PRE-EMPTING THE GREAT PUMPKIN.

Last April, there were rumblings of a changing international trade environment affecting Christmas decorations.

The local home improvement stores start setting out their Christmas stuff sometime around Labor Day.  Yes, seriously, the Hallowe'en stuff is often marked down the last week of October.  We'll see how the Festive Season supply chain shakes out, and whether that will affect the blinging out of the houses nearby.

A week or so ago, one of the local home improvement center stores had the pre-decorated Christmas trees set up and positioned in front of the Hallowe'en house decorations, which are available in free-standing or inflatable versions, and very much popular with the neighbors.

THE BETTER ORGANIZATION WILL PREVAIL IRRESPECTIVE OF OTHER INSTITUTIONAL ARRANGEMENTS.

Come see what's brewing.

😃, i’m having a great time on this app right now pic.twitter.com/YT4It9Zc5J

— nickmearsmuse (@Brew_Crew_fan) July 21, 2025

Baseball's All-Star break can be a momentum-breaker, although the Milwaukee Brewers came out of the break by winning three straight in Los Angeles, sweeping all six games with last year's champions.

THE LAMENT IS NOTHING NEW.

Minding the Campus contributor Rob Jenkins,  "I Can’t Understand My Professor."

These days, institutions have come to rely more and more on non-native Ph.D.s. Just scan through the faculty roster at any American university and see how many names you can pronounce. This is a problem for some of the same reasons Jared mentions: Not only did many of these professors take grad-school seats from American students, they eventually took jobs that might have gone to American candidates.

There’s another problem with foreign-born professors, though, on an even more basic level: Students often struggle to understand them in class. If students literally can’t grasp what the professor is saying, due to a language barrier, how can they learn the material? Often, they resort to essentially teaching themselves, using textbooks, study groups, and online aids.

Perhaps that says something about compensation and working conditions in higher education. "Wouldn't there be plenty of professors, adjuncts, and TAs speaking impeccable English if the jobs the professors held and the adjuncts and TAs aspired to were as cushy as a lot of this college-bubble talk suggests they were?"

WASTE NOT, WANT NOT.

Second-hand Rose, second-hand clothes.

One of the themes explored in “Dress Codes” will be re-wearing, and how the Royal family have been interested in passing down and repairing their clothing through generations – since well before the current Princess of Wales, Princess Royal and the King became heralded as sustainability role models thanks to their modern-day approaches.

A pair of Liberty print dresses that belonged to a young Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret are a particularly special example, says Matthew Storey, a curator at Historic Royal Palaces.

Royals or not, they were Depression babies, and "use it up" is good advice, in New England or Olde England.

“The dresses are in a Liberty print which dates from 1936, we’ve traced it in their archive,” he explains. “They are in this classic, quality British fabric and when you look at the bigger dress in particular you can see all of the evidence of the history of this object and the way it was worn by Queen Elizabeth II when she was a child.”

The larger of the two dresses shows signs firstly of being tailored to accommodate a growing Princess Elizabeth.

“You can see how it was let out,” Storey notes, “and it probably originally had quite a large hem allowance at the bottom from which they’ve taken fabric, and then added that at the waist to make the bodice a bit longer. They’ve also taken panels and added them at the side of the bodice as well to make it larger. When you look at the making up close, it looks as if it was all done by hand at home – these are skills that would have existed in the Royal household.”

There is also a suggestion that the dress has then been adjusted further, in order to likely become a “hand me down” for Princess Margaret, who was four years younger than her sister. While the princesses will have initially matched in their co-ordinated frocks, the larger of the two is evidently more faded, says Storey, implying that it was washed and worn many more times overall.

Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without is sound advice no matter what your station.  Mr Storey concludes, “We can’t tell for sure [there are no photographs in the public domain to firm up the evidence], but it makes sense, as that’s what many aristocratic families would have done at the time. The bigger dress is clearly more faded, and has also got a couple of little stains on it, which we would never remove, because it’s evidence of wear.”  Well, yes, treating garments as disposable when the subjects are mending and mending can irritate the subjects, with pitchforks and torches to follow.

THE EXURBAN ENVIRONMENT CONTINUES TO BE EMERGENT.

