THE SOURCES OF DISTRESSED MATERIAL.

Wisconsin state legislator John Jagler sponsored legislation requiring state universities to disaggregate, by source high school, the number and proportion of matriculants requiring a second go at high school remedial mathematics or English.  The first report under the law is now available.

Milwaukee Hamilton has changed a lot since I graduated in 1971.  It remains one of the largest high schools in the shrunken Milwaukee Public Schools, but college preparation there isn't what it once was.

Alexander Hamilton High School sent 29 new freshmen to the UW system in fall 2015. Of those 29 students, 19, or 66 percent, needed math remediation, and 12, or 41 percent, needed English remediation. Hamilton High was listed named 32nd in the state on the Washington Post's 2016 list of most challenging high schools.

Other MPS schools typically touted as high performing also sent large numbers of unprepared students to UW. Rufus King High School was named the 13th best high school in the state by the Washington Post and was ranked the 8th best by U.S. News and World Report - yet one-third of Rufus King graduates needed remediation in math.

Mr Jagler's home district, Watertown, made the report, sending 94 students to UW System campuses, with 21 matriculants requiring remedial math. For all my carping about the misplaced priorities at Hartland Arrowhead, the district sent 257 graduates into the UW System, with 28 requiring remedial math and fifteen requiring remedial English.  (That's almost as many students from Watertown or the Arrowhead District relegated to high school as there were matriculants out of Hamilton High.  What's that bit about a mediocre student of means having a better chance of finishing college than a bright kid from a poor family?)  My nephew's high school, Greendale, sent 102 students on, of which eight required remedial math.

DEUTSCHE BAHN IS A RAILROAD.

Trains Magazine's David Lassen is disappointed with the passenger service on Deutsche Bahn.

It would be difficult to understate how disappointed I was with the performance of the Deutsche Bahn while I was in Germany. I was in the hands for the DB for three trips, each scheduled to have one train change:  Zurich-Nuremburg, Nuremburg-Berlin and Berlin-Zurich. The railroad let me down on two of those trips. I missed a seven-minute connection on the way to Nuremburg (by no means an unusual bit of scheduling) because my first train was exactly seven minutes late; I made it off the first train just in time to watch the next one depart. And the train into Zurich was so late that it was annulled in Frankfurt, requiring an hour wait to catch a train that was, as a result, filled with two trains’ worth of passengers. In both cases, I arrived at my destination more than two hours’ late, and since those were my only evenings in either city, essentially lost my opportunity to see even a small part of either one.

Yes, years ago a planned day trip from Wien to London broke down over a six minute connection in Köln.  Got as far as Brussels to rebook the next day on Eurostar; there the Eurostar agents noted that the connection in question frequently failed.

But in other ways, Deutsche Bahn is becoming more like a railroad.

I’ve heard Deutsche Bahn is no longer the flawless operation it once was, and I believe it — based not just from my own experience, but on conversations with other passengers. If and when I get back to Germany, I will be a little more conservative (perhaps pessimistic is a better word) when it comes to trip planning.

Yes, and the diner sometimes runs out of food.  And yet, you can go almost anywhere, even with the occasional change in travel plans (just call it an adventure.)  Try going from Washington, D. C. to Ottawa (or Montgomery, Alabama) or Chicago to Toronto on a train.

A PROFESSORSHIP? FUHGEDDABOUTIT.

Inside Higher Ed's Betsy Lucal sees the nasty side of neoliberalism at work making higher education jobs less desirable.  Read carefully, though, and you'll see other influences at work.

How soon will it drown us all in its insistence on small government and free markets, competitiveness, deregulation and privatization? Its celebration of ever-lower taxes, consumerism, individual empowerment and self-interest has had dire effects on education in general and on higher education in particular.

Tuition skyrockets, students bear staggering debt burdens, cost cutting must always be prioritized -- even over learning. Institutions lean ever more heavily on poorly paid contingent faculty members (don’t even ask about fringe benefits), pit faculty against administrators and create a culture of accountability that takes time and energy away from the important and difficult work of teaching. Students focus on earning a credential and pray that all the debt they are taking on is worth it. (No wonder many of them only seem to care whether this information will be on the exam and if a course fulfills a particular requirement.)

