I'LL NOT LACK FOR WORK. Some newspaper editorials address gasoline prices.

Here's the Visalia (California) Times-Delta.

Washington talks about energy all the time, and rarely does anything about it. This nation has been undergoing an energy crisis for almost 40 years, yet not a single president in that time has proposed the kind of energy program that, say, Kennedy declared for space, Johnson declared for racial equality or Reagan declared for defeating communism in Europe.

The energy bill President Bush signed last week increased subsidies for energy companies and fiddled with Daylight Savings Time. Not exactly a call to arms for a national war on energy dependence. Where were the visionary strategies like the hydrogen highway or photo-voltaic cells?

And here the Salem, Oregon Statesman Journal.

Everyone is fed up with the record prices -- that is, everyone except the oil companies raking in those profits. So it's puzzling that Congress would pass an energy bill that befriends those companies while doing little to encourage energy conservation.

Other than screaming out the window, which might provide momentary satisfaction, most of us can do little about our nation's misguided energy policies. There also may be little that some farms, airlines and other businesses can do to reduce their fuel consumption.

Next week I begin teaching a principles of microeconomics course and a sophomore-junior level public policy course. It will be very difficult for me to not make it all about the oiiiiillllll.

THE COMPANY YOU KEEP? Two illustrations of discredit-by-association for your consideration today. At Marquette Warrior, Gold Star mother Cindy Sheehan's history of working with the more extreme elements of the Angry Left receives some documentation. At Pandagon, the citizen's organization calling itself "Minutemen" that operates a form of Neighborhood Watch on the southern borders is called out for receiving support from the more extreme elements of the white supremacist Right. Exiled Kleagle David Duke endorses both causes.

With the new semester starting, it is time to review some fundamentals of policy making and argumentation. The extremists of any stripe (and I apologize for the excessive abstraction of "Left" and "Right;" nativists are not necessarily royalists or capitalists, and pacifists and war resisters not necessarily republicans or socialists) do not affect public policy unless they are able to move the marginal decision maker. And that marginal decision maker is somewhere in the middle. Why? Review the median voter theorem and the principle of minimum differentiation. (The closing paragraph of Harold Hotelling's "Stability in Competition" notes that Democrats and Republicans, or Methodists and Episcopalians, are quite similar.)

So, should prospective students be reading these pages, kindly be advised that discredit-by-appeal-to- argmin[Michael Moore, Rush Limbaugh] will not fly. Evaluate immigration policy, or war, or gasoline prices on the merits, and be particularly sensitive to those arguments attempted to move the median rather than to shore up the base.

OPPORTUNITY COSTS. Is the gasoline price increase permanent or transitory? Lynne at Knowledge Problem observes,

The persistently high oil prices reflect a large risk premium (security, change of regime in Saudi Arabia, etc.) interacting with the stubbornly high Chinese demand for oil due to their growing economy. Don't forget that in real terms, the price of a barrel of oil would have to be $90 today to be as high as it was at its highest in the 1970s; today oil is about $66/barrel.

The array of factors influencing gasoline prices is much more complex. First you've got constraints on refining capacity; the last refinery built in the US was in 1976, and refiners have been squeezing more blood out of the stone ever since, but it's increasingly difficult and we're operating very close to capacity. Then add in the demand for other petroleum products, like jet fuel and the build-up of home heating oil for the upcoming winter, and there are a lot of different things competing for the scarce refining capacity. Add to that the season: two weeks before Labor Day, and we're taking driving vacations.

Then there's the regional fuel market balkanization due to the wide range of fuel formulas to meet the federal fuel oxygenate requirement. While the recently-signed energy bill promises to streamline the formulae and reduce the fuel market balkanization, it hasn't kicked in yet, and won't until next spring.

King at SCSU Scholars links to news (link appears to have been retired) that Russia, a major exporter of oil, is taxing those exports heavily.

For some perspective on the usefulness of oil in transportation, Phil at Market Power has some reflections on the difficulties of developing steam automobiles (which might also be oil burners.) Sure, one can raise steam by burning a number of fuels, but that has the effect of producing carbon dioxide and a number of annoying combustion byproducts. Visualize eating lunch on a railroad dining car on a hot summer day in the Age of Steam. Do you really want to open the window for some ventilation?

RULES WRITTEN IN BLOOD. Remember Arthur Hailey's Runway Zero-Eight? A former military pilot is passenger on a plane with an incapacitated flight crew. He saves the day. Now reflect on that recent crash of a Cypriot airliner in Greece. The pilots were incapacitated. Pilots have a separate oxygen system from the main cabin. We don't know whether the oxygen masks dropped down in the cabin, or if passengers reacted promptly enough if they did. (In Airport, one of Hailey's characters reflects that the passenger briefing ought to go something like "If you see a mask in front of you, stick your nose in it and ask questions later.")

But under the new flight deck (the railroader in me wants to say "cab") security rules, a heroic passenger that managed to get on oxygen would not be able to get to the cockpit to assist an incapacitated pilot. Here's a challenging uncertainty problem. There is some positive probability that bad guys will get on the flight deck and fly the plane into a building. There is also some positive probability that the pilots will be incapacitated by an in-flight mechanical failure. What is the best balance of those two risks?

WHITTIER WAS RIGHT. Book Review No. 32 is What Might Have Been, which was the least wise expenditure of ten pounds at Blackwell's last fall. Don't be fooled by the cover, which suggests Wernher von Braun and his team landed a German astronaut on the Moon. No such story is between the covers.

The introduction proposes a serious purpose: to offer an alternative to Marxian and Whiggish approaches to doing history that view past events through a lens of class struggle or greater enlightenment. Their approach is the construction of counterfactuals to illustrate the path-dependency or state-contingency of pivotal events, primarily battles and elections. That is serious work but it requires serious and careful execution. Unfortunately, proposing that Napoleon's republic becomes an 1840s version of the 2003 European Union, Lenin is shot by a Balt called Lev Harveivic Osvalt who is himself murdered two days later by someone with mob ties, Stalin is betrayed by his bodyguard Tengiz Fiktionashvili, and following all that by asking President Bush's speechwriter David Frum to envision President Gore holding a September 11 crisis session with National Security Advisor Leon Fuerth and Secretary of Defense Wesley Clark, an exercise that plays on the fears many red-state voters have about the Democrats has its entertainment value at the expense of serious considerations of counterfactuals.

CHEESEHEAD LESSONS. The Johnsonville bratwurst is the "fastest growing protein" among outdoor chefs, according to USA Today. The article includes a pronunciation guide (that's brAHT) and a few grilling tips (don't puncture them, but a bit of drippage out the end flavors the smoke.) The report does not get into some regional variations such as condiments (brown mustard, please, not that annoying yellow flatlander stuff; ketchup is for boors; sauerkraut in Milwaukee but not in Sheboygan) or portion size (one on a sausage roll or two on a round hard roll derived from the Semmel?) There are regional variations in German-speaking countries as well; some brief notes here.

And yes, there really is a Johnsonville. And I remember when the only outlet for Johnsonville bratwursts was a butcher shop on the main drag of ... Schnapsville?? (That I like as a chaser.) Two taverns, a church, a bridge over a small stream, the meat market.

DO I HEAR AN ECHO? Armed Liberal has an impression of the new World War II monument in Washington, D.C.

The World War II memorial - a circle of pylons around a sterile central fountain - encouraged no such involvement. The garish wreaths, and the martial eagles holding the banners at the entrances, left me imagining how Leni Riefenstahl would have photographed them. I can't imagine another response to this kind of iconic imagery.

Yes, that occurred to me, also, when the memorial opened.

Albert Speer would feel right at home.

(To be polite, the monument does capture some of the Roosevelt Gothic of such buildings as the Milwaukee County Court House and the University of Michigan central campus, which might have been on the designer's mind.)

