CAN SUMMER BE FAR AWAY?

Brewer batteries are in training camp. The Brewers and Amtrak are working to build ridership.

The Milwaukee Brewers today announced a new promotion designed in part to give Brewers' fans a chance to cheer their team on at Wrigley Field just as Chicago Cubs fans do at Miller Park.

The team and Amtrak announced details of an away game trip that includes a train trip to Chicago and special T-shirts for the Sept. 17 game between the Brewers and the Cubs at Wrigley Field.

The promotion is being called Miller Park South. Here's how it will work: On Feb. 20, the Cubs will put individual tickets on sale. The first 100 fans who bring their game ticket for that Sept. 17 game will receive a voucher for a free, round-trip ticket on the Amtrak-Hiawatha train to that day's game.

Along with the free train ride, fans will get a special Miller Park South T-shirt.

After the first 100 transportation vouchers are issued, the Brewers will provide the next 1,500 fans that bring their Sept. 17 game ticket to Miller Park’s “Big League Blast” retail store with a free Brewers-branded Miller Park South – September 17, 2009 T-shirt.

On Sept. 17, Amtrak Hiawatha Train 334 will depart from the Milwaukee Intermodal Amtrak station at 11 a.m. and from the Milwaukee Airport station at 11:10 a.m., with a return trip from Chicago at 8:05 p.m. on Amtrak Hiawatha Train 341. Travel time for the full route (one-way) is only 89 minutes. Upon pick-up of a transportation voucher set, each fan will also receive a map with directions to Wrigley Field. Additional information will be posted on Feb. 20 at the Brewers' Web site and the AmtrakHiawatha Web site. The start time for the Sept. 17 game is 1:20 p.m.

The promotion isn't playing real well with the commenters at the Journal-Sentinel post.

The train-ride part of it is kludgy. Brewer fans have to purchase a ticket from the Cubs (perhaps by making a trip to Chicago) and redeem it in Milwaukee. The promotion is limited to 100 seats, no doubt for cost reasons, but unless the Amtrak capital spending in the stimulus package has identified full-size Atlas cars ready-to-run and we don't have to wait for Christmas, those 100 additional passengers well might overload the train.

They then have to make their way to This Property Is Condemned, in Yuppie Hell. The train arrives at 12.29, if all is well. That allows just enough time to walk east to State Street and ride the Dan Ryan - Howard line north to Addison and maybe be there in time for the first pitch. (Too bad there's not a North Shore Line: the 11.00 Electroliner set down at Wilson at 12.31, and it was not unknown for trains to set down at Addison. Getting it to pick up at Grange Avenue, just northeast of the Airport Station, was another matter).

I did get a kick out of that "only 89 minutes". Yes, when you have to contemplate an hour to the Lake Forest Oasis, another half hour to the interchange near O'Hare, and potentially another hour plus from O'Hare to This Property is Condemned, that sounds attractive. Regular readers will know, however, that the figure of merit for Milwaukee to Chicago is 75 minutes.

A DIFFICULT DAY. That was evident from observing people, from conversing with people, from my own state of mind. We took time to thank the first responders and to award the first Forward, Together Forward scholarships.

Seventy-one students applied for the scholarships. Criteria were based on academics, achievements, community service, extracurricular activities, employment experience, hobbies and special interests.

“Rather than doing something purely on academics, we really felt it should be university-wide and a celebration of the character of those students we lost,” said Mallory Simpson, president of the NIU Foundation. “They were all collectively and individually phenomenal people.”

The first recipients are Deanna Bach (a composer!), Jacqueline Do, Scott Hudek, Justin Kuryliw, and Grace Weidner.

The memorial garden will include five granite panels with the motto and the names and some benches. Cole Hall is behind the camera to the left.


It seemed a logical place to leave candles after the vigil.


Nobody organized the candle placement, it happened. This woman is one of the last people to leave one in the planters outside Cole Hall.


The art gallery in the student center contained a number of items, including the 9-11 Quilt.


Students at St. Hilary School in Ohio made this for a school in New Jersey where many students lost parents at the Trade Center. Those students sent it to a school in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. From New Orleans it went to the Amish school in Pennsylvania, where the parents made the box, in the hope that the troubles of the world could be contained, before the students there sent it to Virginia Tech. Virginia Tech entrusted it to Northern Illinois.

Virginia Tech also set up six message boards that have not previously been shown publicly at Northern Illinois. They were set up at the reception (including hot chocolate with marshmallows) after the evening vigil.


This banner came from a DeKalb elementary school.


The University of Illinois message board includes an aspiring social scientist.


At the art gallery was a loop of television news clips, including an ABC News "Citizen of the Week" recognizing Northern Illinois University for getting back to business so quickly last year. Perhaps part of it was a brave face. Perhaps it was Midwestern reticence. The editorial board of the DeKalb Daily Chronicle considers these things.

NIU went above and beyond its duty in planning for this day of reflection. More than a dozen events were held including a commemoration ceremony, a concert, a memorial mosaic, a time capsule, an art exhibit, a video montage, a scholarship luncheon and a candlelight vigil.

Some would argue that it’s all a bit much. All this memorializing can be painfully overwhelming. But it’s necessary. We need to remember all that was lost on that cold February day. Not only did we lose the lives of five young people, but we lost our sense of security and innocence. Never before did we believe that such violence could happen here. We were wrong.

The editors suggest it's time to move on. Perhaps so, now that the university and the neighborhood have had an opportunity to release the sadness behind that show of fortitude ABC News observed.

52 WEEKS. My suggestion for the "summarize in one word" project was "goodwill," an idea that occurred to me that evening,and which was reinforced by the continued kindness of people in DeKalb and Sycamore and elsewhere in the state. Thursday afternoon included a 3 pm balloon release organized by Huskies United.

Northern Star photo by Sean Curl.

The release included more balloons than organizers had planned for.

Huskies United secretary Ryan Sego said they weren’t supposed to have 500 balloons originally.“We were going to have just five balloons, because we didn’t have enough helium,” Sego said. “But an employee from Airgas donated us enough helium to have 500 balloons, which was really great of him.”

The weather cooperated: unlike last year, when we had already lost time to more than one snow day, and when the snow hung around for all of January and February and well into March, we've had a stretch of above-freezing temperatures including a few records in the 50s and 60s. The Avalon Quartet was able to present its February performance: Beethoven, Ives, and Janacek.

The Northern Star put together a special issue (the link activates a .zip script). As part of their coverage, they asked the families if they'd be willing to remember their children, and obtained responses (in the order the website provides them, Gayle Dubowski, Catalina Garcia, Julianna Gehant, Ryanne Mace, Dan Parmenter.) Their recollections tell of internship and study-abroad opportunities, practice teaching, and student organizations, in short, great potential lost.

TALKING ABOUT MY GENERATION.

A USA Today columnist seeks to put me in the same cohort as President Obama.

