GETTING CAPITALISM RIGHT.

Here's Mark Skousen on what enterprise can deliver. "Andrew Carnegie was right: 'Capitalism is about turning luxuries into necessities,' and the poor benefit even more than the rich."  Yes, provided business delivers the goods.  Trains correspondent Fred W. Frailey calls out the railroads, and, per corollary, the entire cult of shareholder value.

For Class I railroads, record revenues, record earnings ... and unsurpassed congestion and unhappiness among shippers.  Not a good combination.  The best way I know to go out of business is to prosper while your customers suffer.

(Trains print edition, January 2015, page 16.)  It gets better.  "Railroading turns out to be a growth industry only if measured by executive compensation."

More recent reports suggest the freights are moving more fluidly again.  Why?  Hire more crews, repair and replace the locomotives, build additional tracks.

The generalization to other enterprises is left as an exercise.

TRIFECTA.

In a recent update on Marquette University's non-suspension suspension of John "Marquette Warrior" McAdams, I suggested that the university's complaint about a weblog post provoking online impoliteness toward a graduate student was a stretch at best.  "In a world of social media and Rate My Professors, there's plenty of opportunity for dissenting, disgruntled, or simply disgraceful students or observes to identify faculty and graduate assistants who let their freak flag fly, and have at them."  And that's before I discovered some new way of connecting smart phones called Yik Yak, the use of which has already frightened the Perpetually Aggrieved.

University officers are now locked in a panicky debate over how to deal with this new technological scourge. I’m not entirely certain that these administrators realize the value of this admittedly volatile phenomenon. Yik Yak offers faculty and executives alike a new, scary, but undeniably real glimpse into various elements of the undergraduate psyche. Professors can learn about certain patterns of holdover bigotry that inflect campus life in ways otherwise invisible to the adults in the room. We begin to get a sense for the fault-lines in the moral landscape of our school, the flags under which march the regressive forces of prejudice and doomed privilege.

Yes, it involves a certain degree of “who’s getting marginalized this week,” but that question is one we should be considering already. Last year—2014—brought numberless wrenches and fissures on my own campus, and a twisted element of consolation was the opportunity to hear the most reactionary elements lashing out in fear of self-wrought obsoletion. On a calm day, a platform such as Yik Yak provides a glimpse of the workaday stresses in undergraduate life; on the worst days, the platform is like an X-ray that lets us study the cancers of the campus, the malignant growths we thought had gone into remission.

Yeah, it was scary enough when Accuracy in Academia or No Indoctrination (now closed?) had to aggregate the inanities of the self-despising multiculturalists and the loopy ideas and circulate them.  It now happens in real time, and deanlets and deanlings can see the pushback, and perhaps the more thoughtful among them might see something other than "regressive forces" at work.  And embattled former Marquette graduate assistant Cheryl Abbate might have pulled her weblog, a perfect circus of politically correct shibboleths, in response to an emergent student rebellion, not because of anything Professor McAdams posted.

I have a trifecta, though, because a more recent episode of Yik Yak pushback took place at Eastern Michigan University, and the story even merited mention at the house organ of business as usual lowering higher education (behind their paywall).  But a participant in an unofficial Eastern Michigan discussion list shared some of the juicy bits.

In a confidential report on the Yik Yak incident issued last month, Sharon L. Abraham, the university’s director of diversity and affirmative action, said the professors had “described a classroom environment where students talked during lecture, responded aggressively to requests to stop inappropriate behavior, and were generally disrespectful.” It said the professors had “felt threatened when dealing with students in the class who were physically large and male.”

Some Yik Yak posts about the professors suggested racial and cultural divides.

After one of the professors described a topic as too complicated to get into, one student wrote, “Are you calling me stupid? I’m an honors student bitch!”

Another Yik Yak post said, “She keeps talking about Detroit. Bitch, yo white ass probably ain’t never been in Detroit.”

[Professor Elisabeth] Däumer recalls reading the Yik Yak posts directed at her and asking herself, “Just who the hell did they think they are?”

Priceless.  The class in which the Yik Yak talk back took place was a mandatory honors seminar.

First off, the setting (which I kind of knew before, but I think that’s key here): this was a mandatory interdisciplinary studies lecture hall class of 230 first year students, and it met at 9 am on Fridays.  The article says that students “resented” having to be there and were “unhappy” about what had been going on before the Yik Yak incident. If I were a first year student and I was told I had to show up to a lecture hall class on a Friday morning, I’d feel the same way.

I'm not going to get into whether scheduling a class on a Friday morning is productive or counterproductive, although Eastern, in common with many universities that are going to lose students if community college ever becomes "free", offers most of its classes as Monday and Wednesday, or Tuesday and Thursday, or all in one go on one day.  Rather, I want to focus on the offending course, “Interdisciplinary Exploration of Global Issues: The Environment: Space/Place, Purity/Danger, Hope/Activism.” What perfect postmodernist wordnoise, and what perfect irritation of protected-status minorities with the condescension they perceived.  Not exactly the "regressive forces of prejudice and doomed privilege."  More like what happens when an honors program ought to come with an asterisk.

Eastern Michigan's students, staff, and faculty have been dealing with the social media storm since last semester.  There's more in a mid-January posting, and in the comments, specifics of the student discontent.

Although I was not privy to the details of the discussion threads on yik yak, my impression from what my students said they saw seemed more in the order of what Steve Krause was discussing, i.e. words like “bitch” and also a discussion of how unprepared 2 of the instructors were. In fact, according to my class’s discussion, the yik yak threads centered on how disorganized 2 instructors were, how unwilling those instructors were to allow discussion in the course, and how repetitive the material was. (students were very clear that 1 instructor was quite prepared and appeared very professional).

Thus the trifecta. Perhaps we're dealing with a university attempting to distinguish its first-year offerings from those of the community colleges by promoting an honors^(*) program, or other themed learning community or freshman experiences.  Or perhaps we're dealing with a university offering a simulacrum of higher education to a clientele indistinguishable from the intake of the local community colleges.

Thus: students can push back without any provocation from dissident professors, pushback is an emergent phenomenon, and U.S. News continue to sell college ratings.

WON'T THE GAINS BE DISSIPATED IN LAND RENTS?

Good old central place theory.  Here's a Vox essay that may be missing something.

People with similar skills and similar levels of education make a lot more money in New York and San Francisco than they do in St. Louis or Cleveland. You might expect these differences to even out over time, as workers relocate from low-income areas to high-income areas to take advantages of the opportunities there.

To a first approximation, they do. But net of adjustment costs, and subject to the bid-rent curve, the differences might already have evened out.

But that hasn't been happening. Over the last half-century, income differences between metropolitan areas have actually been increasing. One study estimated that this effect is costing the country hundreds of billions of dollars in lost income every year.

It's not hard to figure out why people aren't moving. While the wage difference between St. Louis and San Francisco is large, the difference in housing costs is even bigger. A programmer in St. Louis might get a big raise by moving to San Francisco to take a job at a technology company there, but he might still be left worse off thanks to the much higher rents there. High housing costs make it hard for companies in high-cost areas to attract workers, stunting the growth of some of America's most dynamic industries.

So far, so good. But what, apart from geographic constraints, might be contributing to disequilibrium?  (Left to the reader as an exercise: is the New York area so powerful a Marshallian industrial district for finance, or the agglomeration economies in Silicon Valley so significant, that Chicago or Minneapolis or Sioux City might as well forget about any expansion in finance, or much of flyover country just empty out?)

How much does this cost the economy? In a study released as a discussion draft last year, economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti tried to figure that out. They imagine a world where the housing markets in America's most productive cities became more elastic, meaning that increasing demand led to more construction rather than higher rents.