THE STATE OF MAINE EXPRESS, REDUX? If you build a corridor, passengers will come. (No, this is not another tribute to the Hiawatha service.) In this case, the corridor is the old Boston and Maine - Maine Central service from Boston to Portland and points Downeast. Under consideration: an extension of the Downeaster service (schedule is a .pdf) another 40 miles to Freeport (for your L. L. Bean yuppie wear) and Brunswick. Years ago, there were a few sleeping cars and at summers a day train from New York City to the Maine coast (it bypassed Boston.)

PEOPLE RESPOND TO INCENTIVES. Today's message is at Marginal Utility.

In the bigger picture, what worries me is that we'll get policies that take the organization of suburban sprawl life as immutable consequences of primal human desires, rather than as an adaptation to cheap private transportation that may be abandoned as quickly as it was thrown up when market forces turn on it. (Policies that seek to promote low gas prices versus low fuel consumption may have this effect.) Human life has been successfully lived without big-box stores, even in my lifetime, if you can imagine that. This is not to say that I disagree at all with Prof. Hoch's conclusion that the transition will be hard, especially as it implies that the values of today's half-megabuck McMansionettes are no more privileged than those of the once-grand houses owned by the elites of small (and not-so-small) towns along, say, the route of the Erie Canal.

But I think an underappreciated feature of neoclassical microeconomics is that while consumers may in principle want everything, what they actually choose to have is regulated by relative and absolute prices. So when self-mobile freedom is sufficiently expensive, sooner or later other forms of consumption will be substituted for it. The question is whether the corporate welfare state will allow this to happen.

There's a harder question: to what extent will business interests (the automobile lobby, mall and tract housing developers primarily) make common cause with more populist interests (should real gasoline prices rise further; right now there is a summer peak approximately equal to early 1981 levels just before domestic price controls and international collusion came to an end) who face large capital losses as house prices adjust and job losses? There's also the possible reaction of urban interests. Will they continue to push their thickly-settled, rail-structured view of work and shopping, rather than, for instance, allowing local bus authorities or bus entrepreneurs greater freedom of action?

ACCUMULATION OF SMALL ADVANTAGES. Book Review No. 31, some good on-train reading, is Gary Nabhan's Why Some Like it Hot. In some places it reads like a young adult's diary; in some places the knowledge of blood chemistry and related topics is a bit beyond me. The central thesis is straightforward enough, "[W]e are what our ancestors ate, and also what they had to regurgitate," and in some ways the findings parallel some of the observations in Guns, Germs, and Steel about technology transfers. In this case the frontier between Eurasia and the rest of the world is in the South Pacific, where the plants of Java are familiar to those observed on Eurasia; go a few islands east and the plants are completely different. The cautions are also instructive: no magic genetic marker for difficulties eating some foods; both rapid and slow adaptations are observable in people and other species. (Note: differences in adaptation rates cannot be seized upon as refutations of evolution or as evidence of intelligent design. It takes an improved theory to beat a moderately successful theory.)

But think about how populations with similar genetic codes and different resource endowments might reward mutations differently. That's the main story of the book. Consider foragers. A mother nursing a child is less effective as a forager. An enzyme that turns off a baby's desire to suckle favors faster weaning, and greater fertility in the mother, something else that might be favored with lots of infant mortality and short life expectancies. Now consider herders. That enzyme will not be as favored in a population that has learned to make yogurt and cheese and later used the milk directly. On the other hand, herders might learn to develop substitutes for water, particularly water downstream from the pasture. Here another enzyme that aids the digestion of fermented liquids might be favorably selected. Over the years, a population with a longer history of foraging might be more lactose-intolerant and alcohol-intolerant than a population with a longer history of herding.

There are several other case studies in this vein that, taken together, suggest proposing a single dietary fix for all earthlings subject to obesity or heart disease or cancers is nearly impossible. But for a population with common traditions and less intermarriage outside the extended family, there are health gains to respecting the ancient traditions. Mr Nabhan has an intriguing way of summarizing it.

When the persistence of traditional foods is more widely recognized as a source of both cultural pride and as an aid to physical survival and well-being, I doubt that many Native American communities will abandon what many of them feel to be a true gift from their Creator.

I also discovered that my willingness to help out my younger siblings with their brussels sprouts and cauliflower and my later affinity for hot peppers are connected.

WELCOME VISITORS. Thursday turned into a rain day, and Friday into an end-of-summer-research Hiawatha excursion, although the hits kept on coming.

Laura at 11-D wrote a post on public and private virtue that linked here; that post mentioned The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce. The expansion on that subject attracted an Instalanche from designated poster Megan; some of those readers headed over here. The comments at 11-D provide several brief reviews of Unexpected Legacy for your perusal; I have moved that book up in the stack of 50 and hope to post a review before classes begin.

Scott at The Valve linked here to lead readers to a criticism of criticism on Opinion Journal. Perhaps my guests can help me make sense of this passage.

Why should that suppress internal criticism of theoretical within or across academic disciplines? Those who would so appropriate these arguments would have found grounds for criticism elsewhere because they actively seek them out. As I tell my students: If you go fishing in a novel you can almost always find the claims that you need to support the argument you were determined to make. The difference between a fisher and a scholar is that a scholar takes seriously what the novel takes seriously and analyses in accordance with its logic.

To my limited knowledge, that's thinking about the plot and the symbolism and the intent of the author, and it might add to the enjoyment of a novel or a poem. That, however, doesn't really bring the Journal columnist up short: what purpose does the notion of a sexed equation or a privileged velocity serve, in a close reading of a hypothesis about the way light propagates, and its implications for the rest, inertial, and relativistic masses of moving bodies? If anything, the misuse of techniques of reading fiction to obtain some sort of insight into the symbolism of theoretical or empirical investigation of physical phenomena and human action leads precisely to the pass Mr Kaufman reaches.

How has it continued to thrive in a political environs vastly different from the one in which it first evolved? From the perspective of those who would think Theory a bulwark against political conservativism, how are we to account to the vast rightward drift of the country when many of them would’ve taken their required English and/or Composition courses with instructors radicalized during the culture wars of the ‘80s and ‘90s?

I pose the Carrie explanation. They're all going to laugh at you. Experimental scientists have called out the junk science hidden in much application of critical techniques to their work much more effectively than I ever could. There's also a simple corrective for the introduction of primitive Marxian notions such as "exploitation" and "alienation" and "immiserisation." One simply has to pick up Marx's Economic Predictions and keep score of how many testable implications of Capital and other works have been falsified.

POSSIBLE SOURCE OF COMPANY MAIL. Live from the Third Rail bids farewell to a contributor who has moved to Greater DeKalb and set up Thrown for a Loop, with a title image offering an Electroliner's eye view of the Gold Coast.

THE MISERY OF LIVING UP TO OTHERS' EXPECTATIONS. At Phantom Prof, a bull session on the lost souls of the pre-meds.

The greatest thing I feel for the pre-meds is pity. Too soon it becomes all too apparent that these kids, for all their thoroughness and regaled smarts, have never thought of what they wanted to do with their lives for a second. They just "want money" and heard they were "good at science," so why not be a doctor? These are the kids who end up drinking in excessive amounts because they hate who they have become but lack the clarity to see a way out.

We've recognized that phenomenon here for some time; noted more generally.

There is nothing quite so miserable as the middle-aged partner in a law firm, ostensibly prosperous, who is there primarily because his (or her, parental programming is ubiquitous) parents aspired to have a lawyer in the family. There's a particularly nasty parody of the phenomenon, John Hersey's Child Buyer (details or compare prices,) that ought to be required reading for any parent that wants to program a kid in that way.

A QUOTE FOR THE DAY. Betsy's Page, reacting to news that high school students themselves would prefer to be challenged.

