HOT LANES.

It's the dog days of summer, with high humidity, and time for Congress to get out of the malarial swamps of Washington, D.C. after throwing some cold-patch into the highways, er, the Highway Trust Fund.

Congress has managed to avoid a shutdown of highway funding for another three months, but pushed the difficult questions of how to pay for the nation's road and rail projects long-term into an already bursting fall.

The Senate on Thursday passed a pair of measures: one to authorize the Highway Trust Fund for six years with three years of funding and a second, three-month extension already passed by the House to keep the fund afloat. The Senate passed the House patch ostensibly to buy time for both congressional chambers to come to a long-term agreement.

And thus, more things to do once the fall session convenes, and the opportunity to strategically shut the government down draws near.  But that's business as usual.  (Why should the Highway Trust Fund be any more sound than the Social Security Trust Fund?)

Perhaps the next time a major bridge collapses, policy makers might be amenable to doing something other than passing another emergency appropriation or posturing about "crumbling infrastructure."  (Speaking of which, Union Pacific, apparently without any major fanfare, replaced most of the concrete cross-ties on the north main that were installed as part of a track replacement in 2007.  The idea is that concrete ties last longer than the wood ones.  There might have been some litigation here, but no posturing in Congress, just protection under Form B and the maintenance equipment out on the line.)

And the way forward for the highways has been available for years.  I'm still cleaning out a backlog of posts that for one reason or another interested me but couldn't get to them at the time.  Today, some goodies from 2009 about High Occupancy Toll lanes.  (Must have been preempted by final exams and preparations to participate in a faculty search, judging by the dates.)  First, the general principle.

"The reason they're becoming more popular is that they relieve congestion," says Anthony Downs, a transportation expert at the Brookings Institution.

But there are people still in need of enlightenment.

"Why would you put a toll on I-95 when you already have tolls on the (nearby Florida) Turnpike?" says James Vamper, 45, owner of Supreme Limousine Service. "That is absolutely ridiculous. I don't think this is fair for the small-business person … or for poor people."

Because if there are two comparable roads, one tolled and the other not, all the toll evaders will go to the un-tolled road, which will delay the limousines. And you'll see a lot more heavy trucks on the un-tolled road, pounding it to pieces.  (Don't get me started on the way some trucking companies evidently instruct their drivers to avoid the Illinois Tollway and use U.S. 30 and Illinois 23 and 38 instead, never mind the congestion and road-breaking that follows.)

And as of six years ago, it is the Southern states that have decided toll lanes (there are few full turnpikes) are not some damfool carpetbagger notion.  As the article puts it, "Toll roads — or at least plans for them — are becoming as common in Dixie as pecan pie, pickups and porch swings."

In part, that's local governments responding to the lack of serious action in Washington.

The nation's primary source of revenue for transportation projects, the federal gas tax-supported Highway Trust Fund, is shrinking as many Americans drive less and operate more fuel-efficient vehicles. "We have a transportation funding crisis," says Pat Jones, executive director of the International Bridge, Tunnel and Turnpike Association. "Governors and mayors … are saying, 'Look, I'm not getting any help from the federal government. I'm going to bootstrap solving the problem myself. I'm going to go for tolling.' "

Congestion pricing follows congestion, and congestion might follow air conditioning or civil rights or Republican fiscal policies at the state level (graduate programs have dissertation proposal deadlines, I just offered three) and economists understand something about pricing in the presence of congestion.

Tim Lomax, a congestion expert at the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University, says tolling is catching on in the South for a simple reason: Sustained population growth means the region is running out of interstate capacity.

"If you have a bunch of free (interstate) capacity, you don't need tolls," he says. "Not until you get to the point where you have congestion, and your state DOT has difficulty building for that larger population. Until the 1980s and 1990s, in cities like Nashville, Knoxville (Tenn.) and Charlotte, you had pretty good capacity. There was congestion in certain corridors, but it wasn't the all-encompassing Chicago- or Los Angeles-kind of problem."

Even with all the proposals for toll roads in the region, legions of vociferous opponents to the concept still abound. [Dave] Thomas, the South Carolina state senator, is one of them.

"The problem with tolls is that once you have them, rarely can you get rid of them," he says. "With revenue sources dwindling all over the place, states are becoming desperate. But once (tolling becomes) a revenue source … it never goes away."

Nor, Mr Thomas, should it. Pricing at long run incremental cost yields the funds to keep the roads in a state of good repair, and to add capacity.  And if the Southerners, bless their hearts, start thinking about commuter, regional, and accelerated Passenger Rail when they discover that there are limits to building more roads, why, here are some ideas they might consider.

BUY YOUR ADVISOR A TRAIN SET.

Some years ago, in the course of commending me as a useful foil for his ideas, Dean Dad teased me about the model railroad content amidst the commentary on Deeper Things.  But one of the early themes on his site was the discontent among recent Ph.D.s who had been enticed into graduate school  in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the expectation of lots of slots as the current senior faculty retired.  But many of those tenure-line retirees were replaced with contingent appointments, and, years, later, the Baby Boomer faculty are still hanging on.  So many, apparently, that when one decides to call it a career at a normal age, it's newsworthy.

Having worked 35 years at the University of Iowa, Betsy Altmaier was absolutely "ready for a new environment" on May 15, her last day as a professor.

With changes on the horizon in her field and college, Altmaier decided 2015 was as good a year as any to stop collecting a paycheck for her position in the Psychological and Quantitative Foundations Department. At age 63, however, she knows her decision to pursue a traditional retirement has become rather unusual among tenured professors.

There are a variety of reasons, including continued enthusiasm for projects and the absence, because it's age discrimination, of mandatory retirement.  But in the presence of stingy administrators, the consequence might be a serious case of institutional collapse in future.

Altmaier said the unwillingness of some of her peers to exit the stage more quickly and gracefully has disrupted what "used to be a healthy rhythm" of experience and change in the the academic world.

"I feel that we need to leave," Altmaier said. "It used to be that faculty left at 65, and you could count on that. ... I simply cannot believe that having a department (or a university) that is too top heavy with people over 65 is a good thing."

Although it's true that intellectually curious people can chip away at the frontier at any age, the day-to-day responsibilities for curriculum and administrivia and internal politicking mean it's the new PhDs who ought to be turned loose at the frontier and encouraged to push it back in a meaningful way ... and that's why there's a tenure track.

But getting off the tenure track only makes sense if you are able to switch to some other track.  That might be good for your health -- Craig Newmark, Emeritus, thinks so.

So far, it's working for me, too.

That's a throwback train for Throwback Thursday.  And with daylight at 14 hours and shrinking, look for more of this content in the next few months.

IOWA REDISCOVERS ITS INTERURBAN PAST.

I'm amassing a portfolio of stories about private railroad operators looking to go into the passenger business, perhaps with participation from a local Passenger Rail authority.  Here's an intriguing one out of Iowa, involving the Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, or "The Crandic Line."  It's still a long way from any trains running, but the idea is to get people between Iowa City, where there's inter alia a flagship state university, and something called The Eastern Iowa Airport.  (Cedar Rapids is along the Overland Route, but Union Pacific isn't friendly to passenger trains.)   But check out the intrusion of contemporary terminology into the history.

