EVERYTHING ELSE IS COMMENTARY.

Michael Munger has good advice for policy wonks.

Don’t focus so much on the fact that the proposed solution won’t work.  Instead, grant the premise: “Yes, X (poverty, unemployment, poor education) is a problem, you are right. We agree about that.  But I think that your solution will do more harm than good.  If you really want to solve Problem X, research has shown that we should [Y].”

It gets more challenging when doing Y gets you some of good thing X but troubling consequence Z is also likely to follow.

The best you can do, perhaps, is to sigh, and try, and persevere.

That's all for February.

WOKE BEYOND PARODY.

It's generally Cold Spring Shops practice not to pick on student journalists, but we make an exception for Chico State student newspaper columnist Rachael Bayuk's "White privilege is real. Stop acting like it’s not."

Arguably, she, and her newspaper, are getting lit up in the comments, probably after the insurrectionist websites circulated her story.  And perhaps she's simply writing talking points that she acquired at Morale Conditioning 099 or however Student Affairs brainwashes indoctrinates inculcates doubleplusgoodthink in new students.

If you want to say something like: “I don’t know why I can’t have those hair braids, I like them,” stop. Think about how privileged this sounds. Why should you get to wear a style and be complimented on it, while a black woman who does it can be labeled as “ghetto” or see her job prospects damaged just from wearing the braids that are part of her culture?

It's likely there's more information content than those braids at work, and cultural appropriation is an empty concept anyway. Don't read me, read her.

We don’t get to pick and choose what’s okay and what isn’t. That’s what colonialism has been doing for centuries－picking and choosing all the parts white, dominant culture likes and discarding the rest. Well, we should stick to box tea and lederhosen and stop injecting ourselves into places we don’t belong.

Wait, what, box tea and lederhosen???

If you're wearing lederhosen, you'd better know how to Schuhplattler, or perform Ein Prosit, or Gloria.

It's unlikely that you're sipping box tea.

You're going to need a Doppelbock before you read her next paragraph.  Set it down, though, and swallow first.

Our society has adopted celebrations from Mexican culture only to gentrify them. We mash them up beyond recognition until all they become are excuses to drink and wear “funny” (racist) costumes. There is not a single thing funny about racism. The systematic oppression and crude depictions of people of color is unacceptable.

Boy, she sounds like a lot of fun on St. Patrick's day. (Oops, better run to Confession Constructive Self-Criticism and do my Hail Maos before the wokescolds try to pillory me.)

I wonder if Californians have gentrified Oktoberfest, and if they even observe Oktoberfest, if the local Bavaria soccer collective does fund raisers.

I repeat, because repeat I must, "give these kids an America to buy into, and an America that buys into these kids, and we'll be OK."

Those poor True Believers at Chico State, not so much.

Being an ally is being willing to fight along side them for the fair treatment they have not been afforded. Being an ally is being willing to be shot with pepper balls at rallies. Being an ally is using this privilege to make a change and not demanding recognition for it.

Let’s stop saying things aren’t fair, or they are racist when we aren’t invited to something. Our voices have rung through these mountains for far too long. It’s time we hold the megaphone up for the people who need to be heard.

Be careful what you ask for.

That is all.

HISTORY RHYMES.

One of the primary causes of Amtrak legislation in 1970 was a Penn Central proposal to replace all of its long-distance (which mostly ran overnight) trains with daytime-only, short-distance trains.  Outside of the Northeast, with what later became the Boston - Washington Acela route, and the New York - Albany - Buffalo Empire Service, that would have meant whatever remaining passengers there were might have to change trains in Buffalo (traveling Rochester to Ashtabula) or Cleveland (Erie to Toledo) or Pittsburgh (Johnstown to Mansfield) and if you were headed from Crestline to Mattoon, well, you were already sod-out-of-luck.

STANDING ATHWART HISTORY, YELLING STOP?

Francis "Manhattan Contrarian" Menton apparently hasn't heard of Fabian gradualism. Progressivism: What Is The Limiting Principle?

Always (or at least, always before now) the progressive proposals to make the world perfectly just and fair have been presented one by one. Wouldn’t the world be so much more fair if we only had free (government paid) college for all? Many people look at such a proposal and think, sure, that would make things a little more fair; I guess I could get on board with it. Then, wouldn’t the world be so much more fair if we had universal (government paid) health care for all. In isolation, same reaction. Separately, wouldn’t it be great to “save the planet” by getting carbon emissions under control (by some form of government subsidy and/or command)? Addressed separately, and with no context of what other proposals may be coming, many people find themselves nodding along. With your attention diverted from the big picture, any of these proposals might get your support.

The "wouldn't it be nice" ratchet has been screwing over people much longer than that: the interstate highways, and urban renewal, and the Great Society, and the story is always the same: self-congratulation over good intentions never compensates for bad policy.  Go, read and understand Thomas Sowell's The Vision of the Anointed.  I'll wait.

Pace Mr Menton, it is the nature of Fabian gradualists to keep ratcheting up the crises.

Is any single Democrat ever going to say, for example, I support universal single payer health care as our first priority, and therefore, let’s be honest, we’re never going to also have total transformation of the energy system, free college, reparations, high speed rail everywhere, universal job guarantees, universal housing guarantees, and all those other things? I’ve never seen it.

I haven’t seen any Democrat, or any spokesperson for the progressive side, ever mention this issue or offer any limiting principle. Isn’t it time we started to get some answers here?

There is no limiting principle.  Unfortunately, as Ross Douthat notes, the people who call themselves conservative are not respecters of limiting principle either.

They envision a larger communitarian panoply — civic associations, religious denominations, charities and universities and private schools — which needs protection against the jealousy of a centralizing state. And they tend to assume that keeping the American corporation embedded in this communitarian system is a better way to balance productivity and innovation and public-spiritedness than just trying to regulate and micromanage businesses into good behavior.

If you wanted to summarize the intellectual uncertainties of conservatives in the Trump era, you could say that the right is trying to figure out whether the unwritten American constitution it imagines itself defending still exists. And if it doesn’t, or if it’s failing, whether that means that “limited government” as a slogan and strategy is increasingly irrelevant when it comes to shaping the society that conservatives would like America to be.

Better, perhaps, to have control of that centralizing state with a different set of guarantees?  That is, might the implicit powers of the state be desirable per se, if simply being misused by the self-styled progressives.

Is America still a deeply religious country, with strong churches and growing denominations? Are American businessmen basically public spirited, eager to compete on equal terms once government removes its heavy hand, and natural allies for a political movement wedded to patriotism and religion?

For years now conservative critics and sociologists and intellectuals have been acknowledging that the answers might be no — that the country’s once-rich associational and civic and religious life is declining and dissolving, that corporate America embraces conservative slogans to keep taxes low and unions weak but otherwise seems post-patriotic and performatively woke, that the “silent majority” of hardworking, pious, culturally conservative blue-collar families is now essentially defunct.