A recent Associated Press analysis suggests, "Forget downtown or the ’burbs. The far-flung exurbs are where people are moving."  The story starts in Haines City, Florida, a little off the course of Brightline's projected extension.

Not long ago, Polk County’s biggest draw was citrus instead of people. Located between Tampa and Orlando, Florida’s citrus capital produces more boxes of citrus than any other county in the state and has devoted tens of thousands of acres to growing millions of trees.

But last year, more people moved to the county than to any other in the United States, almost 30,000.

Bulldozed citrus groves in recent years made way for housing and big box stores that could one day merge the two metropolitan areas into what has half-jokingly been dubbed, “Orlampa.”

The migration — and property sprawl — reflects a significant kind of growth seen all over the country this decade: the rise of the far-flung exurbs.

Outlying communities on the outer margins of metro areas — some as far away as 60 miles (97 kilometers) from a city’s center — had some of the fastest-growing populations last year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Those communities are primarily in the South, like Anna on the outskirts of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area; Fort Mill, South Carolina, outside Charlotte, North Carolina; Lebanon outside Nashville; and Polk County’s Haines City.

The article suggests this part of Florida has not yet become stroad hell.

For some residents, like Marisol Ortega, commuting to work can take up to an hour and a half one-way. But Ortega, who lives in Haines City about 40 miles (64 kilometers) from her job in Orlando, says it’s worth it.

“I love my job. I love what I do, but then I love coming back home, and it’s more tranquil,” Ortega said.

And some of this dispersion might be a rethinking of cities in an age of plague. "The rapid growth of far-flung exurbs is an after-effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Census Bureau, as rising housing costs drove people further from cities and remote working allowed many to do their jobs from home at least part of the week."

The suburban and exurban land use patterns continue to be emergent.  And people have this tendency to do what they perceive to be best irrespective of the nudges of the Wise Experts.

Residential density makes getting to work or going shopping using the transportation company easier, perhaps at a greater risk of a plague running rampant. At the same time, though, orderly zoning appealed to the brains trusts of the era, and the rapid transit services that might have been laid down in anticipation of people building further from the cities was gone, a Depression era casualty of the Public Utility Holding Company Act.   Thus we get the exurban development pattern.

Which will take on forms that cannot be anticipated, let alone planned. "[T]he best thing for the Wise Experts to do is to lie down until the urge to micromanage goes away."

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Peanut and Fred did not die in vain.  They provided clarity about the nanny state.  "Peanut is for everyone who has ever feared that someone more powerful than you could walk into your home and take something that you absolutely cherish away from you, for absolutely no good reason, with no recourse."

The normies struck back.  They said enough.  They are here to stay.  "They have seen what the power of the cultural curators in our country, in academia, media, Hollywood, institutions, and corporations, and in the bureaucracies has done to their lives, and they have rejected it."  It's called agency.  "Trump defeated Harris in large part because very many Americans are like my siblings: ordinary, good, honest, hard-working people who are sick of being treated as if they are ignorant and helpless bigots."

It wasn't complicated.  "Trump won because people are worse off now than they were four years ago when he was president. Prices are higher, the border is broken and the world teeters on the edge of World War Three. That all happened on Harris’s watch."  All Our Past and Future President had to do was call attention.  "Trump has exploited the widespread disillusionment that has curdled into cynicism about a ruling class rife with hypocrisy, self-aggrandizement and bad judgment."  The past few years have felt anything but normal.  America is not a country that kowtows to the elites.

Now it is time to restore a state of good repair.  "The backlash against a failed elite was the phenomenon. He was just the face of it. If it weren’t Donald Trump, it would be someone else."

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

The presidential election approaches.  Biden will be remembered as a laughingstock.  Ten percent for the big guy.  "I mean, Trump said mean things on Twitter, but Biden was apparently selling his country out for a few bucks."  It's hard to keep track of all the valor stolen.  "Trump stole Obama’s glory, and also, there was no glory."