CRANDIC once offered light-rail service, but that was discontinued in 1953, [railroad marketing manager Jeffery] Woods said. But because the track already exists, it eliminates some important hurdles to restarting it.

The CRANDIC track runs through Iowa City, Coralville, North Liberty, Swisher and into Cedar Rapids. Freight traffic is 24/7 north of the airport, making it an expensive proposition, Woods said. The track in study area sees only about 100 rail cars a year.

There's a bit of the "light rail service" in preservation not far from Cold Spring Shops headquarters.

Indiana Railroad highspeed 65 became Crandic's 120, and a train enthusiast saved some of his motorman's salary to buy it.  Doesn't look like a contemporary light rail car, doesn't have the passenger capacity or the bike racks of a contemporary light rail car, but there's no light rail car with the get-up-and-go.

Now as far as that round-the-clock freight operation, shall we have a clinic in the discipline of clearing the time of superior trains?

PEOPLE RESPOND TO INCENTIVES.

There are limits, even to the enthusiasm of participants in the common schools, for what government is doing to common schools.

My friends, in real life and on Facebook, know that I am a huge supporter of public education. I am a product of public schools, and so are my children. Public education is the backbone of democracy — but we all know there is a privatization movement trying to undermine it.

I became an activist after Gov. Rick Snyder and his Republican compatriots  took over the Michigan government and declared war on teachers. I am part of a group called Save Michigan’s Public Schools, which put on a rally for public education two years ago at the Capitol steps that drew over 1,000 people from all over the state with just three weeks’ notice and during summer break. I have testified in front of the Michigan House Education Committee against lifting the cap on charter schools, and also against the Common Core State Standards. I attended both conferences of the Network for Public Education to meet with other activists and bring back ideas to my compadres in Michigan. I have been fighting for public education for five years now, and will continue to do so.

Presumably, that's why Common Dreams picked up the essay, and the current assessment mania isn't something that separates Democrats from Republicans.

I have been forced to comply with mandates — from the Republicans at the state level and the Democrats at the national level — that are NOT in the best interest of kids. I am tired of having to perform what I consider to be educational malpractice, in the name of “accountability.” The amount of time lost to standardized tests that are of no use to me as a classroom teacher is mind-boggling. And when you add in mandatory quarterly district-wide tests, which are used to collect data that is ignored, you get a situation that is beyond ridiculous.

The barnyard metaphor I've always liked is "the calves don't put on weight faster if you weigh them more often."  And management fads are the stuff of Dilbert strips and policy wonks alike.

Sometimes I feel like I live in a Kafka novel.  This is No. 1 on my district’s list of how to close the achievement gap and increase learning: Making sure that all teachers have their learning goals posted every day in the form of an “I Can” statement. I don’t know how we ever got to be successful adults when we had no “I Can” statements on the wall.

That's the kind of silly thinking that has turned course outlines into something resembling Conditions of Carriage. Irrespective of field or political affiliation, it's something a lot of teachers and professors roll their eyes at.

PATRICK KANE WILL GET HIS HEARING.

Obscure collegiate wrestlers deserve no less.

A judge overturned the expulsion of Corey Mock—a University of Tennessee at Chattanooga student and star wrestler—after determining that UT’s administration had improperly required Mock to prove that he was innocent of sexually assaulting another student.

The decision is a significant blow to the concept of affirmative consent. According to Judge Carol McCoy, UT’s consent standard wrongfully shifted the burden of proof and violated Mock’s due process rights.

Legal proceedings may continue.

Mock’s expulsion stemmed from a sexual encounter with a fellow student, Molly Morris, during the spring of 2014. Morris and Mock had met online and quickly become friends; they hung out on several occasions and decided to attend a house party together. Morris had too much to drink—someone might have slipped her something, though no evidence established this—and went to the bathroom to be sick. Mock found her, took her to a bedroom, and they had sex.

A week after the incident, Morris told Mock that she had not given consent. Three months later, she formally accused him of raping her.

The campus judicial process initially cleared Mock, but UT Chancellor Steven Angle took an interest in the case after meeting with Morris. Angle asked the campus adjudicators to re-hear the case. This time, Mock was found guilty.

In court, however, there's a double jeopardy provision for criminal investigations.  And Mr Mock is the difficult sort of poster boy for unconstitutional collegiate disciplinary policies.  In that, there are parallels with Mr Kane's troubles.  Girls and drinking.  And perhaps, notes Chicago sports pundit and Northwestern defensive back Rick Telander, the enabling culture that cocoons emerging superstars.

He has never had to grow up.

This is because he was identified as a hockey genius when he was just a child, and so much smoke has been blown up his behind that he might reasonably be expected to lift off the ground like a hot-air balloon.

He never went to college. He never truly matured. He never was able to shed the hockey culture of excess that has ruled for generations.

This is terrible for the Hawks. Of course, it is terrible for the woman involved — if, in fact, this situation is real and true. And for Kane, it’s do or die.

And sports worries about the appearance of impropriety in ways that perhaps -- although regional comprehensive universities that look the other way at the hookup culture self-contradict -- the affirmative consent crowd would like to emulate.  Different column from Mr Telander.

If this investigation takes a left turn for Kane and goes straight off the cliff, I don’t think it’s too much to say the Blackhawks’ Stanley Cup era is over and the NHL is badly wounded.

Pro hockey has always had the problem that it sells the fighting, rather than the finesse. (Call me a follower of Tarasov and the Johnsons father and son: skate without the puck and finesse the opponent.)

Higher education, however, can dial back the celebrations of transgressivity and dial back the hookup culture.

A RISING TIDE LIFTS ALL BRIDGES.

OK, it's not a tide, it's a rise in the level of Lake Michigan account a couple of cold winters and a return of the spring rains.  But the bigger recreational powerboats that now dock along the Milwaukee River mean more work for the bridge tenders.  (The priviligentsia cannot go north of Wisconsin Avenue without giving two hours' notice, same idea as the sailboat runs in Chicago at open and close of the yachting season.)  What intrigues, though, is that a number of the drawbridges are controlled remotely from other bridges.  Water Street, just before the confluence of the Milwaukee and Menominee rivers, remotely controls the two Sixth Street draws, which still see the passage of bulk freighters.  It's those freighters that require some tenders on duty at all hours.  And you gotta like a story where someone refers to "down by Potawatomi."

COULDN'T GO UPSCALE FAST ENOUGH?

Poor Valdosta State.  Colleen Flaherty of Inside Higher Ed surveys their troubles, and there are many.

​Valdosta State University’s had a rough run in the last few years: declining enrollment, something of a revolving door of administrators and a divisive political protest controversy. But is the way to solve Valdosta State’s problems really getting rid of some its best and brightest young faculty members? That’s what some on campus are wondering after the university announced last week that it was laying off 33 staff and faculty members, including some on the tenure track.

“These kinds of layoffs do not do anything good for undergraduate enrollment and they have a detrimental effect on graduate enrollment,” said Thomas Aiello, an associate professor of history at Valdosta State who’ll lose two high-performing tenure-track faculty members in his department by the end of the coming academic year as a result of the cuts. “Faculty like the ones who were let go are the ones students are reading with as undergrads and they want to come back and study under them.”