That might be so, and it might also be the case that the best thing for the national government to do might be to stay uninvolved, as bourgeois convention might well be robust against transgressivity.

That's not going to reassure members of the political class, let alone the legions of pundits who rely on the activity of the political class to generate column inches (or is it clickbait these days?)

But while accounts like [Tim] Carney’s acknowledge the role of economic forces — globalization, trade, deindustrialization — in the dissolution of family and community, they also tend to insist, contra liberals and our new socialist vanguard (and also contra Trump), that this cultural collapse isn’t primarily driven by economic policy decisions and can’t be reversed by public policies or programs. Instead they tend to suggest that state interventions often just replace community instead of strengthening it and cast any communitarian revival as a necessarily local project, in which government can play at best a supporting, don’t-make-matters-worse kind of role.

These kind of arguments are still in continuity, then, with the basic conservative posture of the last few generations. But there are also increasingly partisans of rupture on the right, a loose group of state-power conservatives who hint that if the Tocquevillian dream is dying then the cause of “limited government” is increasingly irrelevant — which in turn would require conservatives to become more comfortable using the power of the state, and more engaged in centralized policymaking that has specific social and cultural ends in mind.

It's likely that advocates of a more interventionist national government will use disagreements between libertarian conservatives and national greatness conservatives as a tactic to question all advocacy for limited government.

For my part, I have to wonder why, if Our Political Masters had fixed health care a few years ago, they have to fix it again.  Or why we oughtn't ask how well the Great Society worked out.

It's straightforward to conclude that centralized policy making is unlikely to work out well, no matter who is in charge.

REVEALED PREFERENCES FOR TAX HELL?

In The American Spectator, R. S. "The Other" McCain wonders whether the star-and-glitterati crowd can be nasty toward Trump voters and wearers of #MAGA hats because such people might as well live on Christmas Island, or Mars.

It’s easy for someone like Alyssa Milano to hurls insults at Catholic boys from Kentucky, because she’s never been to Covington and none of her friends in Hollywood wear MAGA hats. She hates everyone who voted for Trump, all 62.9 million of them, and this blind hatred of Republicans defines the current liberal worldview. Anyone who’s looked at the map of the 2016 election results can see how Democrats are isolated, living in like-minded enclaves. Of the 65.8 million votes Clinton won in 2016, more than a third of them, about 22.5 million, came from just six states (California, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Virginia). The post-election boast that Clinton won the popular vote rests entirely on the lopsided majorities she got in California (a margin of about 4.3 million) and New York (by a margin of 1.7 million). It’s tautological to say that, in the places where most liberals live, most people are liberal, but the geographical concentration of Democrat voters is such that few of them actually know anything about the people who vote Republican. To liberals, therefore, those red hats with the “Make America Great Again” slogan symbolize a distant and alien tribe, and everything the liberal sees on his favorite cable-news outlets, CNN and MSNBC, tells him to hate the MAGA tribe.

That geographic separation is real, and the sorting of like voters with like is real, as is the preening of the likes of Bill Maher and his artisanal ice cream, and yet that might not be the real story.

Look again at that list of the Democrat-plurality states.  "Guess what four states had the highest percentage of leavers in 2018: 1) New Jersey, 2) Illinois, 3) Connecticut and 4) New York."

The question, though, is, as voters catch on (as they will) that states cannot cease to be tax hells by becoming even more of a tax hell, will they migrate to other states and bring their metrofexual preferences with them?  And migrate they will.

Last fall, Connecticut, Illinois and New Jersey voters elected mega-rich Democratic Govs. Ned Lamont, J.B. Pritzker and Phil Murphy, who have promised to sock it to the rich -- the ones who haven't yet left. In Illinois, Pritzker would eliminate the state's constitutionally protected flat tax so that he can raise the income tax on the rich by as much as 50 percent. After raising income taxes three times in the last five years, Connecticut's legislature now wants to raise the sales tax rate. No one in any of these progressive states even dares utter the words tax cut. In just one decade, New York lost 1.3 million net residents; Illinois 717,000, New Jersey 516,000 and Connecticut 176,000. California has lost 929,000.

The victims might remove their sanction, and their businesses, but will they rethink their political beliefs?

CAPTURING THE ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS.

Children of all ages will notice. Shrewsbury model railroader’s circus train is accurate, down to the elephant dung.  In the story, that's an HO scale model of part of the Ringling Barnum train.

Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey ended its run in 2017. [Model builder John] Rezuke recalled seeing a little girl from a circus family with her puppy on the last circus train to visit Worcester that year. Her family had lived on the train traveling from show to show across the country, he said. “That’s what they called home,” he said. “Broke my heart.”

As it happened, he had started building the train shortly before Ringling Bros. announced it would be giving its final performances after 146 years. “When I knew about that, I wanted to bring this train into existence,” said Mr. Rezuke, a member of the North Shore Model Railroad Club and the Circus Model Builders Association.

The HO-scale train is 1/87th the size of the real thing, he said. “The real train was about 61 cars in length, including stock cars for the elephants and all sorts of other animals,” he said. “It had cars to house all the performers, a generator car to supply power, and a dining car called the Pie Car where they ate their meals. Wagons carried all the supplies they needed to put on the show.”

No elephants, no circus.

That's just a shameless plug.  The Karlson Brothers Circus will be opening the 2019 tour in Delavan early in March.

See you down the road.

ILLINOIS IS A GOOD PLACE TO BE FROM.

I'd say, pass the popcorn, but the latest bit of feel-good legislation out of Springfield is chasing the popcorn out.

Ryan Hopper, owner of Hopper's Poppers and an Oregon resident, said this is the last week the store at 422 W. State St. in Sycamore will be open. He said he is closing up shop in Sycamore and eventually in Oregon because Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker recently approved a statewide $15 minimum wage by 2025.

Hopper said three months ago, he and his wife Stephanie were looking at adding a third location for Hopper's Poppers in Roscoe – which would bring him closer to his five-location goal for the business. But the minimum wage hike and Illinois's notoriously high property taxes solidified the decision for his family to continue their business ventures outside Illinois.

“Our taxes added up and everything was just really starting to go against being able to make a living,” Hopper said.

For the time being, the family will provide the popcorn at the Sycamore Theatre, although longer term, the popcorn might be on the road.

Hopper said he's aware that he could just own the one store in Oregon, be happy and make an OK living with his wife, Stephanie, and his three children, who are all 8 or younger.

"But at the age that I’m at, I feel like I would benefit from taking my business somewhere else,” Hopper, 34, said.

Hopper said he also factored that his children aren't very integrated into the school system yet. He said he also has been looking at moving to North Carolina, home of a lower state income tax, lower property taxes and a lower minimum wage.

"I could open up almost three stores compared to the one I could have here" in Illinois, Hopper said.

For now, there will be a taco truck storefront replacing the Sycamore popcorn stand.  Perhaps that's a line of business more easily automated.