It's also hard to keep track of the existential threats.  "Democrats don’t much like Constitutional government, and indeed don’t much like the Constitution itself."  Nor do their court intellectuals like normal people.  "They mostly speak to the college educated, the urban and affluent, in their language. Their tone is condescending and paternalistic."  And irrelevant to the lived experience of normal people.  "You’ve known it for years: they’re snobby, condescending, overly educated, and care about things that normal people couldn’t care less about."  When they're not outright wrong.  "The cult of expertise is the problem. In many cases, expertise is really just unearned certainty. No expert should be certain of things to the point that they ridicule others, prevent dissent, and quash inquiry."  Sanctimonious liberals make me want to vote Trump.  Likewise.

If the Expert Class take a beating this election cycle, that's good.  "Tom Friedman deserves a lifetime achievement prize for cluelessness."  He's in bad company.  "David Brooks, Tom Nichols, William Kristol, and Peggy Noonan have all written the most amazingly refutable piles of nonsense in the last few days, being professionals at the task, and I kept asking out loud if David Brooks hears himself, because every paragraph clashes and refutes all the other paragraphs around it. But no."  Undermine them with mockery.  "The word 'experts' has taken such a hit in the last few years... right up there with 'democracy' and 'fascist.'"

What's the answer to expert failure?  Invent another existential threat.  "Trump has already been president, and it turns out he wasn’t Hitler. He wasn’t even just a disaster."  In two weeks, we'll see whether energy independence and secure borders matter.

The deeper questions remain.  "Leviathan may seem calm and controlled at one moment, but the potential for a sudden and destructive outcome exists due to the unpredictable and fundamentally dangerous nature of the forces involved."  And the Trumpian coalition, eclectic as it is, gives conservative purists pause.  "Trump has some advantages over Harris, especially in the realms of illegal immigration and the judiciary, but he is a long, long way from being a conservative."  That article reinforces the importance of the city council, the school boards, and the dog-catcher.  "In the states, by contrast, conservatism is ascendant."  What happens when the government turns out not to deliver the promised miracles?

The weekly round-up of mostly pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

TODAY IN FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS.

Used to be parents might make a piggy-bank for their kids by making a slot in a used canning jar lid with hand tools on hand, or perhaps taught their spawn how to make a clean cut under adult supervision.

These days, that work has been outsourced.

I suppose that puts a new twist on "save big money at Menards!"

FRIDAY short TAKES.

The Democrats:  We were the party of loose morals.  Jen Psaki can't help but continue to lie about the situation.

They might be cruising for a bruising.  In the absence of devolution, there's still Donald Trump.  "Is it any surprise that voters have decided to abandon technocratic/bureaucratic governance in the midst of the chaos it has delivered?"  Fool me twice, shame on you.  "Trump’s strength is once again a rebellion against a coalesced liberal elite class that has become far more strident and arrogant in insisting to Americans that they have the nation on the right track while they relentlessly attack Trump to the point of trying to put him in jail."  No, seriously.  "Hold my beer. Watch me vote for him again."  That includes some of the Never Trump types.  “My ‘Never Again’ is trumping my ‘Never Trump’ these days.”

The Higher Learning:  Scholars should not have a priori interests in the outcome of their studies.  Robustness and replicability are hard to define in economics.  Rules matter only when guardrails are consistently upheld.  Today's universities have gone from being critical institutions to totally adversarial institutions.  The reckoning will come.   To awaken from Wokery is a brutal shock to the brain.  Reality will throw the switch.  "But disappear they will, and free thought will survive them."

The Green Transition.  "The modern Left espouses ideas that are not irrational if you start from completely nutso premises."  Something to keep in mind.  "If the goal is to get Americans to use EVs, how does it make sense to raise their cost to consumers?"  It doesn't.  "Americans aren't about to give up our hot water."  It's truly a race to the protectionist bottom.  When central planning misses, it misses.  Fortunately, enumerated powers are real.  "Better to get [an EPA electric truck ukase] law thrown out now than to wait until food become unaffordable because there aren’t enough reliable trucks to deliver it…"

You will all know what a high trust society is when it's gone.  Civilization takes work.

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Democracy, good and hard.  "In America, you get the 'luxury' of freedom, liberty, and self-governance, but with it comes the responsibility to make informed decisions. If you want to blame someone, look in the mirror."  And at the Conservative Establishment.  "They inherited Ronald Reagan’s 'shining city on a hill' and have bequeathed to us the Rise of China, Big Tech, and Woke Totalitarianism."

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations of traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

SEEN AND UNSEEN.