The article suggests that Valdosta State sought to upgrade its academic profile, but that couldn't stem the decline in enrollment.

There was talk of declining enrollment since 2011, but no sense of crisis and no declaration of financial exigency. The cuts also seemed haphazard, since some laid-off faculty members in the sciences said they actually made money for the university in external grants.

“This is not a smart financial decision,” said Joshua Reece, an assistant professor of biology who was notified that his contract won’t be renewed after this year, despite the funding he's secured (about $200,000 over two years total, some $73,000 of which came from external grants from the University System of Georgia, the Florida Institute for Conservation Science and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service). “And now I have to quit on my graduate students. These are students I pay to do research in my lab that I have to drop now -- I’ve made long-term commitments to make them better scientists and I have to give that up.”

Humanities faculty members have similar complaints about the quality of faculty they’re losing. Aiello said the history professors who were let go, including Stephanie Hinnershitz, are some of the best teachers and most productive scholars he knows.

Hinnershitz said the university updated its tenure guidelines several years ago to bolster its research profile and capitalize on its status as the area’s comprehensive university. And tenure-track faculty members have been working extra hard to meet new expectations, she said. So the news is “harder to swallow. We’ve really pushed ourselves.”

It all asks the question, “How much is this university dedicated to being a comprehensive university?” she said.

That's the right question.  It's not clear, though, whether that's a recent commitment, or whether that's something the current administrators attempted after everything else (sub-prime party school, retention and completion?) failed.  It strikes me that the university is being treated as a stepping stone for serial administrators.

Faculty members blame some of the messaging and mission inconsistency on what they called a “revolving door” of administrators in recent years. The university’s last president, William J. McKinney, stepped down in July after three years on the job. His resignation followed that of his chief of staff, Kimberly Luse, in March, after an on-campus “run-in” with the police, according to WCTV. Also in March, the executive committee of the Faculty Senate published a report detailing longstanding concerns about “systemic problems with communication and leadership.” That report followed a written proposal by a group of unnamed faculty members that the Faculty Senate vote no confidence in McKinney and former Provost Hudson Rogers. Rogers has since returned to the business faculty, replaced by an interim provost and vice president of academic affairs.

McKinney also become mired in external controversy in his last months on the job, after he’d already announced his resignation, following the trampling of an American flag during an on-campus protest. McKinney affirmed the university’s commitment to free speech, but some said he should have done more to condemn the protesters’ actions, and pro-flag events on campus followed.

That's the way things roll these days.  The transgressive are a protected class, never mind how many normal Americans are offended, and as one administrator leaves and another comes in, there's a new round of strategic planning or crafting a vision (never mind how new the previous one was) and somebody has to focus-group a new tagline (or perhaps some deanlet does it on the sly), and that turmoil does nothing for faculty morale, or for attracting good students.

The article, and the accompanying comments, suggest two things.  First, there is probably excess capacity in access-assessment-remediation-retention in Georgia (why should that state be any different from any other state?)  Second, Excellence Without Money doesn't work.

It has not been fun watching higher education either self-destruct or antagonize normal Americans, whether from inside or observing from my workbench.

DENY COHERENT BELIEFS, ENJOY THE INCOHERENCE.

Everything else is commentary.  Read and understand.

DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE.

The Convocation Center at Northern Illinois University, an attempt to disguise a sports arena as something more, the same way the Milwaukee Public Schools used to call elementary school gyms "multipurpose room," has long been a money suck.   But before it opened as a sports arena,  Bill Cosby came to town as headliner for an opening show during registration week.  Bill who?

Although comedian Bill Cosby opened Northern Illinois University’s Convocation Center 13 years ago this month, his photographs are no longer welcome to hang on the building’s walls.

Amid controversial allegations accusing Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting numerous women throughout his career, employees at Northern Illinois University’s Convocation Center plan to eliminate the celebrity from the venue’s future marketing materials. Autographed photos of past entertainers will continue to be showcased in the “suite section” of the center, but the poster from Bill Cosby’s inaugural performance has been removed, said John Cheney, head of the university’s facilities and event operations.

“Based on his recent history and the current allegations against him, I would guess we would not put it up until that problem is resolved,” Cheney said. “Currently, there are no plans to return it.”

Cosby was the first major act to perform at the university’s Convocation Center during it’s opening weekend in August 2002. Manuel Sanchez, who was then the president of NIU’s Board of Trustees, lauded Cosby for “not using any of the horrible words that it seems so many ‘artists’ feel compelled to use to entertain our children and adults these days,” minutes from a September 2002 NIU Board of Trustees meeting show.

The show attracted an audience of about 7,000, the minutes show, and has been a celebrated part of the Convocation Center’s history ever since.

But the Convocation Center went from the Next Big Thing to an afterthought very quickly. (And it's depressing to see how many of the troubles of 2003 are troubles to this day.)

WATER FOR ELEPHANTS?

Look closely at the pachyderm providing rides before the Carson and Barnes Circus evening show.

RISING UP ANGRY.

It's going to be a fun election season, watching Business as Usual struggle to hang on to its privileges.

First up, here's Victor Davis Hanson, anticipating the End Times for the Democrats.

The logical liberal trajectory of abortion on demand is the Planned Parenthood fetus emporium, of race-based grievance politics is the “hands up, don’t shoot” (and Trayvon as the son Obama never had) fantasy, of open borders is the murder of Kate Steinle, and of therapeutic foreign policy is the Iran deal, reset with Putin, Benghazi, red lines with Assad, the collapse of Iraq, and the birth of ISIS.

The result is Hillary is sort of stuck. She can mouth Obamisms that remain unpopular, with the realization that the polarizing rhetoric needed to energize an Obama black or Latino bloc voter in the past had often ensured turning off a working-class Reagan Democrat. Hillary needs to win both groups, but so far there is no indication that her “first woman president” theme will energize minorities in the fashion they had flocked to “hope and change.”

Or Clinton can go full-populist, damning Wall Street, the elite, and the one-percent, while again changing accents to reflect regional audiences. Here the challenge is twofold: all three Clintons swim most comfortably in plutocratic waters. Hillary, Bill, and Chelsea are all multimillionaires, precisely because they leveraged their political connections and the Clinton name, in quid-pro-quo fashion, to extract millions from cash-flush Wall Street and banking concerns. The world of the Clinton Foundation, the family’s jet-setting, the Clinton son-in-law, and the speaking fees of all three Clintons are elitist to the core and simply unfathomable to 99% of the population.

That first paragraph will antagonize a lot of Democrat sympathizers or people who get their world view from public radio, and yet it's going to be hard for those folks to get outside of their comfort zones and suggest that (a) practitioners in difficult fields sometimes say things among themselves that they wouldn't in mixed company (b) Our President is playing a long game in racial reconciliation and calling attention to stereotyping and profiling today will change future attitudes and behaviors (c) immigration is evidence that the rest of the world sucks, and perhaps an attitude adjustment when it comes to "Land of Opportunity" is in order (d) it is difficult to bend over to be nice to people who hate you.

Interestingly, though, Mr Hanson pivots from social and diplomatic themes to political economy, where there's a long record of state failure, from the War on Poverty to the non-stimulus stimulus, and the old age benefits are still in trouble.