That's not as easy as it looks.  Brad DeLong picked up the abstract to an earlier version of the paper (now replaced?)

Differences in the nominal wage across cities reflect differences in the marginal product of labor across cities which, ceteris paribus, lower aggregate output. We show that the dispersion of the average nominal wage across US cities increased from 1964 to 2009 and may be responsible for a 13% decline in aggregate output. Changes in amenities appear to account for only a small fraction of this output loss, with most of the loss likely caused by increased constraints to housing supply in highly productive cities. We conclude that welfare gains from spatial reallocation of the US labor force are likely to be substantial.

Perhaps, although the losses to vested interests are also likely to be substantial.

For the last couple of years, San Francisco has been erupting with periodic protests aimed, rather imprecisely, at a nexus of grievances related to gentrification, affordable housing, transportation, the tech industry, newcomers to the city, its changing skyline and Silicon Valley to the south. The city is screaming, although at what its protestors seem a little confused.

"In my view, the whole debate here misses the point," says Enrico Moretti, an economist at the nearby University of California at Berkeley. "People aremarching against Google buses when they should be marching for more housing permits."

At the root of San Francisco's tension is a mismatch of supply and demand: Affluent workers have been flocking to the area for its tech jobs, but as the number of jobs in the region has grown, the number of housing units to accommodate people taking them hasn't remotely kept pace. As a result, rents are going up. Low-income residents are pushed out. Landlords who see more lucrative opportunity in condo conversions have ramped up evictions.

"Once I started seeing what was going on in the San Francisco public debate, I got appalled by the lack of understanding of basic economics among the general public, the protesters," Moretti says. "And it’s even more problematic among policymakers."

The culprit here isn't really the tech industry. It's much-harder-to-protest land-use policy. And from Moretti's point of view, the rest of us should care about how San Francisco and big cities like it restrict new housing because the economic repercussions of such local decisions stretch nationwide.

Perhaps so, although that's why land rents adjust.  Professors Moretti and Hsieh argue that existing constraints on land use contribute to the rising land rents in some cities.

If housing wasn't so expensive in coastal cities, a lot more people would move to New York, Washington, Boston, Seattle, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The data suggests that — even after controlling for factors such as education — workers in these cities are more productive than in other metropolitan areas. The study doesn't try to explain these productivity differences, but possible explanations include better infrastructure, opportunities to learn new skills, and a culture that encourages entrepreneurship.

Hsieh and Moretti estimate that moving American workers to higher-productivity cities could increase the income of Americans by a stunning amount: more than $1 trillion. That amounts to a raise of several thousand dollars for every American worker.

I'll have to locate the working paper and look at it carefully, as there might be agglomeration economies at work to further boost the value of living in those already crowded cities.  Perhaps, though, in addition to relaxing the constrains on relocation to those cities, there are unexploited gains from trade in working around those constraints.  For instance, might a company based in Rockford, Illinois, be better off paying a compensating differential to get people to locate there, rather than paying a higher salary that reflects Chicago or San Francisco or New York costs of living?

BISCOTTI AND CIRCUSES

Book Review N^o. 4 is Joel Kotkin's The New Class Conflict.  Let's say that he's not happy about the alliance of Wise Experts in the academy and in government agencies with rent-seekers in business, and ward-heeler politicians everywhere.  The alliance makes for a mutually self-enriching oligarchy, without necessarily creating an opposed mass of impoverished proletarians in the best Communist Manifesto way.  But Mr Kotkin's Yeomanry class (independent contractors and small business owners) face a fate similar to that of the petty bourgeoisie of Capital.  But with the absence of the factory system, no emergence of a radicalized proletariat incompatible with its capitalist integument is anticipated.  Sadly, neither is much of anything else.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

IRRELEVANT HOTHOUSES.

Swarthmore's Timothy Burke has recently embarked on a series of posts (sailing under the banner of grasping the nettle) attempting to deal with his "perplexity and unease about online discourse, about academia, and about the political moment."  One of the posts deals with privilege-checking.

There’s an odd thing about privilege-checking as it has evolved into a shaming slogan, a sort of taunt. Shame only works if the target has an internal sense that the moral argument of the shamers is valid, or if the shamers reflect an overwhelmingly dominant social consensus such that it takes an iron will to refuse to be shamed.

Would that it were so simple.  Jessica Valenti, responding to a gripe by Jonathan Chait about being hectored for aggrieving the Perpetually Aggrieved, offers a bon mot.  "If the worst thing ‘PCness’ does is make people occasionally feel uncomfortable when they do and say terrible things, we can all live with that."  Or, more simply, that the mannerly thing to do might be to recognize that others experience reality differently, and generalizing from your own experience handicaps your thinking.

VERDICT FIRST, THEN THE TRIAL.

The Red Queen can get away with something like that, at least until Alice dismisses her as part of a pack of cards.

Marquette University's non-suspension suspension of John "Marquette Warrior" McAdams is being compared to standing on a weak hand by two different observers.

First, the legalities, from Gregory Scholtz of the American Association of University Professors.

Given the facts reported to us, it is difficult to see how members of the academic community would perceive Professor McAdams’s continuing to teach as constituting a “threat of immediate harm” to himself or others. Nor are we aware of the administration’s having consulted a duly constituted faculty body at Marquette University about the propriety of the suspension or its conditions.

The administration's action doesn't come as a surprise. For years, the administrative mind-set has been (1) Perpetually Aggrieved find something offensive (2) Administration denounces the offense (3) and then determines what really happened. Meanwhile, fraternities suffer the consequences of double-secret probation, and professors serve non-suspension suspensions.

Wisconsin's Donald Downs, a regular campaigner at Minding the Campus, connects the administrative high-handedness to the proliferation of speech codes and harassment policies, which serve to protect the Perpetually Aggrieved.

Some critics have disapproved of the manner in which the student surreptitiously recorded his conversation with the teacher. And, of course, genuine and strong disapproval is merited regarding the threatening emails some very misguided individuals have sent to the instructor in the wake of Professor McAdams’ disclosure of the conversation. I share such disapproval. But three facts should be noted in relation to these critiques. First, Professor McAdams had no hand in making this recording. Second, to my knowledge he has made no threats of any kind to the instructor or to anyone else. Third, the topic addressed in Professor McAdams’ blog commentary addresses an important issue in higher education today: the status of intellectual diversity and free thought on campus. Numerous supporters and practitioners of higher education have expressed serious misgivings about the way in which improperly expansive harassment policies can stifle free discussion of sensitive intellectual and moral topics. Professor McAdams’ critique in this case dealt with this important concern.

I sincerely hope that the suspension of Professor McAdams is in no way related to the fact that he has publicly criticized the way the University has dealt with harassment training and free thought on campus. Unfortunately, the severity of the punishment, in conjunction with the due process problems associated with the infliction of this sanction, raise questions in this regard.

The administration's linking of Marquette Warrior posts with the opprobrium visited on the graduate student is sketchy in any event.  In a world of social media and Rate My Professors, there's plenty of opportunity for dissenting, disgruntled, or simply disgraceful students or observes to identify faculty and graduate assistants who let their freak flag fly, and have at them.

Marquette administrators have not yet, to my knowledge, responded to these messages or lifted the non-suspension suspension.

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN.

Boston's Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority is once again considering diesel multiple unit cars for commuter rail service.  A Boston Globe article notes, blast from the past.

Preserved RDC-2 in the proper paint scheme, Bedford, Massachusetts.

Boston Globe photograph by John Blanding.