I coined the term "Generation Jones" for this large cohort born between 1954 and 1965. It's a generation that includes the new president, me and 53 million other Americans. Jonesers have long been lumped with Boomers simply because we arrived during the same long post-World War II spike in births. But generations arise from shared formative experiences, not head counts, and the two groups evolved with dramatic differences. Our background is just as distant from Generation Xers'. We fill the space between Woodstock and Lollapalooza, between "Turn on, tune in, drop out" and "Just Say No," and between Dylan going electric and Nirvana going unplugged. Jonesers have a unique identity separate from Boomers and GenXers. An avalanche of attitudinal and behavioral data corroborates this distinction. Generational self-identification is particularly compelling. When polled, those in this age group identify not with Boomers or GenXers, but overwhelmingly with this generation in between.

So who are we? We are practical idealists, forged in the fires of social upheaval while too young to play a part. The name "Generation Jones" derives from a number of sources, including our historical anonymity, the "keeping up with the Joneses" competition of our populous birth years, and sensibilities coupling the mainstream with ironic cool. But above all, the name borrows from the slang term "jonesin' " that we as teens popularized to broadly convey any intense craving.

The Jones runs deep in us. It arose from our 1960s childhoods. While the Boomers were out changing the world, Jonesers were still in elementary school — wide-eyed, not tie-dyed. That intense love-peace-change-the-world zeitgeist stirred our impressionable hearts. We yearned to express our own voice. By the time we came of age and could take the stage, though, a decade of convulsions had left the nation fatigued. During the game we'd been forced to watch from the sidelines, and passage into college and careers came only after the final gun had long since sounded.

The Boomers had their opportunity, and the GenXers weren't around soon enough to bear witness. Neither was left jonesin'. But the actual children of the 1960s yearned for something more. Our unrequited idealism has bubbled beneath the surface ever since.

That's one perspective. (If you hear an echo of the Port Huron Statement in that second paragraph, you probably intuit that I'm going to object to the column's premises.) From my perspective, that of a senior member of that cohort who finished high school relatively young, some of this doesn't ring true. Yes, the people who came of age later could characterize their experience as "after the final gun" (or perhaps after the party had ended). But the attitude of many of the older cohort of Baby Boomers had the attitude Milton Friedman summarized as good things taken for granted, evils blamed on The System, but The System was a social construction that could be changed and rearranged without disrupting the continued provision of the good things. Some part of that cohort never went along with that mind-set, and some who did later went shopping at The Great Indoors.

What generation produced the current leaders in business, industry and politics, those who have held the reins of power for the past decade and a half? We need look no further than the last 16 years in the White House, the terms of Clinton, who represents his generation at its hedonistic best, and Bush, who represents the same generation at its my-way-or-the-highway best. Still, I’m a touch less cynical about them than the media who reported on their administrations. I see neither man as motivated by evil intentions. How can we blame Clinton for saying he “never had sex with that woman” or Bush for his weapons-of-mass-destruction argument for invading Iraq? After all, both were part of the generation reared on Dr. Benjamin Spock’s grand theories, children counseled and coddled, rarely punished for being wrong or irresponsible or held accountable for lying.

I can’t pin dates of birth on all the leaders of industry and finance, but the current CEOs of the big three in Detroit were born post-WWII, as were Jeff Skilling, Michael Milken and the guy who ran Home Depot into the ground and walked away tens of millions richer. Governor Rod Blagojevich, that Baby Boomer wunderkind from Illinois, took office in his late 40s and by his early 50s wore waders in his office to navigate the swamp of corruption he’d built. Boards of directors hand out bonuses to CEOs for demonstrating ineptitude, engaging in irresponsibility or practicing outright deceit. Did I mention the ends-justify-the-means generation?

But the leaders are only partially to blame. Baby Boomers, look in the mirror. What do you see? Someone figuring out how to turn a house after two years into a 50 percent profit?Or use its equity as an ATM? Someone who borrows against his home to pay cash for that BMW in the driveway, the one he really doesn’t need? Our system of politics and business encourages self-serving irresponsibility by rewarding it.

True, the Boomer generation gave us its share of accomplished, legitimate entrepreneurs, artists, musicians and inventors, but even achievements such as “Hotel California” and the wonders of the dot-com aren’t enough to overcome the vapid aspirations of those who idolize Madonna and her ilk. Now that they have plunged the country into a financial crisis that may end up as epic as the Great Depression, the Boomers can hand matters over to their offspring, who hopefully will be prove themselves the next great (well, good) generation.

Even as one of their own, Barack Obama, prepares to tackle this economic crisis, don’t be optimistic those in their early 40s will do better. They have been long misguided, ferried as they were from school to soccer games to karate lessons. The wisdom best passed on to Gen X is that there is no Great Indoors and never was. Not even the bones of a Swell Indoors will be left as a metaphor for Baby Boomer failure. Start change by ridding the language of the word “great,” discard it along with “awesome” and all words associated with the Dr. Spock syndrome. Revive the language of the generation that won WWII. Restore humble words such as “grit,” “integrity,” “diligence,” “honor,” “responsibility,” “sacrifice” and especially “accountability” to the social vocabulary. Let Boomer hyperbole vanish along with the merchandise the scavengers fled with when The Great Indoors finally closed.

That will require President Obama to say no to his own party, in which the Speaker of the House is a very early Baby Boomer and the Senate Majority Leader a member of the Silent Generation, quite possibly the most spoiled and indulged generation in U.S. history. I'll give the last word to Peggy Noonan.

We hire politicians to know what to do about empty stores, job loss, and "Retail Space Available." But they don't, and more than ever we know they don't.

And there's something else, not only in Manhattan but throughout the country. A major reason people are blue about the future is not the stores, not the Treasury secretary, not everyone digging in. It is those things, but it's more than that, and deeper.

It's Sully and Suleman, the pilot and "Octomom," the two great stories that are twinned with the era. Sully, the airline captain who saved 155 lives by landing that plane just right—level wings, nose up, tail down, plant that baby, get everyone out, get them counted, and then, at night, wonder what you could have done better. You know the reaction of the people of our country to Chesley B. Sullenberger III: They shake their heads, and tears come to their eyes. He is cool, modest, competent, tough in the good way. He's the only one who doesn't applaud Sully. He was just doing his job.

This is why people are so moved: We're still making Sullys. We're still making those mythic Americans, those steely-eyed rocket men. Like Alan Shepard in the Mercury rocket: "Come on and light this candle."

But Sully, 58, Air Force Academy '73, was shaped and formed by the old America, and educated in an ethos in which a certain style of manhood—of personhood—was held high.

What we fear we're making more of these days is Nadya Suleman. The dizzy, selfish, self-dramatizing 33-year-old mother who had six small children and then a week ago eight more because, well, she always wanted a big family. "Suley" doubletalks with the best of them, she doubletalks with profound ease. She is like Blago without the charm. She had needs and took proactive steps to meet them, and those who don't approve are limited, which must be sad for them. She leaves anchorwomen slack-jawed: How do you rough up a woman who's still lactating? She seems aware of their predicament.

Any great nation would worry at closed-up shops and a professional governing class that doesn't have a clue what to do. But a great nation that fears, deep down, that it may be becoming more Suley than Sully—that nation will enter a true depression.