But as I never tire of pointing out, it takes something to beat the failures of the so-called progressives.  Mr Hanson is right that "Hillary is a reactionary candidate for a reactionary party."  But Glenn "Insta Pundit" Reynolds suggests there's more at work than the usual fatigue that sets in after eight or twelve years.

Democracy doesn’t do much for technocratically set policy that always seems to reflect ruling-class preferences, and people feel they’ve lost control of their own fates.

Of course, orphaned voters aren’t a bug but a feature for a ruling class that would prefer to rule without them.  But in a democracy, which America still is, voters don’t stay orphaned forever.

In this election cycle, Trump and Sanders have come forward to claim the orphaned vote.  It’s very likely that, this time around, the ruling class will manage to put orphaned voters back in the political orphanage by the time Election Day rolls around next year.

But the orphans will still be there, still longing for someone powerful enough to give them a voice.  And the politician who will ultimately manage to do so, unless our ruling class does a better job of listening, could be one who will make Trump and Sanders look mainstream.

Trump and Sanders are only symptoms. Failed leadership is the disease.

Yes, and Zen Pundit (at Chicago Boyz) wonders why that anger hasn't already manifested itself.

Our bipartisan ruling elite have, in the short space of fifteen years, managed to: lose two wars; collapse at least three states into permanent anarchy; turn Russia into an enemy again; suffer the greatest counterintelligence failures in history; and nearly melt down the entire global economy andvastly enrich themselves while presiding over the greatest loss of household wealth for ordinary Americans in history, save for the Great Depression. If that is not a level of incompetence that should disqualify them from public office forever, I’m not sure what would.

Despite this track record of utter failure and brazen venality, our elite have managed to remain firmly in the saddle. Why is this? In normal countries they typically have revolutions and coups over far less, but our leaders of both parties managed to cruise from disasters to debacles to win re-election, often by substantial margins.

One reason may be that the elite, broadly speaking, have managed to restore a substantial degree of control over the information the general public consumes, that they had briefly lost in the early 2000s and subsequently narrowed and shape the terms of “acceptable” political debate in American society more than ever before.

There's much more, in a similar vein, at the post. Perhaps it's not the narrowing of elite consensus, it's the strengthening of disutility for differences between your preferences and what the elite decides to impose that produces both the frustration, and the inability of anyone to construct a message that will appeal to sufficiently many voters to be able to govern with the consent of the governed.  When President Obama had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a compliant House and the tailwinds of historic goodwill and more than a little cheerleading from the legacy press and the best he could do was a health insurance reform passed on reconciliation and a stimulus that didn't stimulate, what else is at work?

WE USED TO APPROACH GROWING UP DIFFERENTLY.

Joanne Jacobs shared a Federalist list of "Insanely Dangerous Toys" including miniature kitchen appliances and power tools, glass-blowing and lead-soldier casting kits, a chemistry set, a nineteenth century toy live steam locomotive, a chemistry set, and an atomic energy lab.  All this stuff presumably more dangerous than BB guns, baseball bats, or puppies.  I fear, though, that compilers of the Federalist list didn't understand how responsible parenting used to work, or looked carefully at the toy descriptions.  Yes, you can make the atomic energy lab sound scary by mentioning uranium and radium, without understanding that at the time, luminous watches and clocks had more radium than the cloud-chamber pin did, and that at the time, parents would supervise their children and emphasize reading the instructions.

THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING.

It's standard procedure, these days, for institutions of higher education to appoint some kind of chief diversity officer, whose portfolio might include compliance with the relevant statutes governing employment, as well as making sure that everybody plays nicely with others and perhaps having the themed posters ready for each of the Awareness months.  But when the diversity enterprise doesn't seem to work well (that's the charitable interpretation) or it riles up discord (which no amount of campaigning against micro-aggressions will quell) is it worth paying that individual more than high public officials.  Thanks to  Katherine Timpf (via College Insurrection), let facts be submitted to a candid World.

As the state of Illinois is struggling with budget problems, Northern Illinois University, a public school, just hired a “chief diversity officer” that will make more than almost every member of Congress and almost every governor.

You saw it here first.  Perhaps I erred in pointing out that the university could have hired a few faculty members to cover classes that are these days notional, when I could have made the comparison with public officials.  Or perhaps it's more revealed preference.  With football season approaching, a chief diversity officer is still cheaper than a good running backs coach, and it's that program the university would like to highlight, not postponed graduations for lack of classes to complete schedules.

THE SQUEAKY (BIKE) WHEEL GETS A TRAIN RIDE.

We reported, earlier this summer, that the South Shore Line stood out among the Chicago area commuter railroads, in not accepting bicycles as passenger cargo, a stance that earned the Last Interurban a Broken Spoke Award.  By next spring, the Genius Department at Michigan City will have a few cars equipped to handle bicycles.

The pilot program will outfit three cars with specially made bike racks, which will each carry 25 to 30 bike racks each. The pilot bike program will only run on weekends and cyclists must get on and off at stations with high-level boarding platforms.

With floor height platforms at Hegewisch, Hammond, East Chicago, Dune Park, and South Bend, weekend riders will have a few options.  Bicycles in commuter trips are apparently too Danish, for now.  And the days of baggage-carrying trains are over.  But evidence of rising ridership, and plans to double track as far as Michigan City, might mean more cars, including cars equipped to handle bicycles, in future.

At a public hearing last month, officials presented a plan to carry bikes that was dependent on the purchase of new cars within five years. NICTD then would retrofit five existing cars at a price tag of about $10 million. When bike advocates and some NICTD board members heard the program likely would not start until 2021, they complained and officials began to look for a shorter-term solution.

We're sneaking up on the centennial of the coach-baggage arks of the Insull era, will a return of express service be in the future?

GOING BEYOND THE SUPER INTERURBAN.

Suburbanization has expanded into what used to be rural sections of the South Shore Line.

When the 18th Street Brewery introduces a new beer, George Rogge has watched as young people from Chicago get off the South Shore at the Miller stop and form a line to the brewery a block away.

"This is what young people want," he said. "They want that vibe and they want the train."

On Wednesday night, Rogge and others heard about an ambitious plan to capitalize on the enthusiasms of young people like those getting off in Milller and maybe even convince them to make Miller their home.

Must. Look. Into. This. I've already made use of the Shoreline Brewery in Michigan City. Time to do some interurban bar-hopping?

Here's what the Ogden Dunes stop (next one east of Miller) looked like in December of 1972.

New platforms now there, expanded parking, more residential development.  Now local officials want to spend some money in the hopes of making money.

[Regional development authority head Bill] Hanna laid out plans to compete for up to $42 million in Regional Cities Initiative money from the state with a proposal to get trains back and forth to Chicago faster and develop areas around existing South Shore train stations.

Doing that could bring huge benefits to a region that already realizes a gain of about $430 million in personal income per year from the South Shore, according to a study done by consulting firm Policy Analytics, of Indianapolis.

At Wednesday night's public meeting, Policy Analytics President Bill Sheldrake showed a chart that illustrated communities like Hammond, Portage, Michigan City and others along the South Shore could see hundreds of millions of dollars in combined construction activity near train stations if those stations are improved and investments are made around them.