There is something seriously wrong with American high schools if [two-thirds] of the students don't think that their school set high academic expectations. Kids know when things are dumbed down for them. I have found that if you set high standards, all but a very few students will rise to the challenge. And they'll be grateful for it later And that small minority are the same ones who don't do the work when it's easy either. Schools and teachers should set those high standards and then make it clear that they're willing to work just as hard as they're asking students to work.

Karlson is ready; prepare the sophomores.

WATCH THAT FIRST DROP. Kimberly at Number 2 Pencil visits New Jersey's newest ultimate roller coaster. Six Flags' Kingda Ka is one of this summer's new arrivals. Closer to Cold Spring Shops is Mt. Olympus's new Hades, which the Roller Coaster Data Base describes as a "hybrid" coaster (wooden track, steel frame.)

Bear in mind that the Crystal Beach Cyclone and Comet are also hybrid coasters, with much of the Cyclone's steel, including the lift hill, serving the Comet at its new location in New York.

But I digress. What's neat about Hades? It features the steepest drop of any wooden-tracked roller coaster in the States. But that comes later. Mt. Olympus is located in a valley. The roller coasters take advantage of the terrain, although riders sometimes have to climb a lot of steps and ramps to board the trains. (Pittsburgh's Kennywood does a better job of siting the stations such that riders can board from midway level, and then exploit the terrain, although, to be fair, Kennywood was conceived as an amusement park from the beginning, and the Monongahela River bluffs are pretty much perfect for gully roller coasters and not much else.)

Hades offers the rider a figure-eight experience that would be creditable on a small amusement park's junior coaster. But that's out of the station, into the gully, BEFORE it hits the lift hill. Off the lift hill, there are some extremely fast but smooth elements in a tunnel that ducks under the parking lot, more air time in the turnaround, back into the tunnel, and more air-time and another figure-eight experience before it hits the brake run.

And I might have just created a monster ... this evening I mentioned to my eight year old nephew that he was big enough for some of the coasters at the Dells...

GANDER. SAUCE. GOOSE. College sports programs shelter felons who demonstrate athleticism, notes Phil at Market Power. But the real crime is hostile and abusive mascots, which will be banned -- as, apparently, will be hostile and abusive team names -- from National Collegiate Athletic Association tournaments. Robert at The Torch hopes that some university administrators will take a lesson from the basting they are about to receive.

The irony of this situation from a FIRE perspective is hard to miss. The NCAA, whose Executive Committee is made up of university administrators (presidents and chancellors), is ordering other university administrators (at the eighteen blacklisted schools) to abide by a ill-defined speech code or face a severe penalty (being locked out of NCAA tournaments). Those who dissent from the decision are expected to sue. This is no different from hundreds of FIRE cases in which students who run afoul of administrative speech restrictions are threatened with severe punishment—and are given no recourse except an appeal to the public or a lawsuit. It’s a very uncomfortable position in which to find oneself. If nothing else comes of this controversy, we can at least hope that being subjected to a vaguely defined and therefore unreasonable speech code will give college administrators some sympathy for the students they regularly torment with similar policies.

Inside Higher Ed offers a history of the mascots most likely to be viewed as hostile or abusive (that sneer on Wisconsin's Bucky Badger is apparently safe for the moment) as well as news reporting that recognizes potential ambiguities in applying the policy. Marquette Warrior sees lawsuits on the horizon, and King at SCSU Scholars sees inconsistency in naming names. The Education Wonks toss a challenge toward the NCAA's inquisitors. Scrapple Face proposes the limiting case of mascot nomenclature. Or does he? Suppose a school receives 27 consecutive digits of e. Would that not suggest the school transcends others?

RETHINKING MULTICULTURALISM. Michael Barone offers the latest salvo in the mainstream culture wars.

Multiculturalism is based on the lie that all cultures are morally equal. In practice, that soon degenerates to: All cultures are morally equal, except ours, which is worse. But all cultures are not equal in respecting representative government, guaranteed liberties and the rule of law. And those things arose not simultaneously and in all cultures, but in certain specific times and places -- mostly in Britain and America, but also in various parts of Europe.

In America, as in Britain, multiculturalism has become the fashion in large swathes of our society. So the Founding Fathers are presented only as slaveholders, World War II is limited to the internment of Japanese-Americans and the bombing of Hiroshima. Slavery is identified with America, though it has existed in every society and the antislavery movement arose first among English-speaking evangelical Christians.

But most Americans know there is something special about our cultural heritage. While Harvard and Brown are replacing scholars of the founding period with those studying other things, book-buyers are snapping up first-rate histories of the Founders by David McCullough, Joseph Ellis and Ron Chernow.

Multiculturalist intellectuals do not think our kind of society is worth defending. But millions here and increasing numbers in Britain and other countries know better.

Trent at Winds of Change is hosting a lively bull session; organizing theme "The serious intellectual backlash against 'Multi-cult' has begun."

Lest readers propose that Mr Barone is a bit overwrought, withhold judgement until you've visited Coach Brown, who posted the questions put to him in a cultural competence audit, including these gems:

6. Does the curriculum foster appreciation of cultural diversity?

7. Are experiences and activities, other than those common to middle class/European American culture, included?

Note the use of "appreciation." There is a continuum of ways of dealing with people who do things differently, ranging from tolerance to acceptance to affirmation to celebration, and I've probably missed a few buzzwords. I'm not sure where "appreciation" goes on that continuum. Where to stop? Some food? A concert? Great literature? A ritual sacrifice?

MORAL HAZARDS? No Oil for Pacifists has a mini-dissertation on Third World debt forgiveness and related topics.

Though better-targeted aid and conditional debt forgiveness have a continued role in African relief, they're no panacea. The spread of commerce, trade and the rule of law sharply reduced poverty in the West and would do the same in Africa--if we allow it.

Just read it.

CARNIVAL CALL. This week's Carnival of Education, No. 33₍₈₎, is at The Education Wonks.

EMERGENCE, OR INTELLIGENT DESIGN? Laura at 11-D offers a different take on David Brooks's "Virtues of Virtue" column.

What David Brooks is really saying is that America is doing swimmingly for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with government. American youth are pulling themselves up by their bootstraps with the help of family and church groups. Our Republican government has sensibly not devoted one cent to these efforts. Just set a good example. (Eyes rolling.)

Brooks wisely sets up his essay by pointing to the drop in the levels of domestic violence, which takes the steam out of any liberal counterargument. Who wants to play down that important development? If it is true that fewer women are getting thumped, then great. But to attribute that change to an underfunded church group and an army of well scrubbed teenagers is bizarre.

Mr Brooks does point to a 1994 federal criminalization of violence against women as a potential contributing influence, a point that arises in the comments. There is likely to be a research article or four attempting to tease out such effects. There are also likely to be what the statisticians call "confounding factors," something that Mr Brooks noted in his column.

The decline in family violence is part of a whole web of positive, mutually reinforcing social trends.

For some of these, identifying the effect of government policies will be difficult. Tighter standards for drunken driving, more driving, fewer drunken driving fatalities. (Did I mention cheaper gas providing an incentive to buy more crashworthy cars, federally mandated airbags notwithstanding?) For others, well, maybe we're observing better behavior on average because better people are choosing to be parents. (That's one of the more frequently cited bits of Freakonomics, which I reviewed, focusing on the econometrics, to the exclusion of the selectivity effect of abortions, which everybody else goes directly to.)

And then, there are those people doing the relatively obscure work, such as a Chicago Tribune columnist who wants to say "Enough" to hip-hop-pimp.

Maybe I'm just sick and tired of the whole pimp lifestyle and rap music's glorification of it all. And "Hustle & Flow," albeit well-done, is just an extension of that.