What was I saying about the effects of enabling fecklessness?

TRYING TO HAVE IT BOTH WAYS. Impeached Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich would like to provide the people with the context for his remarks, but, on advice of counsel, not on national television.

BESET ON ALL SIDES. A Brezhnev-era joke told of the Soviet soldier who drew a tenner for calling his general an idiot. The straight man asks if that's an unusually harsh sentence. No, the sentence is thirty days for insubordination and ten years for revealing a state secret.

There's certainly reason for the powers that be at Southern Illinois to not want state secrets of that sort revealed. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has honored the Salukis for the Speech Code of the Month, prompting a university functionary to reveal his secret desire to be able to exile dissidents to Siberia, or perhaps to Wasilla.

DARWIN AND LINCOLN. Two influential figures, both born 200 years ago.

How stand things today?

Although the idea of complex adaptive systems shaped by mutation, selection, and adaptation meets with less resistance today, there is still argument about which systems we might accept as being so shaped, and plenty of room for lively discussion of the extent to which humans are able to influence the mutation, selection and adaptation.

As President, Mr Lincoln might have been more reviled than any of the men who have held that office. (Go to the Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield and see for yourself.) His decision to advocate full citizenship rights for freed slaves persuaded John Wilkes Booth to kill him. Those rights took a long time to come, but they did make President Obama's story possible, something he noted in Springfield this evening.

In the Land of Lincoln, his Republican Party is in disarray, but the same Democratic organization that put Mr Obama forward also put forward the recently impeached-and-removed governor Rod Blagojevich.

Somehow that observation about the power of people to influence applies to the political scene as well. Does "far above our poor power to add or to detract" work?

TALKING SMACK. There's a challenge nailed to Newmark's Door.

My view: there are a lot of ways to defend economics and economists. Here's one: show me a social science that's more useful and has a better track record, and we'll talk.

What he said.

THE HIGH SCHOOLS AREN'T DOING THEIR JOB. A professor of accounting counts the ways.

The lower tail of yesteryear’s population had some weak students, and the upper tail of the present-day population has some very strong students; however, when one focuses on the means of these two distributions, he or she finds a huge gap.

To begin, today’s average accounting major cannot perform what used to be Algebra I and II in high school. Students cannot solve simultaneous equations. Students have difficulty with present value computations, not to mention formula derivations. Students even have difficulty employing the high-low method to derive a cost function, something that merely requires one to estimate a straight line from two points.

Via Joanne Jacobs, where the ensuing bull session includes the requisite cautions about generalizing from a small sample.

RUNNING EXTRA. Critical Mass notes that recognizing there is a problem matters.

[The accounting professor] goes on to speculate about the why of it all, citing the usual suspects--failure of K-12 education, the self-esteem movement's hijacking of of our culture, breakdown of family, failure of universities to insist on qualified students and uninflated grades. You won't find anything in that part of the article that you haven't seen before. But the "why" is perhaps, at this point, less important than simply establishing the "what." There is so much denial about that--and until we can get people to agree on the nature of the problem, explanations and solutions are really beside the point.

THE PRESS ISN'T FAWNING ENOUGH. Our President had a little list.

The White House had decided in advance who would be allowed to question the President and who was left out.

Presidents are free to conduct press conferences however they like, but the decision to preselect questioners is an odd one, especially for a White House famously pledged to openness. We doubt that President Bush, who was notorious for being parsimonious with follow-ups, would have gotten away with prescreening his interlocutors. Mr. Obama can more than handle his own, so our guess is that this is an attempt to discipline reporters who aren't White House favorites.

Well, he did play basketball. Perhaps the next step will be to issue credentials to sports reporters, who don't even have to pretend to be objective.

PAYING FOR HIGH SCHOOL, TWICE.

A commenter asks me to square my assertions about where higher education's excess capacity is with the recession-induced increases in community college enrollments. A Brookings Institution position paper that purports to make the case for greater support for community colleges (which need not be the same thing as greater support for College Lite) states my case for me.

Faced with high tuition costs, a weak economy, and increased competition for admission to four-year colleges, students today are more likely than at any other point in history to attend one of the nation’s 1,100 community colleges. Annually, community college enrollment is increasing at more than twice the rate of that at four-year colleges, by 2.3 million students in the first half of this decade alone.

Presumably those students had the option of attending community colleges during more prosperous times. It's the recession, not some new enthusiasm for access-assessment-remediation-retention, that's shifting the demand. I therefore repeat this suggestion.

Hive off anything that hints at dumbing the programs down.

The Brookings essay puts it slightly differently.

The rise of these institutions reflects their important roles in training workers, especially first-generation college students, for well-paying, high-demand jobs and in providing students a bridge to even higher levels of education.

That's what the high schools used to do, but I want to hold that thought for now. (I've never fully grasped that first-generation notion anyway. There are plenty of first-generation collegians in the flagships and the mid-majors.)

OBSERVATION OF THE DAY. University Diaries.

Alabama A & M has stopped functioning. Corrupt, inept, the school’s finished. It continues to operate as a set of buildings inside of which taxpayer money is wasted.

A wag in the comments to one of the linked posts suggests that when the trustees go into civil disorder, the university itself is safe.

That is, if the university has some sense of itself as a university. As excess capacity, it's due for a mercy killing. There's a reason observers call University Diaries salty.

The situation fascinates UD, a veteran university-watcher. If a university falls in the forest, but no one gives a shit, does it make a difference? Does the university go on lying there, deadwood drawing state appropriations?

It certainly isn't in a position to offer academic integrity at a lower price.

GET IN FRONT AND INCREASE YOUR LEAD. The therapy dogs came in from the cold for the basketball game. Those reflective harnesses look like something that could be adapted for pedestrians, joggers, and bikers.


The Huskies were in the locker room with a five point lead. They stretched it out, Miami cut it to three, they stretched it out again, Miami cut it to four, they stretched it out again, Miami cut it to five, get the picture.

ROPE-A-DOPE. With Wings Like Eagles: A History of the Battle of Britain offers some new perspectives on the Royal Air Force's efforts. Because everybody knows the outcome, Book Review N^o.7 isn't in the position of offering spoilers. The military problem, as the Germans saw it, was that without air supremacy there could be no invasion of the Home Islands, as the Luftwaffe had to keep the Royal Navy away from the invasion fleet. (As if Rhine barges were going to get across the Channel in anything resembling an orderly fashion, but I digress.) The book suggests that, although the battle was a close-run thing from the British side, and the Germans might have been able to weaken the Royal Air Force enough to have attempted an invasion had they pressed attacks on forward bases and aircraft factories, the British managed their squadrons in such a way as to be able to meet any German sorties without revealing how much strength they had. The point might have been to bait the Germans into overcommitting.