There are some abandoned business properties near the tracks east of Gary through Miller and Ogden Dunes, and the Dune Park area gives way to another cluster of steel mills.  But you can't have frequency and connectivity without trackage, and the line is already standing-room-only even without the interurban pub crawl.

The core of the region's plan is to add 17 miles of track in areas between Gary and Michigan City to speed trains, prevent bottlenecks and increase capacity.

Constructing the second set of tracks would cost about $98 million, according to NICTD's 20-Year Strategic Business Plan. Half of the money could come from federal funds and half from local and/or state sources.

The second part of the plan is to invest in stations and the areas around them, a movement known as Transit Oriented Development. NICTD and the city of Gary are already moving ahead on seeking funds to improve the Miller train stop and surrounding area.

It will be easier to add a second track on rights-of-way where the Insull era management anticipated a second track.  Look at the pole lines in the Ogden Dunes picture above, and here we are approaching Gary's steel mills.

That's also in December 1972.  I also took some pictures in the Dunes area in August, 1982, which is just before the new cars started arriving on the property.

A two car train approaches Beverly Shores, again there's room for a second track, and note the messenger wire for catenary that could be suspended above the track once the track was built.  And perhaps it now will be built.

RISING UP ANGRY.

Jazz Shaw suggests that Donald Trump's continued success, despite all the ways Conventional Wisdom suggests he's making mistake after mistake after mistake, is evidence of at least some of the voters saying enough to Politics as Usual.

[Washington Post columnist and MSNBC regular analyst] Eugene Robinson was on Morning Joe in the first hour today and recounted how he had watched the debate at a nearby bar as a guest of the American Conservative Union. (Side note: he said he received a warm and cordial welcome there and enjoyed himself a great deal.) He told a very different tale than the one being portrayed on the other cable news outlets. Every time Trump let out one of the groan inducing comments which the experts are yet again predicting will doom him, Robinson said the room let out a collective cheer. That’s not much different from what Ed described happening at Red State Gathering.

I think more of the professional political class and the media analysts should have spent the evening having a few beers with Robinson and the folks from the ACU or at RSG15. Every time we see Donald Trump commit electoral seppuku, political undertakers rush with their shovels to his grave site. And then a week later a new set of numbers comes out and they glumly return to their posts, asking yet again how they got it so wrong. Perhaps this will be the time when they’re right… who knows? Maybe this debate was what it took for the voters to figure out “what’s wrong with Trump.”

C. T. Rex revises and extends.

Well it’s pretty simple really. There is a growing contingent of people in this country who are totally and completely fed up with our entire political system.  They don’t care about pragmatism, or policies, or outcomes.  They just want to give everyone from the pundits to the politicians both middle fingers and they don’t care who else is looking when they do it.

It still takes something to beat failure, and a policy proposal to devolve and roll back and otherwise put an end to the conceit that Talking Heads Demonstrating Gravitas in front of pictures of the (so deliciously scaffolded for repair) Capitol might be the way to go.  But in the absence of that, more drastic measures might be what we see.

And here I am, stuck in the middle with you, watching the political pundits lose their collective minds because they think our elections are still about choosing the candidate with the best record of accomplishment, a 51 point plan for each issue, and a carefully controlled image.

The reality is most people are just looking for a candidate who reflects how they feel, and right now what most people feel is anger, frustration, and resentment.  They’re tired of the games and have absolutely had it with political parties and the rich old white guys in Washington running them.

Trump’s very existence as a political entity is as an expression of that anger. Indeed, anger itself is probably too weak a word.  This is not merely some mild irritation with the GOP establishment. His support comes from raw, unadulterated fury directed at all the levers of power that have failed us all again and again and again.  After all these years of being lied to, stabbed in the back, and disappointed at every turn, some people have just decided they want the entire structure burned to the ground, and if they have to immolate the whole country to do it? So be it.

Fifteen months to go ... can't anybody do anything constructive with fifty years of failure of Great Society, Model Cities, No Child Left Behind, Hope and Change?

DIFFERENT STYLES.

The BBC cast three Chinese teachers into a classroom of fifty British adolescents.  Nobody comes out looking good.

The goal of the experiment was to see how well British children aged 13 and 14 could deal with more stringent Chinese teaching methods. According to Javier Espinoza of the Telegraph, the results will be revealed on the three-part BBC2 documentary entitled Are Our Kids Tough Enough? Chinese School.

Fifty children from Bohunt School in Liphook, Hampshire were taught by Chinese teachers for a month. Though the creators of the documentary note that this was not a scientific endeavor, the results were an interesting study of how teaching methods, and the larger culture, differ in Britain and China.

The Chinese teachers felt that the British children were rude and undisciplined, writes Tristan Stewart-Robertson of the Scotsman, after witnessing a girl flee from class crying upon hearing bad news about her favorite band and another student who brought tea to classes.

Li Aiyun of Nanjing Foreign Language School expressed dismay over a lack of commitment from the students.

The right balance of disciplined practice and free inquiry is hard to find, and neither the Chinese nor the contemporary "inclusive" approach are likely to get it right. But I cringe at referring to a reality show, no matter the human subjects clearances, passing as an experiment.  And the deeper implications of Chinese approaches colliding with the British welfare state call for further study.

CORONATION NOT?

The also-ran Democrats are not happy with the nomenklatura's debate schedule.

Democratic presidential candidates Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders are not happy with the Democratic National Committee after it announced its schedule for the six presidential debates the party will host between this fall and early next year.

The schedule is good enough for the ladies in charge.

“These six debates will not only give caucus goers and primary voters ample opportunity to hear from our candidates about their vision for our country’s future, they will highlight the clear contrast between the values of the Democratic Party which is focused on strengthening the middle class versus Republicans,” said DNC Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

This is the same Debbie Blabbermouth Schultz who saw in the relatively few Republican debates a good thing, as it spared likely Republican voters a lot of gaffes. But the also-rans apparently want their shots at the Dowager Empress of Chappaqua.  Pajamas Media and the Republican National Committee tactfully ignore how the skimpy schedule spares the Dowager Empress of gaffe opportunities.

Republican National Committee press secretary Allison Moore said that “rather than follow the RNC’s lead of having an inclusive and neutral process, the DNC is clearly putting its thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton.”

“It’s clearer than ever the Democrat Party wants nothing more than a coronation for Hillary Clinton,” Moore said.

Fifteen more months of this ...

DO THE RESEARCH.

"No Irish Need Apply" is real.  A middle school student was able to find evidence that peer review, in this instance with The Oxford Journal of Social History, agreed didn't exist.

Rebecca Fried had no intention of preserving the record of a persecuted people whose strife was ready to be permanently written off in the eyes of history as exaggerated, imagined, or even invented.

But with the internet, it's relatively easy to fact-check even peer-reviewed research, in this example by retired Illinois-Chicago historian Richard J. Jensen.

The fact that Irish vividly "remember" NINA signs is a curious historical puzzle. There are no contemporary or retrospective accounts of a specific sign at a specific location. No particular business enterprise is named as a culprit. No historian, ² archivist, or museum curator has ever located one ³; no photograph or drawing exists.⁴  No other ethnic group complained about being singled out by comparable signs. Only Irish Catholics have reported seeing the sign in America—no Protestant, no Jew, no non-Irish Catholic has reported seeing one.

