TASTELESS? American Mind is not amused by Lithuania's Stalin World. Sounds like the kinder, gentler version, if the proposed simulated exile train uses cattle wagons, not the Stolypins.

IVY BIASES SHOWING? The vacationing Virginia Postrel comments on the capture of Gen. Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti, number 4 on the Iraqi most wanted list behind Saddam et fils. She asks whether he shouldn't be the ace of clubs, not diamonds. Depends on the card game you're playing. In sheepshead, the ace of diamonds is an interesting card to have. It's worth eleven points in a trick, but it's a weak trump, losing to any queen or jack. If you pick up the blind, do you salt the blind with that ace, or hold it to trump a lead to a fail suit you're void in? (If you're picking, do you have any business giving up the lead?) A game in which there's vertical integration of two hands looks simple in comparison.

NON SEQUITURS. Common Sense and Wonder fisks Bob Herbert, who is blaming federal tax cuts for local tuition increases.

THE COMMITTEE OF COMMITTEES. Professor DeLong gets his callup notice. His list of objectives is admirable. Will he post updates. His characterization of his committee as "second-guessing departments" is about right.

SEEMS TO BE WORKING. New screen format, new way of adjusting settings. Betsy's Page is still reporting difficulties with the new Blogger front end. (Or is it working if I'm reading it?)

FACTOR PRICE EQUALIZATION? Glenn Reynolds looks at the political economy of outsourcing, in this case the immigration of high-tech workers, or the subcontracting of technical work to sellers in other countries. At the root of U.S. discontent with these actions are two things: the very real disruption in the lives of people who have discovered that others will do their work for less, and the very real confusion of decreases in the nominal incomes of those who continue to do that work, with the increases in their real incomes as the mix of products expands, improves, and gets cheaper.

DISCRIMINATING FOR EQUALITY? Tyler Cowen summarizes four hypotheses about affirmative action. The weak link between admission and merit in particular bears further investigation. Elsewhere on Volokh Conspiracy, Erik Jaffe and Tyler Cowen chew over the possibility that affirmative action has little effect other than to reallocate some students among the top colleges (has anyone ever rejected by Michigan enrolled at the University of Phoenix instead?) Atlantic Blog also weighs in on the costs of reassignment borne by students who but for (can one really capture that?) affirmative action would have enrolled at Harvard (rather than Yale? rather than U Conn?) His post is a reaction to a Semi-Daily Journal essay that appears to have miscalculated the incidence of collective guilt on specific individuals. Truck and Barter proposes that "diversity" be evaluated as a scarce good, with a careful evaluation of the supply and demand.

CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES goes back-roadin'.

LINE RELOCATIONS. Instapundit has found a new location for a classification yard. Service is being maintained at the old yard and the new yard for the time being. Jay Solo's Verbosity has also moved. His blogroll reads like an almanac. There is method to his planetary classification system.

CHANGING TRAINS. Fairly full load on the 8.30 pm Aurora all-stopper. Conductor lifts tickets, notes location of passengers who are paying cash, returns to collect cash fares, automatic station annunciator announces the Harlem Avenue stop. Passenger in front of me asks, "This train is going to Orland Park, right?" Nope, Aurora. (Both trains leave at 8.30, you have to look at the destination list with burned out letters at Union Station.) Instant panic ... there is no later departure to Orland Park. A nearby passenger lends the panicked passenger a cell phone, she calls Mom, gets through, lets Mom know she's getting off at LaGrange Road, which is also the stop for the helpful passenger. Can happen to anyone ... there was this InterCity train standing at the up-side platform face in Swindon, and the destination sign in the window includes "Reading" so guess who got on and wound up in Kemble? (Less serious a problem there, as a puddle-jumper headed up from Herefordshire shows up shortly, and Kemble offered some railway archaeology during the lay-over.)

CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES is at Real Women Online

CHARTER SCHOOLS CATERED FROM GREEN BAY? Read this and decide for yourself.

NO HILTON, NO PAN AM. The DeKalb Municipal Band offers a weekly concert in the park. Tuesday's program included Johann Strauss's Blue Danube. It is difficult to listen to that without envisioning that Pan Am shuttle docking with that orbiting wheel with Hilton accommodation, which we were supposed to have by now, if life imitated art. Or, if there had been more commercial freedom for space exploration starting, say, in 1967.

RECOMMENDED RAILROAD READING. Latest edition of The Railway Magazine (no online content, dead trees have been good enough since 1897) shows a test train in English stagecoach yellow that needs just a touch of green to look right, shows an old idea from New England reborn in Russia, reports that railfans are now being treated as security risks at some stations, and covers a new diesel train that offers "the ambience of a traditional hauled coach within an underfloor-engined [set]." Are you listening, Amtrak? A reversible, fast, 200-passenger diesel train might be just the thing for Midwestern corridors. Hourly service, 62 minutes Chicago to Milwaukee, anyone?

PRODUCTIVITY GAINS. Repeat after me: an expensive service that was formerly unavailable at any price is now cheaper. Then read and understand this.

