MARKETS REALLOCATE RESOURCES.

Mark J. Perry's Carpe Diem compares and contrasts the rising share of national health care expenditures accounted for by procedures covered by third parties with the falling share of such expenditures accounted for by procedures paid entirely by the patients.

Retrieved from Carpe Diem.

Some procedures are getting cheaper.  The biggest winner is laser hair removal, with the price falling almost by half from 1998 to 2015.  (Probably less painful than getting a bikini wax.  Not that I have any experience with either procedure.)  Botox injections, chemical peels, and eyelid surgeries are about 25 percent cheaper.  Other cosmetic surgeries have increased in price, perhaps because surgeons have the option of performing surgeries covered by insurance and government programs.

To what extent, though, are the opportunities for surgeons to perform cosmetic surgeries in relatively private markets affecting the supply of surgeons to perform more conventional procedures in the third-party payment markets?

That we don't yet know, but Mr Perry's observations are instructive.

Cosmetic procedures, unlike most medical services, are not usually covered by insurance. Patients paying out-of-pocket for cosmetic procedures are cost-conscious, and have strong incentives to shop around and compare prices at the dozens of competing providers in any large city. Because of that market competition, the prices of almost all cosmetic procedures have fallen in real terms since 1998, and some non-surgical procedures have even fallen in nominal dollars before adjusting for price changes. In all cases, cosmetic procedures have increased in price by less than the 93% increase in the price of medical care services between 1998 and 2015.

In this way, services that used to be available only to the vain rich are now available to vain people of more modest means.  The generalization to services that might not be so frivolous is left as an exercise.

WITHOUT COMMENT.

Gateway Pundit covered the protests at last night's abortive Donald Trump rally.

On the street between the main campus of University of Illinois-Chicago and the arena.

Unattributed photograph retrieved from Gateway Pundit.

DERIVATIVE AND REALLY USELESS SCHOLARSHIP.

The American Association of University Professors will be investigating the firing of Melissa Click from Missouri at Columbia. "Normative practice among American institutions of higher education is that a faculty member with indefinite tenure—or a probationary faculty member within the term of appointment—may be dismissed only following demonstration of cause in an adjudicative hearing before a faculty body." This is right and proper.  Procedural protections exist for a reason.

And Ms Click has a weak tenure case.  Marc Randazza of Popehat knows how higher education works, and he summarizes it as "her 12 year career ... is f***ing useless."

Her CV indicates someone with a very shallow view of the marketplace of ideas, and someone who figured out how to game the system, but not someone who has much to offer when it comes to expanding knowledge, or just teaching students how to do anything useful.

Don't get me wrong, hers was a brilliant path for anyone who wants to get hired in social science academia.

Go, read, and understand the whole thing. Perhaps if there are any adults left in the departmental or collegiate promotion committees, she's gone for the right reasons.

But what is it about culture-studies types and Thomas the Tank Engine?

She's not quite finished with The trouble with Thomas: A closer look at the popular children’s Series. I presume that Thomas the Train is an agent of the Patriarchy, and railroads are a metaphor for rape culture, or something like that.

Doesn't matter. It's derivative.  Perhaps the culture-studies machinery goes to Shining Time Station for fun.  Or perhaps for tenure.  (And what are the semiotics of "Caitlyn," a streamlined President Pacific?)  I'm with John Hinderaker.

If you put a gun to my head and made me read one or the other–Fifty Shades of Grey or Thomas the Tank Engine–I would go with Thomas. I do wonder, however, what the feminist angle on Thomas the Tank could possibly be.

Derivative scholarship.

For what it's worth, Thomas is Really Useful with autistic kids.  "That's in addition to aiding and abetting the recruitment of the next generation of ferroequinologists."

A LITTLE LATE TO DEVELOP A CONSCIENCE.

More evidence that the possibility of concealed carry on campus is doing more to instill good manners in faculty than any respect for social convention.  In The Atlantic, Firmin Debrabander sees a profound threat to free speech.

The college classroom is meant to be a special space where all manner of ideas are aired, considered, and debated, and differences negotiated—through speech and argument—with no fear of violent recrimination, no fear of inciting angry students to draw their guns.

In my philosophy and politics classes, for example, I—like peers in my field—routinely broach contentious issues: topics such as structural racism, abortion, and gun rights (the most contentious of them all). Few young adults have put significant thought into these kinds of issues; they must experiment with them to understand them properly and deeply, and to develop mature and critical views. It’s important to ensure that students feel free to explore their thoughts and express them—frankly—so they can experiment and develop. They must feel free to push their intellectual limits, and entertain lines of argument that are controversial, probably offensive to some.

Teaching the controversies is good.  But standing up for controversies does not mean practicing liberating tolerance.

Expansions of civil rights are almost always deeply unpopular at first; this was the case in the fight for women’s rights, suffrage for African Americans, and marriage equality for gays and lesbians. Universities play a key role in early discussions about expanding these rights: Radical ideas must be given a hearing, and require a space to be vetted and honed before emerging into the culture at large, and ultimately the political stage.

I fear that campus carry will make students and faculty less inclined to engage in the critical intellectual work that must take place in the classroom, the courageous inquiry and experimentation American democracy requires. As Gonzalez suggests, classes devoted to highly controversial topics could be the most vulnerable in this respect. How many students are going to risk uncomfortable and potentially intrusive lines of inquiry about gender identity, for example, in conservative Texas—when some of their conservative peers may well be armed? Why even go there, if you are an instructor, and can’t hope to have a productive or illuminating conversation?

How can you have a productive or illuminating conversation, if you're implicitly sneering at normal Americans or marinating in the metrofexual smug?  Is it really the fear that someone might be packing (and disregarding all of the range safety training that comes prior to the permit) that is setting students off?

Some conclusions are beyond irony.

It’s impossible to measure the cost of campus carry. But I wager that the cost will be evidenced in the mounting silence on college campuses, and the trepidation, timidity, and lack of creativity among new generations of voters. American democracy will be the poorer for it.

I'll give Gabriella Hoffman the last word.

Those who responsibly carry firearms on campus undergo strenuous training and education in preparation to carry. Learning how to handle firearms is an art—one that requires constant learning and practice throughout life. To insinuate the claim that gun owners are undisciplined or unhinged demonstrates this professor’s obvious hatred of individuals who hold differing worldviews.

Free speech is under attack from authoritarian professors and administrators eager to stifle speech they despise. Permitting firearms on campus will spark conversations and challenge collegiate cupcakes to open their hearts and minds to differing viewpoints—particularly to views in favor of the Second Amendment.

Her conclusion is questionable Utopian Wonkery. And yet, the real threat to free inquiry on campus is the intellectual monoculture.  The over-the-top students who attend Milo Yannapoulis's act, or yell "Trump" at Approved Protesters are the symptom, not the cause.

KEEPING THE POOR POOR.

Russ Vaughn notes that Democratic voter turnout is down in primary states that require voters to show identification.  Unlike a lot of the Democrat operatives with bylines, he does not see voter suppression at work.