Such a story might have potential, as the Daily Beast article notes, to change the nature of the contemporary Oppression Olympics.  But it's the way Ms Fried found evidence to the contrary, and the academy's reaction, that I wish to address.

After only couple of hours Googling it, Rebecca, a 14-year-old, had found out these signs had, in fact, existed all along. Not only in newspaper listings—in which they appeared in droves—but, after further research, in shop windows, too.

The Irish were persecuted in the American job market—and precisely in the overt, literally written-down way that was always believed.

All of this would have been written off as a myth if it weren’t for Rebecca Fried, a rising high school freshman—who one of the preeminent scholars on the Irish diaspora in the United States now calls a “hero” and “quite extraordinary”—and who simply couldn’t believe it, either.

Rebecca never set out to prove the thesis wrong. She was just interested in an article her dad brought home from work one day.

Parents: engage your childrens' brains. Good stuff can happen.  Ms Fried is at Sidwell Friends but it's just as important if your youngsters are at DeKalb High or Milwaukee Hamilton.

“Now and then I bring home stuff for the kids to read if I think they will find it interesting or will convey some lesson,” says Michael Fried, Rebecca’s father. “Half the time they don’t read them at all. Sometimes they’ll read something if I suggest it. Nothing has ever come of any of these things other than this one.”

Rebecca wasn’t even trying to disprove her dad—let alone an academic at the University of Illiniois-Chicago. She just figured she’d Google the words and see what came up over 100 years ago.

“Just for the fun of it, I started to run a few quick searches on an online newspaper database that I found on Google,” she says. “I was really surprised when I started finding examples of NINA ads in old 19th-century newspapers pretty quickly.”

So she started collecting a handful of examples, then dozens, then more. She went to as many newspaper databases as she could. Then she thought, somebody had to have done this before, right?

Evidently not, and after a few struggles (read the article and note the way Professor Jensen threw an identity politics card on a colleague who was advising Ms Fried) there's a peer-reviewed note in The Oxford Journal of Social History written by a high schooler.

Well done, and it's consistent with stories I heard out of Detroit.  Small sample, but two young ladies independently reported that their grandparents had dropped the leading O'- from their family names, the better to pass as Not Irish.

RECLAIMING THE REPUBLIC.

Sometimes, even the over-wrought Chris Matthews gets something right.

E. J. Dionne is more ideological, yet he recognizes the same things at work.

There are many reasons to criticize the far right and what it has done to the GOP, with the complicity of its so-called Establishment. But it's both remarkably elitist and also an analytical mistake to write off Trump's backers as "crazies" while ignoring the source of their frustrations. They tend to be less well-to-do Republicans who are fed up with the political system, dislike the codes and conventions that dictate the way most politicians talk, and have lost confidence that politics and government can really do very much for them.

There are limits to what government can do, and I await the Republican or Libertarian voice who will point out that fifty years of the War on Poverty, Great Society, Model Cities, Urban Renewal and the rest of the Democrats' holy artifacts haven't done much for less well-to-do Democrats.  I suspect that's not where Mr Dionne is going.

But there's an unconventional alternative: lifting up politics by embracing the idea that voters, especially those being hammered by the economy, aren't dunces and would like for their government and their politicians to take concrete steps to improve their situations. This is especially important in a new economy that simply doesn't deliver to large parts of the middle class, let alone the poor.

And Mr Trump, rent-seeker extraordinaire, is unlikely to be the vehicle for freeing the middle class and the poor from its government shackles.  Mr Dionne is probably of the tax-and-spend approach, and yet his closing remarks call for new thinking.

Is there no Republican engaging in a real — as opposed to superficial — questioning of the party's old assumptions? Is there not even a glimmer of acknowledgment that if stagnating wages are the problem, further tilting the system toward employers and financiers is unlikely to solve it?

Trump's supporters have an intuition that something is deeply wrong in their party. Their explanations for its shortcomings may differ from my own, but they are correct that the party is not delivering what they have a right to expect. Most candidates will play along with the disaffection. Those who try instead to reverse the loss of faith by responding to it constructively will deserve to win the debate.

It's the rent-seeking, stupid.

But I have sufficient beer to refill the mug and enjoy the show tonight.

More, perhaps of substance, or perhaps not, later.

ENDING THE WAR.

The Mahablog reflects on Hiroshima.  The full post merits your attention.  I highlight a few paragraphs.

I’m not sure there was a “right” decision. There was no clear, easy out. Any decision made would have resulted in unbearable loss of life. I think it’s entirely possible that if the bombs had never been dropped, today we’d be complaining that America has never apologized for the bloodbaths on Kyushu and Honshu, and if Truman had just dropped the bomb much of that could have been avoided. We’ll never know, of course. It’s also foolish to assume that if the U.S. had never developed the Bomb there’d be no nuclear stockpiles today.

My larger point, though, is that if we’re going to own up to something, we need to own up to how difficult a decision that was to make. Real-time, real-world moral decisions often are very, very difficult. Often, “moral clarity” is achievable only if we close our eyes to most of the facts. Often there’s no “good” solution. This is how it is. It’s childish to assume everything sorts itself into good and evil, and we can just choose good and remain pure.

Being able to second-guess a military victory might be the epitome of inherited privilege.

This display, at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, shows what U.S. military planners were contemplating, had the Manhattan Project not worked first.  That the planners didn't have to commit a thousand ships and nearly half a million troops suggests that generals, also, contemplate the morality of killing.

But to my mind, arguing about the morality of the bomb is the wrong argument. We should be thinking about the morality of killing, by any means, as an instrument of policy, period. That would be the better way to remember Hiroshima.

Yes, and perhaps that's why the expression "collateral damage" is in the military's lexicon.

INCENTIVE, OR CRUSHER?

Digging into the archives again.  Here, from the fall of 2011, are the late Gary Becker along with the very-much alive Richard Posner and Kevin Murphy, on income inequality and populist politics.  Occupy and the Tea Party might be dated references, and yet the emergence of independent senator Bernie Sanders and tycoon Donald Trump as possible presidential nominees might be continued manifestations of what University of Chicago's deep thinkers were tackling four years ago.  First, Professor Becker contemplates the persistence of populism after the winter makes camping out in the financial district unpleasant.

Although, on the whole, I believe that most members of the top 1% provide useful services to society, I share the concern of “occupiers” and Tea Party members about many of the bailouts. The rich bankers and others who took large risks should have taken much larger haircuts. I have also supported from the beginning of the recession higher capital requirements for banks, especially for the large “too big to fail banks” that will be bailed out if they get into financial difficulties.

Nevertheless, the overall earnings inequality has far greater relevance for the vast majority of occupiers and Tea Party supporters than do the earnings of men and women at the very top of the financial sector. The most effective way for the US to reduce overall inequality that will help the largest number of young persons is by finding ways to bring American high school and college graduation rates up to the levels achieved by the other nations, such as South Korea and some European nations, that have replace the US as worldwide leaders in education achievements.

It helps to have high schools that behave like high schools, and colleges that behave like colleges, but one component of rising income inequality surely is more employers of high-end skills chasing fewer holders of those skills (at least until labor-augmenting technical change permits less-skilled people to do some of those jobs.)