It also suggests that the tone for the Battle of Britain was set over Dunkirk. Some commentators make mock of Hermann Goering's promise to finish the British by air, thus freeing the panzers to deal with the remnants of the French forces. Perhaps a Luftwaffe that had a free hand over Dunkirk might have done so. It wasn't a Romulan Cloaking Device that protected the Expeditionary Forces. Had the panzers gone in, the intellectual history of AirLand might have had a different beginning. Very readable and highly recommended.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

RECOGNIZING THE COLLEGE BUBBLE. Market Power.

One of the big problems these days in college is that a degree isn't worth what it used to be. People come out of high school with fewer skills than what people, say, 35-40 years ago had. They get to college woefully unprepared for the rigors of college and colleges have responded by watering down their curricula and putting resources into remedial courses. Add to that all the "studies" courses that students are required to take, and the result is that a college degree worth what a high school degree once was worth. That doesn't take into account the recession's effect on the returns to college.

Recessions tend to reduce applications and enrollments, particularly down the academic food chain, with what few standards remain going away, the better to keep bodies in seats. Never mind that the staff reductions that accompany recessions provide an opportunity to tighten academic standards and match student body size to faculty size.

A FALSE ECONOMY? When I was in high school, several of the Milwaukee teams never had a home basketball game. North Division played home games at Rufus King, South Division at Pulaski, Juneau at West Division, Washington at Custer. The city subsequently spent some money on new high schools (South Division dated to the 1890s, North wasn't much newer) and on some sports facilities, including an athletic complex for Washington. But with a tile floor?

It was one of the best high school basketball games we'll see all year, but it was also a little embarrassing.

When Milwaukee Hamilton took the floor against host Milwaukee Washington in a key City Conference showdown on Friday, the big game was played on a tile floor.

That's right: Washington's main gymnasium still has a linoleum tile floor. Large squares, brown and speckled, well-maintained, but still . . .

A tile floor? Come on, now.

Bill Molbeck, commissioner of athletics for Milwaukee Public Schools, says Washington is the only MPS high school with a tile gym floor. Todd Clark, communications director at the WIAA, checked around Monday and said he couldn't identify another Wisconsin school that holds varsity basketball games in a tile-floored gym.

And we're talking about one of the most storied basketball programs in all of Wisconsin. The Washington boys have qualified for the WIAA state tournament 10 times since 1976, winning four championships and sending Latrell Sprewell to the NBA. The girls have made 10 state appearances since 1979, winning five titles.

Dozens of scholarships were earned on that tile floor. Futures were forged. Basketball means something special to Washington and its students, past and present, and it says something sad to all of them that conditions haven't improved.

Washington won the game. Had they played the game at Hamilton, it would be on a hardwood floor. The alumni association raised some money to refinish it recently. The Hamilton floor went into service in 1967. The athletic complex at Washington is late 1970s or early 1980s ... they didn't start playing home games in the original gym?


As far as I know, the Washington improvements didn't include a planetarium.

VIRTUAL IMPRESSIONISM. First, put the subject in direct sunlight.

Friday.

Make the same view of the subject in about the same lighting conditions.

Sunday.

I bet Claude Monet never had to deal with melting snow.

Tuesday.

THERE WILL BE MORE PICTURES. The dogs are coming back.

The Animal Assisted Crisis Response team will be at NIU Feb. 10-16 and will be visiting various spots during that time, including at events on Feb. 14.

Elizabeth Garcia, counselor for the Counseling and Student Development Center, said the organization is based on volunteers that provide comfort and emotional rescue for those in need of healing. The dogs came to visit last year in response to Feb. 14.

Garcia received positive feedback from students and faculty about the dogs, and how they wanted them to come back.

“The dogs provide a normalcy,” Garcia said. “Kids would hug and play with them, and it gave them a reason to laugh.”

Some of the dog teams returned to DeKalb about the same time as our commemoration of Virginia Tech's bad day in April. By then the weather was good enough for the preschool kids to go for a walk, and the little kids and the dogs helped cheer me up.

SPEED 'EM UP. The folks at Destination: Freedom want a piece of the stimulus action.

We need to budget $17 billion or so – that’s three years worth of shovel-ready freight rail right of way projects --- to put back the railroad track ripped up from existing rights of way over the past few decades due to a very poor strategic decision made by the freights --- under their old management, now departed--- to do that. That right of way is wide enough and straight enough, in most cases, to permit 125+ mph passenger trains on dedicated tracks, and 79-125 mph on some if not all shared tracks.

I've been making this case for some time, particularly with the freight railroads taking advantage of the lull in traffic to make improvements to their rights-of-way.

The column notes that much of the United States is thickly settled enough to make corridor investments worth doing.

Critics of rail like to say that America is not as densely populated as Europe, and therefore rail works there, but won’t work here. Bull feathers! Their disingenuous and dishonest use of statistical averages deliberately ignores the fact that the population centers of America: the Northeast, the Mid Atlantic, the Gulf South, the Chicago/Midwest nine-state population center, California’s coast, and the Northwest’s Cascadia Corridor, are ALL just as densely populated as European centers, and even some states that used to be thought of as “open spaces” are catching up. Not long ago one of the oil-lobby shills, who flaunts a list of “institute” credentials as legitimization for his words, noted in a Florida Op Ed piece that, after all, “high density” European countries such as France could be justified in having high speed rail, but “low density” places like the state of Florida could not.

For an answering Op Ed we wrote that appeared later in response, we did a little actual research, and here’s the news: Florida, allegedly too unpopulated to support rail, actually surpassed France in population density nearly a decade ago. By the shill’s own logic therefore high speed rail is justified in Florida. (The population density of France is 289 people per square mile; that of Florida is 333).

It is time to put the ideological bullies in their place, and build America. Put some REAL rail money in the Stimulus Bill --- out of $800 billion+, some $17, $20 or even $100 billion for rail infrastructure doesn’t seem like much --- and put this country back to work.

The work itself won't involve that many people. On the other hand, if the investments have a positive return on investment, count me as on board. (Government budgets don't make the elementary accounting distinction between an expenditure, such as 4,000 man-hours to bring the Sun Prairie Subdivision up to Hiawatha standards, and an investment, such as a million tons of rail and 200,000 concrete ties.)

Rivet-counting department: some parts of France are more thickly settled than Florida, but the most thickly-settled parts of Florida offer nice flat stretches of raceway for Champions and Orange Blossom Specials.

THE SOUND OF ATLAS SHRUGGING. Sometimes it's the absence of compensating differentials at the taxpayer-assisted banking houses.

In a business where your bonus is often five times your base pay, that’s devastating news. And we’re talking about a line of work in which virtually all satisfaction is paycheck-dependent.

“Fact is that this is a terrible way to make a living — except for the money,” Ken Miller, a former vice chairman at Credit Suisse First Boston and now a private investor, said. “The lifestyle is terrible — the hours, the sucking up. These guys must feel like they’re the victims of a capricious god.”

That’s especially galling to the many in investment banks who had nothing to do with the mortgage end of their company’s business. Maria Anguiano, who works in Barclays’ municipal finance department, has yet to hear if she is getting a bonus this year, but she thinks she deserves one, given the millions her department earned.