Was it the Chamber of Commerce, or the nonprofit Advertising Council, that, before anybody coined the word "neoliberalism" (originally to distinguish the Gary Hart Democrats from the Hubert Humphrey Democrats) was pushing "to get a good job, get a good education?"  Fifty years of hearing that (it's inaccurate advice, but that's Mike Rowe's bailiwick) is likely to turn a lot of matriculants instrumental in their focus.

Life as a faculty member is not what it was when I began my first full-time job. As the dean of my college said just a few weeks ago, we used to have fun. We used to deal with everyday, mundane concerns. We used to complain about grading and entertain each other with amusing stories about hapless students. We would cheer when we passed something by vote in a faculty meeting because it was so uncommon.

Now we debate the meaning of DFW rates (drop-fail-withdrawal -- funny how no one talks about grade inflation these days) and wonder not whether, but how much, the budget will be cut this time. We obsess over retention and graduation rates and wait on tenterhooks to find out if our summer courses have sufficient enrollment to be taught and allow us to support our families through those months. We feel pitted against our administration rather than valuable, and valued, partners with it.

Perhaps fretting about attrition rates reflects the business fad of being "data driven."  (Translation: you only do things you can measure.)  But perhaps attrition rates are a consequence of the access-assessment-remediation-retention mindset, where access is a euphemism for "admitting unprepared students."  And the battles with the administration?  Those deanlets and deanlings might exist in order to avoid prosecution by the Office of Civil Rights, or perhaps to implement the identity-politics priorities the faculty were complicit in implementing without proper review, that is, until the demands of the special education bureaucracy made it impossible to teach at the college level any more, even if the intake of Distressed Material was under control.

Start treating college like high school, don't be surprised when it turns into high school, complete with the cliques and the burnouts.

BEWARE THE CONRAIL OPTION.

The presidential debates may not be the final pieces of information voters receive.

Costs for individual Obamacare policies are expected to be 24 percent higher next year. Voters will see for themselves the huge premium spikes when open enrollment starts just a week before Election Day.

Oops.  Depend on the opposition to call attention to the prices.

Insurers are pulling out of the exchanges after losing billions of dollars, leaving people with fewer choices. Deductibles are soaring to as high as $12,000 on exchange policies, and many people say they might as well be uninsured.

This Obamacare inflation impacts everyone. August saw the biggest monthly gain in prices for medicine, doctor appointments and health insurance since 1984, according to a recent report by Kaiser and the Health Research & Education Trust. The average employer-sponsored family policy now costs more than $18,000 a year.

Count on the opposition to point out, in particular, this component of Let Us Continue, which is Mrs Clinton's theme, slogans notwithstanding.

Clinton owns the failures of Obamacare after telling Iowa voters: "I will defend the Affordable Care Act, but as president I want to go further."

So Clinton actually wants to double down on Obamacare, even after seeing public support for the health law tumble. She wants to create another big government "public option" health insurance plan. The "option" would have unlimited calls on taxpayer dollars and government force and would quickly drive remaining private insurers out of the market, leaving people with only the "choice" of a government-run health plan.

First, tie down the private insurers with regulation, then attempt to create a public agency to pick up the pieces. We tried that with railroads.  Fortunately, transportation policy doesn't attract a lot of attention, and on occasion wiser heads prevail.

Perhaps the quasi-public, not for profit cooperatives provide a cautionary tale.

The idea might have more traction were it not for the experience of a similar experiment the nonprofit, citizen-run health insurance cooperatives concocted by Obamacare. The co-op program cost taxpayers $2.4 billion, but 17 of the 23 state co-ops have failed, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to scramble to find new policies.

Nonetheless, supporters of the law proclaim its success to a skeptical public. They boast that the law has reduced the number of uninsured to 29 million still a far cry from the promised universal coverage.

Many of the 10 million receiving insurance through the health insurance exchanges are there because they lost their earlier policies. And Medicaid has been expanded by 16 million since 2010, relegating beneficiaries to one of the worst health care programs in America.

The uninsured rates may be falling, but unhappiness with our health system is rising. Deservedly or not, Obamacare is taking the fall. It has become a symbol of broken promises and distrust in government. It is an albatross for Clinton.

