THAT FRONT PORCH IS SHOP-WORN.

Athletics directors and unthinking college presidents will refer to the sports programs as the "front porch" of the university.  Competing to have the spiffiest front porch is participating in a positional arms race and Eastern Michigan has been to the athletics arms race as the old Soviet Union was to the nuclear arms race for a long time.  But disarmament is difficult.  "In an effort to stem some of their budget woes, Eastern Michigan University has announced its decision to cut four sports from their athletics program at the end of the 2018 spring athletic season." That's $2.4 million not spent, but students are likely going to be on the hook for athletic fees (for games they opt not to attend) all the same.

The old Soviet Union sort of went out of business, with Vladimir Putin doing what he can to become the next iteration of Alexander III or Josef Stalin.  It's apparently harder for Eastern Michigan.

In order to maintain Division I status with the NCAA, they had to keep 16 spots. In order to remain full membership in the MAC, they had to keep football, men’s and women’s basketball and women’s volleyball. So I can understand why those sports were not cut.

Some people have suggested that Eastern Michigan drop football. I can say with some degree of certainty, that is not going to happen. While football is probably the biggest cost, it is also the biggest generator of revenue for the athletics department. They might be able to trim the budget though but I’m not sure that would save the above programs.

That, dear reader, is why sports pundits ought to understand economics. If your "biggest generator of revenue" doesn't cover that "biggest cost" you're better off shy of the costs and the revenues, particularly, as the essay notes, with an athletics operating deficit of some $27 million per year. And Wisconsin-Green Bay could use some competition in women's basketball.

The article notes Buffalo (the old State University of New York at Buffalo) also confronting its athletics costs.  "In April 2017, Buffalo announced it would cut four varsity sports affecting 120 athletes, including its incredibly successful men’s soccer and women’s rowing programs, in an effort to save $2 million." Buffalo is only recent to Division I football, in the Mid-American, and they're notorious for generating revenue helping other teams become bowl-eligible.

At Eastern Michigan, the sports restructuring will accompany an academic reduction.  "The cut in athletics is linked to a university-wide initiative which is expected to attempt to make up a projected $4.5-to-5.5 million gap in the budget. That initiative is expected to eliminate 42 faculty jobs and lay off 17 others."  That's going to affect more than 133 students.

PRIVILEGE IS CIVILIZATION.

I told you so.

Now the University of San Francisco (didn't they used to be a basketball school -- oh, wait, they got a participation trophy?) confirms it.

Retrieved from University of San Francisco.

The announcement includes a candidate for Understatement of the Week.  "We realize that the posters cannot truly encompass the full complexity of privilege."

Perhaps they'll reflect (and, this being the Jesuit institution in San Francisco, pray) on the subtleties therein.  They could start with a statement from Simmons.

Systems of oppression run through our language, shape the way we act and do things in our culture, and are built around what are understood to be “norms” in our societies. A norm signifies what is “normal,” acceptable, and desirable and is something that is valued and supported in a society. It is also given a position of dominance, privilege, and power over what is defined as non-dominant, abnormal, and therefore, invaluable or marginal.

That "are built around" is telling.  Language is emergent.  Culture is emergent.  Norms are emergent.  "Valued and supported" follows from evolutionary advantage.  Deconstruct at your peril.

KEEP NATTERING, GRANDMA.

Hillary Clinton's ill-advised remarks in India continue to inspire scorn.

Ben Shapiro, "Democrats wonder why they had trouble winning Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin."  With supporting logic.

Married women vote differently than single women not because of pressure from their menfolk but because they often have children, value family over career more than single women, and are older than single women on average.

But here's the point: Clinton represents a nasty, vengeful take on populations she has trouble winning over. That nastiness has filtered through the Democratic Party, which is firmly convinced that it'd be better off drilling down into population groups it thinks are interested in tearing down the system along with them than reaching out to populations it has lost. If Democrats continue with that quest, they'll alienate the very voters who gave Trump victory in 2016.

For "tearing down the system," read "create a third world country along Californian lines."

Jim Treacher never lacks for work.  "Even her fellow Democrats are now begging her to shut her stupid trap and stop making life tougher for them."  He's less than impressed with the clarification she subsequently issued.

What she clearly said out loud wasn't what she actually meant, and if you didn't like it, you can choke on her rambling, unconvincing excuse. She meant no disrespect when she accused you of hating black people and women and Indian-Americans. She had the best intentions when she said you were everything that's wrong with America. She was defending you!

Precisely. It is the role of the Anointed to be the Nurturant Parent. It's for your own good.

Sorry, no.

If you want me to stop talking about Hillary, try convincing her to take up another pastime that doesn't involve speaking in public. If she's going to keep spouting this nonsense where people can hear her, she's fair game. I can't stand the sound of her voice, but the resulting lamentations of the Democrats are music to my ears. They couldn't drag her over the finish line, and now they can't get her to shut up about it.

Finally, Victory Girls compare Herself with the kind of weak student who couldn't write a coherent paragraph to save her grade, but thinks the professor has infinite time to listen to "But I really meant to say ..."

I have to say, definitely not offended by Hillary’s remarks. I’m laughing because she really can’t help herself! Seriously, she’s said and meant crap like this for YEARS. She meant it during the campaign when she called voters Deplorables. She meant it when she slammed stay at home moms with her baking cookies remarks during Bill’s first Presidential campaign. So, no what she says now, she meant exactly what she said in India. In other words,

‘I said that, but you deplorables and misguided women just don’t have the brains to understand what I really meant.’

Hillary as you continue your worldwide whine fest tour, let me give you something to think about. Many Deplorable women, including myself, know exactly who is to blame for not voting for you. Look in the mirror for your answer if you dare.

If that be lookism, make the most of it!

THE FAILURE OF WARD-HEELER POLITICS.

Fifteen years ago, the forced removal of Saddam Hussein began.  Common Dreams posts a recollection by Sinan Antoon, formerly of Iraq, that includes this observation of how the installation of democracy went down.

We were still filming in Baghdad when L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, announced the formation of the so-called Governing Council in July 2003. The names of its members were each followed by their sect and ethnicity. Many of the Iraqis we spoke to on that day were upset with institutionalization of an ethno-sectarian quota system. Ethnic and sectarian tensions already existed, but their translation into political currency was toxic. Those unsavory characters on the governing council, most of whom were allies of the United States from the preceding decade, went on to loot the country, making it one of the most corrupt in the world.

The beginning of wisdom might be in understanding that weaponizing identity politics didn't turn out well in Iraq, colonial power conceits or not, and it isn't turning out well for the colonial power either.

GET WOKE, GO BROKE.

Ten years ago, Antioch College was circling the drain.

They're circling the drain again.  "Another round of cost cutting is under way at Antioch College, with faculty and staff members who earn more than $40,000 per year being required to take mandatory furloughs and a de facto hiring freeze being put in place."

Apparently, giving away what Oberlin charges a price for doesn't work.

Antioch enrolls just 133 students after struggling with admissions in the fall. The college, which is attempting to transition from a free model to one where students pay, netted $1.7 million in tuition and fee revenue last year. It relies on gifts for much of its revenue.