“If you just take your base home, the question becomes, why not just work at a nonprofit from 8 to 4 instead of a bank where you’re expected to work weekends and every night till 10 or 11?” she said.

I've remarked on opting out for some time. It's unusual for it to manifest itself in a recession, although there are probably lots of smart people in banking who are better hiring prospects than the disappointed products of access-assessment-remediation-retention.

Perhaps the increased income inequality of the past 20 years is an expanding compensating differential -- any takers on a dissertation?

A CURIOUS START TO THE RECESSION. Coyote Blog compares first-twelve-month percentage declines in employment and output in several recessions. There could be material for several doctoral dissertations in this iteration of the business cycle.

CLEARING OUT THE EXCESS. New York adds names to Ko-Ko's List.

Wall Street didn't force Americans to take out loans on houses they couldn't afford. They merely encouraged them by extending credit to people that couldn't pay it back, which they would have known if they hadn't been so busy buying and selling the complex securities that they, in fact, barely understood themselves. And there is another force that contributed just as much to the mortgage meltdown, one that is as much to blame as the guys in midtown.

The real villains here, the truly bad seeds at the heart of this crisis, have gone unpunished thus far and are still in operation. They are Jeff Lewis and Ryan Brown of Bravo's Flipping Out, Armando and Veronica Montelongo of TLC's Flip This House, Kristen Kemp of TLC's The Property Ladder, Kendra Todd of HGTV's My House Is Worth WHAT?, and the TLC, Bravo, HGTV, and Fine Living networks in general. All of them encouraged people to take out massive loans in order to buy and renovate homes and sell them at a profit when, really, most people have terrible taste, and furthermore, are bad at laying tile. These shows are still on! WHY?

We'd also like to see the team responsible for MTV's Cribs, the set designers of the loft on Friends, Page Davis from Trading Spaces, and the editors of Martha Stewart Living, Real Simple, and the dearly departed Domino brought in front of the House Financial Services Committee to explain themselves, along with everyone else who, over the past ten years, has colluded to convince the American public that if they weren't living in a wholly renovated open-plan home with recessed lighting, granite countertops, and freakishly organized closets, they might as well be living in a cave.

Apparently the yuppie implosion also has implications for gold-diggers.

That's high-end excess. In Middle America, the recreational vehicle is another symbol of excess that faces tough times. Our President visited Elkhart, Indiana earlier today.

Elkhart's unemployment rate is 15.3 percent, up from 4.7 percent a year ago. Lee [County, Florida]'s is 10 percent, up from 6 percent a year ago.

Elkhart's primary industry, manufacturing, is suffering. Keystone RV Co. and Jayco Inc. laid off 600 people last week, according to The Truth, Elkhart's newspaper. The RV companies were closed Saturday and could not be reached for comment.

A business cycle can be an opportunity to clear out the excess. Although much of the Schadenfreude appears to be at the expense of the financiers and the real estate hustlers, the recreational vehicle business is another in which there is excess to wring out. (I'm not sure whether the recreational vehicle with a Land Cruiser serving as camp dinghy or the large Dodge Ram pickup or those motorized moon buggies that tear up the woods are the worst symbol of lower-middle-class excess.)

OBSERVATION OF THE DAY. Michael Munger explains the error in believing in fiscal stimulus.

The simple answer is to let markets do their work of pricing assets. The use of federal power to filter packages of mortgage-backed securities through Freddy Mac and Fanny Mae was one of the primary causes of the recession.

But I would also say that economic booms and recessions are facts of life in capitalism. (Not in a socialist system. Under socialism you have one permanent recession. But without any growth, ever, maybe you don’t notice the lack of growth!). The government must never give citizens the impression that they are insulated from risk. Personal anticipation of risk, and choosing an investment portfolio to limit risk, are key private responsibilities of every citizen. The government can’t do it for you.

The people who made their living peddling those dubious assets as The Next Sure Thing have some responsibility as well. The best thing for investors to keep in mind when some hustler sells The Next Sure Thing is Complex Adaptive Systems Do What They Darn Well Please.

YOU CAN'T WIN FOR TRYING. Years ago, McDonald's was a symbol of the suburbs, so much so that the civil rights constituency mau-maued the company into building inner city stores and practicing affirmative action.

The repositioning has gone well. Although I rarely eat there any more, as it takes too long to get served, the company's deliberately downscale promotions have paid off.

The world's largest hamburger chain said January same-store sales rose 5.4% in the United States due to demand for McDonald's core menu and breakfast items.

McDonald's has benefited in recent months by cash-strapped consumers shifting down to lower-priced fare during the recession.

Perhaps the affirmative action and the status reversal have worked too well. McDonald's profits by targeting low-income consumers, minorities.

A 2006 New York Times article said McDonald’s is marketing the Dollar Menu to teenagers, young adults and minorities who are already plagued with an especially high incidence of obesity and related health problems like diabetes.

“I always thought of the Dollar Menu as a really good deal,” said John Han, freshman economics major. “Now I realize it may be a deal for a fast bite, but it’s not a deal for my health.”

McDonald’s Dollar Menu is targeting low-income consumers and minorities; and by picking from the poor man’s pocket it grows financially.

“While it seems shocking or cruel that a corporation such as McDonald’s would intentionally market its unhealthy food to low-income people and minorities, this marketing decision seems to support long-standing structured inequalities between these groups and white to upper-class Americans,” said sociology instructor Justin Hoy.

Consumers hoped McDonald’s wouldn’t become so minority-driven, but sadly, it has. Now, the exclusive marketing campaigns are paying off for the corporation.

On one hand, I could carp that the column patronizes low-income people and minorities, who, presumably have the same opportunity to say no to slick marketing and packaging that everyone else has. On the other hand, I could note that sometimes the worst thing that can happen is that you get what you ask for.

WE SOLICIT YOUR ATTENTION. The Images of Hope project has called for photographs.

All members of the university community are invited to submit photographs that they believe could address questions such as these: What does recovery look like? What do you “see” when you think of hope?

The deadline for submissions has passed. There will be a link to the image site, when that site is made public.

I expect there will be pictures like this.


The Northern Star is asking people to summarize the recovery from the shooting in one word.

RUNNING THE NUMBERS. Employment losses continue to be in line with 1981-82 recession.



The key point is this:

It is a fairly busy chart, but we can see the current recession (orange) is very similar to the 1981 recession (light green) in terms of job losses as a percentage of peak employment. But we have had sharper downturns in percentage terms.

If you believe that this recession is not fundamentally different from other demand-driven post-war recessions, then a forecast of job losses continuing for another 6 to 9 months would not be out of line. Furthermore, looking at past cycles, one would expect it will be at least a year (possibly more if the recovery looks more like that after the 2001 recession) before employment reaches the previous peak. Personally, my expectation is that it will take 18 to 24 months (from now) to get back to the previous peak.

There's another chart at the linked site, with additional discussion.

Consider two other things: unemployment tends to be a trailing indicator, and the stock averages a leading indicator. The big bull market that began on August 13, 1982, proved to signal a recovery that began in March of 1983.