At one time, Boston and Maine owned the world's largest fleet of Budd Rail Diesel Cars, and both New Haven and Boston and Albany ran Budd Cars on some commuter services out of South Station.

The article does not note that the Budd Cars didn't have the oomph to get through heavy snow, and in the middle 1970s, as the cars wore out and the money ran out, the Authority took first to pulling them with diesel locomotives, and then to pulling one of the two engines out of each car.  A diesel pulled the train, and the remaining engine was used to support the lighting and heating on each coach.

With Boston digging out from twelve inches of global warming climate chaos January, just thought you should know.

BABY HUEY GROWS UP.

I just can't get away from decline and fall and prole drift and the appeal of Wal-Mart.  It's successful, its political economy might be that of a monopsony, it's the Redneck Universalnya Magazin (or perhaps someplace you don't go to the day welfare checks come out), it's Railroad Salvage on a large scale.  For Book Review N^o. 3, Charles Fishman's The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company Really Works -- and How It's Transforming the American Economy revisits familiar ground.  Mr Fishman's research includes interviews of workers, suppliers, potential suppliers who said no to the monopsony's terms, and members of senior management in Bentonville.  Two conclusions merit mention.  First, Mr Fishman suggests that the company's profitability is the consequence of a lot of small gains on very thin margins, albeit on great volume.  Thus, he concludes, the company has little opportunity to pay higher wages, or to be less vigorous about squeezing "continuous improvement" (read: outsource production to third world sweatshops) without becoming another unprofitable discounter.  That might not sit well with some of the company's critics. "Economists note that if Walmart paid its employees at least $25,000 a year, a million and a half workers would be lifted out of poverty. That would mean more money staying in communities to support local businesses, helping to create at least 100,000 new jobs." Doubtful.

Second, he suggests that the company's business model, which might have been helpful for a Railroad Salvage sort of dealer in remaindered goods, becomes destructive when it's being used to dictate terms to the likes of Procter and Gamble.  His metaphor: the adolescent still engaging in the behavior of a toddler.  Intriguing, and quite possibly true.  But to conclude by suggesting that senior management look outward, falls flat.  For all of Wal-Mart's success, it is possible for consumers to get on, year after year, without setting foot in one.  Perhaps not enough to get the company to change its behavior, not yet.  But lamenting Wal-Mart's symbiosis with the welfare state (selling cheap crap to welfare recipients while fobbing part of the payroll off on the social service agencies) or condemning the corporate culture riles people up to no effect.  Market tests have steeper grading curves.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

REGROUPING.

What's the best team for The Green Bay Packers to study in the wake of Helpless in Seattle?  Perhaps, the New England Patriots.

Before the Patriots lost back-to-back AFC title games, they blew a 21-3 lead on the road against the Indianapolis Colts at Lucas Oil Stadium in 2007 for the right to go to Super Bowl XLI.

Patriots coach Bill Belichick was only able to run a minute off the clock with his team ahead, 34-31. The Colts had 2 minutes, 17 seconds left to drive 80 yards in seven plays for the game-winning touchdown.

It was a crushing loss for the Patriots.

They responded the next season by going 16-0 and advancing to Super Bowl XLII.

The Patriots haven't finished the job since beating the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl XXXIX, but they certainly have cornered the market on not letting a bad loss set them back.

Since Tom Brady became the starting quarterback in 2001, they have played in nine AFC Championship Games and five Super Bowls. They continually give themselves a chance to wipe away the bad taste of whatever the previous season brought.

"I tell young guys all the time, it's incredible how much harder you have to work the next year just to get back to the same spot," safety Devin McCourty said. "And, I think that makes you realize how important it is to take advantage, when you do get to this area, getting the opportunity to play for a world championship, that you want to take advantage, whether it's studying extra or preparing."

Pray that "take advantage" does not include tampering with footballs. Packer spokesman Vic Ketchman notes that the team's draft and develop formula leaves them in a favorable position. "The Packers’ commitment to the future always gives us hope. Imagine how you would feel today if that was a built-for-now-team that lost in Seattle."

GET TO THE HEART OF THE MATTER.

I recently discovered two posts by Jeffrey Alan Johnson, a deanlet at Utah Valley University, and apparently a believer in free lunches.  But in the middle of his predictable fretting about the difficulties non-traditional students encounter, the message emerges, that Utah Valley, or Chicago State, or Wayne State, or Northern Illinois, or Eligibility Junior, are in the same business as the Ivies.  Let's start with his reaction to Our President's proposed performance rating system for higher education.  (Pretend for the balance of this post that the rating system will be more effective than the non-stimulus-stimulus, or the Tax Preparer Protection and Overpriced Insurance Act.)  A crappy university with a lot of Distressed Material failing to graduate, or to successfully execute an articulation agreement, is going to get a low rating.  That, Mr Johnson notes, will not turn out to the advantage of place-bound applicants.

Non-traditional students already have jobs and families, so they’re tied to a place. Their resources are defined by their own income rather than their parents, and their status as non-college graduates means that they are bearing the brunt of the decline in wages for those without college. And the fact that they didn’t go to college as a traditional student suggests they probably lack the preparation for selective institutions. Unless they are in a large urban area, odds are that non-traditional students are not in a position to choose which school they attend. That is especially true of those looking at two-year institutions.

We'll make some progress when advocates for the non-traditionals start looking at the root causes of failed attempts at second chances.  Those causes probably manifest themselves somewhere around second grade.  Mr Johnson, however, focuses on the death-spiral of returning adults with poor life management skills attending subprime institutions pretending to offer preparation for trades and professions, in an environment where "subprime" is no longer perceived or rumored, rather it now has a government stamp of approval.

So what happens to them when the only college in their area is a low-performing institution? That so many in these positions have knowingly opted for poorly performing but fiercely expensive for-profit institutions tells us that a low rating is unlikely to dissuade someone who sees the only alternative as not getting an education. They will go to low-performing schools. Those schools will likely perform even worse as the rating funnels away better students—and their tuition money—along with increasingly common state performance funding, and makes it even more difficult to recruit quality faculty. But they will still go. And if they graduate, their resume will have the name of a school dubbed, with all the pomp and circumstances that the National Center for Education Statistics can muster, “low-performing,” making it less likely that they will get the good job for which they came to school. And they will still go.

Perhaps. The reason U.S. News sells those college guides, and parents hire brain coaches, and your good public school comes bundled with a granite counter-top is precisely because more than a few aspirants to the upper middle class understand the toxic effect of disengaged, hostile, unprepared, surly, or simply dysfunctional people. Stratification is emergent, and until advocates for so-called social justice grasp that reality, the life of the poor will not improve. Contrary to Mr Johnson, a system of ratings, perceived or with the imprimatur of the Department of Education, can only reflect what others are doing.

And when the choice isn’t real, ratings only increase the stratification of higher education, and with it of American society. Don’t believe me? Look at primary and secondary education.

Yes. The common schools have been disrespecting bourgeois convention for years, and more than half the students in the common schools live in poverty because too many common schools are residually inhabited by people with poor or non-existent life management skills.

WISHFUL THINKING?

Our President has his laundry list of things to do, and so does the opposition.  There's a sometimes spot-on, and sometimes funny, such list laid out in Kurt Schlichter's Conservative Insurgency: The Struggle to Take America Back, material for Book Review N^o. 2.  Part phillippic, part polemic, part plausible, Insurgency might prefigure the changing domestic politics of the next twenty years, or it might be insider positioning for the Pajamas Media moguls.  The premise is plausible enough: another eight years of Hillary Clinton as president, confronting increasingly resistant states, with independent-minded legislatures and Republican majorities in Congress.  Some of the targets -- the legacy press, the elite colleges, the fine arts -- get the predictable treatment.  But Mr Schlichter's characterization of Wal-Mart as simply another enabler of the welfare state is hilarious.  What's missing, though, is any serious consideration of the United States in the world.  Yes, Iran gets nukes.  What happens next, though, might require careful thought.  Perhaps Insurgency exists to keep the opposition cheerful.  The serious work, though, will be in developing coherent replacements for the big-government policies that are failing in ways Insurgency anticipates.