Perhaps those symbols will be sufficient inducement to consider something else.  Interstate competition among insurers?  Health savings accounts?  The end of the bundling of health insurance with employment?

MORE ON THOSE SLOW PROFESSORS.

George Leef is less than impressed with the recent book.  "The Slow Professor is a tedious, self-absorbed, word-salad of a book. Still, it prompts this thought: Why have colleges and universities become so “corporate”?" His hypothesis: it's all that public money, pushing first for greater access (invoke the Reynolds Law) followed by a push for greater completion rates.  There are several economists participating in the bull session.  (The economists are often the contrarians in higher education, whether it's about politics or about holding the line on standards.)

My view: there's enough free agency among academicians, particularly those still holding tenured posts, that academic work life is a bundle of self-made purgatories.

JUST IN TIME FOR BLACK FRIDAY.

The engine terminal at Brunswick, Maine, is now in place (some locals are still not happy about it) and a shopping excursion to L. L. Bean of Freeport, Maine will offer additional rail options.  Restoration of additional passing tracks promise even more trains by sometime in 2018.  We're still a long way from the frequencies and the long-distance service of the mid-1950s, and the summer service to Rockland is gone.  And yet, frequency, connectivity, and food service bring passengers.

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, RECRUITING SERGEANT.

The White House and the anointed doddering successor to Our President continue to suggest that tough talk from Donald Trump only encourages the Sillies.  "'Donald Trump is being used as a recruiting sergeant for ISIS,' Clinton said on Monday morning. 'The kind of language and rhetoric Trump has used is giving aid and comfort to our adversaries.'"  Yeah, those are the intellectual heirs of the people who got the vapors when Ronald Reagan correctly described Yuri Andropov's USSR as an evil empire.

I REPEAT, BECAUSE REPEAT I MUST.

Stephen Moore's "No Thank You, Obama" notes that fifteen years of bipartisan failure oughtn't be cause for celebration.  Plus:  "As the great Reagan economist Arthur Laffer has put it so aptly, we keep punishing success through taxes and rewarding failure through welfare, and then we wonder why we are getting nothing but failure."

AMENITIES DESPITE AUTHORITIES.

Public subsidies for Commuter Rail tend to focus on providing utilitarian transportation for as many passengers as can be crammed onto the cars with little regard for comfort.  Thus the bar car is often threatened, even in the land of the three-martini lunch and the eighty-six-proof-anaesthetic-crutches.  Stop the presses!  Metro-North will be restoring bar cars on rush hour trains out of Grand Central.  "Good news for thousands of commuters, although I must say they don’t look as homey as the originals." Trains and Travel's Jim Loomis goes on to observe, "I’m not sure this qualifies as the first indication that a return to the Golden Age is imminent, but it’s a damn good start!"  The restoration of a state of good repair (Make the New Haven Great Again?) might be accomplished more easily on the rails than in the popular culture.  Chicagoans, however, will continue to have to bring their own (except on those weekend departures when the container ban is in effect.)

THE PROTOTYPES WERE LAID DOWN FOR A DIFFERENT JOB DESCRIPTION.

The contemporary successor to the motor torpedo boat has been under development for at least ten years as a class of littoral combat ships.  They're being built at a shipyard in Marinette, Wisconsin -- presumably safely removed from Iranian PT boats and Russian submarines.  The seventh of the series, LCS 13 Wichita, was launched over the weekend.  They're not steaming properly out of the harbor.

All three littoral combat ships delivered to the Navy from Marinette have suffered setbacks since leaving Wisconsin. Last December, the USS Milwaukee suffered an engineering casualty during its journey to California.  In January, the USS Fort Worth’s engine was damaged while out in Singapore. In mid-July, the USS Freedom sustained damage to its diesel propulsion systems during Navy exercises when seawater got into an engine system.

The engine failures and problems caused by crew members have placed a spotlight on the entire LCS program.

U.S. Rep. Reid Ribble (R-Wisconsin) says the problems with the LCS program aren’t so much the ships themselves, but with all the new technology, there’s a gap in training.