DON'T GET UPPITY.

The Milwaukee Brewers got to within three outs of a World Series last year, in part thanks to some creative use of the pitching staff.  "The terminology in Milwaukee is 'first out-getter,' and pitch counts are less important than outs recorded, and hitters deprived of opportunities to see a pitcher's style."

In the opinion of pollster Nate Silver, creative use of the bullpen is ruining baseball.

The issue isn’t really with relievers who face just one hitter at a time. In fact, LOOGYs — Left-handed One-Out Guys — are already fading in popularity as teams realize that if a pitcher isn’t good enough to face multiple hitters in a row, he may not belong in the bullpen pecking order at all.

Instead, the problem concerns teams that use a parade of relievers who enter the game from the sixth inning onward and throw the hell out of the ball, knowing they’ll probably max out at one inning at a time. (The Yankee bullpen is a prime example.) You might call these pitchers OMGs: One-inning Max-effort Guys. They can be incredibly, game-changingly effective, but they aren’t necessarily all that skilled.

In fact, the whole problem is that OMGs are a renewable resource, with no real constraints on supply. Teams can take failed starters with two decent pitches and, after some weeding out, turn them into OMGs who will strike out 25 or 30 percent of the batters they face, provided they only have to throw one inning every second or third day.

That answers a question I raised last fall about pitcher preparation. "The act of throwing a hundred pitches, give or take, to record eighteen to 21 outs, every fourth or fifth day, is different from the act of throwing forty to fifty pitches to record six to nine outs every second or third day."  Baseball teams still have a roster limited to 25 players, and you can't stock up on max-effort guys, and there are limits to swapping pitchers by sending one to the outfield.

But is it really ruining baseball to have designated out-getters?  Mr Silver thinks so, although he rests his analysis on a correlation of declining baseball attendance with increasing strikeouts, where the out-getters are able to be more effective.

It’s not just a coincidence that relief pitcher usage and strikeout rate are correlated in this way. When you take a starter and use him in relief — especially in a short stint that typically lasts only an inning or so — his strikeout rate will be usually be higher, and sometimes a lot higher. You can also expect him to throw harder and to use a more dangerous repertoire consisting of more fastballs and sliders.

Thus it's time for baseball to re-think its roster rules, and limit the number of slots for pitchers (no more than ten, plus one position player designated as "emergency pitcher") and a few other rule changes.

In good policy-wonk style, what Mr Silver wants to do is "change teams' overall attitudes toward pitcher usage."  The problem with any sort of wonkery is it leads to unintended consequences.

For now, the Milwaukee Brewers are back in training camp, and we'll see how their initial out-getter approach works.

BREAKING IN SOME BIG POWER.

The White Christmas we didn't have has given way to what looks like at least six more weeks of winter beyond Ground Hog Day.

That's OK as long as there is work to be done on the railroad.

I'm getting things ready for the upcoming Open Days during the March Meet.

IT TAKES TWO TO TANGO.

Norfolk Southern's senior vice president of transportation Mike Farrell explains Norfolk Southern's implementation of precision scheduled railroading.  "We’re not doing it to our customers, we’re doing it with our customers."  It sounds like Norfolk Southern are, in fact, rediscovering Nickel Plate High Speed Service. "Now NS trains are moving faster, cars are spending less time in yards, and the railroad has fully embraced its own version of an operating model it once dismissed."

In practice, it's rediscovering that concentrating on single-consignment freight trains can make for a clogged railroad.

A lot of what [Norfolk Southern] is doing is standard [precision scheduled railroading] stuff. For example, NS had optimized train services for each of the major business groups: intermodal, unit trains, autos and merchandise. Squires says this made sense for each of those groups, but not for the railroad as a whole, resulting in too much complexity. The new operating plan, TOP21, will be one network, not four. You may find an underfilled intermodal train hauling 50 stranded grain cars, in other words. Or to quote John Friedmann, VP of network operations: “By looking at Norfolk Southern as one network, things that were invisible to us in the past suddenly will become visible. Train 23G, going from Louisville, Ky., to Norfolk, Va., primarily hauls intermodal traffic. But now it carries coal as well. You see, in the Knoxville area, it took the small mines there almost a week to generate enough coal to fill out a unit train. And since train 23G was going through Knoxville anyway, it stops and picks up this coal, 15 cars at a time, saving locomotives and crews. And it gets the coal from Knoxville to Norfolk in less than 24 hours. This. . . is about finding efficiencies that were invisible to us when we operated four networks.”

An interesting change described by Mike Wheeler, the chief operations officer: Whereas train length used to be the focus, now it is train weight. The baseline is 6,400 tons, and NS plans to increase that number steadily, and this will help the railroad get more productivity out of its locomotives (something not accomplished by train length).

If that sounds like a throwback to the era of 70-ton cars and five thousand ton trains, if with bigger cars and longer trains, it does. As does the way you keep the yards fluid.

Run trains on time, switch cars in six hours, put each car on the right train and in the right block and do it all safely. Farrell, a Harrison protégé who spent more than a year consulting at NS before getting his current gig, said this: “For 14 months, I told this organization to run trains on time. For 14 months they told me they had no power, had no crews. I said you have plenty of power, plenty of crews. It’s just how you’re managing the resources. Within 48 hours of my announcement to this position, we went from 40 percent on time train performance [departures] to 85 percent. What changed? The level of expectation.”

To the extent that the railroad is balancing train workings, it has the opportunity to balance crew workings as well, with the benefit of being able to schedule some trains and crews in such a way that many crews are at home every night.  It sounds like contemporary information technology makes keeping track easier than it was in the days of telegraph sounder, train sheet, and wheel report.

There is a Cloud-based solution that requires very little effort, since everyone from train planners to train dispatchers are already in communication with one another by one means or another. Create a Cloud platform and require real-time inputs from all management functions that affect train origination and movement. Delays, route changes and deadheads, whether planned or unplanned, can adversely affect the availability of well-rested train crews.

However, arm them with an app, linked to the platform that collects and processes train movement and crew availability information, and railroads should be able to predict individual work events at least eight hours in advance of when people would be required to report for duty. Fewer would miss work opportunities, and many would report for duty more-well-rested and capable of performing their assigned work for shifts that can extend for up to twelve hours.

There are safety and economic benefits for all involved. Think about that.

The railroad is still going to run at all hours, though, and some of those know-eight-hours-in-advance calls will still be for a three a.m. departure from Minot or North Platte in the winter.

IT'S JUST A WAY TO ANTAGONIZE PEOPLE OF GOOD WILL.

The better part of a month after serial fabulist Jussie Smollett's story unraveled, GQ's Joshua Rivera was still shilling for full employment for diversity hustlers.