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge.)

WHY CAN'T WE HAVE INTERURBANS LIKE THEY HAVE IN JAPAN?

The Economist highlights one reason for the commercial success of Japan's investor-owned passenger railroads.

JR East, the largest by passenger numbers, does not require any public subsidy from the Japanese government, unlike the heavily-subsidised French network. One reason for its efficiency is that JR East owns all the infrastructure on the route—the stations, the rolling stock and the tracks—meaning there are fewer management teams duplicating each other's work. (By contrast in Britain, for instance, ownership of the tracks and trains is split up.) But the railway also thrives because of a planning system that encourages the building of commercial developments and housing alongside the railway route. JR East owns the land around the railways and lets it out; nearly a third of its revenue comes from shopping malls, blocks of offices, flats and the like. This money is reinvested in the network. In Britain, where planning and transport are rarely aligned, it is hard to create similarly successful commercial developments. Indeed, most of the plans for the areas around the stations of HS2 are vague, and some of the stops along an earlier line, HS1, are still underdeveloped, years after the line was built.

In the Cold Spring Shops collection of obsolete software is the Amiga A-Train simulator, which one wag characterized as "SimTrump".  The player purchases real estate, right of way, and trains, then provides schedules and builds residences and offices, with the hope of making money.  (Looks like there's a way to download a compatible version for newer computers, as well as something similar coming out for Nintendo, if I have any younger readers, please advise.)  The simulation is loosely based on those Japanese rules that allow railroads to be real estate developers as well.

In the United States, it's all illegal.  There's one vestige of the old days left, the Blue and Green Lines of Cleveland's rapid transit began life as the Shaker Heights Rapid Transit, purpose-built for the residents of the eponymous new suburb.  (I've alluded to this interurban previously; perhaps a focused Throwback Thursday is in order.)  In Cold Spring Shops territory, the purpose of The Milwaukee Electric's Rapid Transit Line was to help the anticipated suburban householders who were going to buy their electricity from The Wisconsin Electric Power Company to get downtown to shop and to work.

In like manner, Samuel Insull's Chicago-area power, light, and traction enterprise built the Skokie Valley line of the North Shore in hopes of cashing in on suburban development.  These projects came up short account the housing-market crash we now understand as the Great Depression of the 1930s, and the Public Utility Holding Company Act made such energy and transportation conglomerate firms illegal.  But when you're fretting about the costs of infrastructure, or the absence of rapid transit substitutes for the daily traffic jam, remember your history.

Once upon a time, the power companies built railroad tracks and transmission lines in the same corridor. The purpose of building the railroad was in some cases to secure the franchise to deliver the power, some of which was provided via trolley pole to the railroad cars. And to keep those trolleys busy on weekends, sometimes the power company would build an amusement park at lineside. Chicago's Ravinia and Pittsburgh's Kennywood come to mind; the Pewaukee Yacht Club occupies space near another such amusement park.

And that, dear reader, is why we can't have interurbans like they have in Japan.

SEPARATING EQUILIBRIUM.

The National Football League structures competition in such a way that it's difficult for any one team to remain better than the others for any length of time.  There is, first, attrition of players, broken down by age and sex and the length of the season.  Then there's the inverse-order draft, giving the current poor performers more favorable access to the reserve army of aspirants.  The salary cap constrains spending on high performers, and high-performing veterans can hawk their services on the free-agency market.  In addition, schedules going forward are based on current performance.  Under the current configuration of the league, each team plays six games with divisional opponents each year, four games with the teams of another conference division, and four games with the teams of a division from the other conference.  These divisions rotate predictably.  Two remaining games adjust for performance: a team that wins its division plays all three division winners within its conference.  The rationale is similar to that of a Swiss-system chess tournament, in which successful players face successively stronger and comparably successful opponents.

But Peter Ingemi suggests that the schedule strengthens the already strong teams.

If a team finishes fourth, its remaining two games will be against two fourth place teams.  If they finish second, the two remaining games will be against two second place teams, and if you finish first you are guaranteed to play every division winner in your conference.

And it is that little difference which gives these teams the edge they need.

Rather than being a disadvantage, competing with the best of the best raises their game.  It forces them to get better, to play harder and smarter.  It gives these already elite players that final incentive to raise their game to the level of a champion and allow them to do it year after year.

He's getting some push-back in the comments, and strong objections to the analogy he draws to school choice.  His idea, however, might not be completely wrong.  There's one more dimension to consider, specifically the additional practice time the playoff teams get.  (That may be why there are enough bowl games for all the six-win college teams in the country).

JUST LET THE TRAINS ROLL.

Sometimes, the building of the benchwork and the installation of the tracks is most important.

Sometimes, the best thing to do is see if it works.

More to come.  Stay tuned.

THE DOWNSIDE OF DESEGREGATION.

Instructive essay from Atlanta Black Star.  Via Laura at 11-D, who is uncomfortable with the report, but read and understand.

Brown’s most profound irony may be that answers to closing the achievement gap lie buried in the history of the schools that Brown’s implementation destroyed. What are the answers? Dedicated teachers. Strong principals. Order. Discipline. High expectations. Community and parental support. It is astonishing how many Black children attended schools during segregation that delivered on these objectives, and how few do so now.

Turn the page.

As Black children were put into an environment perceived as controlled by whites, the phenomenon of young Black kids equating academic excellence with “acting white” arose. In the Black schools, Black students largely cheered their classmates for achievements. But after desegregation created a clear division of white and Black, the association shifted and Black students began to tease one another by pushing their smart peers into the ‘white’ category. Ever since then, we have seen that Black kids tended to perform more poorly when mixed with whites.

That "perceived as controlled" is perceptive.  Thus did "order" and "discipline" and "high expectations" and deferring gratification become racialized.  The cult of authenticity and the poisonous illogic of social construction have deprived generations of young people, now, of the opportunity to develop the life-management skills of the middle class.

SEEK IT IN THE HEAVENS.

There's a Socialist Alternative response to Our President's most recent laundry list.

Six years ago, Obama was elected on the hope that he would represent the millions, not the millionaires.

When Obama delivered his first State of the Union address, Democrats occupied majorities in both the House and Senate.

Today, after massive disappointment and disillusionment for the American people, he faces Republican majorities in both branches of Congress. Six years later, will millions of Americans finally get the president they voted for?

Rather than provide a national call for action, the speaker appears to be questioning the utility of building a new playground for the Seahawks.

Yet while cities like Seattle have to deal with astronomical rent increases and gentrification, we are simultaneously facing cuts to federal funding for low-income housing.

Here in Seattle I along with public housing tenants and community activists just led a successful battle to stop a 400% rent hike for low-income housing in Seattle.

I hope this example of resistance and struggle can spread nationally where other cities are confronted with similar attacks.

Socialist Alternative, tenants, and I are campaigning for emergency measures like rent control to address this spiraling crisis.

What the speaker decries as "gentrification" is simply some of the middle class taking its higher incomes upward.  Rent control, or the creation of new public housing complexes, will not change that dynamic.

We need to build our own political voice, a mass political party for working people.

Despite Obama’s speech today, bitter experience has shown we cannot rely on him to deliver.