Perhaps accompanied by a lack of urgency, there's nothing on the threat board comparable to putting a bomb-damaged Yorktown into drydock at Pearl Harbor to do enough patching in three days to have her ready to sortie to Point Luck and add her weight to the carriers defending Midway.  (The Japanese thought their four carriers would be sufficient, and Shokaku and Zuikaku went back to Japan for a more leisurely refit.  Oops.)

RUNNING EXTRA.  A Littoral Combat Ship is a powered frigate designed by a committee.

The U.S. Navy effort to abandon the frigate and reinvent it with the quite different and very innovative LCS design was risky, and it largely failed to achieve its objectives. The innovative design did not work out as expected. What many sailors really wanted was a replacement for the 4,100 ton Perrys, which were very popular with their users.

Recent developments in induction-motor and laser-based weapons are likely to render the ships obsolete reasonably soon.

WHAT STANDING ON PRINCIPLE LOOKS LIKE.

Democratic Review quotes, at length, a statement by the Harvard Republican Club that makes as cogent a case as I have seen for #NeverTrump #NeverHillary.

This fall, we will instead focus our efforts on reclaiming the Republican Party from those who have done it considerable harm, campaigning for candidates who will uphold the conservative principles that have defined the Republican Party for generations. We will work to ensure both chambers of Congress remain in Republican hands, continuing to protect against executive overreach regardless of who wins the election this November.

We call on our party’s elected leaders to renounce their support of Donald Trump, and urge our fellow College Republicans to join us in condemning and withholding their endorsement from this dangerous man. The conservative movement in America should not and will not go quietly into the night.

A longtime student of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville once said, “America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”

De Tocqueville believed in the United States. Americans are a decent people. We work hard, protect our own, and look out for one another in times of need, regardless of the color of our skin, the God we worship, or our party registration. Donald Trump may not believe in that America, but we do. And that America will never cease to be great.

It's not clear, for reasons that I've remarked on previously, and for saecular reasons that require further elaboration, what "conservative movement" refers to.  And yet, respecting the separation of powers as spelled out in Article I of the Constitution is clearly conservative, in the sense of respecting established institutions.

A REPUBLIC, IF YOU CAN KEEP IT.

The Milwaukee area Oktoberfest takes place at the Bavarian Inn, which used to be called Old Heidelberg Park, and it has long had a soccer field.  (The field might also have been a drill field for the German-American Bund, but that was a long time ago.)  And during the day of Oktoberfest, there was a game going on.

There's that deep bench in U. S. women's soccer developing (as well as what appears to be a properly organized goal rush.  But as is often the case when you ruin a good run in the grass with the necessity of kicking the ball at the net, no score.)

In the Milwaukee area, the soccer collectives tended to have ethnic names, such as Bavaria using the Old Heidelberg Park field.  Here are three young ladies wearing the Bavaria colours conducting a 50-50 raffle.  (Not bad prizes if you win.)

No longer are the soccer collectives made up of their European tribes.  There were also several young ladies in the red and white colours of Polonia getting in on the Gemütlichkeit.  The soccer moms were quaffing beer, the kids not so much.  Let's be grateful that the Serbia collective and the Croatia collective no longer re-litigate Tito's insurrection.

The raffle didn't sit too well with some of the people attending the festival.  (At weekends, wedding parties visit German outdoor cafes selling small bottles of schnapps for good luck, the raffle might be a Midwestern version of the same thing.  On the other hand, roast potatoes rather than potato salad, and cole slaw along with sauerkraut??)

But give these kids an America to buy into, and an America that buys into these kids, and we'll be OK.

RATES OF RETURN FUNCTION TO ALLOCATE CAPITAL.

After I posted about the recent developments in steel economics research and the mills that closed, I did some digging to find out what happened after the legacy steel companies quit.  (Mostly there's some cheap real estate to be had.)  I also turned up this December 1981 essay by Staughton Lynd, explaining why, in the depths of the shakeout of the steel industry, United States Steel was spending money buying Marathon Oil.