Whiteness in 21st century America has an endgame, and it is this: to divest itself from the shame of its power, while working to revive the fear it needs in which to thrive. And there is work being done, work done by panels of respectable-seeming men and women on cable news networks dismissing the red MAGA hat as innocuous, work done by politicians who continue to openly lie about the danger immigrants pose to Americans while choosing to ignore that almost all violent extremist crime is committed by right-wing terrorists, by the refusal to acknowledge that bigotry is alive and well, perpetrated by racists and homophobes targeting people like Smollett, criminals who have no qualms in sharing what motivates them. Hate needs to sign its work. That's how hate persists.

The assault of Jussie Smollett is not an isolated incident. Americans who do not fit the white, straight, male, or Christian mold of the ruling class are being targeted with concerning regularity, in synagogues and churches and nightclubs. The perpetrators are not all white, but they are cultivated in a culture built to reward the narrow slice of Americans that have lives that mirror those of the powerful and largely disregard the misfortune of those who do not.

Mr Rivera was venting the day after the story first made the news, and, as that news was the kind of story that made a lot of people comfortable with their prejudices, it's understandable that he wrote what he wrote.

His editors at GQ, however, offered a curious justification for leaving the column for all to see.

Editor's Note, 2/22: In the original version of this piece, published January 29, before allegations that actor Jussie Smollett had perpetrated a hoax, GQ made two errors in editorial judgment. We failed to clearly present the post as an opinion piece. And we regret applying unfounded political motivations to then-breaking news with the original headline: "The Racist, Homophobic Attack on Jussie Smollett Is Far-Right America's Endgame." We have altered the headline, but have otherwise left the original post unaltered.

Update, 2/21: Jussie Smollett was arrested this morning on charges of falsifying a police report.

Update, 2/20: This story is fast-moving and we're keeping an eye on the news as it develops. Read a complete timeline of events here.

Instead of sliming only "far-right" America, the editors fret about all of America.  Presumably they'll next issue a call for "dialogue" which any Normal understands as simply an opportunity for Morale Conditioners to hector and deplorable-shame.

It's not going to work.  Normals are wise to the scam.  Wilfred Reilly even wrote a book about the scam.

Doing research for a book, Hate Crime Hoax I was able to easily put together a data set of 409 confirmed hate hoaxes. An overlapping but substantially different list of 348 hoaxes exists at fakehatecrimes.org, and researcher Laird Wilcox put together another list of at least 300 in his still-contemporary book Crying Wolf. To put these numbers in context, a little over 7,000 hate crimes were reported by the FBI in 2017 and perhaps 8-10% of these are widely reported enough to catch the eye of a national researcher.

That is, there are still people behaving badly, and the fix is straightforward.  But a straightforward fix does not guarantee work, or the opportunity to preen and posture while working, to the diversity hustlers.

[T]he motivations of many hoaxers are honorable if misguided. In college campus hate hoax cases (Kean College, U-Chicago), the individuals responsible almost invariably say that they staged incidents to call attention to real incidents of racist violence on campus. Certainly, the media giants that leap to publicize hate crime stories later revealed to be fakes, and the organizations that line up to defend their “victims” — the Southern Poverty Law Center, Black Lives Matter, CAIR — think that they are providing a public service by fighting bigotry.

Those organizations might be making people with already tight priors comfortable with their prejudices, but every time they uncritically accept a too-gaudy-to-be-true story, they're simply antagonizing people who might otherwise be disposed to be helpful.

TO REDUCE THE RENT-SEEKING, REDUCE THE RENT-GENERATING.

It doesn't hurt to repeat the message, this time by Steven Greenhut in Reason.  "Maybe we can all embrace a reform idea that would actually work: reducing the size and power of government. Sadly, that is the one idea that will frighten the kind of politicians and activists who support campaign-finance reform." Yes, because the kind of politician or good-government type who thinks campaign finance reform will end corruption likely believes in unicorns.  "Get away from the Platonic world, and perhaps the most realistic view of taxing and spending might be: under carefully controlled circumstances, and as far from me as practicable."  Mockable pretensions are stock-in-trade for good-government types.  "Too much money in politics" without "too much reliance on government," q.e.d.

WHOSE PRIORS GET REVISED?

Sorry, I remember only enough about Bayesian updating to be dangerous, and yet the kind of conscience-cowboy who fakes a hate crime to raise consciousness provides evidence to the person whose prior beliefs are dubious about such things to revise those prior beliefs more strongly, and those actions weaken the prior beliefs of anyone who has some confidence that hate crimes exist and remains receptive to evidence.

A mini-dissertation continues below the jump.

IT'S A DIFFERENT SORT OF VOCATIONAL TRAINING.

Matt "Dean Dad" Reed would like to remove the stigma he perceives as attached to the community colleges.

Why pay thousands of dollars a year in tuition to send your kid to a private high school if the result is getting into the same college he could have attended coming from your local public school?  Community college stigma is part of what private high schools sell, whether consciously or not. Deprive them of that, and you threaten their reason to exist. You can expect them to respond accordingly.

We've long been in general agreement about the foolishness of the positional arms race that accompanies the sale of U. S. News guides, although we perceive the image problem the community colleges and the regional comprehensives have differently.

But there's a flaw in his argument about the absence of the practical arts in the Ivies.  In particular, Princeton is a short train ride from his current posting, and serves as a useful foil.

Over a hundred years ago, Thorstein Veblen noted that the prestige of a college was in inverse proportion to its usefulness. He suggested that the ability to indulge in uselessness was a sign of wealth and power, both of which bring prestige with them. That’s why you can major in economics at Princeton, but you can’t major in business there. (He even carried the insight over to clothing. Ties are utterly useless and kind of fragile; you can’t really work with your hands while wearing one. Therefore, by wearing one, you are advertising that you don’t have to get your hands dirty. Their prestige is a function of their uselessness. I consider this reason #763 to get rid of ties entirely, but that’s another post.) The more prestigious the college, the fewer “vocational” programs it offers.  Community colleges fare miserably on that index, since most of them are “comprehensive,” meaning that they offer both vocational and transfer programs. The mere presence of the Automotive Tech program, in this view, tars the English department by association.  Elite places don’t like to get their hands dirty.

I finished the Ph.D. at a young age, and the tie did work well as a badge of rank, right up to the day I retired. Had I taken a job that led to a Roadmaster or Road Foreman position on a railroad, the tie would stay as well.

It's that remark about economics as somehow less vocational (as far as I can tell) than business.  In the Ivies, which like to use the old trivium and quadrivium model in undergraduate programs, an undergraduate business program is rare.  But the value of an economics degree from Princeton is precisely as a vocational program, if, perhaps in the sense of a priestly vocation.  Study Ito processes with Avinash Dixit and that group, and your first posting might be a short New Jersey Transit ride to Wall Street, where you can hire out at a hedge fund and give people the business until the black swans fly.  Study monetary history with Ben Bernanke or his successors, and the Federal Reserve is a fast Amtrak ride to the south, and there are lots of classmates, and members of the eating clubs, and past professors to work with and give people the business.  If you have the mathematical chops, you can study taxation theory with Joe Stiglitz and that group, and if you're successful enough at assuming an omniscient central planner, you might be able to assist (primarily Democratic) Members of Congress at giving people the business.