What will then become evident is that the Democratic Party has been engaged in voter fraud on a broad, nationwide scale.  An even more disturbing revelation that is sure to arise from all this is that the Democratic Party has most likely encouraged voter fraud in minority communities, where criminal evidence of such fraud is most commonly found.  While I'm not about to contend that all voter fraud takes place in minority precincts, news stories of criminal voter fraud and the results will almost always be in those communities.

Not only do I believe that Democrats are engaged in widespread voter fraud, but I believe they are playing the minority communities, black and Hispanic, to do the heavy lifting for them in this criminal enterprise.  And to my way of thinking, that constitutes a vast criminal conspiracy on the part of the Democratic Party to undermine the electoral process with millions of fraudulent votes through a callous manipulation of their controlled minorities.

Now finish the argument.

Let's scrutinize the links between insufficient commercial activity and generations of young people rendered unemployable by government schools and the minimum wage. Let's understand the effects of fifty years of urban renewal and Model Cities and the War on Poverty in creating a cohort of voters dependent on Democrat policies that somehow never lift people up.

That's going to take something more substantive than "We're governed by losers." But perhaps naming the losers is a first step.

FINANCING THEIR MERIT RAISES.

Labor markets are institutions of calculating commodification, except when they're not.

When the Wisconsin state government started changing tenure provisions, here's what I saw coming.  "At the University of Wisconsin's Madison campus, even the rumblings of modified tenure are enough to get the research stars testing the job market."

So they are, dear reader, and it's concentrating minds on Bascom Hill.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison last semester gave out $726,436 in raises and $8 million in research support to retain 40 top faculty members competing universities tried to lure away, according to information obtained by the Journal Sentinel through an open records request.

Much of that money is available because sponsored research grants include funds for "indirect cost recovery" which you might understand as covering overhead such as administrative expenses and capital equipment, or which you might interpret as a further subsidy to higher education.  (There is also indirect cost recovery in military procurement, which is how we come up with hundred-dollar hammers and thousand-dollar toilet seats.)

But the use of the indirect cost recovery funds to keep the grant-getting faculty on faculty (when they leave, under many circumstances, the grants go with them) are not sitting well with the journeymen.

But the $8.72 million investment in 40 faculty members won't help morale among the rest of the faculty, said Anna Haley-Lock, an associate professor of social work who is leaving for Rutgers. She was among six faculty members listed as receiving retention offers but deciding to leave, though she said she did not seek a retention offer.

"I find it disappointing there's this big focus on targeted retention," Haley-Lock said. "It's about how to retain superstars instead of the importance of making all faculty feel valued and protected."

Labor markets are institutions of calculating commodification. Professor Haley Lock doesn't like that.  Neither does Sara Goldrick-Rab.

Since 2008, UW’s administrators have been more concerned with preserving status at any cost, and are outright skeptical that price matters much for Wisconsin’s (increasingly strapped) families. They just adopted a new discriminatory admissions application, and are urging faculty to disregard true tenure in favor of retention bonuses. This is not the UW I chose to become part of.

Even worse, this is now a place where outspoken faculty like myself are treated without even a modicum of respect. When we dare to sift and winnow we are chastised, castigated, and shunned quietly and covertly, while leadership continues to assert its commitments to tolerance. Believe me, nothing is ever wrong at UW-Madison. We are all “just fine.” Everyone is nice, as long as you are too. In other words, just chew your cud contently and keep your mouth shut.

It came to administrative usurpation and chastisement and castigation and shunning a long time ago.

Wisconsin's administrators, however, might be rationally responding to the U.S. News phenomenon.

It can be hard to act justly while on the payroll of a public flagship that places a higher priority on prestige (e.g. meaning non-residents and high test scores) and Big 10 football than on access and affordability. I’ve tried to distance myself from that aura of Madison while attempting to get close to the students of Milwaukee, who struggle mightily in under-resourced colleges and universities while UW-Madison continues to hoard state funding and increase its emphasis on merit aid. Staying close to people like Nancy Kendall, Chad Goldberg, Dave Vanness, Dang Chongwerawong, Bill Tracy, and Noel Radomski helped. Spending time at our sister campuses around the state, especially in Milwaukee, preserved my faith that things might possibly improve. But it became too difficult to focus on and advance my work on college affordability in a context where critique of existing institutional and political approaches is not only unwelcome, but outright attacked.

Milwaukee, and Temple, where Ms Goldrick-Rab is joining faculty, are ultimately in the same business as Madison, or Penn State, or Villanova, and will have to confront that reality as well.

DEMOCRAT OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES.

Perhaps the palace guard media can ignore that complaint when it comes from Pajamas Media.

What happens when John Atcheson, a regular with the New York Times, Washington Post, and the like raises the same complaint?

Sanders' victory in Michigan was all the more remarkable given the fact that the MSM has been either ignoring him, distorting his positions, and/or giving Hillary a free pass on issues that should be examined.

Let Facts be submitted to a Candid World.

Media analysts and pundits are trained to analyze political races as horse races.  It’s all about tactics, money raised, who has support from whom, who’s “supposed” to win.

They simply aren’t equipped to understand a phenomena that comes from outside their wheelhouse.  In fact, many resent the presence of an outsider who refuses to play by the same old corrupt rules.  This is clear in the irrational attacks from normally rational players like Paul Krugman. In fact, the entire New York Times and Washington Post editorial staff and most of their news folks seem to be engaged in a institutional attack against Sanders.

Palace guard, operatives with bylines, want to keep getting invited to parties. Read on.

Sanders isn’t merely battling Clinton, he’s battling the establishment forces within labor unions, not-for-profit think tanks, and the press. In addition, Sanders is working to win over the justifiable cynicism of people who believe there is no hope for changing the system.

He's still doing so within the framework of Governance By Wise Experts and Tweaking the Tax Code, and lots of other ways that the rent-seekers will still prosper.

All the same, in a power struggle among gentry liberals, the liberties of the people might be enhanced.

ONE CREEPY CULT LEADS TO ANOTHER.

Over the weekend, Donald Trump obtained pledges of fealty from voters at one of his outdoor rallies.  Ich schwöre, diesen heiligen Eid.  Yes, the optics, to use the current term of art in the political class, of Der Donaldprinzip leave something to be desired, but more importantly, we have one candidate's cult following on a successful presidential cult that also had questionable optics.  I suggested that, previously.  Here's how Commentary's Jonathan Tobin elaborates.

Both Obama and Trump have risen via movements that are little more than cults of personality. Both have inspired absurd hero worship that focused less on their ideology than on their personal qualities. Obama ran on national unity and governed as the most partisan liberal ideologue since Lyndon Johnson. Since Trump has no set principles there is no way of knowing what he will do which is why many conservatives correctly view the prospect of a Trump presidency as not likely to be any different from one run by the Clintons.

Part of the attraction of Trump is the notion that the nation needs a strong man. He appeals to the authoritarian instinct in ways that no other politician has done in the living memory of any American. It is not surprising that his followers are ready to pledge allegiance to him in the way that Obama’s have done. If it’s hard to think of any other presidential candidate other than this pair doing this, that’s not an accident.