We must work to build independent movements of working class people, of young people, of women and people of color, and the LGBTQ community.

To fight towards affordable cities, health care and education for all.

Yes, and every time the Democrats attempt to build a majority coalition out of various out-of-the-mainstream people, they only antagonize people in the mainstream.  Socialists, on the other hand, going back at least to George Orwell, have always attempted to appeal to the out-of-the-mainstream freakazoids, with results similar to those we read above.

PREPOSTEROUS.

John "Marquette Warrior" McAdams posts his dean's rationale for being banished from campus, and his counselor's response, summarized above.  A comment on the post raises the possibility of a Privacy Act violation, something the university has not yet formally pursued.

LET PETTY TYRANTS SHAKE THEIR FREE TICKETS.

Reason picks up a particularly stupid referendum offered to students at Kentucky.  One free speech zone, multiple free speech zones, or no preference.

Despite being part of a survey, the question should come with a single correct answer: Free speech is guaranteed on all campus property under the First Amendment and should be encouraged everywhere by an institution of higher learning, you unbelievable tyrants. Needless to say, this wasn't listed as one of the three possible responses.

Susan Kruth of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education correctly characterizes the referendum as First Amendment Violations in Two Flavors.  But participate in the referendum, get a chance at a scholarship that will cover the cost of one book, or some tickets to watch the current crop of one-and-done basketball stars.  Some people sell their freedom cheaply.

So called free speech areas are unconstitutional, administrative fears notwithstanding.

PERSPECTIVE.

Our condolences to the extended family of Pennsylvania Deputy District Attorney Joseph McCarthy, brother of Packer head coach Mike McCarthy.

Packers president and CEO Mark Murphy released the following statement Wednesday night:

"The Packers family was very saddened today to learn of the passing of Joseph McCarthy III, the younger brother of Mike McCarthy. Our sincere condolences are with Joe and Ellen, Mike and Jessica, and the entire McCarthy family.

"The McCarthy family appreciates the overwhelming support they have received, as well as the respect for their privacy, during this difficult time."

AFTER THE ABANDONMENT.

Early in the morning of 21 January 1963, The North Shore Line ceased operation.

To commemorate its abandonment, we saw images of the railroad in its final years.

At the time, I promised to follow up with images of the North Shore Line, post-abandonment.

The following post is extensively illustrated.  Click to enlarge.

BLIND SQUIRREL FINDS NUT.

Ezra Klein, somewhere down his laundry list.

If there is a deeper crisis that the Obama administration is responding to, it's the crisis of labor-force participation. One reason unemployment is down to 5.6 percent is that millions of people have dropped out of the labor force — they've stopped looking for work, at least so far as the government can tell. That may be because they can't find it, or it may be because the work they can find simply doesn't pay enough.

There's probably a dissertation being started, somewhere, on the effects of the Tax Preparer Protection and Confusing Insurance Act on the incidence of part-time jobs.  The most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics survey has the raw U-Six unemployment rate falling from 13% to 11.1% of the labor force; if my subtraction is correct, the percentage of the labor force "employed part time for economic reasons" fell from 5.1% to 4.4% of the labor force.  The proportion of discouraged workers has fallen as well; whether that is because of anything Washington has done to for us is also subject to further review.

And Reason's Nick Gillespie suggests that the message, and the method, are life-expired.

Obama's proposals are not merely incremental but dumb. Make two years of community college as free, ubiquitous, and doubtlessly rotten as K-12 education! Push students into robotics and nursing (decades ago it was computers and Russian)! Give parents more tax dollars to spend on day care! Tax American corporations into coming back to the U.S. while using federal money and pressure to expand their markets overseas!

There's nothing new or exciting in any of this sort of slop. What there is is what my colleague Matt Welch calls "magical pain-free prosperity" for everyone. Got a problem? Get a program! Deficits are down, so let's not talk about rising mountains of federal debt that's tripled on Obama's watch. Instead, let's talk about increasing federal spending. Let's talk about regulating gas and oil more tightly even as we celebrate becoming energy independent. Let's talk about getting "dark money" out of politics even as Obama set records for raising money himself. Let's talk about a new spirit of bipartisanship in the same speech in which you castigate your opponents as putting politics before principle and human decency.

My point here isn't that Obama is particularly awful on any of these scores. It's that he—and his speech on Tuesday—is perfectly representative of the played-out politics of what we might call the long 20th century, an era of mega-government, mega-business, and mega-planning.

And yes, the limitations of Four of Five Experts Agree are visible, all around us.  The transition to that new era is likely to come as a surprise, and to be messy.

PERSPECTIVE.

Two youngsters understand that the outcome of a football game might be small in the scheme of things.

After Seattle scored in overtime I noticed the young girl was crying and still sitting in her seat. Her father talked to her and gave her a hug. When we were leaving I asked the father if the girl was crying for joy by the win and to my shock he told me no, she was crying because she wanted the Packers to win because she knew my son had lost his dog and she thought he needed this more then she did. I kept this to myself on the flight home.

While my son was having our dinner meal he looked at me and said he was glad that Seattle had won. I was surprised and ask him why. He looked at me and told me the girl sitting next to him had lost her cat to a dog attack only the day before and he wanted her to have something to help her feel better.

UNIVERSITIES ARE FAILING AT THEIR MISSION.

Might as well just say it: garbage in, garbage out.

On average, students make strides in their ability to reason, but because so many start at such a deficit, many still graduate without the ability to read a scatterplot, construct a cohesive argument or identify a logical fallacy.

“Even if there is notable growth over four years, many students are starting at such a low point they may still not be proficient at the point of graduation,” said Jessalynn K. James, a program manager at the Council for Aid to Education, which administered the test. The CAE is a New York-based nonprofit that once was part of Rand Corp.

The exam, known as the Collegiate Learning Assessment Plus, measures the intellectual gains made between freshman and senior year. The test doesn’t cover subject-area knowledge; rather it assesses things like critical thinking, analytical reasoning, document literacy, writing and communication—essentially mimicking the baseline demands for professionals.

David Brooks is thinking about Our President's so-called free community college, yet identifies the fundamental problem.

Community colleges are not sticky places. Many students don’t have intimate relationships with anyone who can guide them through the maze of registration, who might help bond them to campus.

You’d figure out the remedial education mess. Half of all community-college students arrive unprepared for college work. Remedial courses are supposed to bring them up to speed, but it’s not clear they work, so some states are dropping remediation, which could leave even more students at sea.

You’d focus on child care. A quarter of college students nationwide have dependent children. Even more students at community colleges do. Less than half of community colleges now have any day-care facilities. Many students drop out because something happens at home and there’s no one to take care of the kids.

In short, you wouldn’t write government checks for tuition. You’d strengthen structures around the schools. You’d focus on the lived environment of actual students and create relationships and cushions to help them thrive.

I think that's called inculcating the life-management skills of the middle class.  Develop self-discipline with eight year olds, maybe the incidence of family emergencies goes down, maybe the self-inflicted deficiencies in reading and arithmetic become rare.

THE IRON BOATS GO AS THE MARINERS ALL KNOW.

The winter lay-up, and maintenance, is under way at Sturgeon Bay.  There's something jarring about the U.S. Steel fleet now sailing under the Key Lakes flag, and Inland's as Central Marine.  Some of the historic names remain, including Interlake, Algoma, and Canada Steamship.

YES, YOU'VE HEARD IT ALL BEFORE.