HOW HOOSIERS VIEW FLATLANDERS. It's old news, but as long as I'm ripping Illinois traffic engineers, here's a boot to the head of Illinois litigators.

FORMER GOP OFFICIAL ADVOCATES DEATHS OF CHILDREN. Yes, I'm spinning, but now that I have your attention ... The Chicago Council on Foreign Relations has been holding a series of presentations on how the rest of the world views the United States. Wednesday's speaker was former trade negotiator Clyde Prestowitz, now of the Economic Strategy Institute, working off of his new book, Rogue Nation. I will have some substantive things to say about the book, and the others I've purchased during this series of presentations, once I've finished it (there was too much excitement on tonight's train to get very far) but I did get through his chapter on energy dependence, which is much too snarky about sport utility vehicles and the "Bubbas" who drive them, and far too willing to buy the argument that U.S. driving habits are funding the House of Saud (that, when he noted in the summation of his talk that the Europeans import a lot more oil from Araby, is a bit much) and he repeats the National City Lines canard as part of the usual "why can't we have Euro-style mass transit" riff. As there does appear to be some stuff of substance in the book, you might not want to judge all of it by its transportation and energy errors.

Mr. Prestowitz made a statement that I've heard from a few others: the United States is now turning its back on institutions it created to serve its own interests (referring to the United Nations, the North Atlantic alliance, and, the European Union, begotten of the Marshall Plan.) That argument falls a bit flat. This weblog has been updated intermittently, as I have been working on a railroad in the basement. I built some trackbed and laid some tracks, only to discover that cars came uncoupled on a vertical curve. I immediately tore up that trackbed and reprofiled it. Perhaps international treaties ought not be abandoned for small flaws, but they ought not be held onto past any usefulness.

BLOWIN' THOSE REDS. Setting the pace for red light running in the United States are Chicago drivers (So what else is new, ask any Badger about flatlander drivers.) The article raises the possibility that new traffic cameras are contributing to rear-end collisions, as risk-averse drivers apply brakes when they see a yellow with tailgaters expecting the usual flatlander response being taken by surprise. The article also exonerates the traffic engineers with the claim that a three-second yellow is a proper interval for 30-35 mph traffic. In doing so, it misses an important point. Traffic lights seem to have been installed without any thought to coordinating their workings, particularly along commercial roads with controlled entries to shopping centers. In many locations, your experience is to stop at a red light, wait nearly two minutes for the cross traffic, wait for the left-turning traffic that gets its arrow first, then you get your green, and just as you get your green, the light a quarter mile away at the entry to the shopping center or the next crossing drops to yellow, so you get to repeat the experience.

Drivers have discovered that if they speed, and take their chances at yellow lights, they will be able to continue their trip with fewer of these lengthy stops. As the police have other tasks to do, many drivers have also discovered that they can get away with it. Illinois does not seem to grasp that timing the lights, so that drivers who travel at the speed limit will be able to proceed from green to green, does much to reduce speeding and red-light running. Illinois might also consider changing the sequencing of movement through the crossings, so that the left turn arrow comes after the green light for traffic proceeding without turning, as New York state does.

BAD ORDER? Professor Drezner is reporting difficulties with the new version of Blogger. I'm not sure all my posts are getting out, although they're all showing up on my posts screen.

UPDATE: Scroll down, all the 17 June stuff IS now out.

PEOPLE RESPOND TO INCENTIVES. Andrew Sullivan reports on a new right of reply entitlement within the European Union. Looks like it has all kinds of potential to destroy controversial web sites, particularly if sufficiently many people post comments, criticisms, corrections, or just plain nonsense, and exercise their right to be linked.

BUSY DAY AT INSTAPUNDIT. John Hawkins, superintendent of Right Wing News, survives a spin-out. Vodka Pundit returns, with thoughts on Iranian self-determination. Professor Reynolds has plenty of Iran coverage. AndrewSullivan proposes extensive coverage of matters Iranian leading up to 9 July, date of a proposed general strike there.

SERIOUS MOUNTAIN RAILROADING. Where Worlds Collide has returned from Switzerland, with train pictures (worthy successors to the Crocs, I say) and information on the whereabouts of the Iraqi Information Minister.

HOW OTHERS SEE US. Both Newmark's Door and SCSU Scholars enjoy James Lileks's rough handling of a conspiracy-buff professor in Duluth. Money quote: "When I was growing up, the term 'professor' connoted respect and accomplishment. It was a name society gave to its wisest citizens." Compromise away your integrity and all that ...

Incidentally, Cold Spring Shops had the Wellstone crash correctly diagnosed long ago, with an aviator's endorsement. See also this.