The entire premise of the Obama presidency has been a belief that the magic of his personality would transform both American politics and international relations. That it has been a resounding failure on both fronts is hardly surprising since his considerable political talent is not matched by any gift for governing or command of the realities of foreign policy.

Expect presidential greatness, prepare to be disappointed. Has anybody not been disappointed?  The seas will rise or fall on their own schedule.

Those who seek to replace Obama with Trump may think they are doing something radically different. But the sad truth is that they are merely heading down the same dead end that Obama’s followers pursued as they placed their face in another would-be great man.

I don't believe in magic.

HOW HIGHER EDUCATION BECLOWNS ITSELF.

Or, as Power Line's Steven Hayward puts it, "This is why you get Trump."

A team of researchers at Nike U studied the political and social structure of local responses to melting glaciers.  That seems like straightforward enough work, particularly as the university's press release described it.

The long-running reliance on knowledge produced from the perspectives of natural science, the researchers concluded, have marginalized the voices of women and cultures around the world that have lived in the shadow of glaciers.

"Men's voices generally are more represented in government than are women's voices," [historian Mark] Carey said. "Women might be less able to migrate out of a flood zone during a sudden glacier melt. In Peru, we know that men migrate to the cities for jobs, whereas women are more confined to their homes and child rearing."

Unfortunately, the peer-review version of the research is theorrhea run amok.

Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers – particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge – remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: 1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.

That fails to convince Reason's Robby Soave.

I'm sure Carey is well-intentioned, but if his goal was to put a human face on climate change, he failed. The paper is simply impossible to read with a straight face. It employs liberal buzzwords—colonialism, marginalization, masculinist discourses, etc.—with such frequency that the entire thing comes off like a joke.

He extends the Trump hypothesis. "In a country where working class people are being forced to fund research on the postcolonial gender theory of melting ice caps, is it any wonder some of them are rooting for a charismatic demagogue who promises to bully their tormentors?" Who perhaps includes among the occurrences of waste, abuse and fraud the Federal funding of obscure research?

PROCESS, NUANCE, FAILURE.

When the process-worshippers get control of something, the end result is often paralysis by analysis, virtue-signalling, and peacocking.  Or, in the cases of politics, the law, or academic governance, when there is little common ground, there is gridlock.  So, too, mote it be with catching a football.

“No one knows what a catch is,” said [Herm] Edwards, an ESPN analyst and former head coach of the New York Jets and Kansas City Chiefs. “I think the league has done everything in its power to try to get it right, but the problem is this: you have instant replay, and you have people looking at it, at the angle that it happens and all these things. You sit there and watch it unfold, and you don’t know. You really don’t know.

“To me, if it looks like a catch, or it looks like an interception, hey, that’s what it is. To me, it’s that simple.”

Edwards said the catch rule’s ambiguity hurts the game. The damage is easy to see. When a basic element of football becomes so muddled two people can watch the same play and perceive opposite outcomes, there’s a problem.

I've complained about this before.  The original sin is in the locution, process of the catch.  Bleah.  Glad to see the sports pundits catching on.

The catch rule, Edwards said, can negatively affect a game even when officials get it right. Pace of play has never been more important. In this no-huddle era, offenses are on the line of scrimmage as soon as the whistle blows to end the previous play.

Replay reviews halt the rhythm, Edwards said. Pace of play is compromised.

“When I played,” Edwards said, “there wasn’t all those cameras, but there was never a debate. Either the guy caught it, or it was incomplete. You moved on. You kept playing.”

Edwards appreciates what instant replay brought to the game. Yes, it’s important to get a call right. But at what cost? Too often, Edwards said, a game is stopped when there’s no reason for a replay review.

Not only that, I suspect that the officials have become less precise in making calls, as the proliferation of coaches' challenges, booth reviews, automatic review of scoring plays (which kills any chance of a trick play such as a two point conversion attempted out of the one-point-kick formation) and all the other intrusions that provide opportunities to sell more commercial time.

“Instant replay has gotten so good with the ball moving this much,” [Arizona Cardinals coach Bruce] Arians said, almost touching his thumb and index finger. “Is it a catch? A guy runs into the wall in the back of the end zone, drops the ball. He’s about to break his neck. It’s not a catch anymore.

“Two feet on the ground and possession of the ball should be a catch.”

On the surface, Arians’ solution has merit. The ground can’t cause a fumble. Why can it cause an incompletion? Maybe two feet plus possession should equal a catch.

Better than the NFL’s most basic play being its most complicated rule.

Exactly.

In football, as in any other endeavor, simplicity beats inordinate complexity.

PILE FAILURE UPON FAILURE AND CALL IT SUCCESS.

Reason's Robby Soave is, shall we say, not moved by Senator Sanders using a privatization argument to pivot to trashing Wall Street.

Sanders, and to a lesser extent Clinton, are so committed to a left-wing view of how resources should be allocated and managed that they can't even comprehend the idea that some force other than government might be better equipped to provide a service. Sanders finds the very idea deserving of mockery.

Yes, because Governance By Wise Experts has worked so well.

DEFEATING SAFETY APPLIANCES.

There is no railway safety appliance that cannot be defeated by a sufficiently clever person In the case of a recent runaway Elevated train in Boston, it's as clever as a length of heavy wire.  There's a picture at the link.  Do not attempt this when the Grumpy Old Road Foreman is around, or any other time.  "The train operator’s public address microphone and cable was wrapped around the controller so as to disable the safety system that would stop the train if an operator’s hand was not present."  The motorman, who has since been discharged, had a prior record of reprimands for safety violations.  Things ultimately done decently and in order.

I have another post in preparation dealing with the Bad Aibling crash, in which I will argue that the way the train dispatcher defeated several safety appliances was too clever by half.

IT'S CALLED BUYING INTO AMERICA.

Perhaps Herr Drumpf Americanized his family name as a way of assimilating.  Whether that was his rationale or not, here's a pertinent question Sarah Skwire raises at The Freeman.

It’s not funny that Trump’s family name used to be Drumpf. That’s just a standard American story that most of us probably share. To be an American, for most of us, means we’re not really from around here.

But the idea that we might have an American president who thinks it’s fine for the Drumpf family to come to America and achieve unimagined success in a few generations, but who will do everything possible to keep the Rodriguez family or the Habib family from doing the same?

It's going to be more difficult for the latest crop of immigrants to do the same thing, thanks to the deconstruction of the mediating institutions.  The absence of those institutions will only become  more clear as Middle Eastern honor culture, Central American honor culture, and the two strands of Southern honor culture collide.

GOOD QUESTION.

Margaret Soltan. "Paging Bernie: How are you planning to sell America on your free public university tuition plan when this is the way public universities spend our money?"

The way she's referring to: at Southern Oregon, on travel funding for sports teams that overachieved.

Not exactly a strategy for cultivating a critical mass of upwardly mobile strivers.

WE SHOULD ASPIRE TO BE FREE.

Reason's Sheldon Richman details why the Cult of the Presidency is a snare.