Steel is a very capital-intensive business, and, for this reason, investment in steel is not as profitable as investment in downtown real estate, or chemicals, or, apparently, oil. Therefore, American steel companies have been reducing their steelmaking capacity and investing elsewhere. For American society, which needs a steel industry to retain its economic independence, this raises the question of whether the profit motive can be relied on to reindustrialize steel.

The profit motive can be relied upon.  Mr Lynd, in common with many observers of the time, was looking for the investment in the wrong places.

Today, it is generally recognized that the American steel industry is sick because it has failed to modernize. Imported steel is a symptom - not the disease. The competition of European steel companies may be ''unfair,'' in the sense that there are heavy government subsidies, but this is not true of Japan. Japanese steelmakers can undersell American steelmakers in the American market because they have installed modern equipment that dramatically reduces the cost of making a ton of steel.

That was the received wisdom, back in the day, but all of that scrap metal in the form of abandoned factories and redundant railroads was a feedstock, provided someone could figure out how to get good product out of it.  (That every third world country was exporting steel, and a lot of that steel was Distressed Material, simply contributed more feedstock.)

Every mill closed in Youngstown made steel in antiquated open hearths. An open-hearth furnace takes hours to make a ''heat,'' or batch of steel, that a basic oxygen-process shop, which is standard in Japan, can make in 45 minutes. And not one of the mills closed in Youngstown had a continuous caster to semi-finish the raw steel as it came from the furnace.

Yes, and every mill closed in Youngstown had an annual capacity of two to three million tons of raw steel, located far from a deepwater port, subjecting them to the double disadvantage of unexploited scale economies and high inbound transportation costs.  There was another shakeout in progress, the abandonment of inefficiently small basic oxygen shops.

The most intriguing implication of this research is that the "lethargic" steel producers who postponed the replacement of their open-hearth furnaces or only recently replaced them with large electric furnaces made an optimal choice. Early adoption of a (too small) basic oxygen converter may have been a mistake.

I still revisit those research notes from time to time. But building a model open hearth shop with working smokestacks strikes me as more fun.  But Mr Lynd didn't see the revolution coming.

It remains to be seen whether tax breaks and other subsidies, granted on condition that the money provided be reinvested in steel, would induce U.S. Steel and other steel companies to rebuild aging mills in places like Pittsburgh, Gary, Ind., and Lackawanna, N.Y. If not, the people of the United States will have to consider doing the job themselves. In the 1930's, the Governmen created the Tennessee Valley Authority to provide electric power to areas that private utilities could not profitably serve. A Pittsburgh steelworker has suggested formation of a ''Monongahela Valley Authority'' that could use the power of eminent domain to acquire and operate steel mills that the industry did not wish to modernize.

As I asked a few years ago, "Anybody seen Bethlehem Steel lately?"  Raw steel production in North America is as cost-efficient as anyone's, and the modernization came from outside.  That authority would have kept in place precisely the inefficient capacity that has been wrung out, and it likely would have precluded a lot of the creativity that makes recycling scrap into automotive-grade sheet and heavy structural shapes standard practice.

DETROIT IS WHAT DEMOCRATS DO.

Here's a clip in which Chris Matthews along with McKay Coppins and Katty Kay discuss a leaked Colin Powell electronic mail in which the retired general and secretary of state is less than impressed, shall we say, with the major parties' presidential offerings.  There's the usual Chris Matthews foaming at the mouth about the Cheenies.

Toward the end, Mr Coppins gets into Mr Powell's reservations about "nation building" (rightfully so: the fatal conceit is the fatal conceit and it's harder to translate institutions across cultures.)  But Mr Matthews's followup is instructive.  "We're still trying to figure out Newark and Detroit."  Make of that what you will.

ENFRANCHISE ONLY THE DEGREED?

The Litany of Abuses accompanying the Framing of the Constitution surely includes the limitation of the franchise to men with property and the codification of conditions under which the property became proxy votes.  The Framing, however, has been overtaken by the Fatal Conceit of Governance by Wise Experts.  It's not for the good, argues William Voegeli.