Antioch College was closed by Antioch University in 2008, but a group led by alumni purchased the rights to the liberal arts campus and its endowment, reopening the institution in 2011. The college offered full-tuition scholarships for several years after reopening.

There's something unsustainable about the staffing. "Antioch has 118 staff members and 31 faculty members, not including adjuncts."

Market tests, dear reader, have steeper grading curves than area studies classes.

SUBVERTING THE DOMINANT PARADIGM.

Mid-American teams continue to bust brackets in the women's tournament.  (That is, while we can still refer to the women's tournament.)

The local cable service decided we should see another early-round game involving Connecticut, this time playing the pseudo-preppies from Quinnipiac.  But they got to the game of local interest eventually.

Sue Semrau has built an impressive program at Florida State. In her 21st year leading the Seminoles, she has guided the program to 13 NCAA Tournament appearances, won the ACC Coach of the Year award four times and was named the National Coach of the Year in 2015 by three different organizations.

But Semrau knows something about mid-majors. From 1991-94 she was an assistant coach at Northern Illinois helping that program advance to three straight NCAA Tournaments. And while she's made her mark at a school in a Power 5 conference, she has an appreciation and a respect for the mid-majors who have pulled off upsets at this year's NCAA Tournament on both the women's and men's side.

“I think it's fantastic," Semrau said. "I coached at Northern Illinois a few years back and we had that kind of success in the tournament and you look at the men's side and it's been happening for a while. I think it's really good for the game, for women's basketball. There's a lot of really good teams and really good coaches out there and you've got to be prepared every single game in the NCAA Tournament."

That respect carries over to Florida State's matchup with the University at Buffalo in the second round of the tournament Monday night. There will be no overlooking the Bulls nor any extra pressure to perform as the higher seed playing on their home court.

Buffalo will be playing in the round of sixteen.

There was still time to cut to Columbus, Ohio, where Central Michigan met Ohio State.  Goodbye, Columbus.

[Central Michigan], which trailed in the first quarter, 15-5, made 14 of its 27 3-point attempts.

"We withstood that first punch," [head coach Sue] Guevara said. "We didn't melt, we just kept fighting and kept coming back. When we go the momentum, in that second quarter, you could see (Ohio State) got tired. Some of their players had their hands on their knees and we saw that and we said just keep running.

The Mid-American teams playing Big Ten teams in the Invitational Tournament did not fare so well.  Purdue had an opportunity to pay Ball State out in Muncie and took it.  Michigan State got the buzzer beater in East Lansing and excused Toledo.

Look for the strength of teams in the Mid-American to continue to improve.

GOING GREAT WESTERN

March is for model railroad swap meets, including the large O Scale March Meet in Lombard, Illinois.

The convention, at North American O Scale shows, is for a large gathering to include layout tours, meaning the owners of the layouts make their home layouts available for public viewing.  Like this.

That's a continuous track, for showcasing the British or Soviet models, or perhaps there will be an extra-long North American train placed up there just to show off. You get a view of the installed parts of the North American layout, including the staging tracks and the steel works, as we pan around. Enjoy.

WHAT, EXACTLY, DOES BEING THE CLASS OF THE HORIZON LEAGUE MEAN?

I've taken more than an academic interest in the former North Star Conference rivals of Northern Illinois.  There have been a number of realignments (I lose track) and for the present, Northern Illinois are back in the Mid-American, while Green Bay, Milwaukee, and maybe one or two other North Star teams make up the Horizon League.

It matters come tournament time.

Tennessee players took in parts of No. 9 seed Quinnipiac's eventual win against No. 8 Miami. It was Quinnipiac's third tournament win in the past two years. Or one more than the Lady Vols in that span.

While they watched, someone asked which team No. 11 seed Central Michigan would play next after its 78-69 win against No. 6 seed LSU earlier in the afternoon.

Central Michigan was the automatic qualifier from the Mid-American, winning the conference tournament.

An aside: that conference tournament is always at a professional basketball arena in Cleveland. The few spectators rattle around in there. As each of the member universities has spent a lot of money on a basketball arena (frequently named "convocation center" so as to placate faculty specifically and taxpayers generally), why not rotate the tournaments among the universities, or split them, and in the fashion of the volleyball tournament, have the previous season's champion host?

For the first time in a long time, the Mid-American had an at-large qualifying team.

Not noticing that No. 11 seed Buffalo beat sixth-seeded South Florida 102-79 behind a career-best 36 points from Cierra Dillard, giving the MAC a second winner on the day.

That Cierra Dillard single-handedly got her squad to overtime in DeKalb back in January.

There's a reason Buffalo had one fewer win in conference than Central Michigan.

January 6, 2018

Somehow, Central Michigan and Buffalo got the second cross-division game this year, and they split that series.  Northern Illinois learned a lot this season, but they never got down on themselves or sideways with each other.  Note also the company Buffalo is in in the tournament.  "Three teams scored 100 points in the first round: Connecticut, Tennessee and Buffalo. One of them hadn't won a tournament game before this season."

Meanwhile, the geniuses with their power rankings put Wisconsin-Green Bay higher.

After a rough opening day in which they not only failed to spring upsets but twice failed to defend seeds, No. 7 Green Bay giving away a lead and No. 8 South Dakota State losing in overtime, mid-majors ensured they will be represented in the second round.

Thus, dear reader, I repeat: what does being the class of the Horizon League mean?

THE SHAPE OF THE CIVIL WAR TO COME?

Ten years ago, I feared a future conflict over Lake Michigan water, one starting, precisely, in the marsh at the headwaters of the Des Plaines River.  That's almost exactly where the new Foxconn factory is going to go.  Thus do environmentalists raise the alarm.  "At issue is whether Foxconn should be able to tap Lake Michigan water and what impact the company’s industrial process will have on the lake."  That becomes a more complicated issue in that marsh.  "The [Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources] plays an oversight role because Mount Pleasant is situated in both the Lake Michigan and Mississippi River basins. Thus, it straddles both watersheds."

So far, Wisconsin has not fortified the area, nor is Illinois preparing to shell it.  But there is a war of words.  "Foxconn finds way to stick 7 million-gallon straw into Lake Michigan."  That's the hype, this being an Illinois editorial.  Here are the details.

As envisioned by [Wisconsin governor Scott] Walker['s] administration, the water for Foxconn would come from Racine, an industrial city that would add the company to its larger base of residential customers, along with a small number of homes in Mount Pleasant, the community where the factory is to be located. Racine is entirely within the basin and has more than enough capacity from its existing allotment of water from the lake.

Thus, no problem. Unless you're in Illinois, and you want to suck more water through the Chicago Drainage Canal.

Some who were involved in the debate hoped the compact [the current treaty involving states and provinces with Great Lakes coasts] would discourage the use of Great Lakes water to fuel suburban growth outside the basin. Instead, the thinking went, access to the water should be limited to new industries and development in areas within the basin, such as Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha and other older, urban cities ravaged by the loss of manufacturing jobs.

“Access to Great Lakes water is a contentious issue even within states, and we knew southeast Wisconsin would be one of the flashpoints,” said Noah Hall, a Wayne State University law professor who focuses on environmental issues in the region. “We wanted to discourage sprawl, but we made political, perhaps arbitrary, compromises along the way.”