It's probably helping the community colleges, and the regional comprehensives, mid-majors, and land grants that the Anointed Experts have fouled up so gloriously.

Happily for community colleges, that distinction is starting to fray. As the cost of higher education escalates far beyond what most families can pay, and entry-level salaries remain largely stagnant, the middle- and upper-middle-classes are starting to look at the employability of a given college’s graduates. After a century of being under suspicion, ‘usefulness’ is starting to gain some respect.

Has it been a century of decline for the useful degrees?  I suspect not: the rationale for the land-grant colleges and the converted teachers colleges has always been about the practical arts.  The U.S. News problem, however, is self-inflicted.  "The deeper problem, though, is that higher education has lowered itself unevenly, in ways that make social stratification worse."

On the railroad, you set the expectation that the freight yard be empty of cars at the end of the shift.  There are analogous expectations to set in higher education.

DOWNSIZING IS A FALSE ECONOMY.

No doubt there is a business guru somewhere who will complain that two leads, and two switch engines, working Ash Fork, Arizona, are at least one switch engine too many.

The crew at left has pulled set-out cars off a westbound through freight train, and once the crew at right sets the tank cars over to the Houston block being assembled for pickup by an eastbound through freight, they will run around and spot the cars at the industries.  There's a second track for spotting those covered hoppers at top left.  The crew at right will return to the east end of the yard to spot industries there.  Meanwhile the switch crew that works the passenger station will have a few minutes to assemble a transfer of cars for Williams that you see to the immediate right of the tank cars.

At shift's end, all the outbound cars have left, either on through trains or on the Williams transfer, and all the inbound cars are spotted for unloading.

Freight cars don't make money sitting around in yards.

We'll look at how the real railroads have to re-learn this lesson in a future post.

LOOK WHO WANTS TO GET OUT OF THE ARMS RACE.

I'm no fan of state or local governments waving subsidies at manufacturers or sports teams.

Wisconsin is chasing jobs with tax benefits, and throwing tax benefits at factories will turn out as badly as throwing tax benefits at big-box stores and sports teams.  But the reason states engage in such behavior is that doing so might be a dominant strategy, and you look good when your strategy works.

Arms race, dominant strategy, prisoners' dilemma. The way out is to find a way to cooperate. "Lawmakers in at least a half-dozen states are considering forming a compact in which they would agree to end efforts to lure companies with tax incentives."

Look, though, at who participates.  "A similar version to New York's bill is also making its way through the Arizona and Illinois legislatures, while lawmakers in other states, including Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts and New Jersey, are considering introducing such legislation."  Does the expression "tax hell" come to mind?  Particularly, tax hell, with one way of softening the blow to taxpayers gone?

The provision limiting state and local tax deductions at $10,000 wiped away a preferential treatment for high earners in those states, and helps explain why about 20 percent of filers will either get no benefit or see an actual hike in their federal tax bills. The resulting rush for the exits is putting pressure on government budgets in New York, New Jersey and elsewhere while creating a real-estate boom in Florida and other low-tax states.

Throw in the fact that some Democrat-controlled states, especially Illinois and New Jersey, already face huge problems with their civil-service pension funds and it’s obvious that the blue-state model is ­undergoing a major stress test.

The editorial board at New York's Times haven't caught on yet.

Blame also needs to be assigned, of course, to a system in which powerful corporations can milk billions in tax benefits out of cities and states to locate facilities, without any added investment in infrastructure, schools and other benefits. Amazon, one of the richest companies in the world, run by the richest man in the world, had held a nationwide contest in which governments scraped together enough entitlements to satisfy it, even as those same cities struggled to fortify corroding infrastructure and stave off a housing crisis that has pushed the middle class to the brink and forced the poor into homeless shelters.

Catch that Divine Passive? "Blame needs to be assigned." As if Klaatu and Gort decreed that New York would be a tax hell.

Mssrs. Cuomo and de Blasio should have better prepared for what was in store, since their constituents are maybe more worried about housing, subways and the cost of living than in job creation alone. In fact, it’s partly thanks to the failure of these elected leaders to seriously address the subway and housing crises that Amazon was met by some with such visceral anger and anxiety. If they’d better anticipated that reaction, they might have worked with the company to address these issues, and win local buy-in before things went off the rails. Then, together with Amazon, they could have helped the city diversify its economy and leverage the power of a tech giant to help solve big problems. It’s an opportunity lost. May it also be a lesson learned.

Don't lay that "subway crisis" off on Amazon. The Pennsylvania Railroad built the North River and East River tubes and Pennsylvania Station and Sunnyside Yard in about five years. Fifteen years ago, there's a Cold Spring Shops post on the Second Avenue Subway that has not yet replaced the long-gone Third Avenue Elevated.

By all means, yes, let's get rid of corporate welfare, it's a bigger money-suck than the national endowments.  Let's also stop pretending that a federal deduction for state and local taxes is somehow a good thing because it lessens the pain of living in a tax hell.

WHAT DO THEY HAVE TO LOSE?

Northern Illinois University enrollment is down more than 5 percent since last spring.

Don't worry, they have a mission, a vision, and values.

NIU recently released its five-year Strategic Enrollment Management Plan in an effort to attract and retain students. The plan looks to increase diversity and expand online education opportunities in hopes to increase enrollment up to 17,0000-18,000 by 2023.

"When we released our five-year Strategic Enrollment Management Plan, we expect that total enrollment will decline for another year or so before starting to climb again,” said Sol Jensen, NIU Vice President for Enrollment Management, Marketing and Communications.

I'm doubtful.

Perhaps it's time to try something else.  There's more than one way to beat Yale at their own game.

The language in the new mission, vision, and values statements might mollify the craziest Student Services types at Yale or Oberlin, but maybe being competitive in the classroom and the journals would bring in the students.

We don't hammer on Middlebury (or Oberlin, or Yale) for enabling their snowflakes.

We hammer on Middlebury in order that Northern Illinois (or Delaware, or Nebraska) not enable snowflakes.

And yet, business as usual in higher education seems to be doing anything other than raising expectations, and all the time fretting about how higher expectations are hostile to Access or Diversity.  What do they have to lose trying something else

Lifting their game hasn't been tried, and yet Texas historian Steven Mintz, while preaching the old-time religion, doesn't see what's right in front of him.

The need for advanced education will not abate. It will intensify. The United States has been distinctive in distributing educational opportunity more widely than any other country. Tough love, creative destruction, and economic consolidation may help spread material well-being.

But this process poses a genuine threat to our educational ecosystem, where consolidation will only serve to lessen opportunity and reinforce the class divisions that are already contributing to deepening economic disparities, stagnating household incomes, and political polarization.