TENURE, CARTELIZATION, CERTIFICATION. Lots of coverage of the academic job market. Newmark's Door found an Education Guardian story that characterizes the current production rate of Ph.D.s as "unconscionable." Invisible Adjunct, who is taking a vacation, took a look at the academic job market and raised the possibility that tenure exists as a way to create a cartel in academic labor (one easily cheated upon.) The SCSU Scholars weighed in here and here. Something went missing in Invisible Adjunct's line relocation: somebody made the point in the comments to one of her posts that the administration and the faculty were in agreement on some things. Affirmative action came up. I wish I could find that post so as to react to it accurately, as there is something wrong with giving the administration a free hand just because it's doing something that a (current) majority of (voting) faculty agrees with, which provides precedents for the administration doing something that the faculty would not agree with, such as calling committee meetings during the summer research and vacation period, or attempting to steal a paid holiday by going to a four-day summer schedule with Independence Day coming on a Friday. Although I couldn't quickly locate the comments I was seeking (and I think the SCSU Scholars had something about time theft), I did find this set of hits that suggest the use of adjunct and temporary faculty is also a way around the usual affirmative action rigamarole. Interesting.

BLOCKING COALITIONS. Professor DeLong looks at the hundredfold increase in the number of shareholders required to control half the shares of Standard Oil of New Jersey. Interesting discussion in the comments section about whether diffused ownership leads to further entrenchment of the management.

MONETARY ECONOMICS, DEFANGED. From Newmark's Door comes word of a weblog to keep track of developments in Thomas Sargent's graduate income theory class.

BENEFITS AND COSTS. Philip K. Chapman takes a critical look at the government space program, which looks like Keynes's money buried in bottles. "We would not need the shuttle missions if we did not have the station, and we would not need the station if we did not need something for the shuttles to do." He continues with a look at NASA management priorities and presents some proposals for reform. If information technology had remained a government monopoly after World War II, would Vice President Gore have been touting the virtues of teletype machines connected to vacuum-tube logic units?

FALLEN STAR. Professional wrestler Fred Blassie, from the days of pile-drivers and figure-four leg-locks, has died. Wrestling was more fun on the other side of that cultural fault-line, particularly on a black-and-white television tuned to a UHF station.

GIVE IT A REST? Professor Drezner approves of OxBlog's take on the Clinton Wars. Got news for you kids out there, there's a fault line between people who came of age in the middle to late 1960s that will never correct itself. The policy record of the Clinton administration was not something a French socialist would take pride in, and in those days the magazines of the Left pined for a Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. The Clintons themselves are unlikely Pied Pipers of Pepperland, but the real Pied Pipers have either died or been mugged by reality. Doesn't stop people from asking about those days that opened the fault line, as David Weigel discovers.

BLAH BLAH BLAH. Do people write badly because they see only bad writing? Joanne Jacobs reports on spreading pretentious pox.

LINE RELOCATIONS. Number 2 Pencil and Tightly Wound have moved to new sites.

FOURTH TURNING ALERT. Dean's World on the clash of worldviews to come.

REASON AHEAD, WORK BACK. Cal Pundit is doing his family tree work correctly, and he's found a new (to me) genealogy legend. I was aware that there's a Charlemagne line that someone had worked out back to Adam (just work through the "begats" in the Old Testament) but descendants of Jesus???

SHIPPING THE GOOD JOBS OUT? Econ Log posts a comment about the gains from trade. Viking Pundit links to a story about the adjustment costs that sometimes accompany those gains.

SMARTEST MAN BAILED OUT WITH MY BACKPACK. Joel Engel is unimpressed with the intellectual bullying and conformism among the usual official chattering classes. (Via Political Theory.)

AT WAR. Dynamist recommends the Fallen Patriot Fund for families of killed and wounded Armed Services members.

LIFE EXPIRED. It's old news now, but this article makes the point that the safe life of a component depends on how many days the component has been in place, as well as in the use the component gets. It reinforces this argument I made some time ago that Space Shuttle parts might have been worn out by age, even though the orbiters hadn't flown their hundred missions.

THE MAGAZINE OF RAILROADING. Years ago, that's how Trains described itself. The Chicago Tribune's recent list of 50 best magazines credits Trains with "Part geek bible, part passionate advocate for better passenger service and part dreamy evocator of rail's golden years, Trains is ideal reading for those sitting on Amtrak, waiting for the train to actually start moving again." Something tells me that the extensive coverage of Chicago in the most recent issue influenced the panel. Some rail enthusiasts have characterized Trains as channeling Railway Age more recently.

Betsy's Page, who recommended the article (scroll to the 13 June posts, time to do some engineering work on your archives, ma'am), complained that "the Chicago Tribune doesn't enjoy the more conservative offerings" she reads. Perhaps not, although a listing of magazines that includes Martha Stewart Living (prettying up those jail cells?) and Toy Fare (used Stadium Checkers, anyone??) might not be driven entirely by politics. One aesthetic quibble: Reason rated a compliment because its "redesign actually made it better." Perhaps to the judges. The practice of continuing articles from page to page, one column at a time, alongside a two-column article or collection of quotes, distracts.

TAKE IT THROUGH CHANNELS. Campus Nonsense relays a report from the University of California at Irvine, where a member of the student government introduced a resolution in student government calling for viewpoint diversity in classes. The resolution passed. A dean then sent around a memorandum that Campus Nonsense interprets as an attempt at blacklisting. The dean did suggest that the student talk with the department chairmen first, which is only good manners. It's much more effective to take the requests through channels first, then pass the resolution. Quite likely the faculty members will deny that there's any problem, or stonewall in some ways. (For the past 13 years or so the student government at Northern Illinois University has sought, without any success, public disclosure of course evaluations. On those occasions when they visited the faculty senate when I was a delegate, I always suggested they simply collect their own. I have yet to see any such effort.)