The application to divert water for Foxconn assumes Wisconsin is not required to consult with other Great Lakes states, let alone seek their approval.

Southeastern Wisconsin is a flashpoint precisely because the sub-continental divide comes so close to Lake Michigan, and the project currently uses Racine's existing allotment, Racine and Kenosha being two of the lakefront industrial cities slammed by the failure of American Motors.

Foxconn would be one of the largest users diverting water outside the Great Lakes basin. The largest by far is Chicago, which under a 1967 Supreme Court decree is authorized to withdraw up to 2.1 billion gallons a day from Lake Michigan. The decree also resolved questions about the city’s nearly century-old practice of discharging treated sewage into waterways that drain toward the Mississippi, instead of the Great Lakes.

By contrast, the Great Lakes compact requires Foxconn and Waukesha to treat most of the water used and return it to Lake Michigan.

Cameron Davis, who served as Great Lakes czar for former President Barack Obama, noted the amount of Lake Michigan water that would be diverted for Foxconn is tiny when compared with the volume of the lake.

The bigger question about Foxconn, Davis said, is whether Wisconsin ensures the factory is prevented from releasing toxic pollution into the lake.

Under clean water laws, Foxconn could be required to treat wastewater at the factory to remove hazardous chemicals used during the manufacturing process before it is pumped through Racine’s treatment plant and released back into Lake Michigan.

“It’s understandable that people are focused right now on the compact and the proposed diversion,” Davis said. “But in the long run water quality should be the fight here, rather than water quantity.”

That's going to be the case, no matter where the factory is.

But why is the factory not going to be in Illinois?  Hillary Clinton has advised the world that she won the optimistic, forward-looking places, places like Illinois.  How forward-looking is Illinois?  It's a place where people are looking forward to leaving for California, which, itself, is losing population to other states ...

Tuesday comes the primary elections for Illinois state offices.  I have not seen anyone make an issue over losing people to California (and Wisconsin) or losing new businesses to Indiana (and Wisconsin) but I've seen Democratic attack ads that might actually make the candidate being attacked look better to centrist voters, and Republican attack ads that are more like Mad magazine than Mad ever was.  It will be business as usual in Springfield, and business startups in Wisconsin.

STEP OUT OF LINE AND DISAPPEAR.

In October of 2016, when all the Smart People and most of the Smart Money had Hillary Clinton measuring the drapes for the Oval Office (and repurposing a certain closet off it?) I made the following observation about the growing insurgency.  "But the Democrat-Media-Academic-Entertainment complex has been bringing the nasty, and Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine bring the condescension, and it's time to say Enough."  Tim Kaine has gone to wherever smirking betas go to, but Hillary still doesn't have a clue.  "Hillary Clinton isn’t ready to let go of her election loss to President Trump."  She continues to come off as Nurse Ratched.  Priceless.

She said, “She ran the presidential campaign like a mother who was telling the kids to eat spinach because it was good for health while the other guy was asking them to go eat fast food and have ice-cream,” India Today reported. Clinton may not have realized it, but this also sheds a lot of light on how she sees the average American.

The fatal conceit proved fatal to her candidacy (it wasn't the FBI, and it probably wasn't all those fainting spells, but it was that "basket of deplorables" crack) and now it's proving fatal to her hopes of being Mother Superior to the Democratic coven.  "It’s clear Clinton still resents losing the election, and wants to remain relevant in American and international politics. She hasn’t yet figured out how to do this without tearing down the electorate, and embracing that even Americans who make disappointing voting choices are still represented by the President." Yes, the Democrat court intellectuals are catching on, and yet the reaction from libertarian and conservative circles is more interesting.  "Clinton has made a strong showing for team smug," notes Reason's Katherine Mangu-Ward.  (She's also written an interesting essay suggesting that Team Troll rolls out ever more outrageously futile and stupid gestures in response to heightened outrage or scorn from Team Smug.  Perhaps Hillary is flipping the script, but, in the fashion of bad comedians everywhere, she's delivering the punchline badly.)  Then comes M.B. Dougherty in National Review.  "She articulated a central myth of the liberal elite: We are beautiful and successful because we’re morally superior."  Yes, beautiful and successful the way that emperor's new clothes were elegant ... but I digress.  Also at National Review, Jonah Goldberg.  "It shows that she really doesn’t like large swathes of the country. She has a Manichaean view that says people who voted against her are backward, racist, sexist, and kind of dumb."  Perhaps, as Julie Kelly notes, it's simpler.  "No one was in the mood for a third Obama term." (More precisely, a sufficient plurality of previous Obama voters in states or parts of states that Herself couldn't bring herself to visit.)

Perhaps, though, it's Hillary who is dumb.  Jim Treacher.  "If Hillary thinks Trump's whole campaign was centered around repressing women and Indian-Americans, how does she explain why so many Trump voters are fans of [current Ambassador to the U.N., Nikki Haley]?"

Whatever the explanation, she's provided Twitchy with comic relief.  "We get it, she can’t accept that she is the reason SHE lost and is desperate to convince the world that it wasn’t her fault, but all she’s really doing is proving what we’ve known all along, she’s just a mean old lady."  Each time she does that, she provides cover to reluctant Trump voters, or perhaps to realistic observers of the political scene, that the best reason for a Trump presidency is it's not a Clinton presidency.

FRUGALITY ON THE RAILROAD.

One place you surely don't want Chinese Distressed Material is in the track structure.

From its very beginnings, the B&O Railroad kept as much work as possible in-house. It became part of the railroad’s very DNA to be able to make almost anything it needed, even as it fully participated in the larger railway supply market.

In the late 1970s, the B&O still made many of its own bridges at Martinsburg. It sorted, straightened, and re-kegged track spikes, re-threaded track bolts, and otherwise reclaimed anything work trains could pick up and drag back to the yard.

The system scale shop was there, along with the system track maintenance machinery shop. Martinsburg made signs, had a full carpentry shop, and a blacksmith shop with heavy drop hammer straight out of the late 19^th century.

The heart of the operation was the Frog & Switch Shop. A few dozen men using a dozen muscular, early 20^thcentury specialized machine tools manufactured new switches, diamonds, special track work, and anything else required to keep railroad wheels where they needed to be.

When model railroaders scratchbuild, they're simply emulating the prototype.  When prototypes scratchbuild, they don't want Distressed Material, from China or from Youngstown.

In the late 1970s, steel was a bit of a problem. Chessie generally used a “rail bound” frog assembly. The frog is the complex, built-up assembly that allows flanged wheels to cross over rails. The switch points guide the wheels down one path or the other. Guard rails help keep wheels on their proper paths. But the frog is the very heart of the switch, literally and figuratively.

The heart of the frog was a heavy manganese steel casting, to which the switch builders bolted wing rails. Martinsburg shaped and planed regular running rail pieces, heated them in furnaces, then formed the rails into the precise shape to mate with the casting. It was an impressive operation.

Manganese steel exhibits a property called “work hardening.” Basically, every time a wheel rolls over it, the surface of the metal gets a tiny bit harder. The stress of the wheel causes minute changes in the microstructure of the steel, making it slightly more resistant to wear. That principle had been well-understood for decades.