Reason's Matt Welch composes the State of the Union address using snippets of fifty previous speeches.  It's relatively short, and the critic might suggest there aren't enough "We must ..." or "I call on Congress ..." (yes, a few are there, but think frequency of the Hero leitmotif as opposed to that of Loge's in your composition.)  In the same magazine, Steve Chapman proposes that a president comply with the Constitution in a simpler way. "You may want to skip the State of the Union address and prepare for something humbler, like the Super Bowl." Sorry, contemplating the AFL - NFL Playoff Game is still painful.  But, in much the same way that the game has become an excuse for six hours of companies attempting to sell colored water in blue cans to dumb guys, the speech has become more about the wardrobe malfunctions and the pre- and post-game.  "But most people who watch most likely will do so out of a heavy sense of civic duty rather than any urgent interest or any expectation that they'll learn much." I'm not like most people.  For pre- and post-speech coverage, it's simple.  I'd rather look at Megyn than at Rachel.  There will be enough going on around the web that if I miss an egregious wardrobe malfunction, er, gaffe, somebody will catch it for me.

Presidents, of course, love these occasions for letting them occupy the undisputed center of attention, basking in waves of applause. The occasion dramatizes the theme of the 2008 book The Cult of the Presidency, by Cato Institute analyst Gene Healy: the chief executive as "the great leader of the Progressives' dreams, Herbert Croly's 'Thor wielding with power and effect a sledge hammer in the cause of national righteousness.'"

The State of the Union address has grown in step with presidential presumption. It's a conspicuous symptom of a dangerous malady: We expect too much of our presidents and limit them too little.

Whether this event is still worth their time, however, is doubtful. If there was ever a time that direct exposure to presidential eloquence could melt the hearts of hostile legislators, it has passed. Even the public seems to have acquired immunity.

Perhaps that's a good thing.  It's less about public-affairs programming and more about posturing by the Wise Experts.

WHERE THE EXCESS CAPACITY IS.

We noted Chicago State University failing to attract students, and cancelling classes in a manner that the pre-Amtrak passenger train operators can only envy.  Chicago State faculty note that a similar scrubbing of class schedules took place on the other side of Chicago, at Northeastern Illinois. " At Northeastern Illinois University, a number of adjunct faculty are taking—at great risk to themselves—a leading role in both organizing efforts and mobilizing students to protest arbitrary and capricious course cancellations by their administration."  Chicago State and Northeastern are institutions particularly exposed to Our President's community college subsidies.  (Decision making goes on at the margin: does anybody seriously expect Truman College to poach students from Northwestern?)  Many of the cancellations at Chicago State and at Northeastern are general education courses, precisely what the community colleges claim to be adept at offering (and with a full slate of offerings through the day and evening with those working adults in mind.)  I wonder when the Illinois Board of Higher Education will stop hassling religious colleges and look again at the utility of the state institutions whose budget requests they review.

A RIGHTEOUS PROFESSOR.

"Denying due process because of emotionally driven outrage is not the way to get justice, rather, it’s an impediment to justice."  Indeed not.  But who says universities respect due process?

Charles McGregor McCance, Senior Director of Media Relations at U.Va., would not say if the university would offer an apology for its response toward campus fraternities following the Rolling Stone article. In an email to the Examiner, McCance referred to the ban on fraternity activity as a "pause," and claimed that it was "not a punishment of any kind," noting that it only applied to social activities and nothing else.

That's as convoluted as John McAdams's continued non-suspension suspension at Marquette.  "Completing the process of the catch" is clarity itself when contrasted with the convolutions university totalitarians engage in.

PLAY SIXTY.

That was a difficult Sunday for Green Bay Packer fans.

Trailing, 19-7, with 3 minutes 52 seconds left, the Seahawks scored two touchdowns in a span of 44 seconds to take the lead. Aaron Rodgers then needed just a little more than one minute to maneuver the Packers into field goal range and Mason Crosby tied it with a 48-yarder to force overtime.

Then Russell Wilson — who threw four interceptions and had a first-half quarterback rating of 0.0 – needed just six plays to end it, the final one a 35-yard touchdown pass to Jermaine Kearse, who caught the ball in the end zone with cornerback Tramon Williams draped all over him.

Quarterback Aaron Rodgers noted the final two minutes weren't the only time things went wrong.

"You can't let them complete a pass for a touchdown on a fake field goal," Rodgers said, "you can't give up an onside kick and you can't not get any first downs in the fourth quarter and expect to win. And that's on top of being really poor in the red zone in the first half. Put all of that together, that's how you lose games.

"This was a great opportunity. We were right on the cusp."

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel helpfully compiled a list of the most egregious blunders.  Not for the faint of heart.  And that, despite Seattle coming out flat.

A powerful team with designs on becoming the first Super Bowl repeat champion since New England in 2003-'04, the Seahawks were flat, loosely prepared and obviously missing several key performers lost to injury.

Alvin Bailey, forced to start at right tackle when Justin Britt was a surprise scratch (knee), was taken to school early and often by Julius Peppers. Wilson's passer rating at the half was 0.0. The passing game was null and void.

The Seahawks, even with their leather-lunged fans screaming throughout, looked inept.

And thus the battle flag will stay the same for another season.

Now, though, comes the recriminations and the second-guesses.  First, though, some perspective.  Since the 2007 season, the Packers have made the playoffs in seven of eight campaigns, with three trips to the conference championship and one Super Bowl victory.  Is that a record of underachievement, or an opportunity for the veterans of yesterday's loss, who will comprise somewhere around two-thirds of the 2015 team, to take an education from it, and return to camp with the resolve and the determination to let the thing be pressed?  Or is the world we live in one in which the old Black and Blue Division is the football equivalent of Harold Stassen, getting a representative into the tournament to be excused in the first round?

Thus, the Seahawks will play the Patriots for the title.  The Patriots have been to the Super Bowl eight times, winning three.  (They were on the receiving end of a beat-down by William Perry and the Chicago Bears, just before I hired out at Northern Illinois.)  Is that a record of underachievement?  Alternatively, is the tournament just a darned difficult one to win?

THE DOWNSIDE OF BROADLY SHARED PROSPERITY?

I'm deliberately using an expression popular on the left to note a new outburst of sectarianism on the left.

The conclusion that the world's dominant economic model—a globalized form of neoliberal capitalism, largely based on international trade and fueled by extracting and consuming natural resources—is the driving force behind planetary destruction will not come as a shock, but the model's detailed description of how this has worked since the middle of the 20th century makes a more substantial case than many previous attempts.

Some days its tough to be trendy and radical. The 1950s went from an era of Babbitry (the immediate perception) to an era of less inequality and union contracts generating middle class incomes (a more recent perception) to capitalism sowing the greenhouse gases of the planet's destruction.  And globalization -- the Perpetually Aggrieved are troubled more by the losses of purchasing power in the Rust Belt than they are by the emergence of two or three United States's worth of middle classes elsewhere -- is now a contribution to that destruction.

A worrying trend, notes the paper, is how a growing global middle class—exemplified by those in the BRICS nations of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—is an increasing threat to the planet as the consumer mindset established in the OECD nations, particularly the U.S., spreads.

Reason's Ronald Bailey proposes that people contemplate a trade-off. "Is the energy and climate debate really an argument about morality, pitting those whose standard is a flourishing humanity against those whose standard is a burgeoning natural world?"  Perhaps, or perhaps it's the Perpetually Aggrieved, making yet another "see that big house, see all those little houses" assertion.

Before the Industrial Revolution, human societies were mainly powered by human muscles. The average person burns 2,000 calories per day. A gallon of gasoline contains 31,000 calories, the amount energy a human body burns in 15 days. The machines that Americans use every day to power their homes, commute, work, and play, consume about 186,000 calories per person—the equivalent of 93 human servants consuming 2,000 calories daily.