HYPERCUBE. Computer graphics make possible a four-dimensional Rubik's Cube. (Via Common Sense and Wonder.)

YOU DON'T OWE A FOLLOWER ANYTHING. James Lileks is recovering from a bumper-bender. The clueless yuppette who didn't see him also lives to die another day, but with a serious repair bill.

MEDIA CONCENTRATION? Armchair Analyst is skeptical.

COLLEGES OF DEADUCATION: "Only one in five professors of education said it is 'absolutely essential' to produce teachers who stress correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation," notes this study (via Number 2 Pencil, who has been covering exit testing intensively, and contemplating a line relocation.) No wonder the seniors struggle so with their capstone papers. They've not run into anything resembling an editor, which I played at in college years ago.

Gratuitous comment on "teaching to the test." There's no conflict between content and teaching to the test, if the standards and the test are set properly. Nobody criticizes the sergeant for "teaching to the battle." Nobody criticizes the coach for "teaching to the mark-rounding." Nobody criticizes the road foreman for "teaching to the Mountain." Got that? Good.

UPDATE: Vermont Reactionary reacts, from a student's perspective.

LEFT HANDED COMPLIMENT. Oops, discriminatory, never mind who is in the same company with Steve Carlton and Babe Ruth.

MELTING POT. Joanne Jacobs: "At least in California, young people don't see race and ethnicity the way us baby boomers do. They take for granted that they live in a mix-and-match world." Just further evolution. For many years I have challenged those people who say "Karlson ... that's Swedish" to consider in full the implications of Stephen Hopkins Karlson. A colleague once quipped, "Frederick the Great was less Prussian," which is also accurate.

SUBCONTRACTING. Guess who had embedded reporters, and with what unit, and what they did, and who spotted it! Encouraging stuff.

CATCH-85. Highered Intelligence offers observations on the difficulties college graduates are currently having on the job market. More to it than the recession and the extraction of more effort from existing workforces. (Shouldn't come as any surprise, though, that if a 4 year degree now has the information content a high school diploma used to -- within my lifetime -- have, then the job opportunities offered to college graduates might appear to be less satisfying. You've also got to spell out what "satisfying" is about. Writing research papers is usually satisfying, as are office-hour conferences. Committee meetings, even during contract time, are not.)

BLOCKING COALITIONS. What happens if you require ascriptive diversity as a proxy for viewpoint diversity on a committee, and one of the members so chosen doesn't show up, and you're holding meetings during prime research time? Everybody get "Not Pretty." Ayup.

TOPPLING MONUMENTS? Never mind the Saddam statues, Martha Stewart and Howell Raines went too. Oraculations suggests the latter developments are of great importance, Frederick Turner sees people in fashionable settings finding their voice, and Michael Barone anticipated it long ago.

MISS THE COLD WAR? Daniel Drezner points to an argument that, put crudely, it is not currently necessary for the existing constitutional republics to make nice to dictators, just because they're anti-communist.

LEARNING CURVE. Financial Aid Office spells out the private and external benefits of a university degree (likely source was Invisible Adjunct, who does not appear to be operating this afternoon.) $64 billion question: at the margin, how much of the benefit of a university degree is private, and therefore something the university's staff ought to capture?

MEASURING ECONOMIC PERFORMANCE. The relocated Common Sense and Wonder points to two classic Peter Drucker articles on the mismeasurement of business performance. Repeat after me: "Open markets are environments in which powerful and appraising evolutionary forces are at work," saith John McGee.

BIG FOUR NOT SO BIG AFTER ALL? Soundbitten looks at weblog traffic that exceeds traffic on some members of the Big Four. Reminds me of an old bit of one-upmanship in the crew room. The New York Central guy and the Pennsy guy were trading barbs about whose was the more significant railroad. The Pennsy guy ended the debate by observing, "we kill more passengers in a year than you guys carry."

PROTECTING COMPETITORS, NOT COMPETITION. Hit and Run picks up a story about a protest against a new Sam's Club (!) gas station that appears at first glance to be run-of-mine NIMBYism, but is organized by a trade association of local service station operators. Funny how these things evolve. Many years ago, the big threat to local service station operators was the merger of vertically-integrated oil companies. Now it's Wal-Mart or Meijer. The only common theme appears to be to support our right to pay higher prices to preserve independent service stations.

SCHOOLTEACHERS, UNDERPAID? Hit and Run picks up recent research that suggests not. Heated comments ensue.

INTELLECTUAL BALKANIZATION. Tongue Tied discovers that some area-studies program directors are reluctant to be housed in traditional academic departments. Puzzle: do area-studies majors equate to asterisks on transcripts?

MUGGED BY REALITY. Herewith Wunderkinder's 12 step program for recovering liberals.