But where an idea gains traction, a leader, charismatic or not, might emerge.  Here's Judge Posner.

Railing against income inequality, job loss, and banking abuses is thus understandable, but it doesn’t do any good. The “Occupiers” are anarchic and disruptive, and the solid middle of American society, which rejects the Tea Party because of its goofy ideas, is likely to reject the Occupy movement because of its style, while broadly sympathetic to its antipathies. But if the movement attracts charismatic leaders amidst a stagnant or worsening economy, it may become a force in American politics.

We'll see how that plays out.  But, Professors Becker and Murphy argue, messing around with the tax code (a border fence wasn't a hot topic in 2011, and much of the illegal immigration is by way of people overstaying their visas) is less effective than, well, ideas that might be familiar to regular readers here.

Should an increase in earnings inequality due primarily to higher rates of return on education and other skills be considered a favorable rather than an unfavor­able development? We think so. Higher rates of return on capital are a sign of greater productivity in the economy, and that inference is fully applica­ble to human capital as well as to physical capital. The initial impact of higher returns to human cap­ital is wider inequality in earnings (the same as the initial effect of higher returns on physical capital), but that impact becomes more muted and may be reversed over time as young men and women invest more in their human capital.

Yes. Supply curves slope upward, long-run supply elasticities exceed short-run supply elasticities, and induced innovation can expand employment opportunities for people with smaller portfolios of human capital.  Provided those portfolios include discipline and persistence.

We conclude that the forces raising earnings inequality in the United States are beneficial to the extent that they reflect higher returns to invest­ments in education and other human capital. Yet this conclusion should not produce complacency, for the response so far to these higher returns has been disturbingly limited. For example, why haven’t more high school graduates gone on to a college educa­tion when the benefits are so apparent? Why don’t more of those who go to college finish a four-year degree? (Only about half do so.)[7] And why has the proportion of American youth who drop out of high school, especially African-American and Hispanic males, remained fairly constant?

The answers to these and related questions lie partly in the breakdown of the American family, and the resulting low skill levels acquired by many children in elementary and secondary school—particularly individuals from broken households. Cognitive skills tend to get developed at very early ages while, as our colleague James Heckman has shown, noncognitive skills—such as study hab­its, getting to appointments on time, and attitudes toward work—get fixed at later, although still rel­atively young, ages. Most high school dropouts certainly appear to be seriously deficient in the noncognitive skills that would enable them to take advantage of the higher rates of return to education and other human capital.

Thus, it may seem simpler to tinker with the tax code.  But it's not.

For many, the solution to an increase in inequality is to make the tax structure more progressive—raise taxes on high-income households and reduce taxes on low-income households. While this may sound sensible, it is not. Would these same indi­viduals advocate a tax on going to college and a subsidy for dropping out of high school in response to the increased importance of education? We think not. Yet shifting the tax structure has exactly this effect.

A more sensible policy is to try to take greater advantage of the opportunities afforded by the higher returns to human cap­ital and encourage more human capital investment. Attempts to raise taxes and impose other penalties on the higher earnings that come from greater skills could greatly reduce the productivity of the world’s leading economy by dis­couraging investments in its most productive and precious form of capital—human capital.

Yes, provided the common culture reinforces the life-management skills of the middle class, and the schools don't dumb down and call it inclusion.

QUESTION THE COMMONPLACES.

Roger Kimball remembers Robert Conquest.

Bob was born in Worcestershire of an American father and English mother in June 1917. The year seems significant in retrospect, for, like many of his peers, he started his adult life as an ardent Communist only to become one of its most articulate scourges. His magisterial book about Stalin’s infamous tyranny, The Great Terror, was published in 1968 to snivels of opprobrium from the bien pensant left-wing establishment, who complained that he had wildly exaggerated the death toll of Stalin’s effort to bring about utopia. When the Soviet archives were finally opened after the fall of the Soviet Union, it turned out he had actually underestimated the butcher’s bill.

There was good reason for President Reagan to refer to the old USSR as an evil empire.  And, younger academics, there are still plenty of commonplaces to question, and the bien pensant snivelers are weaker now than they were in 1968.

THE IMMEDIATE AND THE INDIRECT CONSEQUENCES.

In economics, the immediate effect of an incentive is generally straightforward (often, a "no effect" response that correctly invokes a tight constraint of some kind is good enough.)  It's what comes later that gets interesting.  Consider all the ways in which workers and entrepreneurs are responding to mandated increases in the minimum wage.In Seattle, there's a curious twist on the backward-bending supply curve.

Many companies raised their employees’ wages beyond the $11 an hour mandated by the law, which has led to some curious results. Employees are begging their bosses to cut their hours so they can keep their food stamps, housing assistance, and other welfare benefits.

That's perhaps the best argument for a carefully tapered earned income tax credit or a negative income tax, as the current jumble of provisions by which workers and employers are covered by various welfare state measures make workers sensitive to the conditions under which they lose benefits, and employers sensitive to the conditions under which they are subject to additional requirements.  And thus we might see a lot of 24-employee businesses on 30-hour workweeks, whether that's even close to first- or second-best efficient or not.

Despite a booming economy throughout western Washington, the state’s welfare caseload has dropped very little since the higher wage phase began in Seattle in April. In March 130,851 people were enrolled in the Basic Food program. In April, the caseload dropped to 130,376.

At the same time, prices appear to be going up on just about everything.

Some restaurants have tacked on a 15 percent surcharge to cover the higher wages. And some managers are no longer encouraging customers to tip, leading to a redistribution of income. Workers in the back of the kitchen, such as dishwashers and cooks, are getting paid more, but servers who rely on tips are seeing a pay cut.

Some long-time Seattle restaurants have closed altogether, though none of the owners publicly blamed the minimum wage law.

“It’s what happens when the government imposes a restriction on the labor market that normally wouldn’t be there, and marginal businesses get hit the hardest, and usually those are small, neighborhood businesses,” said Paul Guppy, of the Washington Policy Center.

But the transaction costs that accompany scheduling workers who like the idea of working and like the idea of public assistance can induce a different kind of substitution.

GET THE MISSION RIGHT.

Education Realist asks, "Why are remedial students allowed to matriculate in the first place?"

Protect the taxpayers, protect the serious students, protect faculty morale, and say no more.

But Education Realist falls into a common trap.

Pick a level and split them. My cutoff would be second year algebra and a lexile score of 1000 (that’s about tenth grade, yes?) for college, but we could argue about it. Everyone who can’t manage that standard after twelve years of K-12 school can go to trade school or to adult education, which is not eligible for student loans, but we could probably give some tax credits or something for self-improvement.

Well, there's the GED, and there used to be the College Level Equivalence -- didn't encounter it much at Northern Illinois, but perhaps ending credentialism for its own sake is the desirable outcome.

On the other hand, the trade school is no place for the slackers or the burnouts, who will be hazards to themselves and everyone else on the shop floor.  But let's fix one thing at a time.  Calling out the school districts that send the Distressed Material is progress.  Making the high schools reimburse for the colleges doing the same job again will be progress.  But rejecting the Distressed Material in the first place is the more cost-effective, and possibly, the more humane course.