It doesn't matter whether Harvard students learn Henry Hazlitt's maxim, "The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups," as long as there are students who look beyond the immediate.  "You bought an electric car. Why did your carbon footprint grow?"

Those electric cars aren't made by Keebler's elves in a hollow tree.  "As a sophomore, Lucas Woodley ’23 started asking tough questions about electric vehicles. Are tax credits effective at reducing carbon emissions? If not, how might incentives be improved for greater social benefit?" Look no further than your reduced spending on motor fuel, miss a lot.  Mr Woodley did a double major, in economics and psychology, and his work qualifies him as thinking like an economist, in the sense of Hazlitt.  "The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond. The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences."

ELIGIBILITY STUDIES AT AUBURN.

Faculty who hold administrative positions have some obligation to uphold the administrative line, but there are limits.

[Economist Michael] Stern’s attorneys successfully argued that Joseph Aistrup, a former dean at the College of the Liberal Arts, illegally relieved him from his job as department chair in May 2018 because he criticized the school for placing a disproportionate number of athletes in a “troubled” public administration major, according to the complaint.

“Dr. Stern’s statements about the alleged clustering of student athletes in the Public Administration major were a motivating factor in Dr. Aistrup’s decision to remove Dr. Stern as chair of the department of economics,” the jury concluded on November 15.

The professor successfully demonstrated that “Airstrup acted with malice or reckless indifference to Stern’s federally protected rights,” according to the verdict.

Usually, the eligibility studies major is something like communication studies or sport management. Public administration, particularly at the graduate level, can be a worthwhile activity. For instance, you'll likely find a city manager or the like with a Master of Public Administration from Northern Illinois almost anywhere in the State Line or Greater Chicago. Apparently not so much at Auburn.

More importantly, department heads still retain some autonomy as scholars and stewards of the curriculum.

A law professor at George Washington University and a commentator on free speech issues wrote that the jury made the right decision.

“Professor Stern went public with his view that the university was using the College of Liberal Arts’ Public Administration major to offer athletes an easy education, particularly as part of the school’s famed football program,” Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law expert, wrote November 18 on his blog.

Turley wrote that while it is commendable when professors have the courage to voice dissenting views, Stern’s criticism of the prestigious Auburn football program “takes an unparalleled level of chutzpah.”

“The decision is a substantial victory for free speech,” Turley wrote.

Better, too, to call attention to the student part of "student-athlete" being neglected before some star athlete sues the university for educational malpractice when his inability to read finally catches up with him.

Inside Higher Ed's Colleen Flaherty provides additional details.  I like the cut of Professor Stern's jib.

Stern became something of a thorn in Auburn’s side in 2008, when he worked with a local reporter on a story alleging that Auburn was accepting money from the Charles Koch Foundation in ways that undermined the economics department’s academic integrity. In retaliation for Stern’s internal and external activism, Auburn in 2009 suddenly moved the department of economics out of the College of Business and into the College of Liberal Arts, the lawsuit said. Around this time, Stern’s new dean allegedly opposed his tenure bid, as did the provost, contradicting the positive recommendation of his department. Stern’s tenure was granted by appeal, in 2010.

Later that year, Stern was elected chair of the economics department. He eventually developed a good rapport with his new dean, but that dean was “run off” in 2013 over a then-quiet dispute about whether to keep the public administration major open at the behest of Auburn’s athletics programs, according to the lawsuit. A new dean, Joseph Aistrup, was appointed.

There's an instructive side story. Imagine a former pro football player with some math chops conducting a clinic on "disproportionate participation".

Football player and mathematician John Urschel, who at the time was playing for the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens and who has no connection to Auburn, raised the issue in late 2014, however, arguing in a blog post that that the high density of Auburn players majoring in public administration only had a one in three undecillion chance of occurring randomly.

"A stunning 23 out of the 48 upperclassmen student athlete football players are enrolled in public administration," Urschel wrote. "Logically, it must be a fairly common major, right? This is where things take a turn for the worse. As of last spring, only 88 of the 11,402 upperclassmen in the whole university were majoring in public administration!"

In other words, Stern's lawsuit said, “pretty low odds" that this was random.