Maybe I'm just frustrated by how rap fits into a broader culture that continues to objectify women, and the movie, which for an independent film is doing well at the box office, is just an extension of that too.

These days, when you have a young daughter, as I have, it's constant and steady work to dispel the negative images out there of women and navigate around rap music's influences.

Read the column and note the absence of a call for government action. Then read her follow-up column, culled from reader mail.

Suggestive lyrics go beyond rap music, says John J. of Chicago: I could go on about the garbage sold by a lot of the white bands. Ever listen to a country/western song? Drinking and sleeping around are still very prevalent there, too. I'm beginning to think that our music says a lot about us as a civilization and it ain't good."

I don't know if that writer read Black Rednecks and White Liberals, but that connection is in that book, and I will be offering a review of it as part of a late summer doubleheader.

Pier S. of Chicago writes: I am entering my senior year as a Comparative Women's Studies major at Spelman College. Rapper Nelly's foundation approached Spelman with putting together a bone marrow drive, and when a few students saw one of his recent videos with him swiping a credit card down the backside of a woman, we told him not to come to our school.

And such support encouraged the columnist, who will probably stay on this message as a consequence. It is by small steps such as these that the great leaders and the great speeches will emerge.

(As a sidelight to researching this post, Steve Levitt has a new economic analysis of crack addiction, which is still present but less deadly. He suggests that policy sometimes ought be changed when the conditions leading to the policy are no longer present, but policy makers are often reluctant to rethink their designs.)

A VICTORY ONE CAN LIVE WITH? Sixty years ago, U.S. aviators delivered a second atomic bomb to Japan, and Soviet forces began invading Sakhalin Island (which to this day has Japanese style railroad equipment lettered for the Russian railroads.) That second bomb stimulates much more debate than the first. Jeff Jacoby makes the "necessary evil" argument.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hideous as they were, shortened the war that Japan had begun and saved an immensity of lives. Far from considering itself essentially defeated, the Japanese military was preparing for an Allied assault with a massive buildup in the south. It was only the shock of the atomic blasts that enabled Japanese leaders who wanted to stop the fighting to successfully press for a surrender.

''We of the peace party were assisted by the atomic bomb in our endeavor to end the war," Kido Koichi, one of Emperor Hirohito's closest aides, later recalled. Hisatsune Sakomizu, the chief Cabinet secretary, called the bomb ''a golden opportunity given by heaven for Japan to end the war." That is still the right way to see it. President Truman's decision to use the new weapons stopped a war that would otherwise have raged savagely on, and made possible the transformation of Japan from vicious aggressor to peaceful democracy. Six decades after August 1945, it is clear: The bomb made the world a better place.

Greg at Cliopatria offers the "unnecessary evil" argument.

To me, the United States committed a far greater crime in the dropping of an atomic bomb on Nagasaki than on Hiroshima. Whatever one’s opinion of the bombing of Hiroshima, there are at least various arguments that have been raised in support: the uncertainty that the bomb would work, the need to give Japan a shock, the need to avert an invasion that would be costly in lives, etc. Yet all of these arguments fall down in judging the Nagasaki bombing. Consider the situation: a bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima three days previously, to devastating effect. The United States had thereby proven that it had the capacity to make and deliver such weapons. (It is not clear how much their effects in the way of radiation were understood at the time by American military or political leaders). Furthermore, the Soviet Union had declared war on Japan on August 8th. There was no reason that the United States could not have waited to determine the Japanese reaction to these events, or to threaten further action, before dropping another bomb.

David at Liberty and Power extends.

I have a question: why couldn’t Truman have ended the war and saved even more lives by pursuing the third alternative of a conditional rather than an unconditional surrender?

Lots of hypotheses here; I lack the expertise to sort them all out. Mr Jacoby's column alludes to the conflict between the war faction and the peace faction within the Japanese government. Some of the former contended that Hiroshima was a "trick," or if genuine, a one-off. (I recall reading someone's observation that an offshore demonstration rather than busting up a city would have had no effect on the true believers in the trick hypothesis.) The Cliopatria post brings up a second hypothesis, in which the entry of the Soviet Union into the war on the Allied side ended the Soviet role as a neutral broker; apparently some members of the Japanese government had been working with the Soviet Union to communicate peace offers short of unconditional surrender to the Allies. The Leyte Gulf campaign itself hinted at a third possibility to obtain surrender without further bombing. U.S. planners were divided between closing the Japanese sea lanes by occupying Formosa (at that time Japanese; their railroads are also in the Japanese style) and establishing bases on China's east coast, or liberating the Philippines. Either action has the effect of isolating Japan from its Southern Resource Area; in the words of Robert E. Lee, it then becomes a siege, and it is only a matter of time. (These comments at Cliopatria consider further options.) But would world opinion be more, or less, critical, of a surrender obtained by starving, rather than bombing, a population into helplessness?

THE WORLD WONDERS. Book Review No. 30 is Thomas Cutler's The Battle of Leyte Gulf, which in 330 pages summarizes four connected naval actions that secured General MacArthur's Philippine invasion and effectively closed Japan's southern sea lanes. The battle, now commemorated with its own dot.com, consisted of four actions. The action that attracts the most notice is the battle off Samar Island, in which remnants of a Japanese battleship fleet that had been savaged by air attacks in the Sibuyan Sea ran the San Bernardino strait unopposed and had three small escort carrier forces between it and the landing beaches. The battleship fleet broke off its attack after sinking several attacking destroyers and destroyer escorts and an escort carrier, for reasons that will be debated unto eternity at Fiddler's Green. Read the book for some of the principal hypotheses.

The research and the recollections of veterans of the destroyers' torpedo attack on the heavy ships make for the most compelling reading. The author let me down a bit with his writing on developments on the U.S. heavy ships, where commanding Admiral Halsey first steamed north to finish off a Japanese carrier fleet intended to decoy the main body away from the heavies, but then reversed course to come to the assistance of the escort carriers, too late to catch the battleship fleet that broke off the attack. I would have preferred some recollections from veterans on the heavies to an allusion to a fictional character in War and Remembrance (in the video version, Robert Mitchum is demoted to playing that staff admiral; in Midway he played Admiral Halsey.)

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. Newmark's Door opens a David Brooks column suggesting there's a less-dysfunctional common culture emerging. Mr Brooks is looking for the vanguard.

I always thought it would be dramatic to live through a moral revival. Great leaders would emerge. There would be important books, speeches, marches and crusades. We're in the middle of a moral revival now, and there has been very little of that. This revival has been a bottom-up, prosaic, un-self-conscious one, led by normal parents, normal neighbors and normal community activists.

The first thing that has happened is that people have stopped believing in stupid ideas: that the traditional family is obsolete, that drugs are liberating, that it is every adolescent's social duty to be a rebel.

The second thing that has happened is that many Americans have become better parents. Time diary studies reveal that parents now spend more time actively engaged with kids, even though both parents are more likely to work outside the home.

Third, many people in the younger generation, under age 30 or so, are reacting against the culture of divorce. They are trying to lead lives that are more stable than the ones their parents led. Post-boomers behave better than the baby boomers did.

Fourth, over the past few decades, neighborhood and charitable groups have emerged to help people lead more organized lives, even in the absence of cohesive families.

The great leaders will come later, when the new dispensation consolidates itself. The noisy advocates of the "stupid ideas" who obtained their platforms in the late 1960s, their policy reforms in the early 1970s, and remained unfulfilled despite their triumphs, were the public face of ideas that were circulating in neighborhoods in the 1940s and 1950s and practiced privately. That is also true of the less-stupid ideas such as voting rights, where "normal parents, normal neighbors, and normal community activists" did a great deal of relatively obscure work, with the mass demonstrations and marches coming later.