Progressives introduced a new determination to organize and improve modern life by applying, vigorously and if need be forcibly, the insights being uncovered by a clerisy of social scientists. Eleanor Roosevelt, for example, believed that the emergency posed by World War II called for government experts to rationalize every aspect of national life. Three months after Pearl Harbor, she contended that “all of us — men in the services, and men and women at home — should be drafted and told what is the job we are to do.” Only through such regimentation could each of us confidently gain the satisfaction that comes from knowing he was “complying with the wishes and doing the things which those in authority thought should be done.”

The -ism of progressivism is the belief that movement toward a better future is a goal, a right, and the highest imperative. “Progress,” in its most direct, literal sense, simply means getting closer to some objective, one both comprehensible and manifestly superior to the current state of affairs. The early progressives believed that ascertaining and mastering the processes that shaped society and history would move mankind to a better future, just as understanding the natural laws of the physical universe had improved the human condition through steam engines, telegraphs, anesthetics, and other modern marvels.

Liberalism, however, came to regard its faith in progress as untenable. The rejection was, in part, a reaction to historical developments. Complying with the wishes of those in authority lost much of its appeal when the authorities turned out to be men such as Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy, smart fools who provided detailed charts and graphs to justify each augmentation of America’s catastrophic misadventure in Vietnam. At home, liberals came to detest the progressivism of Robert Moses and other power brokers, experts whose idea of urban renewal was to bulldoze any city block that had the temerity to evince charm or social cohesion in ways not part of a government agency’s master plan.

The "liberalism" to which Mr Voegeli refers is the radical chic version, which sometimes these days flies under the rubric of "progressivism" new style, in which the regimentation is tempered by lip service to "diversity" or "inclusion."  But it's still about the Wise Experts.  Robert Moses, Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Jonathan Gruber, policy failure is policy failure.

TIME TO PUNCH BACK.

Paul Rahe, in Ricochet, sees in Unhealthy #CrookedHillary's #BasketofDeplorables remark a rallying opportunity.

Hillary Clinton let the mask slip on Friday. She said out loud what she and a majority of her fellow liberals think about the rest of us, and a great many liberal opinion leaders chimed in to indicate their agreement. Every Republican candidate should seize on this, and they should all challenge their Democratic opponents to repudiate the Democratic candidate’s vilification of their fellow Americans.

There are moments when the truth slips out. We cannot rely on Pravda-on-the-Hudson, on Pravda-on-the-Potomac, and on Pravda-on-the-Airways to do anything but deep-six Mrs. Clinton’s remarks. They will be burned into the memories of the American people if and only if the Trump campaign and the Republicans running for office unite in hammering away at this theme. When this electoral season is over, Mrs. Clinton’s remarks should be the one thing that everyone remembers. For her remarks have one great virtue: they crystallize what everyone fears about her and about today’s Democratic Party.

Heck, anyone who has ever been hung up in strip-mall stroad traffic, because the geniuses who zoned all the land for commercial use, and failed to synchronize the traffic lights controlling ingress to and egress from the mandatory parking craters, ought to recognize that a government which fails at a relatively simple task ought not be entrusted with health care or urban renewal or any of the Hero Projects, and ought only be authorized war powers under the most difficult of circumstances.

Mr Trump is using #CrookedHillary's remarks to motivate voters.

Hillary Clinton made these comments at one of her high-dollar fundraisers in Wall Street.

She and her wealthy donors all had a good laugh. They were laughing at the very people who pave the roads she drives on, paint the buildings she speaks in, and keep the lights on in her auditorium.

Hillary Clinton is an insider, supported by powerful insiders, attacking Americans who have no political power.

Hillary Clinton spoke with hatred and derision for the people who make this country run.

She spoke with contempt for the people who thanklessly follow the rules, pay their taxes, and scratch out a living for their families.

While Hillary Clinton lives a sequestered life behind gates and walls and guards, she mocks and demeans hardworking Americans who only want their own families to enjoy a fraction of the security enjoyed by our politicians.

After months of hiding from the press, Hillary Clinton has revealed her true thoughts.

She revealed herself to be a person who looks down on the proud citizens of our country as subjects for her to rule over.

That's the nature of the gentry.  By all means, read the entire speech.

EXPERT FAILURE.

America's Ugly Strip Malls Were Caused By Government Regulation, argues Scott Beyer in Forbes.  The culprits?  Start with single-use zoning, which might be necessary to allow a relatively simple computer program like the original Sim City to run on a Commodore 64, but which gets in the way of emergence.