The baccalaureate in public administration might be a rare sort of program, with most of the action being in the master's degree.  What were the academic profiles of the other 65 majors?  It takes some insider knowledge to understand that the M.P.A. is the main public administration degree, often open to people holding elective or appointed office irrespective of undergraduate degree, and that this Auburn program is eligibility studies without the taint of communication or underwater basketweaving.

Stern shared some of this information with The Wall Street Journal, which published an explosive article just ahead of 2015’s football season. The article said that in 2013 about half of students majoring in public administration at Auburn played sports, including nearly all the top players on the football team. The Journal quoted emails from athletics officials internally lobbying for the major, as well. In one case, an official wrote that “If the public administration program is eliminated, the [graduation success rate] numbers for our student-athletes will likely decline.” In another, an athletics official seemed to be offering money to fund the public administration program, which Stern considered an “institutional bribe.” Stern was quoted in the Journal as describing Auburn athletics as a “second university” in its power.

There has to be a public administration degree, or perhaps an economics department, for Auburn's football team to be proud of, right?

A TRENCHANT PARKINSONISM.

That's the same C. Northcote Parkinson best known for "Work expands to fill the available time."  He also once wrote, "The car would be a splendid vehicle if nobody else possessed one.  Once made common to all it changes our way of life dramatically and for the worse."  It appears as though Streetsblog's version of Friday short Takes has come to the same conclusion: "Friday’s Headlines Are Quitting Cars."  In particular, the speed and cheap mobility was only there when few people possessed one.  "The worldwide love affair with the car, which promised consumers convenience, status and freedom, is over. The reality from Hotan to Hull and Lagos to Lahore is that the car is now a social and environmental curse, disconnecting people, eroding public space, fracturing local economies, and generating sprawl and urban decay."  Replacing the internal combustion engines with fuel cells or batteries ultimately does nothing about the congestion.  Where is this era's traction promoters?

DON'T GIVE THE JARRETT REGENCY ANY IDEAS.

Strong Towns contributor Jay Stange grapples with the post-corona school bus driver shortage (note First Student recruiting at Corn Fest) with a reflection on the long and winding road (that leads to your cul-de-sac) that led to the situation.

Many of our cities’ transportation systems and land-use frameworks are fragile: auto centric and spread out. If you want to know how car dependent our places are, just imagine—as Josh McCarty of Urban3 once suggested to me—what would happen if tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. all the gasoline in the world disappeared.

For now, these school bus shortages are a real-world, non-hypothetical example of the problem we face in North America. In a second year of these bus driver shortages, the tone is getting shriller. The answers are not easy and expose the fragility of our post-WWII Suburban Experiment, which relies on cheap oil and massive spending on infrastructure in a Growth Ponzi Scheme that just keeps making it all worse.

No doubt the doddering ficus would mumble something about that "beautiful transition" and praise Gaia for doing what his cancellation of pipeline permits and oil leases couldn't.  Never mind that it was government decisions that brought us to this pass in the first place.  "Some of that exurban expansion was strictly emergent, and some of it was at the urging of Wise Experts. Similarly, emergence played a big role in the exodus from the cities, but expertise gave us urban renewal."

School consolidation, which is one of several reasons why walking to school is no longer a possibility, occurred for a variety of reasons.

What interests me as the shortage is ongoing, is to recognize, as [Daniel Herriges] writes, that “we didn't have to be here. We've spent decades closing neighborhood schools, consolidating schools in unwalkable locations, and making our communities more dangerous places for kids to walk and bike, all while public transportation became less frequent and less available.”

School consolidation might have taken place in the hopes of having a critical mass of students and taxpayers to properly equip and staff the chemistry class, or that might have been to field a competitive football team.  A school site in each new subdivision plat used to be standard procedure.  For a while the youngsters (and there are plenty) in the subdivisions containing Cold Spring Shops headquarters and the distressed sale properties to the west were on school buses to the former Malta high school, which became an elementary school when the two districts combined.  I lose track of who goes where these days.  These days, there are residents who object to the construction of elementary schools nearby.  Might soft-on-delinquency suspension policies turn elementary schools into nuisance facilities, and the corona tyranny contributing to the driver shortages simply heightened the contradictions, in the Trotskyist sense?