Chessie was an early railroad adopter of a technique known as “explosive surface deformation,” among other terms. Basically, a technician would apply a thin (1/8” to ¼”) sticky layer of plastic explosive to the surface of the rail or frog to be hardened. The stuff obviously needed to be handled with care, but it was not like nitroglycerin. It was fired by an electrical charge.

There would be a bright flash, a loud bang, and that was it. It was an extremely controlled explosion meant to artificially work harden the surface wherever the layer of explosive tightly touched the steel. It gave the surface a bit of texture, but most importantly created a layer of harder and more wear resistant steel atop a core casting that remained resilient and more ductile. It was a bit like case hardening.

Chessie was buying cast manganese frog inserts by the hundreds from U.S. suppliers—and having unacceptably high failure rates. When the railroad “shot” the frogs (the casual term for the process), too many of the castings cracked or warped and had to be scrapped. It seemed clear that U.S. mills were not interested in, or capable of, a reasonable level of quality control.

So Chessie looked east.

Beginning in the late 1970s, the castings arriving from foundries in Japan proved to be superior to the domestic versions. I recall hearing discussions about the Japanese inserts having better dimensional control, needing less machining for fit up, and having a far lower rejection rate after being shot. Think about the state of the U;S. steel industry four decades ago.

Particularly, considering that manganese steel is also used in battleship armour.  (I wonder if a battleship is also tougher after it's been hit a few times.)

The story, however, is really about what happened when Martinsburg area environmentalists got worried about Baltimore and Ohio shooting frogs.  Read and enjoy.

THE ILLINOIS STEEL CROP.

The New York Times sends Monica Davey and Patricia Cohen to Cold Spring Shops territory.

Some countries have talked about payback, and farmers in Illinois, in Wisconsin and elsewhere are worried that they will suffer from the fallout.

“The ag economy is not very good right now — fragile is the polite word for it,” [Maple Park farmer Eldon] Gould said.

His wife, Sandy, across the table, jumped in: “It’s in the tank is what he means.”

Mr. Gould continued, “So then when you go to great lengths to upset some of your key customers, there’s reason for concern.”

He's referring to key customers who sell steel to buy corn and beans.

Two weeks after the administration imposed a tariff on solar panels, China opened an anti-dumping investigation into American exports of sorghum, a grain used in livestock feed. The United States was virtually China’s sole foreign source of sorghum last year, with $1 billion in sales. Almost half of the American crop is grown in Kansas.

The political economy of agricultural trade is always interesting, as the industrialized countries all subsidize their farmers, and that Kansas crop likely requires intensive use of deep aquifers.  Thus, a dumping investigation is likely to turn something up.

We're having every bit of the six more weeks of winter the groundhog promised.  The view from road level will not be this good come August.

New York Times photograph by Whitten Sabbatini.

Not far away is a farmer who grasps comparative advantage.

Twenty-five miles away, in Yorkville, Ill., Bob Stewart, 48, a farmer whose crop is mostly for export, sees the latest dispute as a basic economics lesson.

A Republican who said he did not vote in the 2016 presidential race because he was not excited about either candidate, Mr. Stewart called himself a “proponent of free trade, and a proponent of ‘grow what you’re good at in your location.’”

“We do really good at growing corn and soybeans,” Mr. Stewart said from his office, filled with farm maps and carefully organized tools and overlooking a field with the remains of last year’s corn. “Maybe China’s does really well at steel. Now that may not sound good to folks I’m related to or go to church with who build steel. But they have a competitive advantage at steel. We have a competitive advantage with crops.”

China actually don't do that well at steel, but complaining about subsidized dumping might be easier than making a better product and selling it at a price that compels the Chinese to eat their Distressed Material sideways.

TEACH THE CONTROVERSIES.

An exercise in privilege-shaming goes wrong in Oconomowoc.

The Oconomowoc Area School District is limiting discussions about social privilege after a Martin Luther King Day exercise that touched on the subject of white privilege set off a firestorm in that predominantly white community.

Oconomowoc Superintendent Roger Rindo said he was directed by board members during a closed-door, executive session shortly after the Jan. 15 assembly not to allow future activities around the topic of privilege except in classrooms where it is related to a specific course and teachers can provide appropriate context.

"Schools are a microcosm of their communities. And we had parents in our community who felt like the concept of privilege went a little far, particularly for some of our younger students," Rindo said last week.

"It doesn't mean we can't teach children about diversity with the other 900 ways we can approach it."

Particularly, where among the 900 ways there are probably more effective ways than hectoring and guilt-tripping.   "We could consider, for instance, what happens when working hard and playing by the rules becomes a formula for privilege-shaming."

It appears that the pedagogues in Oconomowoc just rolled out the Diversity Boondoggle's Greatest Hits, and the parents were prepared to push back.

The Oconomowoc controversy erupted in January after a break-out session in which students were invited to fill out and discuss a "privilege aptitude test." Created by the National Civil Rights Museum, the test is designed to illustrate the ways in which some groups enjoy advantages that others do not.

While some of the questions focused on race — for example, "When I go to a store, people believe I am trustworthy and I will not steal something" — others touched on privileges related to gender, physical ability and more.The idea that skin color carries an advantage touched a nerve among some students and parents in the district, where almost 90% of the students are white. Several parents complained, fueled by conservative talk radio. Parents who supported the discussion also weighed in.

But Rindo quashed a proposal by a student club that focuses on equality to follow up with a "privilege walk" — similar to the exercises that have gone viral on social media — saying in an email that the district has to be "prudent and mindful of the context in which we live and work."

The test is in English, are there any questions that might encourage empathy for a speaker of Serbian?    Middle and high school students, irrespective of their ancestry, well might perceive the security measures at the local convenience stores or the mall as singling out teens.  Those privilege walks are a tendentious bit of guerrilla theater intended to make the facilitators feel powerful.  Alternatively, the facilitators aren't sufficiently tuned in to the latest from the Church of Intersectionality.

"Our board is fine with discussions about diversity ... but white privilege is a lightning rod for some parents," said [Don] Wiemer, the board president who also serves as village manager and chief of police for the Village of Oconomowoc Lake, a small, affluent enclave on the southeast side of the district.

"We have poor people in Oconomowoc who are saying they're not privileged ... and people that say, 'Don, we worked our butts off to have what we have,'" Wiemer said.

There has to be a better way to get people who are in some ways insiders to understand the ways in which tacit knowledge, whether of bourgeois convention in polite society, or of Serbian in Serbia, confers advantages over outsiders.

Those are common reactions, said the Rev. Craig Howard, former executive director of the Presbytery of Milwaukee, who led a church-wide conversation about race that touched on issues of privilege during his tenure.

Privilege, he said, is often seen as a zero-sum game or a finite pie; for some to gain, others must lose. Those who have it, he said, often cannot or will not acknowledge the social and familial structures that sometimes underlie their progress.

He points, for example, to the way in which most Americans built wealth in the 20th century, through home ownership. That was often limited to whites through practices of red-lining and federally backed mortgages that could be accessed only for homes in white neighborhoods.

"Even if you don't feel the advantage, you don't feel the disadvantage," Howard said. "As you know, when the wind is at your back, you don't even know there's a wind."