Here's one calculation (I have not reviewed the model or studied the footnotes) of the effects of continued fossil energy use in the presence of anthropogenic warming.

Without climate change, people in 2100 would supposedly be 10 times richer. It is really more just for people today with global average per capita incomes of $10,000 to sacrifice so that people living in 2100 will have average incomes of $100,000 instead of only $80,000?

Or for people, worldwide, to go cold turkey on fossil fuels, and return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when knighthood was in flower and life, even for the titled nobility, was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short?

THE CULTURE IS MORE IMPORTANT.

Ron Lipsman might be relying too heavily on the Cult of the Presidency in arguing to reverse more than a century of institutional decay.

The progressive remake of the United States is now a work that is just over a century in progress. One can argue that its political debut dates to 1900 – the year that Teddy Roosevelt entered the White House; or perhaps 1912 – when Wilson became president; but certainly no later than 1913 – upon the establishment of the Federal Reserve and the passage of the 16^thand 17^th amendments to the Constitution [income tax and direct election of senators]. As I said, a little more than a century.

I shan’t review in detail the myriad ways that the progressive putsch has changed America from a free market, limited government, bourgeois culture, constitutional republic that maximized individual freedom into a big government, crony capitalistic, libertine cultural mess that emphasizes group rights and government dependency. Let me just say that the march from the former to the latter has been relatively steady – under both Democrat and Republican administrations – with major lurches to the left under Roosevelt and Johnson.

It's true that activist presidents, particularly of the self-styled progressive type, and with the cheerleading of the academy, can advance the centralization of government power.  The core challenge, however, is one the cannot be met by vanguardism.

Classic American culture celebrated individual liberty, limited government, free market capitalism, strong morals grounded in religion, intact traditional families and vibrant cohesive communities, individual responsibility and the meritocracy, and American Exceptionalism – in particular, the idea that America is a model and force for good in the world. That culture has been supplanted by one that values: group rights, big government and crony capitalism, loose morals and banishment of religion from the public square, global American weakness and disengagement, and an obscene focus on the warts in American history. It is little wonder that in such a culture, the least experienced, most anti-American, anti-Constitutional, radically left, lawless president in American history could be elected and re-elected.

We must recapture the culture. It took the left a century to overthrow America’s classic culture. It may take us a century to win it back. A program for doing so is for another essay. What we need now is not just another Reagan, but a succession of triple C presidents who understand the cultural issue, as well as the foreign and economic policy issues, and who have the requisite ideas, understanding and political skills to bring about a conservative renaissance. Through their leadership we can take back our country.

First the horse: emergence of a popular rejection of the trashy, splintery common culture, and the trash-enabling self-despising multiculturalism.  Then the cart: traditionalist-libertarian majorities in legislatures and traditionalist-libertarian governors, and a sequence of presidents.

NOT STUDENT CENTERED.

Five years ago, Chicago State University replaced one hack president, Elnora Daniel, who indulged herself like a third world dictator, with another hack president, Wayne Watson, who brooks dissent like a third world dictator.  Chicago Tribune editorial writers commented, "Students at Chicago State are steamed about a selection process that seems destined to perpetuate the status quo at their school."

One way for a student to avoid the status quo at what remains a dropout factory is to not enroll in the first place.

Enrollment in Fall 2010: 7362. Enrollment in Spring 2015: 4800? If our enrollment drops that low, the percentage decrease since Fall 2010 has reached nearly 35 percent. How in the world does anyone in charge of anything retain a position with such a performance? It is long past time for someone to back up a truck to the Cook building and fill it with the people who have put us in this position. Get these people out of here while there is still a school left (as horribly wounded as it is) to salvage.

The university is in such a death spiral that the deanlets and deanlings had to cancel numerous core courses for lack of enrollment.

And the south side of Chicago is still subject to the laws of the United States of America.  Thus, although the neighborhood might look like the third world, a university administrator cannot suppress dissent in the third world way and get away with it.

But will there be any students left for the dissident professors to teach by the time their lawsuit is adjudicated?

A JOURNEY THAT CAN'T BE COMPLETED.

Destination: Freedom's David Peter Alan takes advantage of the temporary, freight-disrupted Empire Builder schedules to make some day trips along Rocky's Road.

Still, the temporary schedule furnished this writer with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel to some communities that were scheduled conveniently, as well as an opportunity to view some scenery that is not normally seen by daylight. This writer took that opportunity for ten days last August. With the exception of one segment, the entire journey was planned to take advantage of the temporary schedule. The results were glimpses of scenery that few riders can observe, along with time to visit some towns where a visit could not be scheduled conveniently under the train’s traditional schedule. Many of those communities are not served by any intercity transportation, except the Empire Builder.

I think we've heard this song before.

The journey started on a bus, from Chicago to St. Paul, Minnesota on Monday night, August 5^th. Many years ago, there was a train that ran between those cities on an overnight schedule, but only a bus does that today. The reward for suffering through the night on a bus was the opportunity to explore the newly-restored St. Paul Union Depot and ride the new Central Corridor (“Green Line”) light-rail line between the Depot and downtown Minneapolis.

Yes, your only Amtrak alternative is to break your journey on the Builder and spend a night in the Cities. No more North Star (the Amtrak option) or Black Hawk (the Burlington connection to the Western Star and Mainstreeter) or Pioneer Limited (Milwaukee took it off a year before Amtrak.)  West of the Cities, there's only the Builder. "It's possible that the rationalization of service under Amtrak auspices destroyed much of the connectivity possible in the upper Midwest, such as Crookston to Winona or St. Cloud to LaCrosse."  Sic transit peregrinus Destination: Freedom.

The temporary schedule was inconvenient for many travelers, and it seems unlikely that people will miss it. It meant a longer trip time, with actual trip time usually considerably longer, due to significant delays. Even without those delays, the temporary schedule was less convenient for most riders than the regular schedule, on which the train again operates. Still, the temporary schedule allowed for some opportunities that were not available before it went into effect, and are not available any more.

The temporary schedule illustrated a difficulty that is inherent with a schedule that operates only a single daily train over a route. On such a schedule, it is convenient to visit some communities, and extremely inconvenient to visit others. In some places, the only train each day stops in the middle of the night. In other towns, the trains stop so close to each other in time that nobody can schedule a visit to those towns and expect to see what those communities have to offer a visitor.

Over the years, many advocates and ordinary travelers have said that Amtrak’s problem is not that it operates too many long-distance trains (as some elected officials have said), but too few. This view makes sense. If Amtrak’s routes have two daily trains in each direction, rather than only one, more travelers could leave their points of origin, reach their destinations, or both, at convenient times. A tourist could schedule a visit to a community and get on a train leaving town, without being stuck there for 24 hours (or up to three days on the two trains that run only three times a week).

Before Amtrak started in 1971, there were many long-distance routes where the railroads operated two or more daily trains in each direction. Most of the current Amtrak routes had that level of service, and so did many others, which now have no service at all. Throughout its history, Amtrak seldom operated a second daily frequency on any of its long-distance routes. Still, ridership is growing and the present glut of oil on the market will not last forever. In the short run, the battle to keep from losing the present Amtrak long-distance network, skeletal as it is, will continue. In the long run, the nation will need more trains, including a greatly-expanded network of long-distance passenger trains.

Yes. Frequency matters. And the freight railroads might see the value of having additional trackage with some of the capital and maintenance costs covered by Passenger Rail operators.

NO SUCH THING AS FREE COMMUNITY COLLEGE.