The excess capacity is in access-assessment-remediation-retention.  What does Texas have to lose, trying to be more like Michigan?  What does Northern Illinois have to lose, trying to be more like Texas?

THE DUST HAD NOT YET SETTLED AT PENN STATION.

New York City's Singer Building came down in 1967, to make way for a new office tower to be used by U. S. Steel.  There's a lesson about creative destruction in there somewhere, with Singer sewing machines still being a thing, and U. S. Steel no longer the country's largest steel producer.

The first decade of the 20th century was a sparkling time in American construction. Nowhere was its spirit more intense than in downtown New York, an aging colonial seaport that was fast becoming a center of industrial capitalism. Here, among winding narrow blocks, a Whitmanesque neighborhood of brick row houses and Protestant steeples was rapidly evolving into a concrete labyrinth of elegant white towers and steam-damp canyons. New York, with each new spire, signaled that America would no longer defer to Europe. Now, the future was being charted on this side of the Atlantic.

The Singer Building was an icon of this moment. Rising 612 feet above Broadway (at the corner of Liberty Street) its sheer ambition was proved by a fleeting reign as the world’s tallest building. Its artfulness was established by use of neoclassical and Renaissance design elements at a novel scale. And its authenticity was grounded in local industry: Manhattan then was a maze of textiles. Its industrial fabric comprised cloth workshops and showrooms, its tenements housed armies of piece workers and seamstresses, and its labor unions were dominated by needle-trades employees. For the city’s skyline to be topped off by a maker of industrial sewing machines was a perfect fit.

I recently learned that Milwaukee's City Hall, which is still standing, for a few years was the world's tallest building; it continued to hold the "city's tallest" honor until the late 1960s.  So many others are gone.  Office towers of the pre-air-conditioning era had to have setbacks and recesses in order to provide for light and ventilation, and they also owed some of their design to a common-law doctrine called Ancient Lights, which we might loosely interpret as "your right to cast shadows ends at my lot line."

Keeping with the patterns of traditional urbanism, the lower floors formed street walls that extended along the sidewalks of Broadway and Liberty Street. This preserved the enclosure of adjacent streets. By day, the tower allowed sunlight to reach the streets below. Clad with neoclassical details and finished in stone and red brick, it rose much higher than the 14-story base to a height of 612 feet. The rounded spire was topped off with a bright lantern that pierced the night sky, signaling the city’s center, like a tall candle, to the surrounding harbor and hills.

In common with many commercial and industrial buildings of the era, including the still-a-building Pennsylvania Station, the public spaces brought some of the pomp of European cathedrals and palaces into a new civic order. "The main hall was a deep arcade of finely sculpted plaster, polished brass, and perfectly hued blocks of Italian marble. Heavily decorated, the space was reminiscent of traditionally sacred architecture in Europe: an early affirmation (to be repeated) of the almost religious place of commerce in the heyday of industrial America."

Alas, though, expertise gave us urban renewal.

The Singer’s fate represented a darker but no less historic moment in the life cycle of American cities—a harsh counterpoint to the rich, artful optimism that had glinted through the fading years of the Gilded Age in the works of men like Ernest Flagg. The loss of the Singer was but a single point in an unfolding narrative of urban destruction that also included (in New York, alone) the demolition of the neoclassical Pennsylvania Station in 1963, the unceremonious wrecking of the Metropolitan Opera House in 1967, and the years-long decline of the Art Deco masterpieces along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx.

Today, Americans have grown more cautious; when it comes to old buildings, we now have laws at our disposal that allow us to designate and preserve what we value. Yet the enactment of such laws, at such a late stage, illustrates how the Singer’s fate coincided with another milestone: an end to the idea that American industry might be trusted to build permanent things, without answering to the deeper values of law or community or tradition. Not only buildings, but individual lives, entire cities, had been built around American industries that projected permanence at one point in the 20th century—only to be gone in a fleeting instant. The fate of the Singer, and everything else, dashed what we now know to have been a naïve hope: a belief that the most audacious commercial efforts to produce something lasting would not, one day, fall prey to the intrinsic transience of commerce.

Yes, there's a lot of destructive faddishness in business, but there's plenty of blame to share around when it comes to judging popular culture by the monuments it has destroyed.

THE CHRONICLE OF NO LONGER HIGHER EDUCATION.

Katherine Mangan's reporting on the changing nature of high school classes remedial courses in college will do nothing to hurt the sales of those U. S. News guides.

At a time when growing numbers of first-generation, minority, and older adult students are going to college, the California State University system, the nation’s largest public-university system, this year eliminated all freestanding remedial courses. Next year, the state’s entire community-college system will do the same. The moves, which are being watched by reformers and instructors nationwide, will have especially far-reaching consequences for open-access colleges and those that accept the vast majority of students who apply.

Is it too much to ask that the people who want to influence higher education stop treating the nontraditional students as somehow less capable?  "It is a libel to think of first-generation or non-traditional as synonymous with less capable of handling college work."

TURF THEM OUT.

Steve "Big Questions" Landsburg has a provocative suggestion.

According to Democratic congressional leadership, [it's stupid to fund] the border wall.

This is a radical new stance for the congressional leadership, which last year rejected the Trump administration’s bid to cut roughly $300 million a year from the budgets of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. Assuming a 3% interest rate, that’s a present value of about $10 billion — enough to fund two border walls. (Take that, you pesky Canadians!).

One could argue that a border wall is not only stupid but a grotesque symbol of xenophobia. One could equally well argue that a National Endowment for the Arts is not only stupid but a grotesque symbol of government overreach and the politicization of everything.

Refusing to fund the wall is a good thing. Agreeing to defund the National Endowments would have been roughly twice as good a thing — and a whole lot easier, since the president was already on board. And there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit that would be at least an order of magnitude better. (I’m looking at you, Department of Commerce!).

Drain the swamp.

The national endowments, in particular?  They exist in order for taxpayers to validate the aesthetic preferences of the cultural establishment.  "External funding, however, involves the possibility of the principal investigator doing work that supports the agenda of the sponsor. That's not the same thing as doing research for its own sake."  It would be more honest for the creative types to seek genius grants or take Beethoven's approach of asking for a lifetime stipend.

THERE IS NEVER A GOOD TIME TO BUILD THE WRONG PROJECT.

California governor Gavin Newsom will finish the a-building section of high speed railroad in the Central Valley, but the continuations to San Francisco or Los Angeles are on hold.

“Let’s be real,” he says. “The project as currently planned would cost too much and, respectfully, take too long. Right now, there isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to L.A. I wish there were,” the San Francisco Gate reports.

Instead of completing the intended route, pegged at $77 billion to build in the next decade, Newsom wants to finish tracks between Bakersfield and Merced in the Central Valley. Roadbed construction, including several massive bridges, is nearly complete on the initial Fresno-Madera segment.