That transition away from the streetcar suburbs was a long time in coming, and the transition back will take a long time.  Meanwhile, all that emphasis on converting motorists into electric car drivers does nothing to change commuting patterns, and when you're stuck in traffic, those batteries will be ticking down and you might have to shut off the radio or CD player to conserve power.

Where is the latter-day electric traction merchant to suggest that a car line that is also a corridor for the electric mains might be the most effective way to provide commuting options by day with the additional power to charge up all those electric cars overnight?

WHY "PEER REVIEWED" ISN'T THE QUALITY ASSURANCE YOU THINK IT IS.

Higher Education Quarterly just confessed to being pranked.  "The retraction is agreed because data in the article has been identified as fabricated and the authors have not disclosed their true identities."  The authors gave their names as "Sage Owens and Kal Avers-Lynde III." Doesn't anybody think of an acronym here, or was the title, "Donor money and the academy: Perceptions of undue donor pressure in political science, economics, and philosophy," just too appealing to The Narrative to call for more careful review?

The paper, titled Donor Money and the Academy: Perceptions of Undue Donor Pressure in Political Science, Economics, and Philosophy, includes the Olin Foundation and the “Randy Eller Foundation” among the “right-wing donor sources” subject to research. However, the Olin Foundation disbanded in 2005, and the “Randy Eller Foundation” does not appear to exist, a detail noted by Steven Hayward at Powerline.

The paper also lists the Federalist Society among donors to four-year universities and colleges. However, a Federalist Society spokesperson told National Review in an email that the organization “does not donate to undergraduate programs.”

National Review has reached out to Higher Education Quarterly and its editors for comment. The nature of the review process for the article was not immediately clear.

It's malpractice for an editor to send a manuscript on the behavior of eleemosynary institutions to reviewers who are so unfamiliar with the foundations (particularly, if there are economists helping review the paper) as to let that "Randy Eller" (it's easy enough to check the sponsored projects office at a university for that one) slide or to be unaware that Olin have not been calling for proposals for over fifteen years.  The Narrative, notes Pierre Lemieux, was Just.  Too.  Convenient.  "The specter of Koch money appears often in the article along with code words such as 'neoliberalization of higher education' or 'market fundamentalism.' That might have been sufficient to have the article accepted, despite fabricated data and obvious errors."

Academia delenda est.

SPOT THE DISPROPORTIONATE IMPACT.

"Any one of the states of California, Massachusetts and Illinois has more power than the four continents of Asia, South America, Africa and Australasia combined." Should you fret, dear reader?

GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT.

Power Line's John Hinderaker is no fan of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation's educated guesses about when coronavirus infections will peak in each state.  Start here, where he notes, "I have followed that model and its predictions for a while, and have concluded that it is more or less useless."  He's been keeping track of the weekly forecasts for Minnesota, Iowa, and the Dakotas, and that's a useful service, as he previously noted, because "As a result I have a record of IHME’s projections for those five states on those dates, which is significant because, as best I can tell, each version of the IHME model’s output is sent to the memory hole when it is updated."

And yet nobody, in journalism or in government, seems to be asking the health boffins, "What evidence would persuade you to abandon IHME's forecasts?"

Robert Verbruggen is similarly skeptical.

The model simply doesn’t work, and the folks behind it are still futzing with its fundamental workings as the pandemic enters its least predictable phase.

During this crucial period when the country is reopening, we can have no faith in the model’s output. It shouldn’t be used to inform policymaking decisions at all. This isn’t to slight the scientists who took on such a difficult task; it’s just a realistic assessment of how the project turned out.

Perhaps the policy makers are in the position of the drunk looking for his keys under the streetlight despite having dropped them up the street because the light is better.  I doubt it.  John "Grumpy Economist" Cochrane knows a thing or two about mathematical modelling, and he's been at work.  One suggestion:

If we had just enough random testing to know how many people are infected in our local area, people and officials could follow the top graphs not the bottom graph. It is not expensive. In the model, one can back out the number of people infected from the increase in the number "resolving." The rate of hospital admissions might be a widely publicized number now available that could be a very good guess.