Americans have been assured for ages that the government in Washington could competently manage the economy, their retirement benefits, medical care, the culture (through immigration control), and foreign affairs. But with each passing year the government's foolishness across the board has become blindingly clear. The national debt soars; the annual budget deficit is enormous; Social Security and Medicare have huge unfunded liabilities; recessions strike periodically; taxes are onerous; economic growth is anemic; and wars go on forever. But privileges for the well-connected keep flowing. The politicians' response consists of little more than bailouts for the rich and symbolic gestures for the rest.

Trump capitalizes on all this and blames the ruling elite for its impotence. He often alludes to what has been called democratic sclerosis, complaining that politicians are "all talk, no action." (We should be so lucky). In contrast, he would act decisively.  When he describes his prowess as a deal-maker, he seems to be promising that he will fix things single-handedly. Lately he talks about cutting deals with Democrats in Congress, but that has not been the theme of his campaign. America's problem, he says, is stupid leaders who don't know how to negotiate. He will be a smart leader—and America will be great again.

But Trump is wrong about the cause of democratic sclerosis and therefore about the solution. Sclerosis results not from weak leadership but from a government with the power to engineer society. The more government tries to do, the more it bogs down in legislative sludge and gridlock. After years of frustration, people unschooled in political economy become vulnerable to a strong man who promises to "get things done."

Sometimes that strong man is a woman.  But whether it's Mr Trump peddling the unicorn, or Mrs Clinton peddling the unicorn, either unicorn is as real as any other unicorn.

THESE ROADS ARE MADE FOR SPEEDING.

Many of the newer neighborhoods in Naperville, Illinois, follow the canonical suburban subdivision structure of winding streets, culs-de-sac, and wide roads, plus excellent schools that sell well with young families, and neighborhoods full of kids.

For years, the neighborhoods featured signs warning about children at play, which local authorities are removing in favor of posting "Neighborhood Speed Limit 25" signs.  Their rationale: the "Children At Play" alerts don't fit with Current National Standards.

What would we do without Current National Standards?

Charlie Zegeer, director of the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center at the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center, said he had not heard of a city removing all of such signs at once, although a number don't install them anymore. Still, he agrees with Naperville leaders' rationale.

"Signs like this are often assumed to make things safer, when really they're likely doing the opposite," Zegeer said. "They might be giving the message to parents, and kids for that matter, that it's OK to play in the street."

Zegeer said he recommends towns install new speed limit signs that are accompanied by speed bumps, strategic street painting or a number of other traffic calming measures.

"Simply putting in a lower speed limit doesn't mean drivers will obey it," Zegeer said.

Naperville spokeswoman Linda LaCloche said no other efforts are under way to slow down neighborhood traffic.

Not all residents agree with the logic behind removing the "Children at Play" signs.

"People don't respect speed limits," said Uriah Jones, 34, at his home off Aurora Avenue, west of downtown. "When you see a visual of kids or the elderly, people respect that."

Yes, I understand the pejorative connotation associated with "letting your children play in traffic."  And yet, where there are neighborhoods full of children, there will be basketballs getting away from players, youngsters still getting the hang of their Big Wheels and bicycles, and energetic dogs taking kids for a walk.  That's where Strong Towns gets it.  Streets are for people, not cars.

Too many streets, though, give drivers all sorts of clues that it's OK (not legal, not safe for kids, dogs, or basketballs) to go fast.  There's a neighborhood speed limit of 25 governing the streets serving Cold Spring Shops headquarters, and yet the street in front of headquarters provides a convenient, relatively free of parked trucks, shortcut from the townhouses to the mile road.  I'm not saying it's an expressway, and yet an early evening on my deck with a radar gun might be instructive.

Thus, posting Naperville streets for 25 mph, in the absence of other hints to take it slow, isn't going to work.

Humans are smart. We pick up on dozens of cues and hints from the world around us. We intuitively know if an environment is designed for walking or driving, but we often have a hard time explaining why.

Naperville is one big environment designed for driving.  Put another way, it is one big collection of visual clues to go fast, never mind whether the sign warns "children at play" or "speed limit 25."

ENJOY THE INCOHERENCE.

At The American Interest, The State of Our Union Is Bleak.  That goes beyond trashy reality television, celebrity politics, and billion-dollar lottery prizes.

A moral and spiritual collapse that has frayed the bonds between the country’s ordinary people and those who seek to lead them, a hollowing out of institutions from Congress and political parties to local churches and civic life, and the disintegration of a shared national intellectual and cultural framework for discussing the issues that confront us. As we approach a critical presidential election at a time of global turmoil and disorder, the state of our union is not strong.

Did anybody seriously think that deconstructing institutions and problematizing coherent beliefs would turn out well?

WHY IT MATTERS.

Chicago Tribune business correspondent Gail Marks Jarvis looks at research into the college earnings premium.  It transpires that the premium is greater for graduates of more highly regarded institutions, and for graduates who came from more prosperous families.

Immediately after college, the pay the low-income grads received was about a third lower than graduates who had come from families with more money. But by the time people reached midcareer, the advantage of a college education slipped. In their 40s, the college graduates from low-income backgrounds were making only half of what graduates from nonpoor households were earning.

By their late 50s, earnings for college graduates who grew up poor decreased substantially. Their earnings fell to the same level as at the start of their careers, the researchers report. The graduates who had been raised by higher-income families experienced some decline late in their careers, but a much smaller decline.

The researchers have not yet identified causes for the vast difference in pay and are continuing to dig through data.

There are always opportunities for future research. Ms Jarvis offers provisional hypotheses.

Students from low-income backgrounds tend to choose lower-quality colleges. Studies show that the quality of a college — not just a degree — matters. More selective colleges may provide a broader network for students, giving them advice on how to advance and introductions to people who can help them.

In fact, in one study, economists Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale found that attending elite colleges was not significant in outcomes for affluent students but helped low-income students considerably. Krueger noted that people from more affluent backgrounds have networks through their families and other contacts that can help them advance. Low-income students, without built-in networks, can gain access to influential networks through highly selective colleges.

[Upjohn researcher Brad] Hershbein said low-income students that would qualify for more selective colleges often don't apply to those colleges because they have not had contact with them.

Growing up in low-income communities, the students haven't seen their friends going anywhere but state college nearby, he said. And selective colleges also "are not reaching out to low-income students."

I've long been of the view that it doesn't matter much whether any real learning takes place in the hundred or so institutions claiming to be in the top twenty, as long as there is a critical mass of motivated and in many cases well-connected students to emerge as the matriculants' social network at graduation and beyond.

The challenge for the regional comprehensives, the land grants, and the mid-majors is to cultivate the same sort of motivation and connection among students in order that the critical mass can eventually emerge.  A pedagogical commitment to access-assessment-remediation-retention doesn't strike me as useful.  The sub-prime party school model is a loser.  An institutional commitment to a tuition break for attending football games, likewise.

DONALD TRUMP PICKS UP MORE VOTERS IN MICHIGAN.

Going into Tuesday's primary, he and Mrs Clinton are ahead in a recent poll.  And the two Democrats will elaborate on "No True Progressive" again tonight, in Flint, on CNN.  It's unlikely to be as wild as the recent Republican throwdown in Detroit, but yet, there is potential.