SUPERIOR DIRECTION OF DIVERSITY? Jonah Goldberg notes the disinterest in integrating Morehouse, let alone making Mills coeducational. (Many of you might have followed others' links to the column already.)

COMIC RELIEF. Right Thinking took the time to read and understand Madonna's ex-husband's infomercial.

RETIREMENT PLAN? Truck and Barter is unimpressed with New York City's licensing of tour guides. (This post is the initial provocation.) Here's the short form of the argument: municipal licensing is a form of forced saving. You take out a business loan, pass the tests, get the medallion, do business, and then sell the medallion upon retirement for a large lump sum. Doesn't matter whether it's a taxi medallion (the canonical example) or any other occupational license, and the public interest is incidental.

BEER AND CIRCUSES. Former University of Wisconsin Chancellor Donna Shalala now wants to realign the eastern football powers.

NEW SOURCE OF COMPANY MAIL. Mises Economics Blog. Selbstverstaendlich.

BELLICOSE WOMEN. The Superintendent prefers not to pick on female commentators when other female commentators, in this instance Virginia Postrel, do such a good job of it.

LINE RELOCATION Common Sense and Wonder no longer have running powers on Blogspot.

SHAH' MAT. No longer proscribed in Afghanistan. With pictures. Thanks to the Netherlands embassy.

WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION. William Tell and Odysseus had 'em, notes Brickbats (May 22 entry.)

REALITY CHECK? "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you," fails to impress youngsters, notes Hit and Run

WELCOME, ECONLOG READERS. There are a couple more goodies there, should you have arrived at this station from a different direction. There's a new post on measuring inequality that's worth a look. Cal Pundit has what he describes as his final post on inequality (for the present, I bet, he's got more tax incidence stuff up). It's some of the interventions I wish to speak to, however.

"Example: capitalist economies work their magic via competition, but classical economists have recognized for over a century that laissez faire capitalism frequently leads to monopolies, which in turn destroys laissez faire capitalism. The answer is antitrust legislation, which is designed not so much to rein in free markets as to allow them to flourish. Securities regulation, which is generally designed to promote transparency and a freer flow of information, is another example.
." But what happens to those monopolies, and do they last forever absent government storm shelters (consider Baldwin Locomotive, Sears, A&P, K-Mart, Ford, and United Airlines)? Consider further the interpretation of the antitrust laws by the courts: does it protect competition in the way Mr. Drum sees it, or does it protect less effective competitors (see, e.g. George Stigler's "The Origin of the Sherman Act" in Journal of Legal Studies some years ago.)

"Interventions designed to correct things that capitalism does poorly. Example: brutally exploitive child labor is a normal and predictable consequence of industrial capitalism. However, when it eventually became socially unacceptable it took government intervention to end it. A modern day example is minimum wage laws. A free market will inevitably price the least skilled labor at (more or less) subsistence levels, but today we have a social consensus that if you want to employ someone, there's a certain minimum amount you should be required to pay." Isn't child labor a normal and predictable consequence of poverty? Those pre-industrial kids weren't playing Pokemon. It's probably more accurate to say that child labor laws plus the establishment of common schools served either to indoctrinate immigrant children into American ways or to give all kids some sort of shot at a fair go, depending on whose interpretation you wish to believe. And as long as there is illegal migration, there will be ways around the minimum wage laws (Junius had an interesting post on illegal migration and induced innovation that is worth a look.)

UPDATE: Atlantic Blog has more on antitrust, including the trap identified in Incredible Bread Machine.

RAILS TO TRAILS. At one time, there was no location in the State of Iowa more than seven miles from a railroad, which made sense in a time when seven miles out and back was a full day's work for a team and wagon and there was a lot of grain to haul to the elevator for export East (and now you know why eastward trains are superior to westward trains of the same class, but I digress). Iowa also happened to be smack between Chicago, where the eastern trunk lines met the granger railroads (which were built first, the first equipment was brought in by boat) and the railhead for the Pacific Railroad, and a number of railroads set up to get a share of that traffic (and to bust the rate pools, but again I digress.) As a consequence, Iowa has a lot of linear corridors suitable for bike trails, which Cornfield Commentary sees as not a great economic engine for tourism.

POLITICAL BUSINESS CYCLES? News and a Bill Hobbs forecast.

MEASURE INPUTS, NOT OUTPUTS. Joanne Jacobs has some thoughts on the costs and benefits of charter schools compared with standard government-issue schools in Texas. Ceteris paribus, anyone?

C. C. C. & St. L.? Sorry, when somebody says Big Four, that's the first thing that comes to mind. Insta Pundit offers an "aw, shucks." (But if he runs the Grand Central *Terminal* of the blogosphere, doesn't he own the Big Four, along with the L. S. & M. S., the P. & L. E., the B. & A., and part of the I. H. B.?) There will be a quiz on this later.

PEOPLE RESPOND TO INCENTIVES. Robert Prather sees the salutary effect of toppling Saddam on the peace "process" in the neighborhood.

SITTING DOWN TO DINNER. G. Jefferson Price the younger sings the praises of leisurely dinners and afternoon naps. There's even a website dedicated to the concept of slow food.