The reverend's sailing ability is worse than his understanding of political economy. If you have no apparent wind, you're drifting, you're not really sailing. You have to move your apparent wind forward in order to go sailing.  Teach the underprivileged how to move their apparent wind forward, and watch them thrive.  Privilege shaming accomplishes nothing.

BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME.

The early returns from Florida's Brightline service are good.

Ridership of Brightline has exceeded expectations since the train began service between Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, CEO Patrick Goddard told an audience at the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce luncheon Wednesday.

The number of passengers who have used the train in recent weeks is three times larger than the company projected, Goddard said.

He did not disclose specific ridership figures but said Brightline is running an average of 11 roundtrips per day between Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale. At capacity, each train can hold up to 240 passengers.

“People are excited to be off I-95,” the executive said. “We’ve gotten people out of traffic.”

Service to Miami is expected to begin by end of April, he said.

On Brightline, passengers can travel between each of its South Florida stops in about 35 minutes, with trains speeding along at about 75 miles per hour. The same trip by car can often take as long as two hours.

Yes, and that car trip is more likely to be fatal. Pedestrians and motorists ought practice caution crossing the tracks, whether or not the Brightline trains are running.  The article notes, "Several pedestrians have been hit by the train after ignoring armguards and signals."

Cross Crossings Cautiously.

We can talk about free rein to 110, or to 125, later.

SHAKING OUT THE EXCESS CAPACITY.

As if there aren't enough troubles in ginseng and cranberry country already, Wisconsin-Stevens Point to Eliminate 13 Majors.

Tenured faculty positions are at stake, with possible layoffs occurring by 2020.

Programs pegged for closure are American studies, art (excluding graphic design), English (excluding English for teacher certification), French, geography, geoscience, German, history (excluding social science for teacher certification), music literature, philosophy, political science, sociology and Spanish.

There will be disciplines favored with additional resources.

Programs up for expansion include chemical engineering, computer information systems, conservation law enforcement, finance, fire science, graphic design, management and marketing. Others include aquaculture, captive wildlife, ecosystem design and remediation, environmental engineering, geographic information science, master of business administration, master of natural resources, and doctor of physical therapy.

That doctorate in physical therapy reflects additional course work required by the physical therapists' cartel, and it's distinct from a Ph.D., Ed.D., or M.D.  A number of the other programs: how will Wisconsin branches at, for example, Green Bay or Superior react to those environmental fields?

Meanwhile, there are other cartel requirements at work.

UW-Stevens Point administrators on Monday said they plan to eliminate low-demand liberal arts degree programs, including English, history and political science. It is part of the college's efforts to address a projected deficit of $4.5 million over two years because of declining enrollment and lower tuition revenues.

Mike Williams, the chairman of the Department of English, said he had no idea that English would be on a list of potential cutbacks.

"We're taken aback by the proposal. And it still is a proposal," Williams said. "Right now we have to marshal arguments that will convince the administration that the measures they have proposed are mistaken." When releasing the plan, university officials said that English majors for teacher certification would continue. But Williams said that under the state Department of Public Instruction's certification criteria, a person looking to become an English teacher has to have been an English major.

"They just both have to exist, or both have to be eliminated," Williams said. "One depends directly on the other."

In addition to English, the programs that would be eliminated because of low enrollment are: American studies, art (but not graphic design), French, geography, geoscience, German, history (other than social science for teacher certification), music literature, philosophy, political science, sociology (but not the social work major) and Spanish.

Not to be too blunt, but what happens when somebody in Madison takes a look at three regional campuses (Eau Claire, Menomonie, and Stevens Point) within a few miles of each other and suggests a consolidation to one campus might be in order?

THE WISCONSIN STEEL CROP.

Earlier today, Our President made a further announcement about the shape of his primary metals tariffs.  Reason's Eric Boehm recites the conventional understanding of the mistake he makes.

According to the Commerce Department's report on the proposed tariffs, a 24 percent tariff on all steel imports would be expected to reduce imports by 37 percent. On a smaller scale, the tariff could be a dose of very good news for steelworkers in Granite City, Illinois, who might find themselves heading back to work in the near future.

But the benefits of a huge new tariff on steel will be highly concentrated in the steel industry, while the costs will be borne by many, many other parts of the economy.

According to 2015 Census data, steel mills employed about 140,000 Americans and added about $36 billion to the economy that year, but steel-consuming industries employed more than 6.5 million Americans and added $1 trillion to the economy. In other words, for every steel-producing job in the country that might benefit from Trump's proposed tariffs, there are 46 jobs in steel-consuming jobs—and each of those jobs will get a little shakier if Trump's tariffs become reality.

The last time the federal government imposed sweeping steel tariffs—during George W. Bush's tenure in the White House, when tariffs ranging from 8 percent to 30 percent were set—the higher costs for importing steel dealt a $4 billion hit to the economy and led to 200,000 job losses, the six groups who wrote to the White House argued.

Megan McArdle takes the analysis farther.

The cheap Chinese steel flooding global markets isn’t there because the Chinese government has made a brilliant move to destroy U.S. steel producers and keep all those lovely profits. It’s there because they’ve done something stupid — or at least, a trifle overoptimistic.

The steel industry, like many heavy industries, is subject to periodic gluts, even if governments do nothing at all. That’s because steel foundries are very expensive to build. Once you’ve built them, that cost is “sunk” — you can’t get the money back by shutting down, because a steel plant can’t really be used for much else. So it makes sense to keep operating at a loss for a while, hoping prices will recover.

The old principles of economics version is, operate at a loss as long as you can recover your avoidable costs; the economic hysteresis version is, operate at a loss as long as the option value present in having the business is positive, thus you're selling at below your avoidable costs, and under the trigger price mechanism of forty years ago, you're engaging in dumping!

There are even more subtleties at work.

Yes, we Americans do love our cheap consumer electronics and our fancy German cars, and we’d hate to lose them. But those things are small comfort to a man who has lost the steel mill job where he spent eight hours a day for the past 20 years and is cheerfully told that, well, maybe he can retrain as a home health-care aide. That man will be devastated — and he will vote accordingly.

Thus, perhaps, the threat of a trade war, whether to fulfill a campaign promise, or simply as a way of getting the other countries to lower the tariffs confronting U.S. exporters.  Ms McArdle hasn't considered all the subtleties.

No one can blame him. But there are even more good people in other industries — construction and machine-making, canning and cars — who will suffer exactly that devastation if we go ahead with these tariffs. That doesn’t seem like a very fair trade.

That devastation is possible, even absent a trade war.  "Wisconsin cranberries have joined Harley-Davidson motorcycles on the European Union’s list of products that could be slapped with tariffs in retaliation for President Donald Trump’s tariffs on imported steel and aluminum." There's even a ready-made argument for the European Union in the story.

The U.S. ships more than 95 million pounds of cranberries a year to countries in the European Union.

Nearly 40% of the crop is exported, and in some years, Wisconsin has accounted for more than half the world's supply of cranberries.

For cranberry growers, the threat of tariffs in the EU's 28 countries comes at an especially bad time, with growers awash in too much fruit and low prices.

It "would significantly hinder our ability to compete in these markets,” said Tom Lochner, executive director of the Wisconsin State Cranberry Growers Association.