TRADE UNITES, POLITICS DIVIDES. Book Review No. 29 is Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat, which has been reviewed recently by John Gray, Jagdish Bhagwati, and Richard Freeman (the last two via Dan Drezner.) I had some preliminary observations here, and wish to offer a few more observations to supplement the aforementioned commentators. The central message of Mr Friedman's book is that recent institutional and technical innovations have made international commerce easier, to the great benefit of people capable of taking advantage of those innovations. (There's a bit of a connection to the Savage Nation discussion of Guns, Germs, and Steel here -- one post there noted that inequality within any nation is greater than the inequalities among nations. That's precisely Mr Friedman's message, which I believe he made more explicitly in Lexus and the Olive Tree, noting (I'm paraphrasing) that a Midwestern academician might have more common ground with a Taiwanese academician than with a Midwestern automobile assembler.) One point left unresolved by Mr Friedman and misunderstood by Mr Gray is precisely how much flattening the innovations will produce. It's an open question in economics. On one hand, competitive equilibrium strongly suggests the emergence of One Best Way to do everything (and, to continue my gripe from my previous post on the subject, the Marxian interpretation of that emergence includes a strong dose of monopoly leading ultimately to the expropriation of the expropriators) that will be the standard business model for everybody, and never mind what ancient traditions get trampled on in the process. Mr Friedman is sensitive to that point, proposing a taxonomy of globalization protestors of various kinds. But -- this is an economics weblog -- there is another hand. Adam Smith first suggested finer divisions of labor accompanying broader markets with wider trading opportunities. There is room for such creativity in an expanding, worldwide economy. Steven at Liberty and Power has found an example: an Ann Arbor, Michigan bank that offers rent-to-own contracts that work like home mortgages while not charging interest. Such contracts enable Moslems (the primary constituency; the anathema on interest arises in other faiths) to purchase houses without having to pay cash.

I'd argue that this sort of thing is an excellent example of how market capitalism is not a destroyer of unique cultures creating one "McWorld," but rather a flexible, dynamic set of institutions that can adapt to changes in the culture. It is only within the dynamism of the market that one can adapt ways of doing business that are "traditional" to one culture to the needs of another culture when those needs arise. So not only do we have US banks altering their practices to accommodate a distinct minority demand (something defenders of markets have long argued as one of their strengths), we also have a potential blueprint of how market institutions and practices can emerge in Muslim societies with very different ethical principles.

The best part to me is that these sorts of changes can happen in the market in small pockets and spread through imitation. They don't require extensive discussion and debate. They don't require a political voting process where the majority has to be persuaded to agree with the change. Can you imagine what it would take to make such a change in a world where banks were run by the state? The ecosystem of the market makes it much easier for a thousand flowers to bloom, and to accommodate the needs of a religous group whose numbers remain pretty small within the US.

A second topic of importance in World is Flat, as well as some of the commentaries, is the knowledge premium. Mr Friedman observes the lack of mathematical and scientific aptitude among the young in the United States, and Professor Bhagwati notes how few of the young in India have those skills, let alone the ability to speak English. (But for Mr Friedman to reduce the shortcomings of the teaching or the learning to the funding of the National Science Foundation is a bit much.) Professor Freeman advocates greater investment in human capital as well. These days, the knowledge premium favors high-skilled workers. That need not always be the case; review this discussion of Luddites and Fordism. There is a further point for analysts and policy makers to ponder. The economic theory of trade relies heavily on comparative advantages. Years ago, high transportation and information costs rendered comparative advantage a consequence of resource endowments. In the face of today's lowered transportation and information costs, comparative advantages can be invented, or invented around.

There's one more trade-off Mr Friedman does not completely lay out. He notes in one place that India's and China's development bid up the price of oil, and he raises the spectre of China working with oil-exporting countries that subsidize Islamofascists, as well as China's fear that the U.S. Navy could close the tanker lanes off Singapore, re-running the resource war that became the Pacific Theater. In another place he suggests that United States policy makers work more seriously at lowering the price of a barrel of oil, so as to de-fund those Islamofascists. If it's developing country demands that are bidding up the price of oil, there's little short of taming fusion that the United States can do to reduce the demand for oil as a fuel source; and that doesn't address the usefulness of oil as a feedstock for other chemicals or for plastics. More questions than answers.

Mr Friedman concludes with the suggestion that getting people not yet on the flat earth to buy into the idea of participating is our best long-term hope. As with any other such idea, the challenge will be in the implementation.

CARNIVAL CALL. This week's Carnival of the Capitalists visits View from a Height. The midway is the midway of the late lamented Elitch Gardens, site of two marvelously entwined roller coasters. (Yes, there is a new Elitch Gardens, a Six Flags property. Visitors to Denver ought check out Lakeside Park for that traditional roller coaster experience. I don't know of any other amusement park where one can take a ride on Simon, Theodore, or Alvin.)

NOTICE OF LINE RELOCATION. Milt's File has moved. The radio show still airs on WGN, which often preempts his show to cover the games of a team currently looking up at the Brewers.

THE MONUMENTS WE'VE LOST.

Millston, Wisconsin, July 23, 2005.

In the foreground: the one track of the Union Pacific's Milwaukee-Adams-Wyeville-Eau Claire-Twin Cities freight main. On the other side of the tracks, and across U.S. Highway 12: a 400 Club tavern. At the left side of the sign: a rendition of the Chicago and North Western's Twin Cities 400, which last ran in July of 1963. The diesel and paint scheme would be correct beginning in 1939, when there were two tracks of the Chicago St. Paul Minneapolis and Omaha Railway, which, unlike its parent the North Western, were set up for right-hand running. Multiple tracks, gone. Passenger trains, gone. Models, available. Most of the freight trains in these parts, gone. But explore central Wisconsin, along the logical travel routes between Milwaukee and the Twin Cities, or Milwaukee and the North Woods, and sooner or later a 400 Club or a Hiawatha Tap will turn up.

What transportation equipment of today ... heck, what cultural icons of any kind ... will be commemorated in taverns 40 or 50 years hence?

DIVIDED RESPONSIBILITIES. Book Review No. 28, continuing the Pacific Theater theme, is Jack Greene's The Midway Campaign. This is another book likely to be of greater interest to collectors of World War II histories, for professional or recreational reading. It does clarify one mystery for me. In December of 1941, when the campaign begins, Douglas MacArthur is retired from the U.S. Army but commander of the Philippine Army. His boss, Philippine president Manuel Quezon hoped to declare neutrality. Thus U.S. Army Air commander Lewis Brereton was unable to use his B-17s to attack Japanese air bases on Formosa or even to disperse his aircraft, which is why the Japanese were able to destroy them a day after the Day of Infamy. I'm sure serious students of the Pacific War have long been aware of this, but it's something I learned.

BEYOND THE CHEDDAR CURTAIN.

The Upper Dells Cruise, and the Ducks.

In place of the Super Dome Hiawathas, 150 minutes late.

Turn around on the bridge, here is Timber Falls' Avalanche.

Coyotes might climb this rock, but there aren't many Roadrunners on I-90-94.
Castle Rock, Camp Douglas, Wisconsin.

IN QUEST OF TESTABLE IMPLICATIONS.

A few days ago I was chatting with a philosopher colleague who captured the essence of difficulty doing literary criticism. Filtered through an economics lens, it's loosely this. Authors have private information. Readers have private information. Authors of letters to family or friends of long standing have private information that includes the reader's likely response to the author's choice of words. Authors can push readers' buttons, or not, accordingly. Authors of letters to a newspaper, let alone of essays or books, cannot be sure what readers' buttons will be pushed, or in what way. That, alone, makes the construction of any formal system of understanding texts sufficiently rigorous and replicable to be referred to as a theory, let alone as Theory, difficult. Ad hoc is more like it.