ECLECTIC CARNIVAL OF THE VANITIES is at Drumwaster this week. Go and browse a while.

THE EVOLUTION OF EMPIRE. Thomas Friedman (via Betsy's Page) and Dominic Lieven (via Milt's File, May 28 entries) offer some thoughts on the role of the U.S. in the world, the wish of people elsewhere to have a say on what its government does, and whether or not it is an empire. Three observations: first, in order for North American pop culture to seep into other cultures, there have to be people in those cultures who like it (this is selling beer to Puritans redux); second, many people in those other cultures are voting ... to emigrate, legally or illegally to the United States and to some of the other Western powers; third, the United States has always been a different sort of a nation, one in which blood or religion is less important, but adherence to the rules is a precondition for membership. Somebody I read (this was years ago, when interactive online meant a two-way teletype) argued that the United States was the world's first ideological nation, a point Lieven notes, and he then notes a paradox, namely that the ideology, at the Founding opposed to the imperial monarchies, is itself an imperial idea. Much food for thought in both essays.

STIPENDIUM PECCATI? Elizabeth Austin discovers the value of saving it for someone you can trust. (Via Milt's File, May 30 entries.)

PEOPLE WHO THINK LIKE US. Best of the Web (scroll to the "Diversity Fog" entry) finds an essay that argues disgraced New York Times staffer Jayson Blair was hired as a suburbanite with dark skin, not as a black person. The author's point: "Diversity is not just about skin color and ethnicity. It's about gender, sexual orientation, religion or lack thereof, ideology and other things I could think of if my own thinking weren't limited in ways of which I myself am unaware." (Does that mean idiocy qualifies as a form of intellect deserving of protected status?) Fair enough, but then why do the Faculty Senate by-laws at my University call for at least one member of color and one female, but viewpoint diversity is limited to one delegate per department?

TRIVIUM AND QUADRIVIUM. "What is the purpose of a liberal arts undergraduate education?", asks Invisible Adjunct. To enable the graduates, should it become necessary, to restore their civilization. Furthermore, it is an error to argue, as Invisible Adjunct does, that "appeal to professionalism as a replacement for civics and morality does represent something fairly novel in the history of liberal arts education." There is no replacement. The professional is devoted to the abolition of errors, the professor to professing ideas, and the ideas of civics and morality with the most glaring errors abolished is not at all novel.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: "It was a new experience for me to be patronized by a Canadian university professor." That's Radek Sikorski on the evolving alliance between the United States and Poland. (It's been evolving for a long time, consider Tadeusz Koscziusko and Count Casimir Pulaski in the War of Independence, but it still hasn't evolved to the point where native English-speakers, even in Milwaukee, even today, can get their tongues around names such as Aloysius Szymanski.)

HETERODOX ECONOMICS. Thought-provoking Winter Speak post on the differences between conventional (read full-information) and behavioral (read limited-information) economics. I'm going to leave aside the markets-vs.-philosopher kings and focus on this: "Behavioral ec. shows that people don't think about things in the right way, and this leads them to make suboptimal decisions. Economic markets anticipate people making the optimal decisions, which leads to them producing the absolute best possible outcomes. People who dislike economics (and there are many) bring these two facts together and argue that this means markets hardly ever produce the best outcomes." My sense is that even this characterization is too strong, but I'm not yet comfortable enough with Liapunov's second method to prove it. There is probably enough compactness in the strategy sets of people acting with limited information (that they can update ONLY by trading) and enough rationality in the updating to produce meaningful decentralization results with optimality properties, which would annoy the abusers of behavioral economics greatly, not to mention the effect that such an approach would have on the Austrians.

ASSESSING THE OBVIOUS? Winter Speak is not impressed with Edward Tufte's smackdown of Power Point.

FORTY FEET BELOW. London's Post Office seeks new uses for its mail tunnel. Samizdata (via Transport Blog) and Going Underground weigh in. It has more potential if it's simply left idle for about 40 years first, so it can become the stuff of legend.

ADVICE FOR ASPIRING THEORISTS. Latest Economic Principals comments on William Thomson's A Guide for the Young Economist: Writing and Speaking Effectively about Economics, a recent addition to the corpus of Advice for the Aspiring Young Economist.

You are 34% geek

You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator. Normal: Tell our geek we need him to work this weekend. You [to Geek]: We need more than that, Scotty. You'll have to stay until you can squeeze more outta them engines! Geek [to You]: I'm givin' her all she's got, Captain, but we need more dilithium crystals! You [to Normal]: He wants to know if he gets overtime.

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com

PRIME CUTS. Common Sense and Wonder takes up Cal Pundit's challenge to propose some federal budget cuts.

REMEMBER THE SABBATH DAY. Christopher D. Ringwald laments the passing of New York's prohibition of liquor sales on Sundays. Some history: "While the modern mind imagines coerced observance to be the only kind, many colonists found rest and renewal on Sunday. Eventually, New Englanders congratulated themselves for keeping the best Sabbath in all Christendom.