“Abandoning high speed rail entirely means we will have wasted billions and billions of dollars with nothing but broken promises...and lawsuits to show for it.,” he claims. He intends to make use of the investments already made rather than send $3.5 billion in federal funds back to Washington, D.C.

That's a sunk cost fallacy at work. It's also the logic of Federal money.  When Wisconsin governor Scott Walker scrapped the extension of the Hiawatha service to Madison, whatever operating subsidies he didn't commit the state to might have been exceeded by the breach-of-contract damages to Talgo, the builder of the trains for the project, and when his secretary of transportation asked if he could apply the Federal money allocated to rails to fixing the highways instead, the Secretary of Transportation said no.  Republican governor in Wisconsin, Democrat president, reverse the roles today, same problem.

AFTER THEY'VE TRIED EVERYTHING ELSE, PERHAPS THEY'LL DO THE RIGHT THING.

Here I stand, I can do no other.  "Few things would help students so much, or harm the core functions of education so little, as a 50% across the board cut in higher ed bureaucracy costs."

Inside Higher Ed columnists Peter Eckel and Cathy Trower might yet catch on.  "Stop Planning!"

Certainly, strategic plans are important to academic institutions. Colleges and universities invest a tremendous amount of time and effort (holding many meetings with various constituent groups on and off campus to gain input) -- and sometimes also money (for consultants) -- in their strategic plans. Once finished, there is great fanfare and publicity, often around the plan’s creative name and new, bold priorities. Plans appear in highly visible places on websites. Institutions hold retreats, often over many days, to talk about plan implementation and progress. They design and put in place new data systems to track progress and create elaborate metrics and key performance indicators. And all the while, those who lead the planning process can be heard saying, “This plan will not sit on the shelf (this time).”

Yet despite all this investment of time and resources, few strategic plans enjoy strong consensus that they are meaningful and have a real impact on the trajectory of the college or university.

Too often strategic plans fall short of serving as a guiding light for the future. Some are triumphs of form (or wordsmithing) over substance. Their key points often are expected, and they share much in common with those of similar, but also dissimilar, institutions. “Educate students for the global 21st century,” anyone? How about “Produce cutting-edge research?”

So if the results are less than impactful, then why do we invest so much in strategic planning? Trustees and faculty members wonder what all the fuss was about, why the process was so time-consuming and arduous and why, in the end, the work seems to have had so little real impact.

Perhaps because it's a phony quest for consensus, and consensus often means the most anodyne of sentiments.

I see no reason to withdraw a previous statement.  "The remedy is part Ko-Ko and part John Galt: identify the twenty percent of the deanlets and deanlings who would not be missed, and fire them."

Messrs. Eckel and Trower are writing for a house organ for business as usual, and yet wisdom is dawning.

During a recent workshop on strategy (and not planning), the following exchange occurred between an experienced administrator and one of us. “I’ve been involved in three different strategic planning efforts at my institution. And with each one we get better,” she said. “Great,” we said, “but better at what? Better as an institution or better at planning?” Her reply, sheepishly: “Ah, better at planning.”

As she realized during this exchange, the real objective shouldn’t be to improve planning, but rather to improve the institution and position it for success in the long run. Given the demands on campuses and the complexities that academic leaders face, might institutions be better served by looking at the future through some new lenses rather than reinvesting in yet another round of similar work? Thus, we have the title of this essay (which is an intentional overstatement, as we will explain below).

Strategy, as a concept, sits between mission and operational plans. And historically in higher education, it has been overlooked in conversations about each. An institutional mission statement says why a college or university exists; it’s the purpose. The better ones convey particular actions with respect to target audiences, as well as articulate outcomes. Strategy is the pathway to deliver on that mission. It is the game plan that contains answers to key questions, such as in what arenas will you engage (undergraduate, graduate; health care, humanities; liberal arts, professional; local, national, global; adult, traditional age, etc.) and how will you succeed? Operations are the steps to implement strategy and therefore deliver on the mission. Too many university strategic plans are mostly outcomes or ideals (or unfunded “wish lists”), without an articulation of strategy.

Their understanding of strategy, however, suggests deficiencies in their understanding of market competition.

Strategy is the purpose for which you will be taking these operational steps. Operations address how to do things right, whereas strategy is about the right things to do.

Articulating the right things to do is difficult work. Roger Martin, former dean of the business school at the University of Toronto, has a wonderful test about plans versus strategy. He argues that you do not have an effective strategy if you and your competitors are doing the same things. Strategy exists if some competitors choose different, if not opposite, paths. Therefore, if the opposite of your strategic choices looks stupid, then all competitors are going to have pretty much the same strategy as you, doing you little good.

For example, the opposite of “performing high-impact research”? Perform low-impact research. The opposite of “provide all students with a transformational learning experience”? Provide some students with a transformative experience or provide all students with a less than transformative experience. While each opposite may occur in practice, rarely are they stated as institutional goals. How well do the strategic choices in your institution’s plan pass this opposites test? (Most do not, but they generate a pretty good laugh.)

That's really about scale and scope. If you're making steel, and Bethlehem is making steel, and you're both making money making steel, perhaps you ought to be thinking about making your steel a little bit better and selling it at a better price,  That shouldn't have to involve consultants and facilitators and all the other trappings of repeatedly meeting, retreating, visioning, and revisioning.  Anybody seen Bethlehem Steel lately?

In higher education, the continued existence of those U.S. News guides ought to be sufficient evidence of what matriculants (or their aspirational families) perceive as the better experience, and the price (third party payments notwithstanding) it commands.  Higher education types might not want to hear about market tests, but market tests have heard about you.

Furthermore, we in higher education seem quite enamored with five-year plans. Yet unlike operational priorities, strategy is not time bound. Most strategic plans tend to adopt an artificial focus of five years (the bold ones aim for 10 years or more). What is magical about 60 months? Why should time matter more than other variables that might define strategy and its direction? (For some, the answer is simply five years of reprieve before they have to go through the planning process again.)

The environment for most universities is volatile and variable, not static and predicable; it is challenge dependent and not time dependent. Yet, most plans are time bound. Therefore, institutions either: 1) revise their plans and priorities as the world evolves during that five-year window or 2) ignore some (or most) of what is in their plans as they respond to new challenges and pursue emergent opportunities. It’s also common to hear someone say, “Culture eats strategy for lunch (or breakfast),” which is fine. But the more substantive the strategy meal, the better, yes?

The result for most institutions is that faculty members, administrators, trustees, alumni and others spend a lot of time and energy developing documents that give incomplete directions. As the roads and conditions keep changing, colleges and universities may be better served by keeping an eye on the horizon rather than trying to follow turn-by-turn signs. Think compass, not map.

Hallelujah!  "They could have listened, thirty years ago. Perhaps they hadn't thought it through back then. Now, restoring a state of good repair will be more difficult."

ROUND UP THE USUAL ALGORITHMS!