Also in the weekend's news, "Chaotic Crowd Looking To Buy New Air Jordan Shoes Forces Eastland Mall To Close."  Eastland Mall is one of the compass-point malls that used to surround major cities, e.g. "in the Dales" from Prairie Home Companion, or on the ridges north and south of Milwaukee.

You know the comment section at that report is going to be nasty.  (It is.)  You know that the punditry and the experts in social psychology will be trotting out all the usual "isms" and "ologies" to make the Trump voters (and there are many, and they are neither impressed with ruling class posturing nor likely to be guilt-tripped) out to be, shall we say, Retrograde and Socially Unenlightened.

Perhaps, but the elite that emerges in the new, no-ethnic-majority United States that is baked into the demographic pie is going to have to tackle the deleterious consequences of the cults of "authenticity" and "transgressiveness" and "intersectionality" that rationalize the ruling class looking the other way at Shoppers Behaving Badly, while that same ruling class sneers at what we used to view as mainstream Americans, who don't need to hear dog whistles when they can see the social rot all around them.

THE NEW TIME OF THE TROLLEY.

Monday's edition of Destination: Freedom had several posts about streetcars.

In Boston, the Ashmont - Mattapan High Speed Line is the last rapid transit property using Presidents Conference Committee streetcars.  That's posing problems for the Master Mechanic.  "T workers have to make some parts for the World War II-era trolleys by hand at their Everett shops. Only about 5,000 riders use the trolleys every day, less than the ridership on some bus lines."  The point of the Presidents Conference Committee was to come up with a standard streetcar design that could be deployed anywhere.  "Mod Desire" is a model of a hippie-era paint job Pittsburgh applied to at least one car.  Cars of similar vintage serve the tourist-catering car lines of Kenosha and Market Street in San Francisco, and at least one is in regular service with several nearing service at the Illinois Railway Museum.

Thus, there ought to be possibilities for the master mechanic for Boston to work with several other operators of the cars to induce a manufacturer to produce parts in commercially feasible lots.

Alternatively, Boston's managers might look at working with other transit authorities purchasing new cars to participate in their orders of rolling stock.  The controversial and questionable Washington, D.C. car line just opened.  Kansas City will get a car line in early May.  A line in the story suggests that the Presidents Conference Committee were wise in one way, creating a standard design.  "The company that made the streetcars did not deliver them as quickly as expected."  The sense I get is that each streetcar authority has its own ideas about what a streetcar is, and the companies that build streetcars and light rail vehicles have their own ideas.  We're a long way from Pullman or St. Louis Car building city cars to Presidents Conference Committee specifications.

But with Virginia Beach seeking to extend a light rail line, perhaps there are enough commonalities between what that operator wants and what Boston wants to agree on a car that can be assembled in larger lots.

LIFE CAN BE STRESSFUL. GET A PICKELHAUBE.

At the beginning of the week, a comedian called John Oliver devoted his show to a sketch titled "Make Donald Drumpf Again."  That's caught on around the internets, with some observers going so far as to install an algorithm that turns "Trump" into "Drumpf."  It also gets Washington Post columnist S. I. Rosenbaum exercised about inappropriate cultural appropriation.

The names we use to talk about a thing determine how we think about it, too.

“Drumpf” feels so satisfying to critics of the Republican front-runner partly because it sounds funny and foreign; it sounds funny BECAUSE it is foreign. Specifically, Drumpf sounds funny because it sounds German. Drumpf, to an American ear, conjures up a dough-faced Bavarian Nazi on his stumpy way to murder all the Jews in his village. (At least, that’s what I think of, as a progressive Jew who opposes Trump.) In the face of a campaign that’s drawing support from white supremacists by a candidate who promises that he would ban Muslims and build a “beautiful wall” to keep out Mexicans, it’s nice to think of Trump that way — as an interloper, a false face that conceals a creeping foreign influence. As not one of us.

Perhaps that will make people who aren't going to vote for Mr Trump anyway confident in their positions, but the people who are on board with Mr Trump may not be interested in substantive arguments or allusions to the Volksbund anyway.

Go read the first link if you want Mr Oliver's video.

Go read the second link if you want to be warned that Team Red and Team Blue are irrelevant.

It's this part of Ms Rosenbaum's column I wish to reinforce.

Germans don’t deserve to be tarred as shifty-eyed Nazi foreigners. Plenty of German Americans were so slandered during World War II; it wasn’t cricket then, and it’s not now.

I suspect that there are enough people made in America of German parts, and there is so much of what Germans brought to the Americas that is now part of buying into America that you're not going to hear much griping about smearing all Americans of German descent or about cultural appropriation.

Much better to have some strong drink to accompany the political madness.

And be grateful that German style courtesy titles did not catch on the way bratwurst, beer gardens, and Sunday picnics did.

Otherwise you would have to address me as Herr Doktor Freiherr von Masuren.

WHY SHOULD THIS CYCLE BE DIFFERENT FROM ANY OTHER CYCLE?

Paul Krugman contemplates the unicorn that is Senator Sanders's macroeconomic policy, then concludes by confronting the tragic vision head-on.  "It’s a rough time for progressives who don’t believe in magic." Somewhere Michael Munger is smiling.  Jeffrey Tucker identifies the fundamental problem.

Presidents were managers of a limited government that didn’t intrude into any intimate aspects of life, much less on the whole population. The governments these men headed had strict, meaningful, and practical limits on what they could do. They had no policy plans to speak of, because policy as we know it barely existed.

Leviathan as we know it had not been invented yet. That came later, in the 20th century. Whatever great ambitions of Gilded Age presidents, they couldn’t be realized through their official capacity. Therefore, the stakes of any one election were extremely low for the country at large. That's why these men’s names are barely known. Even back then, hardly anyone paid attention to the presidency as such. The president was a caretaker, holding an honorary position, of interest to only those directly affected.

As bad as the candidates are this year — as threatening as each of them is to someone’s rights and liberties — none would pose a threat if the power to act on ambition were still limited.

Put another way, there is no cult of the presidency in the presence of proper enumerated and limited federal powers.

There is a sense, then, that when we talk about how grim the policies of a Trump or Sanders or Rubio or Hillary or whomever would be, we are not getting to the core of the problem. We should not have to worry about the character or ambitions of the person we elect. A good system of government is one that is protected against control by wicked people. It should even be protected against good people who want to use state power to realize noble ideals. Government should be impervious to the personal zeal of its temporary managers.

It's so tempting, though, to suggest that Wise Experts can in fact Find Consensus and Fulfill the Promise. Until the wise experts discover that Ordering the People About is more fun.

Power once created will be used. That the special interests and then the masses clamor for it to be used on their behalf is the inevitable result.

With power also comes a divided population, people seething with hatred against those who stand in their way, interest groups consumed by loathing for anyone with a chance of using power to their own advantage.

The presence of power itself, not the people who seek to turn it to their advantage, is the source of conflict. And such a conflict threatens to destroy friendships and even the social fabric itself. Overweening government is the reason we all can’t get along.

Most of the people who created this mess are long dead, but they still rule us. They bequeathed us a monster that the present generation must contend with. There is really only one responsible way forward: dismantle Leviathan before it destroys us.