HACKING THE NETWORK.

It didn't begin with the Internet.  Frank L. Packard's The Wire Devils, which the University of Minnesota reissue describes as "A Classic Mystery Novel of the American Railroad" has a band of thieves more intent on robbing trains than on blackmailing politicians or running terror rings, and yet the techniques of hijacking the network (back in the day, the railroad's Morse telegraphs) and sending coded messages are familiar.  And there is enough of the atmosphere of Railroad Magazine short stories and Bedwell and Dellinger fiction to make it as much a railroad story as an early twentieth century techno-thriller.  That despite author Packard being a Montreal man more familiar with the New York Central and Hudson River than with the American West in which he set it, if the place names and previous locations of the principal characters are any indication.  Quick read, and a change of pace from my usual fare for Book Review N^o. 16.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

WHAT'S WRONG WITH HIGHER EDUCATION?

At Minding the Campus, James Piereson explains How Our Universities Are Failing Us.  Read and understand.

LIVING AT THE EXPENSE OF EVERYONE ELSE.

Reihan Salam sees Bastiat's Formulation at work on the roads.

Since the Interstate Highway System was almost entirely funded by the federal government, local policymakers found it hard to resist going along with plans that tore neighborhoods apart. Who in their right mind would turn down “free” money? Who would turn it down if the neighborhoods that were being destroyed were full of people who didn’t have a ton of political power, as was frequently the case?

While this approach seemed to work pretty well in the first few decades of the interstate, it has proven destructive in the long term. Over time, as the cost of maintaining the federal highways has crept upward, lawmakers have been reluctant to raise the gas tax to a level high enough to keep up with rising costs. And so every few years Congress has to scramble to find some clever way to prevent federal highways from falling into utter decrepitude. It turns out that redistributing gas tax revenue from states with lots of drivers to those with very few also means redistributing gas tax revenue from states that need more transportation infrastructure than they have to states that have more transportation infrastructure than they need.

Perhaps, the best thing for the national government to do about crumbling infrastructure is go away.

First, let’s get the federal government completely out of the business of maintaining the interstate highways crisscrossing our big metropolitan areas. Hand these roads over to state governments as soon as possible, and free state governments to finance these roads in any way they see fit, from higher state gas taxes to variable tolls they could use to reduce traffic congestion. Second, for interstate highways that connect cities across deserts and cornfields, let’s replace the federal gasoline tax with per-mile tolls. One of the many problems with the gas tax is that as gas mileage improves, and as a small but growing number of drivers turn to electric vehicles, gas tax revenue is not keeping up with the needs of the highway system. Per-mile tolls can solve that problem by charging drivers according to how much they actually use the highway system, regardless of the kind of vehicle they’re driving. And as Robert W. Poole Jr. explains, they can be pegged to the cost of each road and bridge, which will help ensure that roads and bridges are adequately financed.

There's no reason the interstate turnpikes can't be owned and operated by private companies, perhaps even by wholly-owned subsidiaries of trucking companies selling spare capacity on their rights-of-way, something that makes more sense on roadways occupied by steerable vehicles than it does on railroad tracks. And local governments can decide whether to spend tax moneys on roads or on railroads or bike trails.

After adopting this approach, we will see states investing in the infrastructure projects that best meet their needs, with some states, like California and New York, choosing to invest more heavily in urban mass transit while others, like Texas and Utah, build bigger and better highways. What remains of the federal highway system, meanwhile, will evolve over time, as the routes that attract the most traffic will grow in line with their per-mile toll revenue while those that attract the least will stay the same size, or perhaps even shrink. We’ll have an infrastructure worthy of a bigger, denser, more decentralized America—the kind of infrastructure that Ike, in his infinite wisdom, would be proud of.

Note, though, both Texas and Utah once had interurban railroad networks in thickly settled areas, and major metropolitan areas in both states are installing Commuter Rail and latter-day interurbans. And I have a post in preparation about the potential for enhanced Passenger Rail in Texas.

THIS IS WHAT COMPROMISE LOOKS LIKE.

Illinois public finances are more messed up than Wisconsin's, and a reform-minded Republican governor faces an intransigent Democrat majority in both chambers of the legislature.  Thus, there's no reason for the most aggravated Democrats to hole up in another state to prevent votes for lack of a quorum as all they have to do is vote No.  And legislative Speaker-for-Life Mike Madigan can get away with offering incoherent talking points on those rare occasions when he consents to be interviewed.

But long-time urban affairs commentator John McCarron proposes a partial compromise in Give this to Rauner and put people to work.  Illinois contractors are subject to the Illinois Project Labor Agreement, which Mr McCarron characterizes as a "souped-up version of the more familiar federal Davis-Bacon Act."  What Davis-Bacon, for federal projects, and the Project Labor Agreement, and Wisconsin's recently-repealed prevailing wage law (whose repeal revealed the extent of Republican rent-seekers among road builders, but I digress) all do is impose union scale wages on government projects.  It's a statute that might have had racist origins (the old Washington Monthly of Charles Peters and James Fallows did yeoman service pointing it out), and its unintended consequences today include a disparate negative impact on minority businesses.  And thus, Mr McCarron suggests, the rehabilitation of foreclosed housing is itself foreclosed, perpetuating slums.

As a matter of principle, I don't think the speaker would -- or should -- go for repealing the PLA on big public works such as expressways or schools.  Somebody in the middle class ought to make a decent buck.

But the purchase and rehab of foreclosed real estate?

Freeing buyers of derelict bungalows from prevailing wage requirements -- and leveraging their investment with a small public subsidy -- could draw hundreds of small-time contractors and developers into the market.  Even the fed's Davis-Bacon already exempts projects of eight dwellings or less.  Why not Illinois?

Yes, there are errors of logic in the proposal, and generating a new set of rent-seekers is not without peril.  But in a compromise, everybody walks away with something, and nobody walks away with everything.  Currently, the governor and the legislature are on a track to get nothing.

REVEALED PREFERENCES.

Northern Illinois University has just hired a chief diversity officer.  First let us consider the opportunity costs.

Northern Illinois University’s new chief diversity officer will earn a salary of $185,000 a year, along with several thousand more in an allowance for taking on other roles at the school, records show.

Vernese Edghill-Walden is set to arrive on the Northern Illinois University campus Monday for her first day of work at the school. Edghill-Walden recently accepted an initial one-year contract as NIU’s first chief diversity officer.

That kind of money comprises the annual salaries of two assistant professors in Economics or up to three professors in English at current market rates. Now perhaps coordinating the diversity activities is more important than making sure students have classes once they enroll. That appears to be the university's spin.

In 2014, a task force made up of NIU students, faculty and staff recommended establishing the diversity position. [University president Douglas] Baker said he heeded that suggestion.

“We really needed someone waking up and going to sleep thinking about these issues, and really coordinating our activities,” Baker said. “We’ve had great diversity activities around the university, but they haven’t been as dovetailed as they could be.”

Perhaps not. But in the comments section the continued lack of pay increases for staff and faculty, and the continuing intrusion of administrivia into the work lives of faculty, including during summers that have long been difficult to protect for research, consulting, or perhaps re-charging, accompany the predictable gripes about boondoggling and ideological bias.