Fredric Jameson conceded that “this displacement of traditional criticism and traditional philosophy by what has come to be known as theory turns out to allow the critic himself a wider latitude for the exercise of personal themes and the free play of private idiosyncasies."[5] Jameson considered this a positive development, as it would allow for the emergence of “virtuoso readers” who would produce “bodies of criticism in which the practice of peculiar and sometimes eccentric textual interpretations is at one with the projection of a powerful, nonsystematized theoretical resonance, and this even where the critic himself ... misguidedly but compulsively submits his materials to a rage for patterns and symmetries and the mirage of a meta-system."[6]

So let a hundred bodies develop. But how, then, to select among them?

The appeal to theoretical ecumenicalism is common enough: this theory best explains this this text, that one best explains that, &c. The majority of critics who work in this mode now do so from a position entailing some permutation of the philosophical incoherence I described above.

Now they are beginning to catch on ... I found a link to the preceding quotes here, where there's this offering.

It bothers me that literary critics can establish careers on an oppositional position without ever having to think through the implications of their arguments. It reminds me too much of Socialists, Communists and Stalinists in the 1920s who, unlike the anti-Stalinist Socialists, chose to ignore evidence of the purges so that they might continue to fight the good fight in the hallways of Harvard and Columbia. That's unfair. (And also intrudes on David Horowitz's lunatic territory. However, I have a point; he has a jeremiad.) My point is simply that much of what passes for "Theory" in literature departments stake a wholly oppositional claim, one which never demands a positive platform, because for more than 25 years they haven't been forced to think through what their position entails.

Which doesn't stop such faux-theorists from doing a lot of damage. King at SCSU Scholars gets it.

The language of Theory is not just confusing like our college's conceptual framework: It's just blather.

There's a rather lurid passage in a James Seaton column that illustrates the point.

The theorist Luce Irigaray asks more clearly, though not more cogently: "Is E=MC² a sexed equation? Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possibly sexed nature of the equation is not directly its use by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged what goes the fastest."

Readers, pay close attention. "Innumerate" is one of the stronger pejoratives I will use on these pages. The Einstein equation privileges no speed; in fact it is a logical consequence of a legitimate theory -- with testable implications -- attempting to make sense of the observation that light propagates at the same speed relative to any observer's frame of reference. From that observation it follows that the mass of an object ... its reluctance to be accelerated ... increases proportionately to its current velocity. And it by no means "privileged what goes the fastest." To the contrary, as Martin Gardner once suggested, it complexifies -- literally -- what happens to an object accelerated beyond the speed of light. Any intellectual who grasped the imaginary part of a Lorenz transformation with v > c would not have written such drivel. (Mr Gardner provides most of the derivation I'm appealing to; it's available in full in Max Born's Einstein's Theory of Relativity.)

A VICTORY ONE CAN LIVE WITH. Sixty years ago, the United States military demonstrated the effectiveness of nuclear weapons. To this day, that deployment is controversial. Some people say thoughtful things. Others are very foolish. In the second category, consider USA Today founder Al Neuharth.

Truman will be remembered as the president who brought us both victory and peace in a war that was justified and necessary. By contrast, self-proclaimed “War President” George Bush has brought us neither victory nor peace in the Iraq war, which former president Jimmy Carter this week called “unnecessary and unjust.”

The victory may have occurred on President Truman's watch. That Joe Stalin played a role in encouraging both Germans and Japanese to work with the United States, also on President Truman's watch, requires your consideration as causes of the peace. The destruction of German and Japanese cities as a precondition to victory continues to lead some observers more sensible than Mr Neuharth to suggest that the victory was not a victory they could live with. It's also something that the current administration has in mind: the objective is to remove the non-state actors and state sponsors of Islamofascism without the kind of slaughter of civilians that accompanied the 1945 victory.

TRYING TO HAVE IT BOTH WAYS? University Diaries notes the use of corporate compensation packages for ranking university administrators.

Yet our wealthy country, as the director of research for the American Association of University Professors points out to the [Washington] Post, increasingly compensates its university presidents “like private sector CEOs,” and CEOesque presidents in turn “often reflect their compensation in their management of the institution.”

That's not always appreciated by those being managed, as David at Inside Higher Ed observes.

John Curtis, director of research for the American Association of University Professors, said that as more presidents are compensated like private sector CEOs, the presidents often reflect their compensation in their management of the institution. Curtis pointed to AAUP’s “Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession,” and said that the rapid growth of presidential compensation has become a morale crusher for other staff and faculty members.

Andy Brantley, CEO of the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, said benefits like country club memberships and car allowances often come standard in presidential contracts. He added that it is “important for universities to clearly define the purpose of a particular membership. Is it associated to business, or truly a perk?” He added that many presidents now have bonuses if certain fund raising goals are met.

And there's something else to consider. A CEO or board chairman who gets bounced by the board of directors usually doesn't return to the engineering department or the complaints desk. University presidents and deans hold tenure in academic departments, a survival of the Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain era that is today being called into question as a wrongful backup job. Remember this?

With the continued division of labor in the academy, the ranks of administrators including presidents and provosts is being expanded by scholars whose research credentials are often modest.

And, if ranking administrators are to be compensated using corporate rather than academic pay scales, perhaps there is an equilibrium in which such administrators are subjected to comparable risks. Watch for the practice of tenuring administrators, particularly job-hoppers with scant academic credentials OR for the practice of paying corporate-level salaries to administrators with tenure in a department to be questioned; that is, IF legislatures and trustees are serious about restoring some integrity to the academy from the top down.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. International Herald Tribune guest columnist Capt. Rory B. Quinn pays tribute to his fallen colleagues.

These young Americans are being redefined. For [Captain] John [Maloney], as for all our service members, the definition of a "normal" life has been changed in a way that's almost impossible for others to comprehend. The implications for America are profound.

In four months spent last year near Iraq's border with Syria, I was exposed to the full gamut of emotions and experiences typical of any modern combat tour. I saw corrupt, wicked men captured or killed by 19-year-old Americans who possessed maturity in applying different levels of force that left me in awe. 11 years ago when I was their age, I wouldn't have held a candle to our 19 year-olds of today.

On patrol last year, I saw one old friend and 17 new ones killed by sniper's bullets, exploding artillery shells or hidden land mines. I grieved in the desert and saw 900 comrades do the same. Then I saw our marines lock their grief and rage behind a mental door and go back out the gate to patrol again. On those very next patrols, I saw looks of utter joy in the eyes of Iraqi children when I'd hand them a soccer ball, or when one of my marines would mimic a salute at a child pretending to be an Iraqi Patton or Schwarzkopf.

Through it all, our countrymen have been imprinted with a new perspective on life. Much like the returning veterans of World War II, they stepped off the plane with a sense of how petty or unimportant many of the seemingly pressing issues covered in the news media truly are. Compared to the shock of the instant, violent death of a squad-mate standing right next to me, or the excitement of a child looking at my uniform, the constant barrage of partisan politics, runaway brides and the activities of Paris Hilton seem utterly devoid of importance. I have marines slowly recuperating at hospitals in San Francisco, Washington, Bethesda and San Diego. Who is telling their stories?

And the work they have done:

For all the mistakes in planning that have been made in this war, and all the acts of heroism that have (or more often have not) been reported, this war is transforming young Americans. We are forming a new "greatest generation" that will counteract the obsession with one's self that has characterized the last few decades.

And the shape of the world to come.

If the policy makers and politicians choose the right path, if they spend our lives wisely, this global war on terror will be a Normandy, and not a Vietnam. Through the actions of our service members and the sacrifices of our Maloneys, we are transforming Iraq. As we return home, we are also transforming the face of America.

Read the rest.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST. Don at Cafe Hayek asks readers of The Jungle to consider what came before industrial slaughterhouses, gross though those might have been.