SMARTEST MAN JUST JUMPED WITH MY BACKPACK. Power Line (via King Banaian) catches Our President in a howler.

But Obama was only getting warmed up. His major howler was this:

So then you get the argument, well, this is not a stimulus bill, this is a spending bill. What do you think a stimulus is? (Laughter and applause.) That's the whole point. No, seriously. (Laughter.) That's the point.

Under this "logic," any bill that contains spending should be enacted because, by definition, it provides "stimulus." It doesn't matter how much stimulus is provided or when the stimulus will occur. This is quite possibly the most irresponsible position ever taken by a president on an economic issue.

The Senate compromise evidently removes science funding from the recovery bill, prompting a sensible observation from Blogs for Industry's Jim Hu.

It's not clear to me that special pleading for science is intrinsically more meritorious, as economic stimulus effects, than anything else in the bill. Perhaps one argument for science in the stimulus is that it's probably less corrupt than some of the alternatives that will get passed.

But a side benefit of cutting science funding from the stimulus bill is that now scientists, no longer being bought off by our miniscule place at the trough, may start looking harder at whether this is actually good for the economy.

The full text of the Senate bill is not yet available, prompting a petition to the Majority Leader and Our President to release the text and delay the vote until citizens can comment.

DEMOCRATIC CENTRALISM. Bardiac discovers the Peter Principle.

He read his handout aloud to us. Seriously, he read his handout aloud. There's probably a hundred years worth of advanced degrees around the table, and he read his handout aloud.

The handout is obsolete. But everybody knows that Power Point exists to make "Read this silently while I read it aloud" more effective. Then we get down to business.

And then we were asked to make suggestions. Someone suggested that point A might make more sense if it were revised as [revision suggestion that made sense]. Our presenter nodded seriously and said, "yes, that's been mentioned to me."

That was the basic pattern a few more times. It was clear, that although these things had been syggested to our presenter, he hadn't actually done the revisions. Nor was he willing to say, "Yes, that's been suggested, and here's why I haven't made the change."

Then the presenter wanted our endorsement for his thing so he could take it on to the next group.

I'm surprised the presenter encountered that much resistance. The principle of comparative advantage suggests that academic committees will be full of relatively ineffective scholars willing to accept whatever fad headquarters would like to use.

Because clearly, he wasn't actually interested in what we were saying, or in revising the work. He wasn't really even listening. He was just doing that administrative dance where someone pretends to get feedback from the staff and faculty, and then does whatever he'd already planned anyway, without including any of the staff or faculty ideas.

If those fads worked, there'd be less reason for me to carp about them.

REMEMBERING PRESIDENT REAGAN. Mitch Berg describes the President's effect.

I’ve been writing about Reagan - who, along with PJ O’Rourke, Solzhenitzyn, Dostoevskii and Paul Johnson is the reason I’m a conservative today - as long as this blog has been in existence. His eight years were not perfect, and I’ll resist the urge to beatify my presidents, even if they’ve been out of office for twenty years (to say nothing of in their first month of service). His last term wasn’t as stellar as his first, and his last two years were very difficult.

Read and understand.

A REVENUE SHAKEDOWN CRUISE. Titanic went to sea after the most cursory of sea trials. We know she never completed that first trip. Titanic's Last Secrets suggests that readers re-think their perception of what happened to the ship. (Hint: all the movies get it wrong.) I have to write Book Review N^o. 6 in such a way as to avoid providing spoilers.

But let me pose a few questions.

1. A ship sinking is a wonderful opportunity to write a realistic related rate problem. Forget about that "sand falls on a conical pile" stuff. Take the displacement of the ship and the time it actually took to sink, then work backwards to determine the rate at which water is entering the ship.

2. A smaller White Star ship, Republic, was holed in four compartments by collission with Florida off Nantucket. Republic remained afloat for 38 hours, giving Florida and other ships summoned by radio time to take all the passengers off. Might Titanic's crew and passengers have been expecting their ship also to settle slowly?

3. The two large sections of Titanic leave 200 feet of ship unaccounted for. The decks at the after end of the bow section and at the forward end of the stern section are collapsed downward, as if they had been squeezed down. Why?

4. White Star specified that Olympic and Titanic be built to the minimum standards for steel strength specified by the British Board of Trade. Does that engineering decision have any bearing on the damage observed on the two remaining sections?

5. Britannic was completed to the scantlings of Olympic and Titanic after Titanic sank. The wreck of Britannic is in shallower water off the coast of Greece. It offers forensic evidence of modifications to the scantlings, possibly including modifications written in blood.

Titanic's Last Secrets offers answers to some of these questions.

If you want to see the spoilers, the book's thesis appears here, and some counterarguments are here.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

IT WASN'T ABOUT JFK. Don McLean's "American Pie" came out in the fall of 1971. A lot of us thought the line about "widowed bride" was one of several references to the Kennedy assassinations. The bride in question was Buddy Holly's wife (see this interpretation, in which some of the references to events later in the 1960s might be in error) and "the day the music died" refers to a 1959 plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, J.P. Richardson, and Ritchie Valens. William Polley finds a commemorative event at the Iowa dance hall that became the site of their last concert.

Trivia question: what is the site of the last authenticated Elvis sighting?

LEARNING TO WIN. Tennessee's Pat Summitt coaches her thousandth win, with a young team.

These baby Lady Vols (17-5, 6-2 Southeastern Conference), with seven freshmen on the roster, are nothing like the squads that brought Summitt her seventh and eighth national championships in the previous two seasons. This is an inexperienced group that had Summitt joking about whether they would even be up to the task of winning the 17 games she needed to reach 1,000 this season.

Afterwards, she received numerous honors, including the first star in a Knoxville Walk of Fame. (I agree with the concept, although the best one I've seen is in Vienna.)

Next up, the Runs-from-Huskies paid a visit to Madison, where the hosts ended a run of frustration.

The Badgers, who won the Big Ten title and tournament last season but came into Thursday's game having lost six straight -- most recently a loss at Northwestern on Saturday.

It was the Badgers' worst losing streak since the 1997-98 season, when they lost eight in a row.

But it's not like Wisconsin has been blown out in the majority of its losses. The Badgers held the lead in the final 3 minutes of regulation in five of their last seven losses going into Thursday, but were unable to close out a win.

(Go figure. The last Wisconsin win at home was a blowout of Northwestern, and Northwestern won the return match in Evanston on the weekend.)

There were no posts yesterday, because the Real Huskies used up my energy.

Down 43-27 with 18:27 left to play, Akron (8-13, 3-5) went on a 14-2 run, to cut the deficit to four with 13:10 left in the contest. With NIU up 49-45 with 11:41 left, The Huskies rattled off an 8-2 run of its own to push the lead to 10 with, 57-47, with 7:30 left to play, but the Zips refused to go away.

I stand by a previous statement.

It's good value for the money, if a bit stressful to watch on occasion

THE ERA OF THE NEW MODESTY. The expression comes from 11-D, reacting to Our President's problems getting some of his insiders confirmed.