Drinking was a particular target, even in the less religious, and more profit-minded, Dutch colonies along the Hudson River. Kieft first prohibited immorality and immoderate drinking on all days and then restricted Sunday liquor sales, which provoked unrest and led to his recall. His successor, Peter Stuyvesant, further limited sales to between mid-afternoon and 9 p.m. But Dutch colonial authorities, and later English ones, found their zeal tempered by New Yorkers' resistance to moralizing. Religious ideals and popular appetites seesawed for centuries."

Now, for the rest of the story. Mayflower Compact signer Stephen Hopkins was probably the first resident of North America to be fined for selling beer in Plimoth on Sundays. But in order for Stephen Hopkins to sell beer on a Sunday, there has to be a backslid Puritan who wants to buy beer on a Sunday.

SUMMER TRAVEL OPPORTUNITY. Transport Blog visits Samizdata, and discovers the London Duck Tours (if you neglect the corks, do you have a Yellow Submarine, Patrick?). Ah, nostalgia. The concept of DUKW-as-sightseeing-craft got its start at the Wisconsin Dells (still operating, company details here). Smithsonian has noticed them, a local business restores and operates them and you can work your way through college driving them, but you'd best be handy with the stick and the lost art of double-clutching (clutch in, move selector from gear to neutral, clutch out, clutch in, move selector from neutral to new gear) to make it as a Duck Driver.

MORE ON INEQUALITY. Professor Drezner's promised post is up, and it's extensively researched. He illustrates a number of ways in which the lot of poorer people has improved in absolute terms, in ways that don't show up in the income accounts. Cal Pundit has a response, focusing inter alia on the return to a university education: "He gets the "income mobility" argument right, I think, but is much too sanguine about the health of the middle class. Sure, more kids are going to college, but that's never going to be more than a minority of the population. And while resentment toward the rich may indeed be muted in America, will it stay that way if current trends continue? I have my doubts." I'll leave the second point to the yuppies to sort out. Bottled water and a $50 serving of pasta and sauce that would be miserly in the Gulag fail to impress me (spark up the barbie, grill the bratwursts, open the PBR, that's good enough for me, and I scratchbuild my toys, thank you very much.)

Cal Pundit misses the college point completely. Just about anybody who wants to go to college can probably find someplace that will accept them. Only a minority of the population might be able to get a slot in one of the highly ranked schools, but that's irrelevant if your only criterion is making money. (It might make a difference if you aspire to be a court intellectual to the Democratic Party or get into Polite Blue State Society or the right law firm or an influential public policy magazine, but I digress.) The more troubling problem facing the students, the universities, and the employers is the loss of signal stemming from the consumerist mentality of some students and parents, catered to by administrators and some professors, the use of the university to do over what the high schools fail to do in the first place (and some corporations then hire people to provide the information the universities don't deliver), and the fear of low grades that might steer students away from the subjects that yield higher returns on their investments.

IT'S CALLED A MARKET TEST. "So when [Alabama music professor Marvin Johnson] learned last fall that the average assistant professor in the business school was earning $72,691, while the average full professor in the humanities made $63,531, he was shocked, he says. 'It seemed completely out of whack,'" reports Katherine S. Mangan in the Free Chronicle (via Political Theory.) "He decided that something had to be done. At his urging, the university's Faculty Senate voted last month to endorse a proposal that would put a cap on raises for the most highly paid professors on the campus, many of whom are in law and business. Schools that still wanted to pay their professors more could do so by charging higher tuitions, the proposal says." As. If. There's. Anything. Wrong. With. That. Students in the lucrative degree fields are harvesting many of the gains from trade for themselves, with the administration skimming some of the take to pay for assessment of the obvious, beer-'n-circuses, diversity boondoggles, and academic fads. That's not how everybody sees it.

"'There's a tendency to value very obvious practical gain over human enrichment,' says Charles W. Nuckolls, a professor of anthropology at Alabama. 'That's why it's easy to see why professional schools, which emphasize their practical focus, get more money,' he adds. 'The long-term consequence will be the erosion and eventually the demise of the liberal arts, particularly at state-supported schools.'" Not. The demise of the liberal arts began long ago, with the gutting of the core curriculum. There's plenty of evidence that rigorous schooling in the liberal arts enables such graduates to make connections that more "practically" trained (and yes, I am using different verbs deliberately) graduates cannot. Put most simply, a business degree has greater entry-level but less upside potential than a liberal arts degree. But where does one get such a core curriculum any more? Your general education requirement is more likely to resemble a railway tariff: some class rates here, some commodity rates there, an exception or exemption under footnote (b).

"The salary differences have been exacerbated because the market for top talent in law, business, and medicine has become increasingly competitive. In business, that's largely because of a shortage of business doctorates. In other professional schools, the obsession over a program's ranking is often said to account for much of the intense competition -- and higher pay -- for 'star' faculty members. Whatever the cause, professional schools are shelling out big money to attract new hires." Tournament in progress? Is the tenure system and the graduate program so cumbersome and so unresponsive that additional Ph.D. programs in business and related disciplines are not forthcoming (shameless plug: check out Economics 640)? Are the transaction costs so high, and the ignorance so great, that aspiring academics can't arbitrage the difference? How big a compensating differential do professors require to put up with business students?