Cranberry growers say they've spent more than 20 years cultivating sales to Europe. Currently, many but not all cranberry products are shipped to the EU duty-free.

It's easy enough for a European populist to gripe about dependency on Yankee cranberries or to point to excess capacity and United States farm price supports as fostering dumping, which is exactly what happens when there are surpluses to unload before the stuff rots.

The real problem, dear reader, is simpler still.  The purpose of all production is consumption.  Make it harder for Europeans or Chinese or anybody else to export steel to the United States, you make it harder for Europeans or Chinese or anybody else to purchase cranberries from the United States.  Thus, Wisconsin's cranberry bogs will be even more awash in fruit, whether or not Europeans impose retaliatory tariffs.

LET THE MUGGING BY REALITY CONTINUE.

I warned the True Believers a long time ago.  "One would think that people in the civil rights community, particularly the older ones who became Communists or fellow travelers after being accused of being a Communist one time too many would be a little more careful with their accusations."  I quoted Rod Dreher warning the True Believers not so long ago.  "The point is this: if you cannot tell the difference between Ross Douthat and Richard Spencer, you’re not marginalizing Ross Douthat, you’re mainstreaming Richard Spencer."  Now comes Bari Weiss, in the house organ for Business as Usual along the Acela Corridor (that's "the failing New York Times," to Normals) making the same point.

By tossing people like Mary Beard and Christina Hoff Sommers into the slop bucket with the likes of Richard Spencer, they are attempting to place their reasonable ideas firmly outside the mainstream. They are trying to make criticism of identity politics, radical Islam and third-wave feminism, among various other subjects, verboten. For even the most minor transgressions, as in the case of Professor Beard, people are turned radioactive.

There are consequences to all this “fascism” — and not just the reputational damage to those who are smeared, though there is surely that.

The main effect is that these endless accusations of “fascism” or “misogyny” or “alt-right” dull the effects of the words themselves. As they are stripped of meaning, they strip us of our sharpness — of our ability to react forcefully to real fascists and misogynists or members of the alt-right.

For a case study in how this numbing of the political senses works, look no further than Mitt Romney and John McCain. They were roundly denounced as right-wing extremists. Then Donald Trump came along and the words meant to warn us against him had already been rendered hollow.

But that's how the Church of Intersectionality rolls. Ms Weiss is already being denounced as a heretic.  Add Amanda Marcotte to the list of political illiterates who don't know what a classical liberal is (or perhaps they don't understand the writings of Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, and Edmund Burke?)

More recently, I warned the intersectionality crowd again.

Sixty to a hundred years ago, the Communist parties in the United States picked up members from the habit, by some critics of the civil rights causes suggesting those causes were communist-inspired when they were not, of deciding that maybe declaring yourself a communist wasn't such a bad thing after all. Now live in a world where the self-appointed thought leaders suggest that there's a whiff of white supremacy in mathematics or good manners or farmers' markets ...

The analogous conclusion, today, is straightforward.

UNDO THE PROGRESSIVE EXCESS?

Sixteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution provides for direct taxation of incomes.  As my brother the tax-preparer puts it, is it April 17 yet?

Seventeenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution provides for direct election of senators.  Michael Walsh wants it gone.  "Until the 17th Amendment is repealed and the balance of the Constitution restored, there will be no justice and no peace."

Eighteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution provided for prohibition of alcoholic beverages.  It took another Amendment to repeal that one.

Undoing some of the other excesses of the self-styled progressives might take a little longer.

INDUSTRIAL ECONOMICS ISN'T EASY, EITHER.

There may, or may not, be tariffs on all imported steel and aluminum, or perhaps on steel imported from some countries but not others (in one variant, steel imported from Mexico is exempt, which helps pay for the wall in a perverse way, but I digress.)  But the political economy of primary metals trade is, Ramesh Ponnuru suggests, the political economy of rent-seeking.

Trump announced the tariffs after hearing from executives of companies that will be protected. “Cronyist” is a better word for this kind of economic policy than “nationalist.”

But while protectionism tends to promote corruption, a desire to please the CEOs of steel and aluminum companies is almost certainly not what is driving the Trump administration’s trade policy. What’s driving it, rather, is a set of ideas about trade that Trump and some of his advisers have long held.

Many of them genuinely think that trade deficits are dangerous, that free-trade deals have hurt our economy, and so on. These ideas are, unfortunately, bad ones, and there’s no good argument for the policy that is resulting -- which is why we are hearing such confused defenses of Trump’s planned tariffs.

Steel's difficulties? Self-inflicted, notes Stephen Mihm.  "Unfair trade practices of foreign nations had nothing to do with it."

POLITICAL ECONOMY IS DIFFICULT.

Let's start with an Art Carden and Steve Horwitz essay from five years ago, "Is Market Failure a Sufficient Condition for Government Intervention?"

Pointing out imperfections in the market does not ipso facto justify government intervention, and the only certain way that market "failures" are "failures" is by comparison to an unreachable theoretical idea. Market imperfections are not magic wands that make market solutions and government imperfections disappear. Real understanding of comparative political economy begins rather than ends with the recognition that markets are not always perfect.

That is, dear reader, it is much easier to teach the interventionist Welfare Economics Paradigm on a blackboard than it is to implement the policies in practice.  Regular readers will understand the points Messrs. Carden and Horwitz make before drawing the conclusion I cite.  Perhaps it would benefit some public policy intellectuals to be more familiar with the argument.

THE INTERSECTIONAL INQUISITION.

National Review's David French nails a thesis to the common-room door.  Intersectionality, the Dangerous Faith.  "It turns out that America isn’t raising a new generation of unbelievers. Instead, rising in the heart of deep-blue America are the zealots of a new religious faith. They’re the intersectionals, they’re fully woke, and the heretics don’t stand a chance."  Look, if there's an information cascade developing around the notion of culture-studies as a false belief system, I'll ride along with!

Mr French continues,  "Just ask Christina Hoff Sommers. Yesterday she walked into the First Intersectional Church of the Lewis and Clark Law School and promptly experienced the congregation’s wrath."  Yes, it's either the congregation calling for the witch to be burned, or the laity conducting an exorcism.

What took center stage was not Sommers but students carrying flaccid cardboard signs accompanied by a woman with the words “Stay Woke” printed on the back of her jacket. She appeared to be the group’s leader since she was the one who read a series of statements, which then proceeded to be repeated by the rest of this group of “enlightened” social justice warriors. Maybe she and her “comrades,” as she called them, should have taken the words “Stay Woke” to heart because they looked rather lethargic and phlegmatic.

Bell, book, and candle. Candle, book, and bell.  Forward and backward, to damn Sommers to hell!

At heart, though, the intersectional belief system commits the essential error of favoring hasty generalization.  Mr French continues, "Intersectionality privileges experiential authority, with each distinct identity group able to speak conclusively and decisively only about their own experience."  That is, though, only those speakers who speak the Received Wisdom.

The faith is fierce. Intolerance in the name of tolerance is the norm. Debate and dialogue are artifacts of scorned “respectability politics.” I’m reminded of the worst sorts of fundamentalist Christian sects, the kind that claim to take the Bible literally yet live as if mercy is alien to Scripture and that commands to “love your enemies” or “bless those who persecute you” somehow fell off the page. In the church of intersectionality, grace is nowhere to be found.