This class backlash going on right now, isn't coming from DC. It's coming from America. They are sick of double standards and their average paychecks. The DC types might be slightly irritated that their college roommates were making a fortune on Wall Street, but they aren't that upset. They know they can always cash in later. No, DC is just responding to the new message of their constituencies.

We're moving into an Era of the New Modesty. No more Viking stoves and houses in Hamptons. No more corporate jets and trust fund brats. And there's some muscle behind the New Modesty. The bail-out money is being closely watched. Senate confirmations are putting the rich on trial. And this is a good thing. The teachers and cops and contractors are having their say.

Andrew Malcolm sees the same thing.

That's the way Washington used to be, a place where representatives of the people went to work temporarily before they returned back home to the states, districts and, most important, the people they represented. Somewhere along the way, things got turned around.

Once elected, the representatives moved to the Washington area (Republicans generally to Virginia, Democrats to Maryland), got home mortgages there and, most likely, sold their home back home. Unless they had so many they couldn't keep track.

They lived in Washington and became part of a bipartisan, permanent political aristocracy because they knew, even if they ever got unelected, they'd be staying on to work in the lucrative legal-lobby-association complex that permeates that onetime swamp that Maryland gave away as worthless for the federal capital. (See video report on Obama's TV interviews about the Daschle withdrawal below.)

Pretty soon, even well-meaning elected folks began to represent Washington during their home district visits, instead of the original way. It takes a very strong personality to resist the self-import that comes from living and working and socializing in the national seat of power.

The same applies to the media, whose elites thrive on the access and exposure there. And it is a heady experience to address the president and others as unelected representatives of their audiences. Once assigned there, you may notice, few rotate back out into the field where most Americans live.

And so the District of Columbia becomes a club, mainly a fraternity still, with all the rights and privileges assigned to membership thereto.

Unsustainable privileges, perhaps. Right Wing Nut House has no use for business as usual.

Political debate – or what passes for debate in this world of media talking points and one line zingers – accomplishes nothing today. It isn’t just the rancorous partisanship that prevents a serious discussion of the weighty problems that confront us. It is the failure of the political class to project their ideas outside of the extremely superficial and predictable framework of simple minded ideology that has us talking past one another instead of communicating back and forth. There is no effort to stand for a while in our opponent’s shoes or even examine an issue for points of commonality upon which any compromise is to be based.

At bottom, this is a failure of imagination. No one is asking either side to abandon principles or betray one’s party. But what real political debate accomplishes is that both sides must constantly re-examine and justify their positions, bringing fresh insight to bear that might lead to a closing of the gap between the two sides and form the beginnings of a political understanding.

As superficial and half hearted as it has appeared to me, President Obama should still be commended for reaching out to Republicans on his stimulus bill. I think it is not enough but is that his fault? He seems constrained by his own base who view any outreach effort as both a waste of time and dangerously naive. But what Obama appeared to be doing was trying to alter the framework of ideology that grips both parties and makes our politics so poisonously partisan.

Although I appreciate the sentiments, and welcome the loss of credibility of the Permanent Screaming Establishment, perhaps the better outcome would be for the economic recovery to begin while the Permanent Screaming Establishment is still screaming about whether the National Endowment for the Arts or Amtrak improvements are stimulus or infrastructure or pork. Imagine ... conditions improve while the government is doing ... nothing.

PET GOAT UPDATE. President Obama's mental health excursion to a nearby charter school prompted a Power Line fantasy

....wouldn't it be nice if the President had called on one of those kids, and she had said: "Why is our school good enough for a photo-op for you and Mrs. Obama, but not good enough for Sasha and Malia?...Why is that?"

(Via Charlie Sykes.)

This evening, NBC News reported that Our President would be making his first trip in Air Force One, to Williamsburg? Williamsburg? That's almost in chopper range, and it's almost cost-effective to couple Bishop Polk Georgia 300 to the evening corridor train that goes that way.

UNUSUAL OCCURRENCE REPORT. Medievalist earns tenure.

Congratulations and best wishes.

OF KEYNES AND BASTIAT. Professor Mankiw offers his macroeconomic policy proposal and discovers a glazier improvising his own stimulus package.

CROSSING OVER FROM THE DARK SIDE. The former Undersecretary for Policy in President Bush's Amtrak-unfriendly Department of Transportation sees an opportunity to practice fiscal responsibility.

Instead of spending time with their families, participating in civic life, or investing in their careers, millions of middle-class Americans are stuck sitting in cars.

The root cause of congestion is quite simple: Prices aren’t set to balance supply and demand. Imagine if consumers paid the government a weekly food tax that permitted them to take all the food they wanted from any grocery store. This policy would create massive food shortages. Yet, by and large, that’s how we pay for highways in America. As long as highway prices have little to do with highway costs, congestion will be inevitable.

Recently, however, serious cracks in status-quo defeatism have emerged. Thanks to technology breakthroughs, such as electronic toll tags and stickers, most major metropolitan areas are now in the process of implementing state-of-the-art, variable time-of-day road-pricing programs. The projects completed to date reveal four critical points: 1) variable pricing immediately and sustainably reduces congestion; 2) the more road space you price, the cheaper the price; 3) most drivers love the experiments once they’re implemented; and 4) pricing can be installed on a road in a matter of months.

With a growing body of research and real-world demonstrations, policymakers now have a firm foundation on which to build. Pricing policies can be flexibly integrated with mass-transit investments, targeted subsidies to low-income people, and tax cuts. In addition, pricing can attract private-sector debt and equity capital to upgrade infrastructure. Implementation is sometimes tricky, and it requires a lot of data to get the pricing right. But very few other policies can achieve so many “wins” as variable pricing can when properly designed.

The Superintendent added the emphasis.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK. Does a National Center for Campus Safety pass the cost-benefit test?

The House has approved creation of an office to help university security forces train for and prevent violent incidents such as those at Virginia Tech [and] at Northern Illinois University.

The National Center for Campus Public Safety would issue grants to campus safety agencies, encourage research into improved college safety and conduct training.

University security forces, including those at Northern Illinois, studied the Virginia Tech shooting, I argue to good effect. There have been subsequent conferences studying the Northern Illinois shooting. Is a middleman necessary?

The mass shootings attract a lot of attention. The daily backdrop of domestic disputes, gang fights, and the ordinary frictions of human interaction pose a different (and very real, at Virginia Tech and at Northern Illinois and I bet everyplace else, including the Ivies) challenge to the safety agencies and different strategies for improving safety, possibly strategies not provided for in the National Center's mission statement (or in the priors of the committees that will allocate the grants.)

SIX MORE WEEKS OF BLOGGING. I did see my shadow on the weekend, not a difficult thing to do in Silicon Valley, which is currently in the middle of a drought. The purpose of the trip was to do some shopping at O Scale West, the first swap meet of the year.

The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority's streetcars serve the San Jose airport and the headquarters hotel for the swap meet. They also afforded opportunities for a streetcar fix with somewhat better weather than Kenosha offers.

Champion station is in the middle of Cisco's office campus.