Perhaps, in a Democratic race that has degenerated into "No True Progressive" and a Republican race best summarized as "short fingers, short schlong" it might yet dawn on the electorate that the contentiousness will persist as long as the presidential cargo cult does.

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS FREE PARKING.

But what the government subsidizes it gets more of.

In a world without benefits, driving commuters will increase and public transit riders will decrease. The same patterns and results held true in Baltimore (Maryland), Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), Newark (New Jersey), and New York (New York).

The passage refers to what appear to be survey outcomes.  Change the incentives, and that changes the behavior.

It seems that offering commuters incentive to use public transportation just is not enough. In order to truly change the minds and decisions of commuters, cities must simultaneously create disincentives to drive and park.

Sometimes, the authorities have to do very little. That appears to be the case in Chicago, where ever-more-crowded expressways (widening, no widening, changing the traffic flow at the Mixmaster, removing the left-side slip ramps notwithstanding) and increased downtown parking charges likely contribute to increases in Metra riding, even off-peak and at weekends.

There's a provocative Strong Towns post suggesting that government-subsidized parking is an upscale failure of socialism.

And while Vancouver prides itself on multi-modal transportation options, with less than half of trips into its downtown in cars, free parking is still sacrosanct for many. Jens [von Bergmann] makes a good point that Vancouverites pay lots of money to buy private property to live on, and then continue to pay property taxes for that privilege. However, we pay nothing to store our vehicles on public roads.

The article goes on to note that, whether the parking involves no cash outlay, the land devoted to parking lots is land that has an alternative use.  There always is an opportunity cost.

BAD WRITING OUGHT NOT BE READ.

Here's Professor Bainbridge, slogging through a few lines of theorrhea.  "There are lots of explanations for why people write this way, but I think a lot of it has to do with obfuscation. How do you assess the merits of an idea if you can't parse it?"  Precisely.

WE'RE NOT QUITE HOLDING OUR OWN.

The Economic Innovation Group recently issued an interactive map featuring a Distressed Communities Index.  The more the map looks like a bad case of measles, the sicker the neighborhoods are, as measured by some weighting of housing vacancy, unemployment, absence of middle-class markers.  My zip code has a "distress score" of 64.8, ranking as the 323rd most distressed county among 1129 state zip codes.

The housing market remains flat.  With the El Nino influenced weather pattern (or is it climate chaos?) it's possible to go for a walk around the neighborhood in shorts last Sunday and then have to put on extra layers Wednesday and Thursday.

Since I took this picture, the owner of the house at right has since installed a deck, and there are several dogs and kids enjoying the yard.  My trees are much bigger.

On the other hand, many of the houses along that street, and elsewhere in the neighborhood, are empty, sometimes for a long time as evidenced by wind-strewn trash in the yard, or fading paint on the woodwork (the decorative headboards on the fronts of many of these houses are apparently not durable.)

THE TRUMP TRAIN MAY NOT REACH ITS DESTINATION.

Professor Bainbridge read some of the articles I rolled into two posts last week.  He, too, notes that it's too late for the mature adults to put the groundlings back in their places.  "Trump is the unprotected class' beta test for a cure for the revolt of the elites. And its about damned time."  It's not going away, whether it's the Republican Establishment making three-no-Trump, or whether it's Mrs Clinton winning through.

REVEALED PREFERENCES.

In Psychology Today, Ray Williams asserts, "There is a growing anti-intellectual dumbing down of our culture."  First he lists some examples.  He then states the general proposition.

In American schools, the culture exalts the athlete and good-looking cheerleader. Well-educated and intellectual students are commonly referred to in public schools and the media as "nerds," "dweebs," "dorks," and "geeks," and are relentlessly harassed and even assaulted by the more popular "jocks" for openly displaying any intellect.  These anti-intellectual attitudes are not reflected in students in most European or Asian countries, whose educational levels have now equaled and and will surpass that of the U.S.  And most TV shows or movies such as The Big Bang Theory depict intellectuals as being geeks if not effeminate.

As he notes, the enabling of superficiality has been present for some time, whether we're looking at the spending priorities of high schools or at high-concept contemplation.

It should come as no surprise, though, that when people get a platform to communicate with like-minded people more cheaply, and when they're encouraged in their outrage because it's trendy and transgressive, they'll do so.

Fashion, entertainment, spectacle, voyeurism – we’re directed towards trivia, towards the inconsequential, towards unquestioning and blatant consumerism. This results in intellectual complacency. People accept without questioning, believe without weighing the choices, join the pack because in a culture where convenience rules, real individualism is too hard work. Thinking takes too much time: it gets in the way of the immediacy of the online experience.

Reality TV and pop culture presented in magazines and online sites claim to provide useful information about the importance of The Housewives of [you name the city] that can somehow enrich our lives. After all, how else can one explain the insipid and pointless stories that tout divorces, cheating and weight gain? How else can we explain how the Kardashians,or Paris Hilton are known for being famous for being famous without actually contributing anything worth discussion? The artificial events of their lives become the mainstay of populist media to distract people from the real issues and concerns facing us.

The current trend of increasing anti-intellectualism now establishing itself in politics and business leadership, and supported by a declining education system should be a cause for concern for leaders and the general population, one that needs to be addressed now.

It may not have been given me to finish the task, and yet I will not give it up.

And yet, perhaps we are really seeing the advance of civilization, as Alfred North Whitehead would have it.  On the other hand, being able to follow the latest Donald Trump smackdown or Kardashian family drama on a smartphone the owner has no clue how to build or to service might be what Mr Whitehead was counseling us to fear. "The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows."

DO THINGS DECENTLY AND IN ORDER.

State legislators might well push university governing boards to exceed their authority.  William Bradley, a graduate of the University of Missouri, before its football team, its president, and its board of curators beclowned themselves, explains why caving in to the legislature establishes a bad precedent.

If politicians are now allowed to dictate an institution’s personnel decisions, what is to stop them from abusing this power even further? Will scientists researching climate change be safe in such an environment? How about a religious studies professor whose scholarship isn’t dogmatic enough for some politician’s tastes? Can the theater department still perform Lysistrata, or is Aristophanes’ antiwar sentiment and frank discussions of carnal matters unsuitable for the commissars of the new political correctness? God help the political scientists, the sociologists and the artists if we decide to allow politicians this kind of power to meddle in academic affairs.

Or, to extend the argument, if there's Hayek or Sowell on somebody's reading list, or a faculty member serving as county chairman for the Republicans.  Procedural protections exist for a reason.

Had the board been confident that Melissa Click was truly unfit to teach at the University of Missouri, it could have stepped back and let the faculty members and administrators in charge of Click’s case do their job and come to that conclusion on their own. Shared governance may be slow, but it is effective, despite what proponents of “disruption” and critics of the professoriate tend to believe. If Click needed to go, then that would be the appropriate way to get rid of her. That the board could not wait for others in the campus community to come to the same conclusion it had come to suggests that the board is not as confident in its assessment as its members have publicly said they are.