Somehow I suspect I won't persuade Professor Johnson: "'The notion that someone who's devoted his or her life to a field and has earned two promotions is somehow less worthy than someone right out of graduate school is ludicrous, but that's the way it is,' he says. 'It isn't just about money. The whole value system is skewed toward professional schools and their needs at the expense of traditional disciplines.'" On the other hand, if university composers wrote music that people would listen to, some in their ranks could become the next John Williams, or Jerry Goldsmith, and be able to buy way more toys than those Masters of the Universe wanna-bes in the Faculty of Commerce. In fact, they could double-dip, and sell their music to the studios after presenting their juried recitals. Or would you prefer to go to the Football Model, where very few people earn two promotions, because most are out after a losing season or two? There was an article in Journal of Political Economy some years ago about precisely that tradeoff: how do you protect people against the possibility that their work will be obsolete in ten years?

PROFESSOR-WEBLOGGERS. Invisible Adjunct and Gallowglass link to and remark on a Free Chronicle news report on professor-webloggers. My take: this elder is quite happy to misbehave on these screens. It's probably spared ten vice-presidents from hearing nasty words in three or four languages. (If you're unfamiliar with Slavic languages, doing the decimal expansion of pi is almost as effective if you have the right intonation.)

STEEP GRADING CURVE. On Thursday, I was a guest of the Securities Industry Foundation for Economic Education, operators of the Stock Market Game, at their annual conference for state coordinators. At one of the sessions, a presenter noted that more college students drop out account credit card troubles (here's a test for libertarians: what restrictions ought a university place on sales efforts, including t-shirts and other inducements, that credit-card and cell-phone companies put in front of students?) than account bad grades (or boyfriend or girlfriend problems, or are many of those fallout from credit cards.)

GETTING THE WORDS RIGHT. James Lileks bleats about Star Trek, and somebody (I saw it but can't place it and my history files aren't helping) posted on Klingons and Tribbles (please advise if it's yours or you saw it, in the interest of proper attribution) and it included a quote from Captain Kirk, "And unfortunately, though the Klingons are brutal and aggressive, they are most efficient." (source) Somewhat later that season, Enterprise called at Ekos, where Captain Kirk's history professor goes Plato and Herbert Croly one better by attempting to be a benevolent Nazi (scroll down to "Patterns of Force.") One of the professor's advisors reads the omitted bits of Mein Kampf und Sie kennen was stimmt, nicht wahr? So what reason did the professor give: "most efficient," a proposition that Spock agrees with (a tiny country, defeated and broke, becomes a world power in ten years.)

There are two reasons for being skeptical of Star Trek's politics. First, Spock's training in logic didn't equip him to distinguish between "effective" (Klingons, Nazis, the Ba'ath Party on a good day, any organized crime family, and Tammany Hall are all quite effective) and "efficient" (which calls for a standard. I like either "allocating resources in such a way that any production involves an opportunity cost" or "identifying and acting on all possible gains from trade") and by either standard the organizations named above do not qualify as efficient. Second, the Star Trek mindset appears to treat efficiency in the second sense as some kind of cosmic evil. If it's not betting quatloos on gladiators, it's portraying the Ferengi, intergalactic traders, as sleazy. So much to do, so little time to do it...

UPDATE: Truck and Barter's superintendent emails, it's this.

NO TIME TO DO IT RIGHT, LOTS OF TIME TO DO IT OVER. Chester Finn on the waste of resources involved in remediation-across-the-curriculum and the horizontal inequity of subsidized tuition at flagship state colleges. Joanne Jacobs provides color commentary.

MEASURE INPUTS, NOT OUTPUTS. The marginal product of $282 per student is 64.7 more points (on a scale of 0 to 100) on a state assessment test. Dean's World suggests there are some omitted variables.

RAILFAN = SECURITY RISK. It's happening in the UK, reports Where Worlds Collide. It's been our reality Stateside since September 2001, with several articles in Trains. Perhaps there is reason for Network Rail to worry.

MEDIA CONCENTRATION? Shot in the Dark offers a history lesson.

THE ABOLITION OF WRITING. Term papers endangered in high school (via Newmark's Door.) Joanne Jacobs has commentary and an interesting anecdote. Number 2 Pencil links to demolitions of each of the excuses offered by teachers for not assigning papers.

VERBAL TERRORISM. Here's Porphyrogenitus's suggestion for dealing with unpleasant graduation speakers. What goes around and all that...

ENTRY BARRIERS? Econ Log takes a look at the academic job market. A commentator notes, "Nothing weeds out potential candidates like an integral or a differential equation," to which a colleague offered the perfect reply: "Yeah. So?" I would note only this: almost all the important theorems of mathematical economics come in the first chapter of a good real analysis textbook. The serious mathematics comes later. A game-theoretic argument is easier to follow than just about anything in Critical Studies. My. Eyes. Glaze. Over. But apparently putting together an argument in Critical Studies appeals to proportionately more aspiring academicians than does putting together a simple proposition that follows from specification of a criterion function.