Before the centralization of butchering – which was a major economic event begun in the early 1880s, made possible by Gustavus Swift’s successful development of economically efficient refrigerated railroad cars – almost all consumption of fresh meat took place within a few days and a few miles of its slaughter. Lack of refrigeration required that butchering be local. And butchering back then was real butchering – actually killing animals on the spot – rather than merely carving up carcasses delivered to local supermarkets from afar.

True enough; pick up Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie and note the lurid passages when the calf gets it (to obtain rennet in order to make cheese) and when the pig gets it.

But did you know that there's a book written to answer Sinclair? It's less well known although it's likely to turn up in big-city libraries. J. Ogden Armour wrote The Packers, the Private Car Lines, and the People (not a catchy title and we are talking about a meatpacking heir) and it will reward careful study if one takes the corporate special pleading at face value and evaluates the technology of packing and refrigeration.

(And, in an odd footnote to this post, a trivia contest on a local radio station awarded a prize to a listener today who correctly identified Budweiser as the first beer to achieve national distribution by use of refrigerated cars; perhaps that name recognition advantage lasts to this day.)

ORDER, COUNTERORDER? Last week these pages noted additional amenities in Amtrak's Empire Builder. This week the Department of Transportation's inspector general proposed knocking off the dining cars, the sleepers, and the checked baggage. Despite rates that exceed those of four-star hotels, the sleepers tend to run at capacity, especially during the summer. Long distance accommodation trains without any mail and express will likely lose Amtrak more money.

SYSTEM IMPROVEMENT TIME.

I had to laugh about Michael Berube’s column today on academics and summer guilt. He feels guilty that he takes time off to play golf in the summers. He also mentions that he gets 4 months off in the summer - not sure how he swings that. We go mid August through mid May.

Get over it, I say. He mentions the 60-hour workweek that I think a lot of academics (and teachers) keep. It is so intense at times that many of my colleagues, when asked what their plans are for a particular school break, answer with things like finally paint the living room or clean out the garage. There are dull but important jobs of human maintenance that my colleagues simply do not have time to do when classes are in session. So when summer break comes along, they need a break. For mental space, at least, in order to promote creative thought.

Ayup.

AN APPALLING MARITIME DISASTER. Twenty feet of water. Ship tied up at the quay. A great city on either side. A capsize, and 844 dead. David at Liberty and Power links to Mayer Blog's remembrance of Eastland's capsize, in the Chicago River at the Clark Street Bridge, a casualty, Mr Mayer suggests, of a regulation inspired by Titanic's sinking.

In fact, it is one of those great ironies of history that the Eastland disaster was caused by the government’s reaction to the sinking of the Titanic – specifically, by the La Follette Seamen’s Act of 1915, named for the “Progressive” Republican from Wisconsin, Senator Robert La Follette, which among other things required additional lifeboats and rafts on all American passenger ships. The mandate of the La Follette Act extended even to Great Lakes steamers, even though they were built differently – their hulls had much shallower drafts – than trans-Atlantic liners, making them unstable and top-heavy when loaded with the extra lifeboats and rafts the Act required. The owners of the Eastland, in partial satisfaction of the provisions of the La Follette Act (which was set to come into force later in the year 1915), added a number of boats and rafts to the ship’s top deck, just three weeks before the Western Electric picnic. The addition of those lifeboats, which were never used – the ship had capsized and sunk too quickly for them to be any use – was a crucial cause of the disaster. Something caused the ship to list to one side; and before it even left its dock, the ship overturned, trapping many of the victims in the lower decks.

To be precise, not all shallow-draft steamers are tender. There's something called the metacentric height that affects a boat's stability. A ship with a low metacentric height and partially filled ballast tanks can get you into trouble very quickly. Something like this befell Eastland well before she was fitted with the additional lifeboats.

Early in her career, Eastland had a very close call. On July 17, 1904 after leaving South Haven, Eastland was running at full speed with a load of 3,000 passengers. About 1.5 miles out into Lake Michigan, the ship, for no obvious reason, began listing to port by some 12 to 15 degrees. Her ballast tanks were partially full. The crew reduced speed, ordered the passengers off the upper decks and shifted water in the tanks to right the vessel. In some 10 minutes the ship straightened up, but immediately began to list more severely to starboard; some 20 to 25 degrees. With further filling of the tanks and shifting of the passengers, the list was corrected and the Eastland proceeded to Chicago. This was a very close call. Had the ship capsized, she would have continued over until she floated keel-up, with a huge loss of life.

There's a book by transport historian George Hilton about the Eastland capsize that makes use of what naval architects have learned about tender boats. The list to starboard as a consequence of flooding to correct a list to port is an illustration of the difficulties that arise on a boat with a low metacentric height and partially-filled ballast tanks. I had some observations about the Eastland capsize two years ago, with links; here is the Eastland Disaster site.

A HIGHER STANDARD OF AMATEUR. I'm going to hold off on working through and commenting on Paulo Ribenboim's Fermat's Last Theorem For Amateurs. It is not the kind of book that one can read in bed or on the lounger with some music or talk radio playing; it helps to have a pencil handy to make marginal notes, as well as a pad of paper to tackle some of the more challenging bits. (Perhaps if I make my 50, this will be No. 51.)

Let me give you a feel for what's involved. From the preface:

The following general remarks are quite obvious and henceforth will be taken for granted.

If n is odd then Xⁿ + Yⁿ = Zⁿ has a non-trivial solution if and only if
Xⁿ + Yⁿ + Zⁿ = 0 has a non-trivial solution.

If x,y,z are non-zero integers such that xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ, if d = gcd(x,y,z) and x₁ = x/d, y₁ = y/d, z₁ = z/d then x₁ⁿ + y₁ⁿ = z₁ⁿ, where the non-zero integers x₁, y₁, z₁ are pairwise relatively prime. So, if we assume that Fermat's equation has a non-trivial solution, then it has one with pairwise relatively prime integers.

It goes on in a similar vein. First, there's some instructive material on Pythagorean triples. There's an algorithm for producing Pythagorean triples. Choose any two integers a, b, satisfying a > b > 0; then define x = 2ab, y = a² - b², and z = a² + b². But we're not interested in simply producing all the Pythagorean triples (a countable infinity; use the same method you'd use to count the rationals.) It's the primitive solutions we're after; namely, those for which gcd(a,b,c) = gcd(x,y,z) = 1. That makes possible the development of Fermat's first result, X⁴ - Y⁴ = Z² has no solution in integers all different from zero. I want to work through all this as Ribenboim addresses something that once occurred to me: perhaps the last theorem is Fermat's method of infinite descent, which does work for even powers, although (and perhaps he discovered this later) it fails for powers that are odd primes. Whew. Bedtime, and some lighter reading.

A CLEAR STATEMENT OF CONTEMPT. Thus did a colleague in another department characterize the Great Zulauf Space Grab. Economics is pretty much in place and sorted out for the new semester. It still galls, though, to have rooms that we absolutely, positively, had to be out of by the last Friday of exam week not ready to be occupied by the new occupants. Some departments might be in temporary quarters for the beginning of the fall term with people compelled to pack up and move again during midterms, or perhaps the December exam week. The deans who precipitated this space grab have yet to be moved, and the advisors that are supposed to occupy the deans' offices are not yet to be seen.

In two weeks comes the acting dean's "state of the college" address. That should make for some good copy.

TEPLOPAROVOZY. Politburo Diktat has further thoughts on what might replace the Space Shuttle. The illustration, apparently from the New York Times, proposes an adaptation of existing Shuttle components to create passenger and freight versions of something intended to ... what?? But as I look more closely, what do I see? A passenger version that looks like an Apollo capsule on top of an Atlas-Agena stack. A freight version that looks like a Saturn V casing riding the current Shuttle stack. Anybody remember Skylab? (And this from an agency that took a dig at Burt Rutan for making a suborbital flight of less than 15 minutes, some 40 years after the late Alan B. Shephard did so.)