Let’s assume, just for the sake of conversation, that nobody finds a corporate fast-food establishment particularly attractive. The visual impact of these places is nonetheless minimal and sporadic in mixed-use, urban settings, where they bump up against different building types, or sit at ground level within buildings. But along many American strip malls, fast-food chains—and other low-budget retail—are clustered side by side, extending into infinity with their loud signage, cookie-cutter design, drive-thru windows and parking lots.

We can thank single-use zoning for this. Most cities’ comprehensive zoning maps separate residential, commercial and industrial uses. They usually allow commercial retail on just a handful of key roads that run from downtown to the suburbs. So that’s where most of the retail ends up. It’s as if the government has taken uses that are fundamentally ugly, and crammed them together, causing the ugliness to spread. People still shop on these strips because they have no other choice, but don’t celebrate the areas themselves, often finding them distasteful and congested.

I wonder if the argument generalizes to New Zealand.

Paraparaumu, North Island, 7 January 2000, as observed from the Wellington to Auckland day train.

The very rules that seek to encourage expansive use of land also encourage cost-cutting.  "Because government regulations are limiting the value that developers can accrue from their land, they throw up something hasty and cheap to get a quick return."  The best thing for government to do might be to go away, notes Rachel Quednau of Strong Towns.  "Until we change the government regulations that induce strip mall development (or until every strip mall fails completely), we're stuck with these low-returning investments in our towns and cities."  Strip mall failure?  Perhaps, in Vancouver, comes the first signs.

At a recent job fair, 3,000 jobs were available but only 500 potential applicants showed up. The minimum wage jobs and poor transit connections will hinder hiring. The lack of a good separated sidewalk and protected bike lane from Tsawwassen to the mall will also thwart local residents who are active transportation users.

Yes, and sometimes the mall developers deliberately keep the bus stops away, so as to make access by deplorables less easy.

GET OUT FROM THOSE BURDENS.

Isn't it Time to De-Escalate the Arms Race?, asks George Leef.  No, it's neither a reprise of the Cold War, or the latest marketing effort for Truck Month.  Rather, it's his suggestion that university administrators stop lusting after Football Glory.

[University of Houston president Renu] Khator isn’t satisfied and wants to get Houston into the Big-12, declaring that “we have no choice but to keep becoming better so we could get into the Big Five.” And if not, she added, it would be “difficult for Houston to sustain” its athletics program.

That’s where we get the “arms race,” since many other universities are similarly trying to improve so they can outshine all the rest and get into a power conference. Huge sums are diverted away from academic programs and into stratospheric salaries for coaches, state-of-the-art facilities for the athletes, bigger and better stadiums, and so on.

But it would be a mistake to think that this only affects a small number of big schools that are at the top of the athletics food chain.

Of course not. The logic of rent-seeking is that each rent-seeker is prepared to spend up to the expected value of the rents in quest of the rents.  Thus, when two new memberships in a power conference open up (just watch, we will see four major conferences of sixteen teams each before this is done), there might be multiple aspirants to those rents.  "After all, with 17 programs in the running to join the Big 12 this time around, at least 15 institutions are guaranteed not to receive an invitation."

But large student fees to support sports the students don't watch (sometimes because they're juggling jobs and making use of on-campus food pantries) have changed some minds in higher education about staying in the athletic positional arms race.

EVIDENCE OF CREATIVE DESTRUCTION.

The productivity gains in North American steel came with massive shakeouts of suboptimal capacity and today's steel business employs about a quarter of the workers it did as recently as the late 1970s.

Here's a #ThrowbackThursday visit to some of the plants that closed.

The gate of the closed Youngstown Sheet and Tube Campbell Works, in Youngstown, Ohio, with the open hearth shop across the footbridge behind.  The still-manicured lawn goes with an office building of Youngstown Sheet.  Sign on the open hearth shop gives speed limits for plant trucks: 30 mph, but not exceeding 10 mph on bridges and ramps.  Memorial Day, 1983.