Fiat! Fiat! Fiat!

MORE HEAVY ELECTRICS IN MY BACK YARD.

Illinois Railway Museum will be taking delivery of Amtrak AEM-7 (Toaster or Swedish Meatball) 945.  I doubt that the locomotive will be re-wired to run on the museum's track.

Last year, the museum acquired an earlier rectifier locomotive, originally built to haul coal for the Virginian Railway, later put into freight service by the New Haven and successor owners Penn Central and Conrail.

There is a collection box for doing a cosmetic restoration of the shell.  It's unlikely this motor will ever run in service.  The South Shore electric locomotive in the collection, which has circuitry more compatible with the 600 volt direct current on the demonstration railroad, is capable of knocking out the substation if the motorman takes too much power.

In a barn is a cosmetically restored GG1, also unlikely ever to run.

FAITH BASED EDUCATION.

Or, perhaps I should call it the Intersectionality Catechism.

Sociology faculty often feel frustrated when students don’t “get it,” i.e., when students are resistant or hostile to course material or faculty, and have little increase in sociological critical thinking. Those of us who teach about gender must find ways to manage student resistance to the course material. Dealing with student resistance might increase some students’ critical thinking, while simultaneously frustrating progressive students. As we engage with resistance, we must consider whether we are engaging in feminist teaching or teaching feminism.

Translation: the true believers, who already have read and accepted whatever the class analogues to John 3:16 and Genesis 1 and the like, will get frustrated with the skeptics, and hope that the high priestess will hector and deplorable-shame or otherwise exercise authority, rather than be open to dissenting views, and familiar enough with the controversies so as to be able to produce genuine critical thinking.  That's hard work.  "It's apparently easier to compare the perceived weight of vectors of oppression and throw around accusations of insensitivity or privilege, than it is to quantify them, or demonstrate the existence of intersections, or to characterize equations of motion and basins of attraction."  Confirmation, dear reader, is as close as that abstract.  "Resistance" is a term of art borrowed from psychiatry, referring to the unwillingness of a patient to consider that his troubles are first his responsibility in some way.  It's a bad practitioner, though, who will condemn the patient in such terms.  College students in victim studies courses, though, are apparently as not-yet communicants in catechism, more to be threatened with eternal damnation than won over by logic and content.  The references to the article suggest there's a lot of that sort of "resistance" to be "managed."

THE TRENCHANT OBSERVATION OF THE DAY.

Don "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux identifies the hyperbole in many a trade-protection argument.

This conservative American protectionist’s mysterious confidence in the economic-planning powers of foreign governments is stronger the closer foreign governments are to totalitarian dictatorships lording it over populations that have long been impoverished by communism.

This conservative American protectionist then – also mysteriously – trusts Uncle Sam to intervene into the U.S. economy if and only insofar as that intervention is aimed at obstructing fellow Americans’ access to the miraculous cornucopia of economic goodies that highly interventionist foreign governments alone are able to engineer through their devious schemes of impoverishing us Americans by compelling their own peoples to shower us with endless gifts of attractive goods and services.

Or, as a college friend had it years ago, "if those countries want to rip up their economies to provide me with cheap stuff, let them!"

Right on cue, (sorry, not South Moon or even Brooklyn 'cue) though, Our President trolled his detractors by wishing he had the kind of power the latest Red Chinese Great Helmsman exercises, and the detractors very kindly set their hair on fire.  "Norm Eisen, the Obama administration's legal counsel and current chair of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), reacted on Twitter."  The most responsible and ethical thing Washington types might do is give up some of their influence.  The next most responsible thing to do might be to stop letting pundits of the Thomas Friedman sort get away with the same sort of wishful thinking.  A quick refresher.  "China's system of government is inferior to ours in every respect - except one. That is the ability of China's current generation of leaders - if they want - to cut through all their legacy industries, all the pleading special interests, all the bureaucratic obstacles, all the worries of a voter backlash, and simply order top-down the sweeping changes in prices, regulations, standards, education, and infrastructure that reflect China's long-term strategic national interests - changes that would normally take Western democracies years or decades to debate and implement."

That top-down thinking also saddled Red China with the equivalent of four United States's worth of primary steel factories, three United States's worth of which are currently idle.  Perhaps someone ought advise Our President that China-envy isn't a good idea, either in the halls of government, or in industrial policy.

IST'S NICHT EINE FETTE SAU?

I wonder if the Brooklyn barbecue joint of that name was inspired by a Schnitzelbank poster.

Brooklyn barbecue joint, you ask?

Barbecue's Southern roots and finest pitmasters are a long way from New York, even though the city has grown by leaps and bounds in terms of its barbecue pedigree in recent years. Especially in Brooklyn. It's almost impossible to walk between Bedford Avenue and the East River without sniffing mesquite smoke. Since Fette Sau opened in 2007, nearly a dozen others have followed, several with pitmasters recruited from Central Texas or Kansas City.

Recruited from 'cue's traditional lands, and yet, in Brooklyn, they go all arch deluxe, and not in a good way.

The décor, for the most part, fits with a wider Brooklyn theme of details like subway tiles, exposed brick walls, Edison light bulbs and lengthy lists of craft beer and small batch bourbons. Brooklyn pitmasters tend to be less traditional than their counterparts in the South. They don't really follow any single barbecue philosophy and aren't so focused on beef brisket, like most of Texas tends to be. They may include items like house-cured pastrami or pork ribs or burnt ends. Most use heritage animals—free-range and hormone free—from small family farms within the region.

Yes, and by the looks of the plate, minimalist portions with nonexistent sauce, and a lot of open metal space, appear to be the order of the day. "Few would argue that the barbecue being served in Brooklyn is better than in Texas, so why is a Kings County adaptation that is already a bastardized adaptation the one that is furthering the cause?"  That's what deconstruction for its own sake gets you.

IT'S WAR.

When the right wing attacks.

These outbursts and outrages against liberal professors who have written or spoken about white supremacy in America have become routine. Scholars like Steven Salaita, Saida Grundy, Johnny Eric Williams, George Ciccariello-Maher, Amanda Gailey, Dorothy Kim and, most recently, David Palumbo-Liu have all been subjected to severe right-wing media scrutiny for their stances against white supremacy, white privilege, settler colonialism and fascism.

Not a lot of nuance, or openness to differing points of view here.

When the left wing attacks.

That’s what it means to hold the commanding heights of the culture war: you have the power to annihilate someone’s career with the power of accusation. You think those workers and their families are going to be more sympathetic to the cause of racial justice now, given what was done to them?

Not a lot of nuance, or openness to differing points of view here either.

STUPID.

All the business bafflegab in the world can't change that.

In its original release in 2014 announcing the decision to play this week in Madison Square Garden, [Big Ten commissioner Jim] Delany said “this pairing is a natural fit for us as we continue to extend our brand and live in two regions of the country.” In the statement, the league crowed about “a significant branding presence both inside and outside the building.” All of that gobbledygook about “branding” is closer to the truth, a lot closer than giving players “a chance to see the Big Ten in the Big Apple,” but it wasn’t the primary objective, either.