So why the title? Something about these Mercury-Shuttle combinations reminded me of some efforts by the Soviet Railways to combine steam and diesel propulsion in one drive train. (The site is under construction; the most bizarre such effort is not yet illustrated.)

ON THE STACK.

Time permitting, I intend to finish and comment on Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat (and several of the other books Amazon would like to bundle with it) before year's end. Perhaps I ought to get to that shortly while this John Gray review (via Frank Foer, pinch-hitting for Andrew Sullivan) is still timely. I do wish people would read and understand the theories they're attempting to apply. Mr Gray begins his review with an excerpt from The Communist Manifesto that will be familiar to regular readers. Then the train of thought slowly derails.

Marx and Engels had no doubt that they were witnessing the emergence of a global market—a worldwide system of production and consumption that disregarded national and cultural boundaries. They welcomed this development, not only for the increasing wealth it produced but also because they believed it enabled humanity to overcome the divisions of the past. In the global marketplace nationalism and religion were destined to be dwindling forces. There would be many convulsions—wars, revolutions, and counterrevolutions—before the Communist order was securely established; but when global capitalism had completed its work a new era in the life of humankind would begin.

The train is still on the track, but here a reviewer ought really be more conversant with Volume I of Capital to grasp the full implication of "global capitalism had completed its work."

The centrally planned economies that were constructed to embody Marx's vision of communism have nearly all been swept away, and the mass political movements that Marxism once inspired are no more. Yet Marx's view of globalization lives on, and nowhere more vigorously than in the writings of Thomas Friedman. Like Marx, Friedman believes that globalization is in the end compatible with only one economic system; and like Marx he believes that this system enables humanity to leave war, tyranny, and poverty behind.

I'll have to read Friedman before offering any hypotheses about Friedman's belief system. It's what comes after capitalism -- when the integument bursts asunder and the expropriators are expropriated -- that will enable humanity to leave war, tyranny, and poverty behind, and Mr Gray's review neglects that feature of the argument. The omitted actors Mr Gray mentions well might matter to the outcome, but one can make that point without drawing misleading parallels between Karl Marx and Thomas Friedman.

Neoliberals, such as Friedman, have reproduced the weakest features of Marx's thought—its consistent underestimation of nationalist and religious movements and its unidirectional view of history. They have failed to absorb Marx's insights into the anarchic and self-destructive qualities of capitalism. Marx viewed the unfettered market as a revolutionary force, and understood that its expansion throughout the world was bound to be disruptive and violent. As capitalism spreads, it turns society upside down, destroying entire industries, ways of life, and regimes. This can hardly be expected to be a peaceful process, and in fact it has been accompanied by major conflicts and social upheavals. The expansion of European capitalism in the nineteenth century involved the Opium Wars, genocide in the Belgian Congo, the Great Game in Central Asia, and many other forms of imperial conquest and rivalry. The seeming triumph of global capitalism at the end of the twentieth century followed two world wars, the cold war, and savage neocolonial conflicts. 

Over the past two hundred years, the spread of capitalism and industrialization has gone hand in hand with war and revolution. It is a fact that would not have surprised Marx.

The question as yet unanswered is whether global capitalism will be a competitive capitalism with many of the features Adam Smith envisioned and Leon Walras made formal, or whether it will feature the dwindling numbers of magnates of industry who must accumulate or be accumulated as Marx anticipated.

ARCH DELUXE? Tuesday night, Milt Rosenberg's guests were beer mavens. I listened to a few minutes of the program, just long enough to hear about Goose Island Beer's Bourbon County Stout, which is flavor aged in bourbon casks (product reviews here and here.) That's intriguing, and a bit more convenient to buy than the Sprecher.

I turned off the radio when the guests began talking about the protocol for a beer tasting, including things like cheese and chocolate. Perhaps it is fitting that the National Liquor Bar is being sacrificed for a Walgreen's; to turn it into someplace suitable for this generalization of a wine-tasting would be a bit much.

TO REALLY FOUL THINGS UP REQUIRES A COMMITTEE. The Chicago Tribune (registration required; if you know how to reach me, and my railway namesake you can log in) reports on today's spacewalk being a repair of the space agency's image, as well as of the shuttle. Fortunately, the oakum picking was relatively easy, as unrehearsed space walks go. It's the corporate culture at the agency that is of interest.

Post-Columbia changes at the agency have extended to the new, $857,000 room in Houston where [deputy manager Wayne] Hale's mission management team decided to try a repair. The high-tech conference room is festooned with written reminders of how previous teams went wrong.

One poster reads, "People in groups tend to agree on courses of action which, as individuals, they know are stupid." Another one says simply, "None of us is as dumb as all of us."

I like these posters, and will keep them in mind the next time some lackwit on a committee says "consensus." And there is likely to be such an opportunity, as well as opportunities to provide early warning of academic fads.

One has to find the fun no matter what happens ... in this case, the acting dean sent an urgent email to all the departments not currently represented on a committee that approves all curriculum intended to get students their initial certification as teachers, and by virtue of my role as coordinator of the Office of Economic Education, I was asked, and unlike General Sherman, I agreed to serve. I've also made a quick pass through the minutes of assorted bodies likely to have the responsibility to change the composition of committees, and found nothing. We shall see whether new members will be given any explanation for this change, or if this will be left to those members who care to find out.

JUST SUCK IT UP. Cousin Eddie (via Kelly in Kansas) has a bit of advice for incoming students.

This means that I am probably intelligent enough to devise a course that will enable you to gain sufficient mastery of the material (if you try). This also means that all of the assignments I give you have a purpose. You should take the time to do the assignments, and do them properly. Oh, and coming to class? You should probably try it.

My job is not only to help you learn the course material, but also to prepare you for life. In the real world, most employers will not accept tardiness, late assignments, or excuses. I do not either. Your grades should be earned, not given to you.

When you screw up and miss class (without a legitimate excuse), or do not turn in assignments, or miss an 11:30am exam because you "overslept," do not come to me with a slew of inadequate excuses. One of life's tough lessons is that you are now an adult who must learn to live with the consequences of your actions.

I'm tempted to borrow extensively from this as supplemental course information for my upcoming courses. With Blackboard, it's easy enough to put it up as an announcement, without going to all the trouble of laying out a table of sanctions for violations.

TODAY'S BEST BUSINESS COMMENTARY. That would be Electric Commentary noting Adidas's intended acquisition of Reebok. And with two sections of a general public policy class and an antitrust economics class on my schedule for the upcoming academic year, here's something with lots of potential for examples, or exam questions.

INCREDIBLE VICTORY. Book Review No. 27 is Hugh Bicheno's Midway. Again, this is probably of greater interest to Navy buffs, although the maps are among the more comprehensive I've seen, and the tables attributing hits to individual pilots in the U.S. and Japanese dive-bombing squadrons are instructive and sobering. The author does more digging into cultural and social influences on warriors in the adversary powers; that he refers to Progressivism as a milder manifestation of Social Darwinism suggests a reader ought consult additional sources.

ONE MORE BOOK TO READ? Never occurred to me to purchase this one.

You're Siddhartha!

by Hermann Hesse

You simply don't know what to believe, but you're willing to try anything once. Western values, Eastern values, hedonism and minimalism, you've spent some time in every camp. But you still don't have any idea what camp you belong in.

This makes you an individualist of the highest order, but also really lonely. It's time to chill out under a tree. And realize that at least you believe in ferries.

Take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

That last sentence is true. I have made a number of ferry crossings over the years. Tree-chilling is less fun after lightning bug season ends, and this season's end is near.