Boards do not function solely as rubber-stamps, and there are ways for a board member to communicate to a department head, dean, provost, or friend on a college or university promotion board (depending on what the by-laws stipulate about where a divided vote is meaningful) that a particular tenure case is going to put the university in a bad light.

It's in Mr Bradley's continuation, however, that you see the way in which higher education has broken the social contract with the polity that sustains it.

When I started graduate school, I thought that being a university professor would be the coolest job in the world. And in some ways, it was and still is. I mean, you get paid to read and write and think. You get to work with idealistic young people excited to make a difference in the world. You get to make a difference in people’s lives. It’s awesome.

Unfortunately, though, there are forces in our culture that resent academics, and intellectual pursuits in general. We hear it in the voices of governors who insist that college is about the acquisition of job skills and that a pursuit of anything artistic or literary is a luxury that young people can’t afford and don’t really need. We read it in “trollish” online comments that say that people who have dedicated their lives to teaching and research live in “ivory towers,” untouched by the concerns of the “real world.” We witness it when a presidential candidate sneers about the discussions going on over brie and chardonnay in the faculty lounge.

The smug in which gentry liberals, including the alleged brie and chardonnay set in the faculty lounge (in 35 years in higher education, I don't recall ever setting foot in one, but I mostly enjoyed the gig all the same, for similar reasons), marinate, is real.  The expense-preference behavior of administrators, who on paper report to the trustees, is real.  The recondite and incomprehensible scholarship, particularly in disciplines artistic and literary, is real.  The practical degrees that have value, no matter where the student matriculates, are real.

By all means, insist that trustees do things decently and in order, and defend the work of the university.  Is it too much to ask, though, that the people who do the work of the university also do that work decently and in order?

NO RAILROAD IN MY BACK YARD.

The promoters of the Great Lakes Basin Railroad (think a resurrection of the Chicago Milwaukee and Gary and the Kankakee Belt) recently rethought their planned routing.

The original concept (which demonstrates that contemporary mapmakers don't get railroads) featured a belt line running to the west of Rockford and Rochelle.

Image retrieved from WIFR TV.

The promoter now wants to change the route.

The route, which previously ran to the west of Rockford, is being moved to the east side of Belvidere because of environmental challenges in Brodhead, Wisconsin. With so many state parks and water obstacles, the prices would have jumped because of added bridges.

Founder Frank Patton says everything worked out for the better.

“If we went all the way through, once we got out of Winnebago County, we couldn’t get into Wisconsin. That was the killer. We ended up with a better route I think. It’s all a part of the process,” says Patton.

I remain skeptical of a Chicago Outer Belt that ends anywhere in southern Wisconsin, which has become a railway desert in a prairie country.

Belvidere residents, however, are taking seriously the prospect of an eminent domain taking.

One landowner says she's been in her Boone County home since 1956 and she just found out a train could soon be chugging straight through her property and there may be nothing she can do about it. Dozens like her said they were too angry to go on camera after hearing the news.

Boone County's board says it's too early to make any judgments. Railroad organizers are expected to hold public hearings by April.

The former grades of the Northern Illinois Railroad, which was last a Belvidere to Sycamore to DeKalb branch of the Chicago and North Western, and the Gary Route, which was last a Kirkland to DeKalb branch of The Milwaukee Road, are still intact in the prairie, although there has been extensive construction on those grades closer to DeKalb and Sycamore. The Great Lakes Basin plan, however, is to avoid thickly settled areas wherever possible.

If public hearings are coming, more coverage here might be coming.

MEET THE NEW BOSS, SAME AS THE OLD BOSS.

Chicago State University, which has cancelled this year's spring break so as to finish the academic year before the money runs out, gives new meaning to the expression "all-administrative university."

After the first layoffs occur on April 30, and after the university ceases to be able to make payroll after that date, these 9 persons will be entitled to $615,987 in compensation. Of course, with the staff laid off after April 30 and faculty all laid off after August 15, it seems unclear what these administrators are going to administer. I guess that's OK in this state. In any event, these layoffs are going to be damned expensive for someone in Illinois.

The charitable explanation might be that compliance with contracts and statutory protections (for example, faculty must take their nine month salary over twelve months to remain on health insurance during the summer, and academic year contracts run August 15 to May 15.)  The cynical explanation is that an expense-preference playground remains an expense-preference playground, even unto financial exigency.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

Winter continues into meteorological spring.  Plenty of time to work on the railroad.

When we last looked at this section, late last November, it was a tabletop  Installing a proper ladder of N^o. 10 turnouts is slow, painstaking, but ultimately rewarding work.

Yes, there's now track along the south wall, and those turnouts will handle the longest of passenger cars in a way that looks right.

In the northeast corner, two tracks in place for the Eastern Route Main Line, plus three tracks serving the Midvale Steel works.

BLAMING THE VICTIM.

It's the presidential season, and the developments thus far have pushed the chattering classes into Bertolt Brecht territory, thinking it's easier for the punditry to abolish the people.  When it comes to the Republican voters, we have Juan "How the U.S. Went Fascist: Mass Media Make Excuses for Trump Voters" Cole and Sean "America, you're stupid: Donald Trump's political triumph makes it official -- we're a nation of idiots" Illing.  Follow the links if you want the supporting arguments, such as they are.  David "The Governing Cancer of Our Time" Brooks at least makes the reader read the column to see that, he, too, would prefer to cut out the cancer abolish the people.

Over the past generation we have seen the rise of a group of people who are against politics. These groups — best exemplified by the Tea Party but not exclusive to the right — want to elect people who have no political experience. They want “outsiders.” They delegitimize compromise and deal-making. They’re willing to trample the customs and rules that give legitimacy to legislative decision-making if it helps them gain power.

Ultimately, they don’t recognize other people. They suffer from a form of political narcissism, in which they don’t accept the legitimacy of other interests and opinions. They don’t recognize restraints. They want total victories for themselves and their doctrine.

Which, because Mr Brooks doesn't go far enough in shaming the Republican establishment, allows Sean Illing, apparently a Salon regular now, to engage in concern-trolling.

Republicans have played to the populist Tea Party id for years – fomenting fear, demonizing immigrants, and exploiting cultural angst. What we’re seeing now is the fulfillment of this strategy, which has helped them win elections but has failed to produce meaningful legislative change – and that’s precisely the point.

That argument, and Mr Illing's elaborations, might go well on a Sunday show or in the common room, and yet, we're seven years into a non-recovery recovery, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care act is two lies for the price of one, and the cultural left is in full cry in the academy and the vulgar culture.  Doesn't look like total victory or meaningful legislative change from my perspective, or, in all likelihood, from the perspective of Trump voters.

WHEN THE SOCIAL CAPITAL LEAVES TOWN.

Steven Shultis reflects on becoming a homeowner in a rough part of Springfield, Massachusetts.

Being poor is hard. Whether the poor living here think so or not, in many ways this is a great neighborhood in which to be poor. Whatever the general state of public transit, living where I do gives people a tremendous mobility that no other location in the region does. Just about every governmental body and institution has a branch or outlet here. Living in an urban center gives the poor access to many of the services which cater to their needs. Residing near the region's hospitality industry (7 hotels now, 11 by 2018 with thousands of guest rooms), universities, and medical centers makes access to thousands of entry level jobs possible.