The objective, if you can believe this, was to lure Rutgers to the Big Ten.

Rutgers!

That’s where this whole thing started, the same place where so many stupid decisions in college sports started: conference realignment. The biggest conference tournaments staged their own hunger games, eventually devouring the Southwest Conference and devaluing the Big East, but they didn’t get bigger intelligently. They got bigger stupidly because MONEY! The Big Ten wanted to expand its geographic footprint, a phrase I’m putting in italics because you need to hear it as I’m trying to write it: as an obscenity.

There’s no going back, but somehow the Big Ten is stuck with Maryland and Rutgers (!), and to get those schools to leave their own conferences, the Big Ten had to make all sorts of promises including this one: We’ll bring the men’s basketball tournament to you. Last season the Big Ten tournament was in Washington, D.C., where it was sparsely attended, and this year it will be in Madison Square Garden, where it will be sparsely attended. Put the Big Ten tournament in two of the four most populated areas in the country — greater New York City is first, greater Washington, D.C., fourth — and the league can’t fill the building. Why? Because those markets don’t care about the Big Ten.

For all the good it did. Rutgers? Out. Maryland? Out.

Longer term, though, we're seeing the Hunger Games eating the NCAA itself.  Four power conferences, sixteen teams per conference, no more pesky mid-majors and bubble talk.

YOU HAVE TO DEVELOP YOUR INTUITION.

The Post-Crash Economics crew offer One-and-a-Half Cheers for Maths.

A key bone of contention for PCES is that the maths in economics is rarely linked to the real world. The charge that many of us don’t understand why there’s maths in economics is therefore true on one level: we do not understand because nobody tells us! Mathematical models are often learned by rote instead of being introduced to solve an economic problem. As one student put it, ‘you learn to solve models before you even know what a model is and its purpose.’ Economics students typically come from very different backgrounds and so expecting them to automatically understand the purpose of maths is unfair – in fact, we believe that grounding the teaching of maths in real world problems would help many students to understand it better.

Should economics use maths? Since large parts of economics deal with mathematical quantities and dynamic processes, the subject can clearly benefit from quantitative analysis and mathematical modelling. The question is whether it is appropriate to use maths in a particular case, and what is gained by doing so. For example, looking at financial flows and balance sheets surely invites the use of mathematics, as do macroeconomic quantities such as GDP, unemployment and inflation. At a micro level, it seems absurd to study the impact of (say) sugar taxes on sugar prices and consumption without using mathematical quantities.

On the other hand, modern economics is rife with mathematics used to represent things which are simply unquantifiable in the real world. One example is ‘effort’, a key variable in the kind of contract models for which the 2016 Nobel Prize was awarded to Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström, and which are the bane of all Manchester Micro III students.

There's nothing wrong with modelling exercises that act as if something is observable when it is not, treated as modelling exercises.  The Welfare Economics Paradigm is rife with fully-informed super-agents (masquerading as Government Officials, or Philosopher Kings) who are capable of identifying the exernality-causing activity and optimally taxing it, and perhaps uber-managers capable of measuring effort can optimally reward it.

Implementing such models might be more difficult, although the idea of tinkering with the incentives by imposing taxes on polluting activities with the hope of rolling them back isn't exactly the same.  At the same time, who among us hasn't heard a gym teacher or athletics coach suggesting a laggard is "dogging it."  Relying on a proxy for effort, maybe?

More to the point, the message is about treating the mathematics as the servant.

We embrace maths and statistics as invaluable tools in the study of economics, but believe that students should learn a variety of these tools so that they can know which types of maths to use and when. Perhaps most importantly, students should be made aware of times where maths is not appropriate so that they have a critical grasp of how to use it most effectively in economics.

It's better to understand the stories first.  Good mathematics or statistics adds precision to the parables.  If you understand how the incentives align, or fail to, you can even pose econometric questions without using "heteroskedasticity" or "autocorrelation."

THERE'S MORE THAN ONE WAY TO WORK THE U.S. NEWS PROBLEM.

Washington Post education pundit Jay Mathews sees the highly-regarded institutions not responding to the excess demand for their services.

If you owned a factory that was selling everything it made but left 90 percent of orders unfilled, what would you do?

Open more factories, of course.

That’s not the way higher education operates in the United States. The top ranked colleges accept less than 10 percent of applicants. They freely admit that they reject thousands each year just as good as the ones they let in.

His proposal? Franchised branches.  (The idea has been mooted before.)

You probably have some good ideas for prime Ivy satellite spots. How about Dartmouth at Daytona Beach, Brown at Biloxi, Harvard at Huntington Beach, Columbia at Carmel, Penn at Pensacola or Cornell at Corpus Christi?

With qualifications.

I am not suggesting the brand name schools should run the new campuses. They are weak on original thinking, otherwise why wouldn’t they have taken this step already? They might be persuaded, however, to award naming rights to educational entrepreneurs with fresh ideas.

Some companies spend $20 million a year to attach their name to a big league stadium. The chance to use an Ivy name should be worth even more. Just the sweatshirts would be hot items for visitors.

One question to be answered in this scheme: What’s in a name? The popularity of the Ivies does not appear to reflect any significant benefits from attending those leafy campuses. A study by Alan Krueger, former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and Mathematica Policy Research expert Stacy Berg Dale showed that students accepted by selective colleges who chose not to attend those colleges had incomes just as high 20 years later as those who did attend.

We've been documenting that Spielberg Effect for what feels like forever, and we've offered something simpler that might even work.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP SERVES NATIONAL SECURITY.

Don "Cafe Hayek" Boudreaux calls BS on the steel tariffs.

To the extent that a thriving U.S. steel industry is important for national defense, protecting U.S. steel producers from foreign competition diminishes their incentives and motivation to innovate and to keep production costs as low as possible.  This negative consequence of protectionism should, at the very least, be weighed against the allegedly ‘positive’ effect of ensuring that the U.S. steel industry is larger than it would be in the absence of U.S. government-imposed punitive taxes on Americans who buy imported steel.

In addition, the weighting ought pay attention to domestic metal fabricators, paying more for the privilege of buying that United States steel, and to domestic exporters, for instance Wisconsin ginseng farmers raising steel in their fields.

IT'S THE RENT-SEEKING, STUPID.

Don't blame the NRA, blame campaign-funding rules, argue the editors of DeKalb's Daily Chronicle.   "The real problem lies with our political system’s failure to rein in the outsized influence of money in politics."  Unfortunately, never do they consider that the political system exercises a great deal of influence on the affairs of the population.

It is within our power to change the rules. This could require a constitutional amendment imposing strict limits on campaign contributions and spending, something that will preserve the rights of individuals to advance their views, without allowing a few people or interest groups to dominate.

Only by imposing stricter limits on the role of money in our electoral process will average Americans be able to reclaim the power that is rightly theirs.

What good is another constitutional amendment, when "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people" is a dead letter?

WATER IS NO DIFFERENT THAN ANY OTHER COMMODITY.

Stop pretending that it is.  (Via Newmark's Door.)

Yeah, I've pointed this out before, as have others.  But people continue to ignore it, to their peril.