Along the Mahoning River that weekend, the old Youngstown Sheet Brier Hill Works was partially in operation under the ownership of a minimill company, Campbell Works was closed, the Republic plant to its south was closed, and the United States Steel facilities were gone.

A subsequent trip took me to Homestead, Pennsylvania.

The open hearth plant of United States Steel's Homestead Works was still active.  I asked permission at the guardhouse to take this picture from a public sidewalk on the Monongahela River bridge.  Scrap and alloying ores arrive on the upper tracks, hot metal below.  The slag cars and ingot buggies arrive and leave on the other side of the furnaces, which are in the center of the picture.

Detroit, during the second World War, might have claimed to be the arsenal of democracy, but Homestead had a legitimate claim to be the forges of democracy.

A mill building belonging to Mesta Machinery.  The external stacks suggest an open hearth plant, but they're spaced too closely (compare the Campbell Works picture) and the building does not include the supply tracks on multiple levels characteristic of an open hearth shop.

Blue diesel locomotives are U. S. Steel intraplant power.  Homestead pictures taken 5 August 1983.

WHEN THE VANGUARD LOSES ITS BEARINGS.

John Harris asks, Does the Left Have a Future?  This is a think-piece in The Guardian, thus not to be confused with someone at Reason or National Review spiking the football.

The western left faces three grave challenges, which strike at the heart of its historic sense of what it is and who it speaks for. First, traditional work – and the left’s sacred notion of “the worker” – is fading, as people struggle through a new era of temporary jobs and rising self-employment, which may soon be succeeded by a drastic new age of automation. Second, there is a new wave of opposition to globalisation, led by forces on the right, which emphasise place and belonging, and a mistrust of outsiders. And all the time, politics rapidly fragments, which leaves the idea that one single party or ideology can represent a majority of people looking like a relic. The 20th century, in other words, really is over. Whether the left can return to meaningful power in the 21st is a question currently surrounded by a profound sense of doubt.

Complex adaptive systems tend to do what they darn well please, and when a new social order is emerging, a Vanguard to Lead the Way has the same problems as everyone else, namely, Where Are We, and What's The Most Promising Way to Go?

Meanwhile, as deindustrialisation ripped through 20th-century economies, the instability and fragmentation embodied by the financial and service sectors was taken to its logical conclusion by new digital businesses. In turn, the latter have spawned what some now call “platform capitalism”: a model whereby goods, services and labour can be rapidly exchanged between people, companies and multinational corporations – think of Uber, eBay, Airbnb or TaskRabbit, which link up freelance workers with people who need help with such tasks as cleaning, deliveries or moving home – with little need for any intermediate organisations. This has not only marginalised retailers and wholesalers. It calls into question the traditional role of trade unions, and further reduces the power of the state, which is now locked into a pattern where innovations take rapid flight and it cannot keep up.

In retrospect, the left’s halcyon era was based on a straightforward project. When the archetypal factory gates swung open, out came thousands of men – and by and large, they were men – united by an unchanging daily experience, and ready to support a political force that would use the unions, the state, and the fabled “mass party” to create a new, much fairer world in their monolithic image.

Now, an atomising, quicksilver economy bypasses those structures, and has fragmented people and places so thoroughly that assembling meaningful political coalitions has begun to appear almost impossible.

The new institutions will emerge. But if people who think of themselves as "progressive" reflect on how often their form of progress destroyed the old mediating institutions, perhaps they'll be less destructive in future.

People on the left should be thinking about extending maternity and paternity leave and allowing its reprise when children are older; reviving adult education (often for its own sake, not just in terms of “reskilling”); assisting people in the creation of neighbourhood support networks that might belatedly answer the decline of the extended family; and, most obviously, enabling people to shorten their working week – think about a three-day weekend, and you begin to get a flavour of the left politics of the future.

The deep changes wrought by our ageing society will anyway begin to increase the numbers of people beyond working age, and accelerate the shift away from paid work towards caring. But the most radical shift will be caused by automationand its effects on employment. If the Bank of England now reckons that as many as 15m British jobs are under threat from technology, and if a third of jobs in the retail sector are predicted to disappear by 2025, does the myopic, often macho rhetoric of work and the worker really articulate any meaningful vision?

I expect we'll be revisiting these ideas.