Apparently algorithms to play prisoners' dilemma games are becoming subtle.  The Grim Strategy is apparently a blunt instrument for humans with long memories.  "Our findings suggest that in this framework even relatively simple pricing algorithms systematically learn to play sophisticated collusive strategies. The strategies mete out punishments that are proportional to the extent of the deviations and are finite in duration, with a gradual return to the pre-deviation prices."  Might make for interesting times, both in antitrust enforcement and in teaching industrial economics.

WHAT IS SEEN AND UNSEEN.

Sarah Anderson is not happy with the length of the presidential campaign season, which goes on forever.  (And I remember how unprecedented it was for George McGovern to declare sometime around Thanksgiving in 1971.)  "If You Hate Campaign Season, Blame Money in Politics."

So what can we do to avoid contests that shift politicians’ focus away from governing to endless campaigning?

We could try to compress our interminable primary process. But that wouldn’t make much difference when candidates are launching their bids a full year before the Iowa caucus.

A more effective step would be to slash the cost of competing for higher office. Candidates bolt out of the gates because they know it takes a long time to raise the mega-millions required for a White House run.

Wait, wouldn't "slashing the cost" mean even more crowded fields?

Guess what's missing from her essay?

When Expertise runs out of ideas, that's what happens.

I'M SHOWING MY AGE (AGAIN).

The Michigan Department of Transportation posted a safety warning with a seasonal theme.

Perhaps the message could be put on five small signs, with a tagline.

That's apparently too ancient a reference.

BLAMING THE BLAMELESS?

Mark Bauerlein makes the trenchant observation of the day.  Heck, make it the trenchant observation for whatever protected-status-month you want it to be.  "White privilege doesn’t describe a reality. It tells people how to behave."

That's provocative.  It's also accurate.

It tells white people how to behave, their first obligation being to acknowledge their own responsibility for injustice and inequality. When someone talks about white privilege, he doesn’t burden blacks, Hispanics, or Asians with changing their ways. Only whites are affected. The moment someone utters “white privilege,” it sets all the white people in the room on the defensive. Only when whites join in the attribution of white privilege, especially to themselves in a kind of show-trial or struggle-session confession, do they regain some integrity.

That's nuts.  Professor Bauerlein elaborates.

It is essential that conservatives, especially Republican politicians, understand “white privilege” in just this way—as a power move, not a sincere idea. It is not designed to communicate facts. It means to stymie and stigmatize opposition.

There’s a reason, too, that liberals have chosen this particular rhetorical weapon. It doesn’t just paralyze conservatives with a guilt trip. It steers the subject away from a condition embarrassing to liberals.

Seventy years ago, liberalism adopted the plight of African Americans as a cardinal moral mission. That’s why they so often refer to fresh controversies as “the Civil Rights issue of our time.” Back then, African-American uplift, especially in education, became a special goal that would confirm the truth and goodness of liberal philosophy and politics. And through the 1970s and ‘80s, it seemed to work as the education achievement gap closed.

But over the past two decades, the trend has stalled. On the National Assessment of Education Progress math exam, the gap for white and black 17-year-olds in 1973 was 40 points. (See Figure 4 here.) By 1992, the gap had shrunk to 26 points, a clear sign of success. Since then, however, the gap has remained at around 26 points, in spite of Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, affirmative action, and other programs designed to remedy the inequity.

This is painful for liberals. They don’t know what to do about it. More money for public schools, more “cultural relevance” in the curriculum, fewer racial disparities in school punishment, no more school-to-prison pipeline . . . the liberal solutions keep coming, but nobody puts much faith in them.

Conservatives have a ready answer to the “why” question: No matter how much you improve schooling, they say, children who grow up in a single-parent household generally fare less wellthan do children in two-parent households. Educational achievement rises for children living in a stable traditional family.

But that is not the situation for most African-American kids. In 1965, when Daniel Patrick Moynihan completed his report on the black family, the rate of illegitimacy was 25 percent, which he termed a “crisis.” Today, the rate of African-American children raised in single-parent households stands at 66 percent. This family breakdown, more than any other factor among African Americans, has hampered educational progress. It has stopped liberal hopes cold.

Liberals can’t talk about the family, however. Feminism and LGBT voices won’t let them. It might sound like blaming-the-victim or downgrading single mothers or pushing “heteronormativity.” Still, they can’t ignore the educational stall, so liberals desperately need another explanation for the persistence of the achievement gap.

“White privilege” does the job well (as does “systemic racism,” another murky term). It retains the racism theme, which still frightens conservatives who worry about their “respectability.” At the same time, it is nebulous and insinuating enough to keep the targets of it off-balance.

It’s time to stop playing along. The next time conservatives face the white privilege point, they should not give it one iota of credence. Instead, they should say, “Let’s talk about something real, like the number of African-American boys who have never lived with their fathers. What happens to them, Mr. Caring Liberal?”

Yes, or what happens when you deconstruct useful institutions, or substitute high sounding slogans for sound standards?

DAVE. STOP, DAVE. PLEASE STOP, DAVE.

Fifty years ago, the moral standing of a silicon-based intelligence was the stuff of fiction.

Perhaps it's time to think more systematically about it.

Yelling at Siri, kicking a Roomba, throwing a Jibo; what it means for these to be right or wrong was the topic of a book talk with professor of media studies David J. Gunkel from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Wednesday at the 71 North space in Founders Memorial Library. The talk, titled The Right(s) Question, was based on Gunkel’s book “Robot Rights,” published by MIT Press in November 2018. The book, and talk, explored whether robots are capable of having rights, whether they should have rights and whether this is a question worth asking right now.

The first two have no easy answer, but the last is answered with a resounding yes.

Gunkel began the talk by explaining the four possible positions to the first two questions, combinations of robots can/can’t have rights and robots should/shouldn’t have rights. All positions are plausible, but none are without flaws. A common thread runs through arguments against these views: humans cannot help but grow attached to some artifacts, like a cherished guitar or a Stradivarius violin. In the case of robots, humans often project sentience onto the machines and treat them as if they have a moral obligation to them, even knowing full well the robots don’t have sentience.

Robots might not yet have sentience, but you don't want to learn, the hard way, that a silicon-based intelligence is capable of acting in self-defense.

What Gunkel calls for is a conceptual reboot — a fundamental challenge to the current theories of the world, humanity, robots and ethics.

This reboot is unavoidable, whether in the next few years or at the moment robots achieve sentience, possibly decades from now. Robots will have to be considered for personhood — even if for nothing other than to fit into the legal system, just as corporations were granted legal personhood so courts knew what to do with them.

"Although you and Frank took great precautions to keep me from hearing you, I could see your lips move."

Robots aren’t quite there yet, but the time will come when robots’ resemblance to humanity is too striking to ignore and when kicking a Roomba may be a little more than kicking a vacuum. It’s better to ask the hard questions now than leave it for an unsuspecting future.

Particularly when even the geniuses at the H.A.L. plant and Mission Control didn't anticipate it, but the movie director did.