But these are mostly not actually benefits of the concentration of poverty, they are the benefits of living in a city center. One problem of the concentration of poverty is how it normalizes dysfunction. I see the dysfunction every day. Some gentrification is what the neighborhood needs. Concerns that it could go so far as to displace tremendous numbers of people here are misguided in my view. That is not to say that it wouldn't create new challenges for the people living here--far from it, of course it would. But in many cases what these people need is for a buffer of "function" between themselves and their neighbor's dysfunction. Someone needs to call the police. Someone needs to care enough to pick up the nips bottles, the used condoms, and the dog poop. Someone needs to be at the city council meeting, and the PTO meeting.

Gentrification is emergent, and the critical mass of service industries suggests it is likely.  What Mr Sultis is writing, however, is a suggestion both to the new arrivals to see the grit and determination of many of the current residents, rather than to think of those people as those people ...

At the same time, he's suggesting that the life management skills of the middle class matter.

With school desegregation, white flight created a vacuum which has (in a paradoxical turn of phrase) given concentrated poverty a chance to expand. With the middle class and the wealthy having fled to the suburbs and the exurbs, one result is that many of the rich not only do not ever see poverty, they also have a very warped sense of their own disproportionate wealth. That is to say: I know families with incomes a quarter of a million dollars a year that think that they are middle class.

The concentration of poverty does not just isolate the poor in their behaviors, attitudes, and dysfunctions, it does the same to the middle and upper classes. The recent epidemic of opioid overdose deaths in more suburban and rural parts of the country has led to a spate of articles acknowledging that "we can't just incarcerate our way out of this problem.” Funny how that same realization never occurred to people when most of those being locked up over drug problems were from "that place, that class, and that race.” When "that place" is your place, and people of that class and that race are your neighbors, that realization might well come sooner.

A fact became clear to me a short time back, it is now almost something of a mantra: Were I to find a billion dollars, my dream would be to stay here. Were most of my neighbors to find a thousand, their dream would be to get out. It isn't the place so much as it is the people around them. When you have resources you can be in this world, but not of it, so to speak. The poor do not have that luxury; the poor are always with them.

Whether your bogeyman is "social engineering" or "snob zoning" or "self-segregation" the message might be that your place, wherever it is, will be a more livable place if you and your family are capable of living competently, and more so if your neighbors also are.  I'm likely to return to this argument again, although it's being crowded out by the electoral crack-up going on this spring.

PRIVILEGE CHECKING.

You expect a conservative to enjoy the discomfiture of the culturati being called out, and David French does not disappoint.

Conservatives should never stop noting that the three primary targets of contemporary race protests — big cities, universities, and Hollywood — are staffed top-to-bottom with leftists and have been for decades. And in each of them we can see a common thread — racial justice is cool mainly when there’s something in it for the white liberal activist. The progressive elite gets to have its cake and eat it every day. They live at the top of the cultural food chain, their children inherit their wealth and connections, and they get to feel simply awesome about their politics and world view. Because they hashtag. Because they vote the right way. Because they’re good at condemning other white liberals on command. It’s the greatest activist gig in the world.

It's a different matter when, elsewhere in California last weekend, Donna Smith of the Progressive Democrats of America gets marinated in the smug.

I went to the California Democratic Party's convention in San Jose this weekend, and I decided I would attend the Women's Caucus and try to say a few words on behalf of Bernie Sanders. I had no illusions about the situation, so grabbing a few moments to speak was my goal. But not only was I excluded from doing so, I also watched the women convening the caucus celebrate what it means to be a wealthy and privileged woman during this campaign season. And I was clearly in a class of working class women not invited to this table.

As a woman who strongly supports Bernie Sanders in this race, my position was dismissed. But it was more than that. I was dismissed. I felt at first annoyed, then sad, then more angry than I have felt in a long, long time. And that sort of anger may well be what makes some voters steer clear of political involvement all together if the Democratic powers that be aren't careful. No amount of superficial reassurance will overcome a genuine disdain for the working class that I experienced in what should have been a friendly crowd.

By all means, dear reader, go read and understand the whole thing. South Park has nothing on the real smug of the gentry liberals.

After witnessing the good old girls network in full swing this weekend in support of Bernie's opponent, I was completely sure that I won't matter if the cotillion set stays in charge of my government. Republican or Democratic, arrogance is arrogance. I expect and demand more of my party and my government. This weekend inside the CADEM convention, it felt a little like being in high school when the rich girls giggle and hug one another in restless anticipation of their next dinner party. I've seen Mrs. Trump adorned in her diamond belt standing behind her man, and that overt show of wealth was less offensive to me than what I witnessed as a show of elitism at the CADEM Women's Caucus.

During the same weekend, though, I also watched as more than 1,000 convention goers marched and rallied for Bernie just outside where Vice President Joe Biden was set to speak to those inside the ballroom. Security was very tight. After all, keeping the riff- raff class at a distance from the ruling class is critical if the message is to be controlled. When I saw the Vice President on the Academy Awards television program later in the evening, I'll admit that I saw him in a different light too. Good old girls and good old boys seem pretty much the same to me.

Bernie's vision is a massive change from the country club set's control of our government. Bernie says this government belongs to all of us. But it will only be so if we make it so. We cannot do that if the ruling class only allows our engagement as props in commercials or press ops.

A Tea Party libertarian could not have said it any better.

THINGS DONE DECENTLY AND IN ORDER.

At Mount St. Mary's University, it's now former president Simon "I'll drown the bunnies, and the tenured faculty too" Newman.

After months of turmoil and criticism, Simon Newman leaves, effective immediately. He calls recent controversy "too great of a distraction."

The distractions are mostly self-inflicted, as Adam Steinbaugh of the Torch explains.

Newman’s transparent contempt for dissent and mild criticism—off-hand remarks about a plan that was never implemented—demonstrated an utter lack of appreciation for free speech and academic freedom.

Plus evidence that even a short-fingered vulgarian can overreach.

Had Newman simply weathered the initial criticism and left his critics in place, he almost certainly wouldn’t be resigning now. There would have been little continuing attention from the public and likely no attention from MSMU’s accreditor. It wasn’t Newman’s “kill the bunnies” remark that doomed his presidency—it was his cynical attempt to quell criticism through terminations, risking the credibility of his university in the process.

Better, though, to have worked with the faculty, respecting their stewardship of the curriculum.

An Alex Morey post at the Torch properly calls out the curators of the University of Missouri for caving too readily to legislators.

While FIRE has been critical of [fired assistant communication studies professor Melissa] Click’s actions during the Mizzou protests, it in no way lessens the importance of ensuring faculty members are afforded due process. A renewed commitment to procedural due process by Mizzou not only would comport with the institution’s promises to its faculty, it would also give students and faculty increased confidence that a fair and accurate result will be reached in every termination proceeding.

Melissa Click—like everyone else—is entitled to nothing less.

It is up to the faculty to teach the controversies, to the students to grasp the subtleties of the complexities, and to the administrators and the trustees to provide an environment in which the sifting and winnowing can be continual and fearless.