't believe your friends when they say how "courageous" you are. You ain't, bub.

Tell me about it. On occasion I serve on hiring committees. Nothing turns me off faster than the dissertation spiel that mentions the current popularity of the topic. Find something that interests you and tell me why it interests you.

GO FIGURE. Baseball season starts far too soon in the northlands, particularly in years when sunspot activity is low. Here's an exercise. Consider two teams. One has a new field with a retractable roof. Another has a Eugene Debs era open air field. At the end of May, which team do you think had 33 of its first 56 games at home, and which one had 31 of its first 56 games on the road? Do Amtrak's schedule writers moonlight for Organized Baseball?