Our President proposes to cover tuitions for all eligible applicants to community colleges.  There properly is more controversy involved on the merits of such a proposal, which is likely to be rolled out at the Campaign Speech in the Capitol (oh, ok, the State of the Union address) in the next week or so, than there is on the meaning of "completing the process."  (By contrast, completing the square is easy.)

The dean at Pioneer Valley Community thinks about the administrative implications, at least one of which is of particular importance at the land grants and mid-majors.

If I worked at a Compass Direction State, I’d be concerned. If community colleges start to siphon off significant numbers of prospective freshmen and sophomores, that would have impacts on enrollment and finances at four-year colleges. They would have to get clearer about the value proposition they offer students, which is not a bad thing. On the other hand, the four-year publics would have much more incentive to be receptive to transfer students, who in turn would save significant amounts of student loan debt. The savvier four-year publics could turn this into a positive, though not without a bumpy transitional period.

It's not easy.  Articulation agreements, which are de rigueur in Illinois, make transferring from community colleges to the state universities simpler, and lead to efforts to create themed course clusters, or themed floors on residence halls, or perhaps to provide big time sports in a way that the community colleges don't.  (Northern Illinois have such an event coming up on 19 September.)

What students have to do to be eligible for the tuition subsidy is likely to be contested.

If community college becomes free, I could see contradictory pressures on “performance” as measured in graduation and transfer rates. On the one hand, lowering the barrier to entry even more could lead to greater “churn,” as students are able to move in and out as needed.  As Tressie McMillan Cottom has argued, we should see that as a feature, not a bug, but our current performance measures would register that as system failure. (In this context, Obama’s repeated references to “responsible students” were a bit grating.) On the other hand, if moving from means-tested aid to universal entitlement brings more middle-class students, who have had stronger academic preparation, the numbers could jump.  They’d also bring some political protection, since universal programs are harder to attack than programs aimed specifically at the poor.  In any event, a dramatic shift in the nature of the beast would require a serious rethinking of how we measure performance.

The government cuts the checks, but individual professors will have to deal with the special pleading by students who think of themselves as responsible, and yet are not making the grades to keep the government subsidy coming.  Megan McArdle extends.

I suspect that this plan will mostly help subsidize people who could have afforded tuition on their own, while encouraging marginally attached students to stay enrolled. It's not the worst way to spend government money, but in a world of limited resources, it's probably not the way I'd choose to spend that money.

Particularly in a world where developing the life-management skills of the middle class is optional.

If you graduated high school without mastering basic math and reading, and can't complete the remedial courses offered by your community college, what are the odds that you are going to earn a valuable degree? Why are we so obsessed with pushing that group further into the higher education system, rather than asking if we aren't putting too much emphasis on getting a degree?

Asking that question usually raises accusations of elitism, of dividing society into the worthy few and the many Morlocks who aren't good enough for college. I would argue instead that what's elitist is our current fixation on college.  It starts from the supposition that being good at school is some sort of great personal virtue, so that any suggestion that many people aren't good at school must mean that those people are not equal and valuable members of society. And that supposition is triple-distilled balderdash.

Not good at high-concept academic stuff, good at something useful, and dependable: fine. Not good at anything and irresponsible to boot: time for a reality check.  Perhaps, as Tyler Cowen puts it, "Overall my take is that the significant gains are to be had at the family level and at the primary education level, and that the price of community college is not a major bottleneck under the status quo." Indeed.  By the time the Distressed Material has been socially-promoted out of high school, it's not the tuition that is a barrier to completion.  "Educational folly," suggests Neal McCluskey.

Of course, one of the biggest problems in higher ed is that for so much of it, someone other than the student is paying the bill, tamping down students’ incentives to seriously consider whether they should go to college and what they should study if they do. This proposal would only exacerbate that problem, essentially encouraging people to spend two years in community college fully on the taxpayer dime while they dabble in things they may or may not want to do—and as they maintain a pretty low 2.5 GPA—then maybe focusing a little more when the two years is up and they have to pay something themselves.

Or, after those two years, blaming The System or elitist professors or The Rules or any other convenient object of abuse for their failure.  Cue Michael Filozov.

If community college becomes “free,” it will attract even more unserious students than the ones already enrolled in community colleges.  Anecdotally, I’d say that about half the students in community colleges are not ready for college-level work.  (I worked at one community college in which the department that offered the most course sections of any department on campus was the remedial education department.)  Many students enroll in community colleges simply because they were handed a high-school diploma based on grade inflation and social promotion and have no clue what to do next.

It's a blessing to have a prosperous enough society in which young people can spend some time figuring out what to do next, but the access-assessment-remediation-retention model of higher education stacked on top of the lax K-12 system contributes to depriving young people of the framework from which to commence figuring.

NOT IN OUR SOUTH END ZONE.

The Green Bay Packers continue a recent winning streak against Dallas.  For the first time in XLVII years the Cowboys didn't host the Packers in the playoffs.

A sports columnist concedes, the Packers beat the Cowboys, fair and square. "Too many lesser Packers made key plays in this one." We refer to a football team for a reason.  The game, however, featured a late coach's challenge involving "completing the process of the catch."  That phrase, itself, suggests inordinate complexity, and perhaps the way to demonstrate the folly of a rule is to comply with it.  Incomplete pass, Packers take over on downs, the four-minute stall works as intended.

Referee Gene Steratore explained after the game why the officials overturned the catch.

“Although [Bryant] is possessing the football, he must maintain possession throughout the entire process of the catch,” Steratore said. “In our judgment, he maintained possession but continued to fall and never had another act common to the game. At the time he lands, the ball hits the ground, it comes loose, which would make that incomplete.”

Steratore said that Bryant’s elbow hitting the ground before the ball didn’t matter. He said elbows and knees are “irrelevant” when a receiver is “still going through the process of the catch … he must complete the entire process with the football.”

That is the rule, and its application contributed to the Bears securing home field for the 2010 playoffs.  A Detroit Lions fan attempted to make sense of the rule, but couldn't.

If the call was correct then the rule is bad. Anyone can see this. This is a direct product of the league trying to legislate out judgment. If game officials had the leeway to use reasonable judgment in rules interpretation then this would have been a catch. What makes this particularly outrageous though, is that in no way has subjectivity been legislated out of the game. On virtually every play one official or another is using judgment and experience to make determinations of penalties, ball placements, completions, and turnovers. Rules that restrict the flexibility for game officials to use their professional judgment when it absolutely matters the most are absurd.

There's a separate problem in the playoffs, namely the creation of new panels of officials who performed well individually whilst working with others, and the delays because of post-play conferences bring to mind the posturing and straining at gnats of a faculty meeting.  A New York Times columnist characterized the rule as the worst rule.

N.F.L. Rule 8, Section 1, Article 3, Item 1: Going to the ground. If a player goes to the ground in the act of catching a pass (with or without contact by an opponent), he must maintain control of the ball after he touches the ground, whether in the field of play or the end zone. If he loses control of the ball, and the ball touches the ground before he regains control, the pass is incomplete. If he regains control prior to the ball touching the ground, the pass is complete.

The N.F.L.’s worst rule struck again Sunday, and this time it cost the Detroit Lions a near-certain victory.

Green Bay Packer publicist Vic Ketchman defends the rule.

You have to draw the line somewhere, and the rule makes the line most distinct. If you want it to be a catch, then catch it and eat it. That’ll work. Reaching the ball out for the goal line has become a dangerous mania. There’s a point at which ball security is more important than breaking the plane. This was one of those times. As soon as I saw the replay, I knew the call would be reversed.

In the same column, however, he quips, "Nobody knows" what a catch is.

And so, on to Seattle.