The car line blends in well with the surroundings. Californian transit is a world removed from The Milwaukee Electric with multiple cars lined up at Allis-Chalmers or Seaman Body or Allen-Bradley for the shift change.


The cars, which run as single units on weekends and in two-car trains weekdays, update the Boston two-rooms-and-a-bath configuration to a smooth running package in which the bath (center) section provides four bike racks. That's not a bad idea, although when the racks are in use, the passage between the two rooms is obstructed.


The signalling includes provisions to discourage left turns in front of the cars. The square screen underneath the leftmost left-turn arrow (like most of the thickly settled states, California has excessively ornate traffic signals) flashes with the silhouette of a trolley when the trolley approaches, and the left-turn arrows are interlocked with the track circuits. It's still possible for an inattentive driver to make a left in front of a trolley, but the signals will give positive evidence of disregard.


The headquarters hotel is also close to the Santa Clara Great America stop on the Amtrak Capitol Corridor line, which is now home to the weekday Altamont Commuter Express. There's space in this right-of-way for a second track, should the investors and the policy makers see fit to expand freight and passenger capacity.


The purpose of a swap meet is to take your castoffs there and bring somebody else's castoffs home. This meet includes an auction, where several lots of detail parts and a small collection of Lima 1:45 Continental stock stimulated spirited bidding just before the auction closed. The bids for one item that interested me got beyond my reservation price, just as well given how full my kit bag was already. (Sleepers and head-end cars primarily: the State of Maine Express is just about equipped now, and the Bar Harbor Express can run as the midweek edition.)


A swap meet also includes a model contest. I liked the Pennsylvania perishables train in the foreground. The Santa Fe Golden Gate train, a precursor to Amtrak's San Joaquins, appeals, although I had to mark the coaches down for visible gaps between roof and car sides.


The most remarkable occurrence of the weekend was in the air: on time departures westward and eastward, with early arrivals and severe clear most of the way across the country. If only the airlines could expedite loading and unloading ...

NO PET GOATS. President Obama and the First Lady visited a Washington, D. C. charter school today. During the visit, the President quipped to the youngsters that he wanted to get away from the White House. Fair enough. The visit was in order.

In his sign-off from the evening national news, NBC Democratic Party hack newsreader Brian Williams expressed sympathy with the President's sentiments, noting that two of his appointments had to withdraw their nominations today, over a failure of his organization's vetters to catch some creative tax filing, and that five news organizations had one-on-one interviews with him that day.

That strikes me as a less trying day than a school visit interrupted by planes crashing into office towers.

WORKING ON THE RAILROAD. Destination: Freedom sees the potential for transportation infrastructure investments as distinct from economic stimulus.

And waive all environmental review for rail projects on existing rail corridors – or give the Governors the power to do that --- so that intercity rail and commuter rail can be rebuilt NOW, along the rights-of-way that largely already exist. Talk about shovel-ready! The freight railroads that own these rights-of-way have had plans on the books for years for a second or third track, because the second and third tracks used to be right there along with the single track that’s left. The freight railroads of course haven’t had the money to build the capacity they need, and that will be absolutely required for any passenger rail system to work, because the return on that investment takes decades, and Wall Street wants quarter-to-quarter results. Only the government can do this kind of capacity-building, while also taking over the maintenance costs of those re-laid track miles, just as governments now maintain the roads and bridges – but with one hopes better skill.

The writers have too much faith in government, and their Obama blinders are obvious, and they haven't looked carefully at what the freight railroads have been doing to improve their plant. The latest issue of Trains reports that the big carriers have been taking advantage of the downturn in traffic to make improvements that are difficult under the traffic levels they've been dealing with.

That noted, there might be efficiency gains in government agencies providing additional capacity for commuter and corridor trains (and in some parts of the country, additional long-distance service) that provides additional freight train capacity. That's a matter of the right rules: that Union Pacific got away with clogging the third track between Geneva and Elburn for much of the first year of Metra service cannot be laid off entirely on the carrier's attitude toward passenger trains.

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU ASK FOR. A College Affordability post hails a policy shift in Pennsylvania.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported Thursday that the Pennsylvania State board of Education approved a proposal to explore the possibility of founding a new type of 4-year state university, which would focus on offering a “low-cost, no frills” bachelor’s degree. This “no-frills” university would forgo the extras, which have become common at other schools. No sports, no luxury student center, and even no climbing wall. The reduction in both capital and staff would, in theory, allow the university to run a much leaner operation and pass the savings on to the students.

Detroit Normal becomes Detroit Teachers becomes City University of Detroit becomes Wayne State University. Northern Illinois State Normal School becomes Northern Illinois University with the intervening steps left to the reader as an exercise. There's probably a community college that has become a state university somewhere. Perhaps the no-frills versions got their start in tough times and their mission crept over time, possibly assisted by greater prosperity. (That's received wisdom for the G. I. Bill - Space Race - Baby Boom era of local colleges becoming state universities with national aspirations.) If so, perhaps the Arizona and Nevada model of mission reversal is the simpler solution. Close the doctoral programs, end intercollegiate athletics, make no further upgrades to the residence halls.

I'm skeptical of that approach, because it adds capacity in a sector of higher education where there already is excess capacity. The folks at College Affordability make my point for me. The latest Chart of the Week disaggregates freshman to sophomore retention rates. These are highest at Ph. D. granting private universities, followed by Ph. D. granting public universities, M. A. granting privates, and M. A. granting publics. The lowest rates are at two-year public colleges. The quest for prestige degrees cannot be dismissed as a positional arms race by parents (although that exists) or as expense-preference behavior by faculty and upper-level administrators (although they indulge). There's a genuine flight to perceived quality at work.

COMPLEX ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS DO WHAT THEY PLEASE. I've made this observation before, sometimes to suggest the folly of macroeconomic management by the government. That's not the same thing as suggesting attempting to understand what complex adaptive systems do.

A professor of physics describes the difference.

Macroeconomists should realize that the inability of their theories to make accurate predictions means that they do not know what they are talking about. We non-economists should realize this also, and realize that our leaders, who are being advised by macroeconomists, haven’t got a clue where they are leading us. Their actions may lead us out of the current recession, or they may lead us into a depression as bad as the Great Depression.

Franklin Roosevelt is often given credit for experimenting with the economy in a scientific manner. He did nothing of the sort. Any experiment involving human beings has to be a controlled experiment, as in medicine. Half the patients are given the new medicines and the other half, the controls, either the old medicine, or a placebo. Then, and only then, can one tell if the medicine actually improves the condition over doing nothing (the placebo), or is making matters worse. In contrast, Roosevelt — and today’s economic advisors to the President, unfortunately — propose to apply their economic medicine to the entire economy. This is astrology, not science. The professors of economics have no true, experimentally confirmed knowledge of macroeconomics.

I'm not familiar enough with what experimental economists have been doing to grant or to rebut that conclusion. It certainly doesn't help that the Cato Institute and the Center for American Progress take differing positions on the usefulness of the fiscal stimulus, with signatures of economists famous and obscure.