State officials have still been concentrating, perhaps not unreasonably, on infected areas, and inviting people who are showing symptoms to be tested. In Illinois, for instance, a Rockford area testing site ended one day with unadministered tests, as fewer people than they prepared for showed up.  There's a to-do-list of projects, and a number of interesting suggestions in the comments.  Consider, in particular, this model.  If you love anomalies and paradoxes, try this: greater variability in susceptibility suggests a lower herd-immunity threshold.  There's also Matlab code, dear reader, should you have the computing capacity and the time to play with ideas.

RETHINKING THE VALUE OF CITIES IN AN ERA OF PLAGUE.

It's the tension between "contagions for good," the possibilities for sharing ideas and exchanging goods in thicker markets, and "contagions for evil," when it's your viruses and bacteria that are being shared with others.

IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME.

Here is an HO Scale model of an early Red Owl supermarket.

The supermarket concept predates the American High.  In DeKalb, there are two early A&P stores, one smaller than the store modelled here, now an auto parts store near the rail station; its successor a few blocks away, where clearing land for additional parking was easier to do, it's been several different things ever since A&P left town.

What we see here was what emerged during the Second Era of American Greatness, when the abundant motor fuel that made victory in the War possible, combined with mass-produced tract housing and improved agricultural productivity releasing land on the outskirts of cities for other uses led to larger supermarkets with bigger parking lots.  Contrast that with the original DeKalb A&P that provided maybe six parking spots adjacent to the store.  The next step was the shopping center, sometimes anchored with a supermarket, sometimes not.  Those shopping centers were sometimes smaller than what we understand as strip malls today.  The enclosed shopping mall first appeared about at the same time, again taking advantage of those land and fuel price incentives.

It's not, though, as David Brooks had it.  "It's as if Zeus came down and started plopping vast towns in the middle of the farmland and the desert overnight. Boom! A master planned community. Boom! A big-box mall! Boom! A rec center, pool, and four thousand soccer fields!"

Rather, the pattern we understand as suburban sprawl emerged, perhaps encouraged by zoning codes and the planning imperative, perhaps not.

I took that picture from the Beaver Tail car of New Zealand Rail's Wellington - Auckland day train, in January 2000.  The same sort of strip development we see in the States is also present half a world away, in a suburban area served by electric commuter trains.

In the same way that the American High built environment emerged piecemeal, whatever comes next is also likely to take shape piecemeal, although some experiments might be more successful than others.

PREPARE TO BE A MISERABLE HUMAN BEING?

Thirteen years ago, an eternity in weblog years, I made reference to an even older Chicago Tribune Magazine article about life in the University of Chicago's economics department, which has almost as many Nobel laureates as Green Bay has football trophies.

[K]eep in mind an anecdote that the Chicago Tribune repeated in a Sunday feature on a local economics department during its run of consecutive Nobel Memorial Awards. A junior professor urged his colleagues to wrap up a meeting that was running long as his wife was waiting in a car outside and he didn't want her to divorce him. One of the older heads is quoted as saying "You'd fit in better if she did." Draw your own conclusions.

I was reacting to some advice by the very successful N. Gregory Mankiw, who was giving economists leave to have a life. (If you're as talented as he is, that's easy. For others, not so much.)

It recently came to my attention that the magazine article in question is available in Tribune archives.  Here's the anecdote as reported there.

A story that has filtered down to the graduate students involves a younger faculty member attending a meeting that went longer than expected. Finally, he announced he was leaving because his wife was waiting for him in a car downstairs.

"I wouldn't want her to divorce me," he said.

"Why not?" retorted a senior faculty member. "You'd fit in better then."

Certainly such zealous devotion to work can take a personal toll. (For Lucas it also took a financial toll: Half his million-dollar prize money for the Nobel goes to his ex-wife as part of a 6-year-old divorce settlement.)

But inside the walls of the university this intensity creates an excitement, a sense of anticipation that there are new economic worlds that can be conquered. You cannot spend time around the laureates and their less-famous colleagues without feeling that these people genuinely believe they are lucky to work at something they love in a place that is intellectually stimulating.

Yes, and Tribune writer George Papajohn describes them as "regular guys."

Let the record show that there was a sunset clause on Professor Lucas's divorce settlement.  The Nobel Prize stipulation was to expire in seven years.  Professor Lucas's award was for his work on rational expectations.  Was he further up the short list than he expected?